PARENTAL
INVESTMENT: WHY ASIAN - AMERICANS SUCCEED
Douglas
Winslow Cooper, Ph.D.
Amy
Chua’s 2010 book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, set off a fervent
discussion of the degree to which Asian-American parenting styles, especially
their investment in their children’s education, was important in producing the
observed above-average performance of these children subsequent to their
schooling.
In
March 2014, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics produced an analytical
report related to this issue, “Investment in Higher Education by Race and Ethnicity,”
written by Tian Luo and Richard J Holden. They showed that, compared to white
parents, African-American parents invested less, and Asian-American parents
invested more in their children’s education, with Hispanics not being
statistically significantly different from other whites in this regard. [The
authors controlled for several of the most likely confounding variables in
their analysis.]
Different
degrees of investment in their offspring are also found throughout the entire
range of the animal kingdom. In fact, those who study such
things have a term for the two extreme cases of parental investment, “R and K
strategies,” the terms derived from the equations generally used in the field
to model the outcomes of the two strategies:
A short article (by Jared
Reser) posted on the Internet by the Organization for the Advancement of
Interdisciplinary Learning
[http://jaredreser.com/Background/Biology/randkstrategies.html] described the
two extremes:
· “R-strategists
usually create an abundance of offspring in the hopes that a few will make it. The
species usually have a very short maturation time, often breed at a very young
age, have a short lifespan, produce many offspring very quickly, have young
with high mortality rates, and invest relatively little in parental care. The parents do not focus on passing down
memes, units of cultural information, to their young. Instead the behavior of
the young is determined by their genes. The young are precocial, meaning
that they often can make it on their own without any instruction from their
parents. Examples of R-selected species include bacteria, insects, and fish.”
· “K-strategists are very different in that they attempt to ensure the
survival of their offspring by investing time in them, instead of investing in
lots of them. It is a reproductive strategy that focuses on quality over
quantity. K-strategists have relatively few offspring and make an effort at
being good parents. Their young are altricial, meaning that they cannot survive
on their own until they reach adulthood. This extended period of maturation is
used for mimetic transference – the
parents teach the young so that they can go on to reproduce themselves. K-strategists
are known to have a relatively long life span, produce relatively few offspring;
the offspring have lower mortality rates and parents provide extensive parental
care. The offspring are also relatively
intelligent so that they can internalize the lessons from their parents.
K-selected species include elephants, apes and whales. Humans are perhaps the
most K selected….”
The
same source (Reser) produced the following ordering of organism types, from the
R-strategists to the K-strategists, or quantity versus quality strategy:
bacteria, mollusks, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, apes,
humans…an ordering that resembles that of evolution, from the least to the most
advanced species.
More
details come from an article posed by the University of Miami
[http://www.bio.miami.edu/tom/courses/bil160/bil160goods/16_rKselection.html]
entitled “r and K selection,” based on
evolutionary considerations, which notes
· “Organisms that live in stable environments tend to make few,
‘expensive’ offspring. Organisms that live in unstable environments tend to
make many, ‘cheap’ offspring.” When investment is risky, it is wise to invest
little.
· It
makes more sense to invest when the life spans are longer, to
give time for the investment to pay off.
· If
you plot the fraction who survive versus the age of the organism, the R
(quantity) species (bacteria, oysters) tend to lose a far larger fraction at
young ages compared to their maximum life spans than
do the K (quality) species (whales, humans) compared to their maximum
lifespans. Which is cause and which is effect? Do they die young because of a
lack of investment? Do they live longer because of the investment? Ecologists
study this kind of issue, often related to the “carrying capacity” of the
environment, related to the number the environment could handle if they lived
to the maximum lifetime.
When applied to the global situation for
humans, this theory indicates that in dangerous parts of the world and in
dangerous times, having many children is a strategy that may maximize the
chance that some survive. In the less hazardous, more developed parts
of the world, during peaceful times, having fewer children and giving them more
input is advantageous for those who seek to pass on their genes and ideas. Thus, ethnic groups and races that
traditionally have had large families are generally expected to have fewer
children as their safety improves. Of course, culture and religion can work
to over-ride this tendency.
Anecdotally, I have seen this investment
in education by my Chinese - American in-laws:
eldest child, a daughter, went to Cornell on a scholarship and eventually
became an orthodontist; middle daughter, my Tina, went to Cornell on a
scholarship and eventually became an Asian Studies scholar who worked for the Encyclopedia
Britannica; youngest child, a son, went to a private high school and then
on to Brown and became a rheumatologist. The girls would have preferred other
schools but family resources were saved to facilitate their brother’s becoming
an M.D. Furthermore, these parents
themselves were the products of intensive educational investment, the
mother having gotten her degree with a major in chemistry at China’s
pre-eminent Tsinghua University, where she met their father, who went on to get
his Sc.D. degree at America’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a
scholarship he won in a nation-wide competition in China back in the 1930s.
Investment in education, broadly defined,
pays off.
According to a research paper entitled
“The Rise of Asian Americans,” published in June 2012 and
updated in April of 2013 by the Pew Research Center [http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/],
the median family incomes---which might be taken as a measure of success---of
groups in America are in almost the same order as the percentages holding
bachelor’s degrees (or more) among those who are 25 and older and in those
groups. Specifically, 49% of Asians, 31% of whites, 18% of blacks, and 13% of
Hispanics hold a bachelor’s degree or more among the population 25 and older in
2010. Similarly, the median household incomes in 2010 were: for Asians $66,000;
for whites $54,000; for Hispanics $40,000; and for blacks $33,300. Some Asian subgroups have higher poverty
levels than the U.S. average, some lower, however, so other factors can trump
education.
Granted, there is always some question
about which is the cause and which is the effect when looking at correlations.
Conceivably, this order might due to the greater availability of college to
groups that have greater incomes, but it seems more likely that it reflects the
greater probability for financial success of groups that have a higher
percentage of their population with college degrees. In other words, investment
in advanced education has paid off in terms of relative incomes, whether or not
it was financially sound.
The same Pew report noted that 2/3 of
Asians believed having a successful marriage is one of the most important
things in life, whereas only 50% of other Americans agreed with this. Their
newborns are less likely than those of other Americans to have an unmarried
mother (16% vs. 41%), although that figure is higher (31%) for women of Asian
ancestry born in the U.S.
The Pew report describes the arc of Asian
ascension the U.S.: “A century ago, most Asian Americans were low-skilled.,
low-wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official
discrimination. Today they are the most likely of any major racial or ethnic
group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial
lines. When newly minted medical school
graduate Priscilla Chan married Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last month,
she joined the 37% of all recent Asian American brides who wed a non-Asian
groom.”
Parental investments in education and
in maintaining intact marriages pay off in greater probability of success for
their Asian American sons and daughters.
###
Dr. Cooper (douglas@tingandi.com), a retired scientist, is
now an author, editor, and writing coach. His first book, Ting and I: A
Memoir of Love, Courage and Devotion, was published by Outskirts Press in
2011. Also available from online booksellers are two memoirs he co-authored, The
Shield of Gold and Kidnapped Twice, and three memoirs he edited: High
Shoes and Bloomers and But…at What Cost and Home is Where the
Story Begins. With Adria Goldman Gross, he recently co-authored Solved!
Curing Your Medical Insurance Problems. His latest books are Write Your
Book with Me and How to Manage Nursing Care at Home. On
Twitter, he is @douglaswcooper. His writing, editing, coaching site is http://WriteYourBookWithMe.com/
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