A colleague whose children are in the same grade as mine asked me about my children’s report card.
I do hate it when parents compete in a contest of “whose children are smarter?”
I also hate it that if your child got bad grades, no one says it is because the mother is stupid, but if she/he got a good grades it is automatically because the mother is intelligent!

I usually avoid being in a contest by saying “oh, they got the usual A’s and B’s”
“How many A’s?” I was asked again.
I honestly didn’t know.( I know my son got his first B this time. It was because of the Magna Carta incident and he isn’t happy. He wanted me to speak to the teacher/principal and be allowed to write another test, I refused. He was very upset. He is still very upset. But he needs to learn that life is full of surprises!)
When I told my colleague that I honestly didn’t  count the total A’s , he replied
“I am sure your children got all A’s, after all you are a brainiac!! and “you Asians” stand behind your children with a hammer and hammer them to study”

I was tempted to hammer my colleague!

I do agree that a lot of Asian parents push their Children to excel academically.

Currently India churns out 100,000 engineers probably 25000 doctors annually.
The oldest university in the world was in India
Yet, periodic table, steam engine, computers. etc were all discovered outside India.
From 1902 to 2009 India had total of 9 Nobel price winners. 2 for literature ( Kipling and Tagore) 2 for Physics( Raman and Chandrasekhar) 2 for medicine (Ross and Khorana) 1 for Peace ( Mother Teresa) 1 for Chemistry (Ramakrishnan) and I for economic science ( Sen).

Why is that a land of 1 billion people only has 9 nobel laureats and no invention worth talking about? ( Yes, I remember the mathematics contributions of Indians..but it happened in the classical period 400 to 1200AD)

I think it is because we push our children to rot learn. We start in vitro. listening to classical Music, mother eating specific food to encourage brain development, flash cards, early reader program, maths time tables..the list is endless..All in the hope of bringing out the geniuses in our children.

I refuse to be part of the race. Yaya learned to read when she was 7. Like me, she goes through an average of a book a day now. I can’t see any damage happened to my child because I didn’t send her for early reading programs.

I tried telling my colleague that I don’t stand behind my children with a hammer. But stereotyping is part of being an Asian!

For my children, I only have three rules.
My three R’s
“Respect, responsible, reliable”
Respect and behaviour goes hand in hand.
responsible and reliable for their school work/home work etc.

I am not a tiger mother. I am a turtle mom..slow and steady..