Asian Parental Influence a Popular Scientific Debate

Asian Parental Influence

A popular scientific debate asks whether we are more likely shaped by 'nature' or 'nurture.' In other words, how much of our individuality and personality comes from our genetic makeup and how much of it comes from the influences around us? This is a debate that is directly relevant to the subject here, which asks what influence Asian parents tend to have on the development of their children. The answer, this discussion will show, is that the tight family bonds typical in Asian cultures result in a heavy influence by parents but that heredity is likely a substantial effecter as well.

In terms of the influence created by culture, there is a long-standing course of biological, psychological and sociological research which says that one's upbringing is unmatched in terms of influencing the personality, psychological orientation and ethical development of an individual. The impact that parents have on these features from the formative stages of development is likely to last throughout one's adult life. As the article by Spett (1998) phrases it, "psychodynamic therapists have long assumed that an individual's personality structure is largely determined by that individual's childhood relationship with his or her parents, especially the mother. Many psychodynamic theorists have become rich and famous by attributing adult personality to toilet training, mother-infant bonding, infant-parent attachment, good enough mothering, parental empathy, separation-individuation, etc." (Spett, p. 1)

What is directly relevant to this discussion is the cultural determinants of these experiences listed above. Asian cultures have their own distinct ideas about mother-infant bonding, parental empathy and separation-individuation. Many of these experiences are, in fact, culturally loaded and varied just as ethnicities are varied. In other words, it should be expected that many of the formative experiences connecting Asian children with their parents will be shaped at least in part based on Asian-derived customs and social norms. As a result, certain personality traits, behavior patterns and beliefs in the child are likely to be culturally-constructed by channeled through their relationship with their parents.

In addition, there are conditions which are not necessarily culturally-driven but which tend to define the relational dynamics between parents and children more generally. Here, a sense of ownernship is common and results in a conveyance of specific ideals, values and personality features as an almost unconscious way of marking parental territory. As the text by LaFollette (1980) says, "long-held, deeply ingrained attitude toward children, repeatedly reaffirmed in recent court decisions, and present, at least to some degree, in almost all of us. The belief is that parents own, or at least have natural sovereignty over, their children.(10) It does not matter precisely how this belief is described, since on both views parents legitimately exercise extensive and virtually unlimited control over their children." (LaFollette, p. 196)

This unlimited control extends to dominance over things as personal as one's sense of right and wrong, one's tendencies in terms of broader socialization and one's intellectual abilities. Therefore, if there are behavior traits that are specific to Asian parenting or personality traits specific to Asian parents, this sense of ownership permits the tendency to project these behavior and personality traits.