I immediately laughed when I read the title of a Wall Street Journal article titled, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.” You hear about “positive” stereotypes, which is an oxymoron because no stereotype is really beneficial, and this person was reinforcing that idea.

A picture accompanies the article: the author, with her arms folded and a triumphant smile; her daughters, grinning while playing the piano and holding a violin.

Perfect, more stereotypes.

This article talks about superior Chinese parenting. How Chinese parents can get their children to obey them and get good grades. There is no secret to the recipe, as the article relents that the key ingredient is through coercion. Perfection through coercion. The kids are basically scared to death to be perfect.

The mother said that she doesn’t allow her kids to watch TV or play video games. Any extracurricular activities they do are chosen by their mother. She compares strict American parents and how that strict American parenting would be a complete joke compared to Chinese parenting.

Is Chinese — or Asian parenting for that matter — really superior to that of Western or American parents?

It’s actually very hard to gauge parenting. After all, there isn’t a “parenting scale” of sorts and this could also be a matter of opinion. However, I think that a lot of things can be quantified to be presented as data where once can make an assumption.

In order to roughly compare parenting skills I will try and interpret the Organization for Economic Development’s scores, which compare academic performance between countries as well as suicide rates. Why suicide and achievement? Because suicide will roughly, and I mean roughly, measure happiness and achievement will also roughly represent parenting effectiveness.

Before we proceed, I strongly recommend that any inferences I make you should take with a grain of salt. Overall suicide rates, for example, are higher in Asian countries like Japan, South Korea and China. However, suicide isn’t a one issue deal, it covers a broad range of problems and wouldn’t be a reliable indicator of parenting by itself. Not to mention that suicide rates are for broad age groups. Suicide statistics in this case may cover from academic pressures to social problems like bullying.

The Organization for Economic Development lists Shanghai and Hong Kong’s performance in reading, math and science as, “Statistically significantly above the OECD average.” This goes for South Korea and Japan. United States is deemed as, “Not Statistically significantly different from the OECD average.” So from this we can infer that American students are average while their Asian counterparts are above average.

Suicide rates for teens 15 to 19 in South Korea and Japan are surprisingly different than that of the United States according to OECD data. It could be that in the United States, firearms are readily accessible which makes suicides relatively easy to achieve while their Asian counterparts don’t have access to firearms and resort to more messy or inconvenient forms of suicide such as jumping in front of a subway train or jumping off a building.

If suicide methods were taken into account — because Asian teens are more likely to kill themselves through more painful methods — one could imply that they would be willing to endure such a physical pain to kill themselves, but even then I am hesitant on making that statement.

Unfortunately it will be impossible to determine parenting skills through these two measures because it would be comparing apples to oranges; there are a lot of variables to consider.

But being Asian myself and also being subjected to this style of parenting, I can safely tell you that it sucks big time. I mean honestly, how fun would it be to not be able to do the things you want and only do the things your parents want you to do? My parents weren’t too strict: I was able to watch TV.

Even then it lead to me becoming very unstable in the mental health department. For their strictness they, as well as I, ended up paying a dear price. Fortunately things turned out for the better.

A well-known developmental psychologist named Diana Baumrind came up with a chart of different parenting types: Authoritarian style, in which the parents are demanding and physically abusive. Permissive parenting, in which the parents give attention to their children but are unwilling to correct bad behaviors. Neglectful parenting, which is basically not giving children any attention at all and not guiding them. Authoritative parenting, which is pretty much in the middle.

With this I can characterize parenting types of the two differing cultures. Asian parenting styles are lean toward authoritarian, where the parents expect obedience and can be physically abusive. If their kid says “no” to their demands, you know something bad will probably happen to that kid later. American style of parenting, at least from what I’ve seen so far, is either a mix of authoritative and permissive.

This Chinese lady can boast all she wants about superior Chinese parenting, but in the overall picture it seems that all it is capable of doing is robbing children of their creativity and individually. They don’t see the need for it early on, but think about it: If children are guided throughout their entire lives with direction, then when they finally have their freedom what happens? They can’t deal with situations that require them to think for themselves. This is what separates the two different parenting styles that this lady does not seem to understand.

I’m not trying to say that American parenting is superior to Asian parenting. In fact, I think it’s silly to differentiate parenting styles into different race categories because each person will have a different parenting style.

Unfortunately for some people, it seems that they like to keep the notion that some race groups are better at doing things than others. I can only hope that they eventually grow out of that mentality.