Blowing Water | Will all you monster parents just please stop screaming?
Can parenting differences be attributed to long-accepted cultural and social practices? Either way, Luisa Tam warns that when discipline becomes excessive, we need to intervene before a child is seriously harmed
My neighbour was screaming at his son again the other day. In fact, it’s a weekly ritual that takes place every weekend when he makes his son wash his car.
I suspect it’s his way of making his son, who is slightly overweight, do a bit of exercise and instil some discipline in him.
But last night, the boy made a mistake and I felt the father was unnecessarily harsh. Instead of berating his son loudly – like he usually does – the man threw in some choice words. What was the son’s crime, you may ask? He left the hosepipe running and wasted water.
In Hong Kong, it’s not uncommon to see Chinese parents (both locals and mainlanders) scream at their young kids in public, or worse, slap them around for misbehaving. It often appears to me that the punishments outweigh the seriousness of the misdemeanours.
This kind of toxic parental behaviour always brings back some of my own less than pleasant childhood memories. My mother is an exemplar of the “tiger mum” stereotype, a term made popular by Amy Chua in her 2011 book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.