How do Asians and East Europeans e.g. manages to successfully to get their kids to revise long hours?

Just finished reading the whole thread. Very interesting & also in my dc's school the Asians & Eastern Europeans are excelling especially in music. The WhatsApps groups are funny, the Asian & Eastern European parents have no problem questioning or emailing the teachers on "delicate" matters! They are great!

This, but there's also a lot of example setting in immigrant families. When you see your parents working really hard to build a life and give you the opportunities they never had and telling you how much harder life is "back home" it makes an impression. I grew up knowing that the world was a tough and competitive place, and as the child of immigrants I would need to fight to claim my place in it.

I am noticeably tougher on my children esp wrt education than my English dh and definitely am not complacent about their "right" to a good life. This does translate in a more conscientious attitude to study than some of their peers, but not to the extent you are seeing in friends children. I guess that's the result of being second generation Brits.

Totally agree with you. Many British parents have very low aspirations as regards their children's education & general extracurriculars in comparison to Asian & Eastern European parents.

OMG! Some of the comments!
It has always been a fact the immigrants tend to put a bigger emphasis in their kids education no matter where they’re from.
In my kids primary School they always organise sessions for parents about English and Maths. It is a very multicultural school with 42 different linguistic backgrounds. And the demographics less represented in those sessions are white British parents. In my country of origin kids do homework everyday, so for me working every day comes natural. And no, there’s no culture of fear.

For all of those people saying the tiger approach leads to poor mental health - it’s not like the generalised UK approach to parenting and schoolwork is giving us a generation of well adjusted individuals, is it? And at least the tiger approach is more likely to give you a sold job so you can be miserable with a roof over your head!

^^This. I'm the child of immigrants and was very much brought up to see education as a privilege and life as a competition where you need to work very hard to get ahead. I've passed quite a lot of that on to my own children who are white British boys . Working hard at school has always been non negotiable - if they don't want to do that then they need to leave and start earning a living.

I also don't see why working hard means you have no social life or friends. Certainly I managed both and so have my children.

Abuildingwith - throughout the Soviet period, and especially in the later Stalin years into through the Khrushchev era and somewhat in the Brezhnev years, civil engineering projects on a massive scale were undertaken in the USSR as the country transitioned from an archaic and primarily agricultural economy to an industrial one. Entire cities were built in the 1930s, Magnitogorsk being a prime example but by no means the only one. Infrastructure was built almost from scratch.

The shock of WW2 highlighted the need for a military industrial complex, which absorbed as many maths, chemistry, physics and engineering graduates as the country could throw at it all, on top of the thousands of civil and mechanical engineers slogging away developing rail networks in the cities of Kazakhstan, etc.

There doesn't always have to be a dark explanation when a country turns out engineers and physics grads in huge numbers.

I mentioned earlier that the vast majority of my (Irish) schoolmates' fathers were engineers, and most of them had grown up on farms. A lurch toward STEM accompanies infrastructure development, housing expansion, and a transitioning economy everywhere.

@mathanxiety - yes of course there are incredible Russian academics and there was always subversion and meeting in secret, even during Soviet times. However, my experience of Russia was being told not to ask too many questions by a professor and being phone tapped despite being a minor foreigner of Eastern European descent with absolutely zero intentions of becoming a spy/negative influence in any shape or form. Even post Soviet era you had to be careful and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous. Imagine if we put MI6 here on every Russian pupil and student, it would be laughable.

My point is you have to question the focus on STEM/Maths in certain cultures and why they place less academic value on social sciences. There is a history to it and it means something.

I’m indonesian. My parents are high earner. My father is surgeon my mother is lawyer. When i was young my mother always said “if i’m not study hard i’m not gonna have a good job and end up with minimum wage job”. My parents always repeated that over and over. Me and my siblings have to study everyday but only for an hour. They never push us too hard. But they always remind us “if we want to have nice lifestyle like now, we have to study and not make poor decision”. They tell me that since i was 5 yo i think. I always remember that. I do believe that. My siblings are both doctors and i’m psychologist.

when i move to england i’m suprised with how parents views school here. I have 6 years old kid. He is in year 1. He is autistic but He able to write and read. He can read as good as an adult now. I’m surprised when one of the mums friend from school thinks the school pushed our kids too much. They need to play more rather than study. lots of my friends here think that education is not that important. I really have to disagree on that. Being educated its not only for having a good job. But it will reflect on your personality.

I think if you investigate the long career of Yuri Levada, which spanned the post Stalin Soviet years and the transition into post-Soviet Russia, you will see that there is an effectiveness problem when it comes to stamping out thought in Russia, and before that, the USSR. The reason for this is that even Russian people have extremely functional brains. The findings of the Levada Center and its independent predecessors corroborate that observation.

@Mumski45 - that is interesting what your DS said. My children are also Eurasian - I ask them frequently if they ever experience racism in school, out and about etc. They are completely oblivious to it or have not come across it. In fact my DD has claimed in the past that she thinks it benefits her because the teachers assume she is good, works hard, will do well at maths and promote her in the orchestra etc.
I think prejudice/bias is everywhere, whether we like it or not, but sometimes it can work in one’s favour. So if teachers think your kid is going to do well that can indirectly contribute to your child doing well too.

Regarding immigrants, again there is a vast difference in terms of their social standing. If you are a middle class “immigrant” in a highly paid profession (consultant NHS, banker, lawyer etc) the experience can be entirely different than for someone who has arrived from another country with nothing and has to work minimum wage jobs and live in bedsits.
Racism is a very very complicated thing and in real life I have observed that people who are very confident with good social standing experience & capital tend to experience far less than poorer people who cannot stand up for themselves. It is often a question of power too.

@mathanxiety - this is an interesting article www.ponarseurasia.org/the-destruction-of-academic-freedom-and-social-science-in-russia/

“Countervailing Trend: Declining Academic Freedom

However, academic freedom, which had flourished in the 1990s and remained fairly protected in the early years of the Putin regime, came under increasing attack as Putin turned toward autocracy beginning in the late 2000s. In 2010 the Russian government established a commission against the “falsification of history” meant to impose penalties for publishing accounts of history that somehow cast Soviet actions in World War II in a negative light. The commission never really got off the ground, but it was a harbinger of more concerted efforts to bring to heel scholars who voiced critical perspectives on both contemporary and historical topics. After returning to the presidency in 2012, Putin steadily intensified a crackdown on civil liberties, with consequences for academic freedom. Laws on “foreign agents,” “undesirable organizations,” and “extremism” were offered tools to target independent research centers such as the Levada Analytical Center.’

@MangshorJhol - thank you. I think modelling the right kind of behaviour (working hard, reading, debating, discussion, looking after your health, exercise) is actually probably the most important thing.

I also think this is a very interesting topic. My DH is Asian with immigrant parents whereas I am from a white middle class background. Our parents had a very different approach to education although both valued it highly.

DH's immigrant parents were keen for their kids to make the most of educational opportunities available to them in UK that we're not available in their home country. However encouragement in their case was a blunt instrument and anything other than A's were derided. I do think it was a culture of shame/fear. However DH did well for himself and pulled away from the poverty he was brought up in.

My family achieved similar results but with a much more targeted approach. DM was a teacher and placed a high value on early years education setting the building blocks for future success. I think she was right and I and 3 siblings all achieved very good O and A levels and went to university.

Our joint approach to our own children is based on my Mum's approach to early years. I taught 2 DS to read and do basic maths before primary school. We gave them lots of opportunities to learn outside of school including holidays, museum visits, sports, etc. I tutored them both through 11+ and both are now at secondary, one doing GCSE and both are high achievers. I have had to temper DH's fear of failure and tendency to only value the highest achievements and get him to trust me and my methods. He does and I have learnt from him that high expectations are also important.
I asked DS2 about why he thinks kids with immigrant parents do so well/try so hard and his view is that the racism in our culture means that they need to achieve more to be noticed and to overcome the element of 'white privilege' that still exists which I thought was interesting coming from a 14 year old.

I also have also noticed a tendency amongst parents of my kids primary school friends to be only worried about wether or not their kids were happy. With some there was easy acceptance of mediocre achievements and a fear of the consequences of failure to the extent that they did not encourage their kids to try hard. This was not universal but definitely not isolated.

@Abuildingwith4wallsandtmrinsid Hi, so DH and I don’t watch much TV. I like sport. He watches the news sometime and we sometimes watch shows together in the evening. But the kids haven’t grown up with the TV on a lot. So that helps.

We also use books as the default. Always have a couple in my bag. If you are bored, read something.

I will say that my attitude has been that there is no artificial boundary between ‘fun’ and ‘learning.’ Learning to swim or ride a bike is hard work. That doesn’t mean we don’t teach them this. So is learning to play a sport or a musical instrument. As is learning maths or writing well. Everything takes effort or practice. If as parents we didn’t see one as ‘fun’ (aka my kids spent their summer only biking, swimming and playing football) and one as a ‘chore’ I think you can have a balance.

So like PPs we do ‘academic’ work in the summer. And bike/hike/swim/go to camp/go on holiday.

Russia and China are autocractic societies where being a free thinker and questioning authority, even in education, is frowned upon. Teaching is of a high standard but spoon fed.

I disagree with your take on Russia.

I know Russians who were very privileged under the Soviet system, a family who enjoyed many of the perks that system offered. One was a graduate of Russia's premier maths and science academy and worked in the space sector, and the other in the literature end of academia. They are intellectually among the most curious people I've met, very keen to try new things, explore new avenues of thought, ask questions about things that puzzle them, and have very well trained minds, well able to observe and analyse, to see how their home country was floundering in the 1990s and that the prospects for their children were diminishing, and adapt to life in a different society.

To believe that people who obviously have good brains can be cowed by a political system into not actually using those brains, or seeing and pondering nuances is to feed into the ugly stereotype of the Asian automaton who can't navigate the complexity of real life and is only good at stuff that is impersonal, like numbers.

Have you ever seen the phrase 'You don't want to be that parent' here? Questioning authority in education isn't exactly encouraged, and bullying is so rife in UK schools that people worry about what to name their children so they can avoid becoming pariahs.

For a child who coasts along and doesn't really learn how to learn, I think sports might come in handy.

Thinking particularly of martial arts, where you literally get knocked over and have to pick yourself up again. In the US, little kids play T-ball and move on to baseball and softball, where it's unheard of to hit consistently well enough to get on base every time you come up to bat, and where the fielding element of the game has its fair share of challenge and potential for embarrassment. Any game where averages count and where there's a progression you work your way up is a good idea. Music is another field where you have to 'learn to learn', starting at the beginning and practicing, and moving up through the grades by sheer application.

It does depend on the child too.
I have one dc who would do her homework straight away and if she thought it wasn't good enough, redo it again, and even again if she wasn't happy.
Then one who does enough to keep out of trouble, but isn't keen on doing any extra.
And one whose attitude is "homework? What homework?"

In all honesty I wish the one who worked really had had at time been able to switch off and accept that sometimes one hour worked for 95% of the marks was fine, rather than 3 hours for 99%.

The biggest think I would say all parents in the UK could and should be doing is setting an age appropriate minimum amount of study time for evenings and weekends from infant/junior school and ensuring this is completed.

Screen time should be a privilege to be earned through effort and good work ethic rather than a right. Generally DC in the UK have far too much screen time that could be spent more prospectively.

@peoniesarejustperfect It doesn’t matter if your dyslexic dc have low or high grades. As long as they love learning, don’t give up easily and have great work ethic then that’s all that matters! It’s awful when dc have poor work ethic and zero aspirations. Quite sad. You sound like my parents. They were very young. My dad has dyslexia. They are the reason why I love reading and learning so much. Parental encouragement and input at home is so important :)

This is such an interesting conversation!! My parents were not immigrants (unless you count Scotland --> SE move) but it's something we talked about frequently when I was a child. My father believed that immigrants made the world work and grow and that it was largely down to their innate character. He travelled a lot for work and said that immigrants are the same world over - the ones who go/ emigrate were highly motivated people in the first place. This is what gave them the drive to go. He very strongly believed that these traits are passed down to their children, through their example and focus on academics. The best thing my father gave to me was his values.

My family are all dyslexic and I work very hard to help my DC with their school work. They need me to sit with them whilst they revise and we do it together. They also do 30mins maths and english on Saturday , Sundays and each day during the holidays. It takes me ages to organise it and help support them, but to me, it's essential. Their achievement levels are low, but I take solace in the fact that without home help, they would be much lower and they wouldn't feel so good about themselves. They both really struggle and are at the other end of the academic scale, but I think it's just as important for them to work hard, develop a strong work ethic and maximise their life choices.

This thread has made me feel so much better about it. Thank you, thank you. It's been a bit of an ah-ha moment for me. So many people (on here and IRL) say they've got to do it for themselves, that they don't help their kids, that school work should be handled by school, that school should see what level they are working at, let the kids learn how to be independent, etc. etc. I disagree and hide what we do at home. But I am so pleased that there are other people who encourage hard work too! I hadn't heard of the Michaela school, but will look it up as so interested. I worry that in the UK we are just teaching everyone to 'get by'. . .

Exactly. If parents tell their dc that maths and English are only to be done in school then of course they won’t think that these subjects are important. Of course they’ll see them as a chore instead of developing a love of learning. They’ll fail. Your English exam results show that you have basic comprehension and inference skills and that you have a good grasp of the language (employers will bin a poorly written letter). You use maths (maybe not algebra) in your day to day life. It doesn’t matter if you get top marks or a pass grade - it shows that you have good work ethic and value yourself. That you have resilience.

Why is it the case of academia OR life skills? Why not both??

I also think that

• teaching chidren to work hard in that doing their best rather than just coasting by,


• teaching them that hard work will lead to earn rewards (eg if you work on playing guitar everyday youll get the reward of being able to play well easily and enjoy the process more than when you are starting)

There is no way you can just follow your dreams and make them a reality wo having learned the power of work and resilience. No way it will work if they are used to things just happening wo them having to make more than a modicum of effort.

Suceeding at following your dreams, explore your talents etc... doesnt happen in vacuum.

And that's wo talking about the fact that not everyone has a specific talents and a lot of talents are learnt (from hard work) rather than something innate.

@Abuildingwith4wallsandtmrinsid
To be able to acually really understand a country you need more than going to Uni for a few months in that country.
I've lived in the Uk for 22 years, fully bilingual, married to a Brit, worked, had my dcs here. I'd say it took me about 10 years to fully get how english people 'are' culturally. Until then there was a lot of things that were still going over me, I didn't get etc...
I would never dare say that I know how a country is culturally from living a few months or even a few years there.

It’s really interesting - what is normal for one family is massive pressure for another, and what one family sees as ‘keeping DC busy in the holidays’ is ‘cramming’ for others.

We have a rule that there’s no TV / screens until homework and music practice is done and I’ve checked if I need any help with cooking or chores. I thought that was pretty standard, but reading this thread makes me think perhaps others would see it as draconian. Especially as I have control over their devices, and a code on the TV, so if they want more than their set daily screen time they need to ask me for it.

And while I would never say I did schoolwork with my DC over the holidays, I would always take them to the library (and ensure screens only in the evening, so they got bored enough to read) and do various trips to parks and do the kids trails at museums or gardens. Which are educational, in a way, and not just ‘letting kids be kids’.