The Rockstar And The Tipping Point

“It’s a book about change. In particular, it’s a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does.” – Malcolm Gladwell, on his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference.

(Random thoughts caveat: This is for fun and pregnancy cravings)

There are things initially deemed super uncool. From clothing choices, to behavior that is considered outré – unconventional, or even undesirable. And then suddenly something tips, and what’s out is in, and vice versa. One moment Hush Puppy shoes are the Ugliest Things For Feet. Next thing you know they’re So Ugly They’re Cool.

There is the Power of Context: What the prevailing wisdom is at the time, what affects popular opinion. Like one Bernhard Goetz, white and in his late 30s, who shoots at 4 rowdy black teenagers (later determined to all have criminal records for burglary etc) on a subway in Manhattan in the ’80s, after they try to extort USD 5 from him. The second shot he very deliberately fires into one already-prone teenager paralyzes the boy for life.

In the era of Goetz’s shooting, people were peeing in public places, dodging the fare or getting mugged. Goetz was heralded as a kind of vigilante. By the mid ’90s however, when New York was then viewed one of the safest big cities and the paralyzed teenager brought a second suit against Goetz, it had become “inconceivable” anyone who pulled a gun could be called a hero for it.

What happens when these phenomena affect parenting decisions?

As an illustration of context in say, parenting choices, Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn Of A Tiger Mother comes out and mums everywhere either love or hate being called Tigermums. (I would just say “hate,” except I do meet mums who have referred proudly to themselves thus – not so much about their kids producing results, I think partly they pride themselves on the discipline involved, that they aren’t Wussy, Wimp-out Parent… I think.)

At what point would Tiger Parenting say, be viewed as Bernhard Goetz, Subway Vigilante? When does it become Bernhard Goetz at the time of the paralyzed teenager bringing a second lawsuit, in one of the safest big cities?

At what point does the Product of Tiger Parenting look around him/ her and become an angry, resentful young adult who has to pretend they want to see you at CNY? For that matter, when does “Aw, can’t do Rocket Science? Don’t worry ’bout it, I Still Love You, YOU’RE AWESOME!!” inspire your child to then grow up, turn around, and go, “What the hell were you thinking, Mum? Now I have to work twice as hard in life!”

At what point do other parenting choices we make become viewed as over the top? Is it possible to develop something like Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome toward the ultra-expensive private schools? It’s no longer considered ok to cane kids at assembly like they used to decades ago, is it?

(I recently attended the parent briefing at a relatively much more expensive international school, and rather than inspire the desired reaction of feeling like we would be contributing towards “a legacy,” I somehow ended up more along the lines of, “And the pool we are donating towards gets my child into Harvard…. how?” (Ok this is my own hangup because as a little kid I’d once had other kids make me feel like crap about how many times they travelled to see the various Disneylands, how much better their piano was… Then again it did inspire me to get my grade 8 on a broken down thing with keys that didn’t work while all the snobby piano kids dropped out. Though I only just finally visited HK Disney (and no others) last Christmas aged 35.)

I just think stuff is no use without motivating the child – what I had wanted to hear was how much that expensive school might put into say, special training for staff – how to identify and work around various learning challenges, how to identify and nurture giftedness among students. Because it is the staff that will interact with my child every day. It is the staff that have the ability to motivate, even if they are not in a world-class facility. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m actually more worried about corner-cutting than over-expenditure, HK is an expensive city. But the push to introduce corporate donors, individuals or yourself as a donor (and what we were told it would be used for in this case) was starting to sound like spending heaps developing a ball-point pen that could write in outer space when you could use a pencil.

(To be fair when I mentioned it to a mum whose child attends this school, she said “Yeah I’d agree. They’re not all like that – we can’t stand the guy who delivered your talk either…”)

Yeah I’m a simple girl. I just want my child to go to Harvard. Here types a miserable FAIL of a potential parent candidate for a certain expensive private school. (Rockstar might have done fine; Kings and I are gonna fail meet-the-parents, cos it’s not likely I can keep my big mouth shut instead of asking that-which-probably-should-not-be-asked: Is The Emperor Wearing Anything? I… don’t think we’ll be going back there..)

Here’s another Power of Context illustration. Based on the biblical story of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke, Princeton psychologists Darley and Batson conducted a study at the Princeton Theological Seminary. Each seminarian in the study was required to walk to a nearby building to deliver a short talk on a biblical theme, passing a man in distress who had been planted. Each seminarian was also told whether they were early or late getting to their next appointment, just before leaving the building.

It turned out when told they were late, maybe 10% stopped to help, but when they knew they had time, 63% stopped. (There’s a lesson in there about human nature despite our best spiritual intentions too, which is probably another of a myriad of reasons we pray about fallen nature, but anyway..)

Frankly, I wouldn’t have stopped. I’d be afraid I’d be mugged by someone who was drunk and probably not realize this person was mugged not high (hit-and-run is another story). That’s another thing – interpretation, misunderstanding can also trump best intentions.

Power of context (whether they thought they were late) in this particular example was so much more persuasive than a person’s character/ values. Here’s a parenting analogy. Recently, a mum told me how she’d gotten so stressed with her lower-primary school-aged daughter’s schoolwork, she’d hurled a pencil case into a wall. Sitting there, enjoying her conversation and her company, I couldn’t imagine her flinging anything.

I’m not sure everyone really believes “pencil-casing” works. But grouped together in a very traditional Chinese school say, with lots of other mums doing similar, you’d be more likely to follow suit. All I could think was I’d be stressed and unhappy. Then my strong-willed, doesn’t-need-to-be-pushed-when-he’s-enthused child, would be unhappy. (And therefore need to be pushed). Oh, and I’m never getting an X-box and will severely limit recreational tv for as long as I can get away with. I don’t even let Rockstar know Kings’ date night event of choice is often a movie. I can’t hurl a pencil case, but I can hide a remote.

Then I listened to conversations describing very strict “typical old Chinese school-style” teachers, like what you might get in the army I guess, and recalled the video footage of an experiment in Freakonomics: The Movie – they’d tried to pay kids to see if they would then earn more As, and an African American boy said, “I can promise milk and cookies, but if the oven is broke, you just get milk.” (Kings and I thought that was pretty smart – we also couldn’t imagine your average very traditional Chinese/ Asian school child saying it. Even if the Asian child had a lot more As on paper. The black kid did however deliver the cookies though.)

Well, when does eloquence and original thought in little kids become more highly priced than typically traditional “obedience” and sitting quietly, delivering a string of As?

Without knowing anything else about the subject, when I first read What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants, I wondered if that (or at least the perception of that) had something to do with it. That traditional sitting quietly and delivering strings of As wasn’t completely cutting it.

Then again, if you had two players with a fairly equal score – one that had been “trained” (or well, pushed to read and regurgitate at the possible expense of originality of thought) and one “less trained”, who do you take? The one who hasn’t been “trained,” obviously – because train that one and…….. yeah, you get my point. You might even get more original ideas to boot…

At some point the delivery (or not), of strings of As at the expense of originality and initiative seems to be tipping, too. Because at the end of the day, drill all the initiative out of the child and who will one day grow up to write the extraordinary dissent? The idea or concept so ahead of its time, so out of the box, as to not yet have tipped, yet is crucial to the development of further ideas… that have not been drummed in and regurgitated in exchange for a string of As.

Y-eah. So this post has been so long in coming, and now it’s long and waffly, lemme redeem myself:

Rockstar calls this work of art, “I ate a lemon.” (He has, btw, never eaten a lemon. The boy will eat sea snail, but oh, the sour taste of a lemon is yucky scary? Go figure.)

Then again society is full of Emperor’s New Clothes Phenomenons isn’t it? Can’t understand it, can’t understand why everyone else loves it – not knowing everyone else feels the same way secretly. Someday some brave soul goes “This is bullshit. I don’t want to hurl a pencil case against the wall anymore about my child’s handwriting.” And then more people go Hell, yeah! That guy’s not wearing anything! What’s the matter with you??

So what I really learnt was: Be prepared to keep tweaking and revising my parenting style. Today’s “conventional wisdom” could be tomorrow’s “reviled Tiger Parenting style” by the time your child hits his/her teens. Either that or you end up with a robot.