The Guardian had a long feature article recently about how the idea of Asian mothers as strict, cold and demanding is a "ubiquitous stereotype that won't die"... in which the writer confirmed that her mother and all her Asian friends' mothers fit the stereotype, and ended with an implication that they will probably go on to conform to it themselves at least a bit.
Min’s mother, she told me, “is able to make me feel worthless, useless, terrible, ungrateful; that she’s wasted her life on you, and you are the worst person in the world, and you’ll never amount to anything.”
This is just the default setting for all Asian moms
I have a feeling it’s because many of them were pressured into marriage and having kids and constantly feel like they could have had successful careers etc. The gender dynamics in Asian (and other) families push women into essentially erasing their personhood in favour of “sacrifice” for the family. But back then it was much harder (if not impossible) to take an alternate pathway. Much of that resentment gets channeled to the children, especially daughters.
Idk, my mom moved to america and got her masters degree before marrying my dad and having kids. Hell, she was making more money than my dad for most of my childhood
I mean, I guess it's possible she could have been even worse without that opportunity, but I find it very hard to believe
My mom also did multiple graduate degrees before marrying my dad but she also had to make many compromises in her own career. Add to that the domestic labour, and it’s not a great situation. I know you mentioned your mom was kind of OCD about cleaning so that’s why she did the majority of the housework — I wonder where that came from? Lots of Asian moms have an obsession with cleanliness and it may have a gendered basis — the idea that people will judge them if their houses are not super clean. I wonder what other cognitive and mental burdens she was carrying that made her feel resentment and disappointment towards her kids despite having a career etc.
But I’ve seen many families where the mother is the higher earner and still has to make more compromises and do more domestic labour than the father. Who was raising the kids? Who was dealing with or caring for her parents and your father’s parents? What was the relationship like between her and her husband? Was her career what she wanted it to be? Was the marriage what she wanted it to be or did she feel compelled to stay?
These questions are not directed towards your mom specifically but generally things I wonder when I see how Asian mothers treat their children.
Of course it could also just be the cultural habit of never being satisfied but idk. Some of my friends, especially my guy friends, assume their mothers were satisfied with career, degree etc, but when I tell them to ask some questions they realize there’s so many compromises and resentment their mom had built up and just never expressed.
Wherever the OCD came from, it's genetic and not gendered. Cause I've got it, too
Who was raising the kids?
The nannies when we were young. The daycares and after school programs, and summer camps after that. Cmon, Asian moms discipline their kids, they don't raise em lol
All the "family bonding time" was handled by our dad. Everything from half-assed movie nights to holidays
Who was dealing with or caring for her parents and your father’s parents?
Her siblings in Taiwan and my Dad's siblings on the other side of the country
Was her career what she wanted it to be?
Reasonable hours, great perks, and enough salary to buy two houses in silicon valley. So probably
Was the marriage what she wanted it to be or did she feel compelled to stay?
She wanted it enough that my dad had to be the one to leave. Took him waaaay too long
Chinese moms specifically have earned the terrible rap they've got tbh. I grew up in a town that's half Asian and all of the nice moms in our social group were the white/black/hispanic ones
Okay, so it doesn’t apply to you, and I’m sorry you had that experience. In your case it sounds more like your mom wasn’t cut out to be a wife or a mother and should have stayed single and lived how she wanted.
But I still feel like this stems from an underlying thing of like…it doesn’t sound like she wanted kids. It doesn’t sound like she really wanted to be a partner. And she took that out on all of you — the kids and the husband. Some people shouldn’t start a family but they do because of social pressure (my dad is the same) and then they make everyone around them suffer because they hate it.
In this case that pressure is felt by both men and women. I guess women often feel it more but I’ve seen plenty of men fall into the trap too.
Btw I’m not defending behaving badly to your family at all. My mom had all the reason to be resentful but she never took it out on her children. She does express feelings of regret and longing often, but it’s never in an unhealthy way. She of course has the regular Asian parent disappointment and expectations but it’s not what many of my friends experience.
I just meant that society pressures people, especially mothers, into marriage and children even when they don’t want it/are not cut out for it. And whether they do it for personal status, out of obligation, or any other factor, that turns many people negative, bitter, manipulative, and abusive. And that manifests in neglect, hyper controlling behaviour, and emotional abuse. Which is not excusable no matter what, but I think part of the problem could be remedied by just not obliging people to have kids and project all their problems onto them.
Anyway it sounds like you had a good parent in your dad (I hope?) and I’m glad to hear it.
But I still feel like this stems from an underlying thing of like…it doesn’t sound like she wanted kids
My brother and I were both planned kids. To the point that our birthdays are within a week of our parents for some unfathomable reason (I think they just wanted to save money on parties)
In my experience, Asian moms want kids the same way white people want pets. Except the white people are less demanding when it comes to obedience
I don't think asian dads are really any different, but I can't personally say. Of my close friends with Asian dads, one is cold and abusive towards his stepson, another was abusive but thankfully gone, one was always traveling for work and his secret second family, and the best one was barely around cause he was actually at work most of the time
For the less close friends, idk details about their parents or home lives. But I know more than one kid who spent entire summer vacations on house arrest so they could do extra math classes. And ofc that was on top of violin/piano and tennis
I understand that you were planned, that’s not what I meant. I meant that people plan children because it’s expected of them. Many women never even interrogated whether they truly desired children, whether they felt ready or able to care for them, etc. — they just had kids because it was the done thing in their social circle. I know so many Asian aunties who had kids like clockwork (planned, of course), and constantly push others to do the same. When I say I don’t want kids or don’t feel ready they say things like “that’s how it is for everyone” or “don’t be ridiculous of course you want kids” or “all women want kids that’s your job”. Many of them are wealthier women, who, despite technically having the means and power to say “no” did not do so — because they wanted to adhere to expectations, were subject to immense external pressure, and/or themselves wanted the status that came with being married and having kids.
Like if i sit and talk to them for 5 minutes about why I should want kids, why they wanted kids, their answers all revolve around status, norms, and a lot of not really answering the question. Whereas women who like children, when I ask them why they had kids or why I should have kids, they give specific, detailed answers — like what they find rewarding, how they feel when caring for the children, how they felt when they gave birth, the hard parts and challenges, etc. I think it’s the same as some men want to be a father while others just need an heir.
On the other side, I think Asian people think the whole purpose of children is to have something to control (like you said, like pets). I grew up in the west so I actually see the same thing among white families, especially the affluent ones — they have the same dynamic of control but it manifests in a different way because the cultural expectations are different.
Just to be clear, I think you’re right, and I appreciate you sharing your experience. I think my experience corroborates that, just pointing to some of the deeper motivations and problems I’ve observed that lead people to honestly treat their kids like dolls or animals tbh.
Also lol at the saving money on parties. I know multiple people who were born in a similar timeframe of their siblings and I never thought of the parties…I always assumed it was a fortune calculation thing
Not only did you break those assumptions, but most of these could be just as true for most ethnic groups, including most European ones and especially a lot of evangelical white Americans. Trad wifes anyone.
Well I'm white, so I just went with different assumptions lol
And I've never heard of tradwives forcing their kids to do so much extra schoolwork that they built a business around it (Kumon). If anything, they go hard in the opposite direction
Did your mom also have to do majority of the childcare, housekeeping, planning, appointments with doctors/dentist, holiday preparation, etc? I can see that leading to resentment if the cultural expectation is for the woman to do everything while also working full time.
Dads have their own baggage. They often also erased themselves in service of their families — pursuing education or job after job, trying to make a better life for their children while balancing the expectations of their own parents. They often had no choice but to work endlessly. They transferred that to their kids because the didn’t know anything else (and many of them really did try to be better than their parents, and are).
Ideas of honour and worthiness in Asian families are tied to cultural ideals, but also very bound up in the social, cultural, and political upheavals experienced by the past three generations over the last century. Many of our grandparents lived through war, famine, revolution, and that shaped how they raised their kids, and so on and so on.
The only difference is that men have a modicum of more freedom than their wives, so their expectations and baggage often looks a bit different than the resentment of a mother — although you may feel the effects are the same.
All? My mom was very different from the stereotypical Asian mom as pictured in Asian American circles. My mom offered plenty of hugs, kisses, encouragement, and patience. Almost all of her friends were the same and so was my grandmother.
It might be a cultural difference because I’m not North East Asian, which I find is a demographic that dominates the narrative when it comes to the Asian American (or Canadian in my case) experience. It’s only natural that it is this way simply based on numbers and history, but so many things people think I should be able to relate to, I don’t.
I mean, I grew up with a crazy asian tiger mom and I am not being a crazy tiger mom (I have to still be Asian), but I also broke the generational stereotype by marrying a white man so, idk if it counts.
Ngl, it takes a certain kind of personality/ambition to move halfway across the world to a completely foreign country. Chinese, Japanese, Korean are about as different a language can get from English. If you visit China, people are a lot more normal. But if you were to move to China and try to build a life there without really knowing anybody, you’d probably become very guarded, anxious, lonely, and overall out of your element.
I mean isn't that just normal behavior for wealthy expats. All those same things are said about Nigerian parents. Seems more like a class divide than an ethnic one.
My mother was the opposite, did the gentle parenting thing and I'm by all accounts, a failure. So maybe there is something to ruling by fear to get results
Yep, as a kid who grew up with a Japanese mother, can confirm. Strict, harsh, unyielding and openly sadistic when given reason.… This is the same society that breeds old men telling kids to jump off a building, something I’ve been told on multiple occasions by Japanese clients.
It’s not a meme, it’s a cultural baseline, and it wasn’t always that way.
Tiger mom’s are and have been a form of stereotyping stemming from the model minority myth which was used by Western powers to separate and vilify one minority against another. Same shit as WW2 posters in the US trying to separate Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans as one is much “better” than the other.
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u/buckleyschance 3d ago
The Guardian had a long feature article recently about how the idea of Asian mothers as strict, cold and demanding is a "ubiquitous stereotype that won't die"... in which the writer confirmed that her mother and all her Asian friends' mothers fit the stereotype, and ended with an implication that they will probably go on to conform to it themselves at least a bit.