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It's true that this trend is ingrained in the Asian immigrant community. To expand on your point that the pressures are due to narrow views when determining success, most people and especially Asians, measure success either by how much they have acquired or the status they possess. Well if you don't have either, then you base your success on what your child/ren has accomplished. It's a competition within the community to see who has the more accomplished offspring - I see it every time my parents gather with friends or family - it's sad but it's all they know to do. Anecdotal perspectives:
So I grew up poor, but I would say I am quite successful now by most standards - yet I still feel the pressure to achieve much more than I currently have (just from wanting to be the best I can be, but also I feel indebted to my parents and want to give them the world). They never pressured me to be a $high_status_title, but I felt to pressure to be someone that could support them into their old age since I saw how hard they worked to provide for me. In a sense, I understood the world of my parents and because of that, I created pressure for myself to achieve greater success (by their standards). I had a friend in HS, who was extremely smart, and both his parents were doctors, living in a wealthy neighborhood, etc. I constantly saw how much pressure his parents were creating for him, PSAT prep and SAT prep and all that, which I felt he didn't need. Whenever we weren't playing CS, he would be studying to make sure he got into the right colleges, then the right medical schools, though I never really asked him if that's what he wanted out of life. I felt bad for him because I did fine in HS and felt fine just coasting (I didn't begin trying as hard as I should have till junior year of college, but in the end I think I did okay with much luck involved, of course). Well he is now finishing up his medical residency (looks like his studies paid off) and I really hope he feels fulfilled in his career path. Just wanted show that pressure to succeed can come from external factors or pressures we create for ourselves, but I feel things are only getting worse as now we have parents competing to get their kids into particular preschools and all the extracurricular activities that just consume what little childhoods we have to begin with. You can be aware of the circumstances, and do your best to "opt out" of the race, but others will just see that as an opportunity to move ahead, continually fueling these unnecessary pressures. |