Why do Asian kids seem more likely to excel in math? How does a Western upbringing compare to an Eastern one?

Maya Thiagarajan explores some touchy territory in her new book Beyond the Tiger Mom: East-West Parenting for the Global Age.

Thiagarajan says she was nervous about making generalizations when she set out to record and share the contrasting parenting approaches she witnessed raising her kids both in the U.S. and in Singapore — and teaching in both places, too.

“I certainly think there’s a huge range of approaches, both within the U.S. and within Asia,” says Thiagarajan, whose family moved to Singapore from Manhattan in 2010, when her eldest child was 5. “It’s not about setting up Asia vs. America and saying one is better.”

But parenting is quite often a cultural act, she says. “We are immersed in our own cultures, so we do often unquestioningly kind of adopt those cultural practices.”

She says she hopes her book will highlight that there’s no universal way of parenting, and show how we might “blend the best of all ways as we raise global children.”

I chatted with Thiagarajan recently. Here is some of what she had to say.

Although you grew up in India, you went to university and started your family in America. In the book, you say you were fully bought into a western way of raising your kids, gobbling up books by western experts. How would you describe your parenting approach and philosophy then?

I was very influenced by American approaches to parenting and to education. I was trying to do everything by the book according to American experts. I think one of the biggest things that I was doing differently then, and that perhaps has changed, was my focus on empowering my very young kids with a strong sense of agency. I used to feel very guilty if I told my kid to do anything that they didn’t necessarily want to do. I was swayed by the American idea that kids need to be empowered and given lots of choices and make their own decisions and be very independent. Certainly moving to Asia challenged that in many ways.

I was also influenced by North America’s wonderful approach to reading in the early years, with bedtime reading and immersing kids in a print-rich environment. I still believe that that’s a very important thing to do.

So then your family made the big move to Singapore. What did you first note in the way your new parenting peers were handling child-rearing compared to you and your peers back in America?

What I noticed when I came here was that parents felt much less guilt about telling kids what to do. For me, that was empowering and liberating in many ways, that as a parent you are the elder, you know better.

And what struck me as really interesting here was that a lot of the moms I met with were very interested in math. They would ask, “What do you do for math?” They were very interested in giving them lots of early math experiences.

Let’s get a little deeper into the math question. Why is it that Asian students, both those living in Asia and those living in North America, excel in the maths and sciences and pursue STEM education and careers more often?

It is a stereotype but there’s quite a bit of data to back it up. Because if you look at Asian nations and Asian-American populations, they do tend to do very well in math and STEM fields.

What I noticed when I arrived in Singapore was just the amount of value that parents placed on math when kids were young. There’s this great cultural reverence and appreciation for math and a tremendous focus on it.

For example, parents even with very young kids would be integrating math into daily conversations. One mother I interviewed talked about how she used the elevators in the apartment building to teach her child math. She said it’s like riding on a number line. “We’re on floor five now. How many floors until we get to floor 11?” Her child became really comfortable with adding and subtracting numbers through elevator rides.

Most of the mothers also started doing math worksheets by the time their kids were 4, so quite a bit of formal math as well.

Also, the numbering system in Mandarin is more logical in some ways than the English numbers. We say “eleven,” which for a young kid is quite confusing, but they would say “ten one.”

What do you think Western parents can learn from their counterparts in Asia and vice-versa?

I used to agonize over things in the U.S. and, when I came here (to Singapore), parents were like, “Well, you’re the mom. You tell her what to do. She has to do her homework. That’s it. You set the boundaries.” For me, it definitely was empowering, both as a teacher and a parent, that I had this natural authority that the culture seemed to give me.

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I do think that there is a tremendous amount of strengths that both Western parenting and Asian parenting bring to the table. In the West, kids are given a lot more leeway to express themselves, experiment with things and there’s a little bit less restriction, which allows them to be more creative and innovative. I think those are great things, and there are a lot of Asian parents that I talk to who are quite admiring of Western parenting and really want to adopt that.

This interview has been edited and condensed.