by Amy Chua
As in Chinese American households, the conflict these stringent rules generate can be intense, especially when children reach their teenage years and begin to see how different their lives are from their friends’. As two young Korean Americans explained:
At school you talk to your white friends . . . [and with them] you go to sleepovers, paint your nails, eat pizza, but then you come home . . . it is like a different world . . . Most of us have first-generation parents. We know what goes on in a Korean house . . . parents’ pressure . . . “study study study, marry a Korean, don’t talk back.”
Why so many immigrants tend to raise their children more strictly is not hard to understand. Immigrants often come from more traditional societies; their economic position is relatively precarious; they’re outsiders, frequently more wary of what they see as an excessively permissive American culture; and they view academic achievement as their children’s best (or perhaps only) path to a more secure future. For all these reasons, immigrant parents of all different backgrounds have been found to “place greater expectations on children than do native-born parents” and probably raise their children with relatively greater impulse control than other Americans.
This is certainly true of Asian immigrants, as evidenced by rates of substance and alcohol abuse. Asian American teenagers—and Asian Americans on the whole—have dramatically lower rates of drug use and heavy or binge drinking than any other racial group in the United States. Asian American girls also have by far the lowest rates of teenage childbirth of any racial group (around 11 births per thousand Asian Americans in 2010, as compared with around 56 for Hispanics, 52 for blacks, and 24 for whites). Because giving birth for teenage girls, and being convicted of a drug crime for teenage boys, are so highly correlated with adverse economic outcomes later, Asian Americans’ impulse control in these domains contributes to their disproportionate success.
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ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE THINGS about impulse control is that it transfers over from one domain of life to another.
Impulse control is like stamina. If you ran five miles every few days for several months, you’d build up stamina, which would allow you not only to run farther, but to perform all sorts of unrelated physical tasks better than you could before. As numerous studies have now proved, it’s the same with impulse control. If people are made to do almost any impulse-controlling task—even as simple as getting themselves to sit up straight—on a regular basis for even a few weeks, their overall willpower increases. Suddenly they’re stronger in all kinds of unrelated activities that also require concentration, perseverance, or temptation resistance.
Which is why stricter child rearing can make such a difference, even when the forms of impulse control emphasized in a particular culture have nothing to do with getting ahead in school. Consider the Mormons.
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MOST PEOPLE KNOW THAT Mormons don’t drink. As interpreted by the LDS Church, the Word of Wisdom—the Mormon “health code” traced to an 1833 revelation—requires Latter-day Saints to abstain not only from alcohol, but also tobacco, coffee, tea, and of course drugs. Gambling, pornography, adultery, and abortion are considered evil. Premarital and extramarital sex is absolutely forbidden, “a sin exceeded in seriousness only by murder and ‘denying the Holy Ghost.’”
Discipline and self-control are inculcated in Mormon children when they are very young. Mormon families spend three hours at church every Sunday, with kids beginning Sunday School at age three. At fourteen, Mormon teenagers are encouraged to attend “seminary,” and many get up at five a.m. every day to attend an hourlong scripture study class before regular school starts. These efforts to raise “clean-living” children appear to be effective. According to the four-year National Study of Youth and Religion, Mormon teenagers are less likely to have sexual intercourse, consume alcohol, smoke pot, or watch X-rated films than teenagers of any other faith.
For most male and many female Mormons, however, a central life-defining experience is the mission—a two-year stint in an assigned location that is basically impulse-control boot camp. The experience begins at a Missionary Training Center; the flagship center is in Provo, Utah. There, young men and women spend up to two strenuous months learning languages, studying scripture, and drilling missionary techniques with “military efficiency.” (“What’s the difference between the MTC and prison?” runs a popular joke. “You can call home from prison.”)
Once on location, which can be anywhere from New Jersey to Ghana, missionaries dressed in suit and tie (or neat skirts) work ten to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, cleaning house on the seventh. They receive no financial compensation; they must give up cars, movies, and romance. Most live in relative poverty and experience constant rebuffs, rejections, or insults from the strangers they attempt to convert. “The thing a mission does is teach you persistency,” says Gary Crittenden, a former CFO of American Express.
Another extraordinary feature of the Mormon mission is the “companionship” requirement. Latter-day Saints are required to do their missions in pairs. Companions spend twenty-four hours a day together, eating, working, studying, praying, sleeping in the same room—not even allowed to take a walk or go to a store alone. For some, companionship turns into lasting friendship. For others, it is itself an exercise in impulse control. As one missionary put it, “The idea of having a companion, at first, is pretty traumatic. You grow up in a society that stresses individuality and privacy for nineteen years and then . . . that all changes. You are constantly with someone else and this someone else is not of your choosing. In some cases, he is definitely not of your choosing.” In almost every case, companionship works for one or both missionaries as a way to monitor and encourage compliance with the mission’s arduous regimen.
The strictures of Mormon youth prove too much for some, but there can be no doubt that they translate into a great many sedulous Mormon adults. Mormon businessmen are well known for not playing golf, not having a beer at the firm barbecue, and not going out for even a one-martini lunch. They also refrain from many nonforbidden social activities, reserving their “free” time for church, community, and customs like Family Home Evening, the Monday nights most Mormon parents set aside—religiously—to spend with their children.
Thus Mormons present a fascinating instantiation of the Triple Package. Here we have a group who believe they are literally God’s children—“gods in embryo”—placed on earth to lead the world to salvation. They know their way of life is superior to the “sea of moral decay” they see around them. Yet at the same time, in the United States, they remain marginalized, regarded with suspicion, persistently viewed as cultish, deviant, or “creepy” (as Mitt Romney’s sons were repeatedly described). Several Protestant denominations have officially stated that they do “not regard the Mormon church as a Christian church.” In a 2006 South Carolina poll, 44 percent said they believed that Mormons still practice polygamy; in a nationwide poll, 53 percent said they had “some reservations” about or were “very uncomfortable” with Mormon candidates.
Among many Latter-day Saints, these suspicions give rise to deeply conflicted feelings. On one hand, Mormons may long to refute their doubters, to fit in, to be seen as “normal” Americans. On the other, they want to preserve their identity as God’s “peculiar people,” with their own distinctive beliefs, values, and practices. In the “cognitive dissonance” that follows, Mormons sometimes present themselves with a clean-cut, all-American image so exaggerated that many Americans actually find it peculiar—which of course Mormons aren’t sure they mind.
This inner conflict has been instinct in Mormonism ever since Joseph Smith ran for president even while Mormons were being threatened with extermination. (Orrin Hatch, the veteran Mormon senator from Utah, wears a Jewish mezuzah—a piece of parchment inscribed with biblical verses—around his neck, explaining, “I wear [it] just to remind me, just to make sure that there is never another holocaust any
where. You see, the Mormon church is the only church in the history of this country that had an extermination order out against it.”) Throughout its history, as the sociologist and practicing Mormon Armand Mauss describes it, the LDS Church has vacillated between assimilation and retrenchment, between respectability and uniqueness.
Entire dissertations could be written (and undoubtedly are being written) on the inner Mormon turmoil revealed by a story in which a chaste, saintly, alcohol- and tobacco-abstaining young woman is seduced by a supernatural being who is simultaneously a blood-sucking vampire and a radiant angel—which is of course the plot of the mega-smash Twilight books, whose author is an observant Latter-day Saint. Such is the nature of Mormon insecurity: half in, half out; half normal, half strange; wanting acceptance, wanting to convert others; indeed, wanting to be accepted by the very people they want to convert.
In classic Triple Package fashion, the result among many Latter-day Saints has been an intensely disciplined drive to prove themselves through business success and other badges of esteem. “As somebody who grew up in Utah . . . I have always felt like there was a little bit of a chip on the shoulder,” explains Dave Checketts, formerly the CEO of Madison Square Garden. “We feel like we’re really good citizens, good people, and misunderstood.” “A big part of my drive,” says Checketts, “is this sense of needing to prove myself.” David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue, feels that “the Mormon Church is one of the most misunderstood organizations on the planet” and says of his own intense discipline, “It’s all about doing better than everyone else.”
Just as it was for the early Calvinists, whose work ethic Max Weber studied, success in business is for Mormons not only a way of proving the superiority of their values and way of life. It’s also a proof of their divine favor. Harold Bloom was hardly exaggerating when he called Mormonism a “kind of Puritan anachronism,” perhaps “the most work-addicted culture in religious history.”
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ASCETICISM HAS NEVER LOOMED large in Judaism, but impulse control is without doubt foundational to the Jewish religion and to the traditional Jewish way of life.
The Ten Commandments could have been called the Ten Big Impulses to Control, and they were but a fraction of the hundreds of injunctions—613 to be precise, according to Jewish tradition—given to Moses as everlasting law to bind the Jewish people. Early rabbinic Judaism posited self-control as one of the highest ethical values. “Who is strong?” asks the Talmud. “One who subdues his passions. As it says: ‘One who is slow to anger is better than a hero and one who has control over his will is better than one who conquers a city.’” According to Philo, the Jewish philosopher of the Hellenistic era, the Stoic virtue of enkrateia—self-control or self-mastery—was at the heart of the entire body of Mosaic law, and in this respect the Jews were a model for all other nations: Moses “exhorted [the Jews] to show [enkrateia] in all the affairs of life, in controlling the tongue and the belly and the organs below the belly.”
Over the long centuries, rabbinic interpretation and application multiplied the rules of Jewish law, until by the sixteenth century one abbreviated code—the Shulchan Aruch—contained thousands of regulations governing every aspect of life, from waking until sleep. Exclusion and anti-Semitism may have intensified Jews’ habits of self-control in societies where their position was precarious. Immanuel Kant offered an account of Jewish abstemiousness along these lines in the late eighteenth century. “Jews,” wrote Kant, “normally do not get drunk, or at least they carefully avoid all appearance of it.” The explanation, he said, lay in the Jews’ “civil status,” which was “weak” and insecure. As a result, Jews needed to be circumspect, “for which sobriety is required.”
It’s true that American Jews of the nineteenth century, who were largely German, often favored the assimilationist Reform movement, which repudiated most of the age-old strictures of Jewish law. Circumcision, declared the leading Reform rabbi in America in 1885, was a “remnant of savage African life,” the bar mitzvah an obsolete ritual. At an 1883 banquet celebrating the inaugural class of rabbis graduating from Hebrew Union College—the first Jewish seminary in the United States and a crowning achievement of the Reform movement—the menu included littleneck clams, “Salade de shrimps,” and frog legs.
But the millions of Eastern European and Russian Jews pouring into New York beginning around 1890 brought with them an orthodox Judaism still committed to all the old restrictions. As described in a 1914 book about Jewish life, the strictly observant Jews in America’s new Jewish enclaves, like the orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe, still “regulate[d] every day in their lives, from the cradle to the grave, by the minute and comprehensive laws of the mediaeval codex, the Shulchan Aruch.” This was the Judaism of the Pale and shtetl, where ghettoized Jews lived “bound and shackled”—as one (Jewish) observer of their poor villages put it—by impulse-constraining rules they imposed on themselves:
[The Jews] tend even to forsake whatever pleasures Jewish law allows them. They are constantly placing new yokes upon themselves. They hide their natural impulses. They renounce the darker elements in their nature. They have ears only for the reading of the law, eyes only for scrutinizing sacred texts, voices only for crying “Hear, O Israel.”
Even the Jewish Sabbath—which many Jews cherish as a family-centered day of rest—was a highly disciplined regimen of self-restraint. Observance included hours of services and Torah study. If a family had a horse and wagon, they could not use it (because riding is forbidden on the Sabbath). Under finely nuanced rabbinic reasoning, recreation too could be forbidden. If, for example, Jewish children were lucky enough to have a river or lake nearby, they could not swim in it, because swimming might entail use of a raft, and a raft might need repair, and repairing the raft would be work—forbidden on the Sabbath.
In America, the core Sabbath ban against remunerative work became itself an acute form of impulse control—where the impulse being controlled was the urge to make extra money. In What Makes Sammy Run?, the popular 1941 rags-to-riches novel that became a long-running Broadway musical, a Lower East Side Jewish father is horrified when his son returns home on a Saturday with money in his hands:
“I hadda chance to make a dollar,” Sammy said.
“Sammy!” his father bellowed. “Touching money on the Sabbath! God should strike you dead!”
The old man snatched the money and flung it down the stairs . . . .
On top of the innumerable religious restrictions, typical Jewish American parenting in the first half of the twentieth century was a match for any Asian immigrant parenting today. Surprisingly early on, Jewish newspapers in New York began to record objections (from Jews themselves) to the pressures and after-school discipline being imposed on children—objections that sound eerily familiar to some of us. In 1911 a Jewish doctor wrote in the Forward:
We push our children too much. After school they study music, go to Talmud Torah. Why sacrifice them on the altar of our ambition? Must we get all the medals and scholarships? Doctors will tell you about students with shattered nerves, brain fever. Most of them wear glasses. Three to five hours of studying a day, six months a year, are better than five to twelve hours a day for ten months a year.
Music practice—especially piano practice—played a significant role in these children’s lives, as revealed by another critical essay in the Forward:
[A] piano in the front room is preferable to a boarder. It gives spiritual pleasure to exhausted workers. But in most cases the piano is not for pleasure but to make martyrs of little children, and make them mentally ill. A little girl comes home, does her homework, and then is forced to practice under the supervision of her well-meaning father. He is never pleased with her progress, and feels he is paying fifty cents a lesson for nothing. The session ends with his yelling and her crying. These children have not a single free minute for themselves. They have no time to play.
Thus the two million Eas
tern European Jews who immigrated to America in the early 1900s brought with them habits of heightened discipline, religious prohibitions, and hard work that they not only practiced themselves but passed down to their children. Later waves of Jewish immigration—for example, during and after the Second World War—would reinfuse Jewish American culture with the same ethos. The anxiety Jews felt as a result of anti-Semitism in the United States for much of the twentieth century probably strengthened their impulse control, as Kant thought it did in Germany. In the face of such prejudice, the disproportionate success twentieth-century American Jews eventually achieved in professions and careers requiring long years of study or practice—medicine, science, law, music—is testimony to their habits of discipline and perseverance.
Today, it’s no longer clear that impulse control is a defining element of Jewish American culture. Orthodoxy has waned, as has anti-Semitism. Contemporary Jewish parents in the United States are much more ambivalent about “pushing” their children (at least openly), especially at upper income levels. The transformation in some circles of bar and bat mitzvahs into $250,000 coming-out parties for thirteen-year-olds is not evidence of a culture of restraint or temptation resistance. (At one early twenty-first-century event, with an estimated seven-figure price tag, the catsuit-clad bat mitzvah girl descended into her party at Cipriani on Wall Street hanging by a wire from the ceiling, and was then “serenaded by Jon Bon Jovi for 45 minutes.”) Whether Jewish culture in the United States today has lost its impulse control—and therefore the Triple Package—is a subject to which we’ll return.
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AMERICA IS THE GREAT wrecker of impulse control. Chinese upbringing traditions, with their emphasis on drilling, obedience, and discipline, survived two thousand years of dynastic cycles, communist upheaval, even the Cultural Revolution with its anti-Confucian, anti-intellectual thrust. But it seems the one thing they can’t survive is—America. After a single generation in the United States, traditional strict parenting in Chinese American households softens; parental expectations drop, and a sharp fall-off in academic performance occurs between the second and third generations.
