Last November I heard a fascinating article on a study comparing Asian vs. Western styles of parenting. Groups of students from America and from Japan were in a room with a set of math problems in front of them. They were told to solve the problems as quickly as they could. They were not told that in fact the problems were unsolvable. Within less than 10 minutes the American children sat back and stopped trying. After an hour, the test administrators had to stop the Japanese children since they all kept trying to solve the problems. This test was done to prove what the psychologists hypothesized was true after they had analyzed hours of conversations between parents and children on the subject of education and success: Japanese children were taught that success comes from your own struggle through the education process, while American children are generally taught that success comes from being inherently smart.
Being a parent myself, this made me stop and think about the way I talk to my own children about their success in school, and then my thoughts turned to my own students. I realized we are in a fascinating and very balanced formula in this Suzuki Method between struggle and innate talent. As Dr. Suzuki said: talent is developed. We do work, we do struggle, we do our bow hold 10,000 times, and practice every day. We also as parents, see when to stop the work in practice when emotions get overwhelmed, and it is time to return to a sense of play. Watch this dynamic in your own interactions with your children - when do we praise them in their struggle? How are we developing their innate talent through struggle? I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this. Comment back here, or drop me an email, and lets explore this Western/Eastern balance we are practicing with our children.
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