• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

A digital-age ‘tiger mother’

January 27, 2011 By Anne 4 Comments

The subhead might be “Where parenting meets the State of the Union.” Anyway, I know I touched on this last week, but – upon hearing the State of the Union address and reading a David Brooks column on parenting (not a typical topic for him) in the same week – it seemed there was more to be said (feel free to weigh in with comments below!)…

New York Times columnist David Brooks may’ve gone a bit far in saying “Amy Chua is a wimp” (or his headline writer did) but – after President Obama called this “our generation’s sputnik moment” in his State of the Union address and in light of his call for highspeed Internet access for 98% of Americans – maybe not all that far. Not in the digital age, where children’s tech, media, and social literacy will have a lot to do with their country’s economic competitiveness when they’re part of the workforce. Brooks surprised and delighted me when, echoing a lot of the social-media research I follow and blog about, he wrote:

“I believe [Chua is] coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t. Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group – these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.

“Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals (swimmers are often motivated to have their best times as part of relay teams, not in individual events). Moreover, the performance of a group does not correlate well with the average I.Q. of the group or even with the I.Q.’s of the smartest members.”

“Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group are good at reading each others’ emotions – when they take turns speaking, when the inputs from each member are managed fluidly, when they detect each others’ inclinations and strengths.”

And Prof. James Paul Gee at Arizona State University said in an interview for Frontline’s “Digital Nation”: “We’re growing a bunch of people who see what they do as social and collaborative … and they want to teach, mentor, lead and build as part of those communities…. It’s dangerous to be an expert in one narrow thing…. We’re seeing cross-functional teams in play, in workplaces, they’re a very important way of being in the world of the 21st century…. And kids are ready for this world” – if, I would add, if they have digital-age tiger parents who are willing to resist the temptation to pine for the good old ways and days and engage in a very different way than Amy Chua’s version of Tiger Mother.

Taking a highly authoritarian approach to social tech use and viewing it in a categorical way is actually the easy way out for parents now. It’s also ineffective. Not that parents could ever honestly operate from a place of “I know all,” but in an age of proliferating small social devices, apps, hot spots (including friends’ houses), discipline workarounds, and information pouring in from a near infinite number of sources besides Mom and Dad, much less so. “Just say no” works less than ever (see “Soft-power parenting works better”).

So moving past whether or not Amy Chua’s a “wimp” (by definition, parents just aren’t wimps), what are digital-age tiger parents like? They know it’s in their children’s interests if parents and kids figure out how to make the best of the new very social, user-driven media environment together, working with them to maximize its benefits, knowing that 1) kids need to swim in this pond which, like all environments and tools, includes some risks and 2) that swimming well, like growing up, takes trial-and-error practice. They know they’re doing this in the middle of a global media shift that has profound socio-political implications, a cloud of cognitive dissonance, a US education system in transition, and with the Internet mirror of adolescent (and parental and virtually all other) behavior in their faces more than they’d like. But they also see that, though the reflection in the Internet mirror is not always pretty, the unprecedented insight it offers into their children’s lives is an opportunity too. And that’s just the parenting part of all that they do. Digital-age tiger parents are lion-hearted!

Share Button

Filed Under: Parenting, Social Media Tagged With: Amy Chua, David Brooks, digital age, Parenting, parents, President Obama, soft power parenting, state of the union, tiger mother

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Kelly EHB says

    January 28, 2011 at 4:43 pm

    As more kids go online, the responsibility of parents to ensure their safety likewise goes up. The complexities of keeping kids safe – and yet fully engaged – on the Internet are discussed in this article which your readers may find of interest:
    bit.ly/esuvIx

    Thanks much!

    Reply
    • blogadmin says

      January 28, 2011 at 5:26 pm

      Thanks for your comment, Kelly. Really appreciated your blog post – just read it. Your “Internet/Social Media full disclosure” rules are great!

      Reply
      • Anne says

        January 28, 2011 at 5:28 pm

        BTW, “blogadmin” is me, Anne! Not sure why I have two login’s! Have a great weekend!

        Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Tweets that mention A digital-age ‘tiger mother’ | NetFamilyNews.org -- Topsy.com says:
    January 27, 2011 at 10:13 pm

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by annecollier, Izzy Neis, SafetyWeb, The KidSafe Team, Tim Woda and others. Tim Woda said: A digital-age ‘tiger mother’: What’s a digital-age Tiger Mother like? New York Times columnist David Brooks may’… http://bit.ly/dGfZ5R […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Follow me on Twitter or even better:
NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • Supporting the youngest witnesses of this humanitarian crisis
  • Should our kids learn how to use generative AI? Well…
  • The missing piece in US child online safety law
  • Generative AI: July 2023 freeze frame
  • Threads: The new social media kid
  • Surgeon general’s advisory: Let’s take stock
  • Lawmakers, controlling and banning kids doesn’t help
  • New clarity on child sexual exploitation online

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for toots on Mastodon or posts on our Facebook page, LinkedIn and Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.