Thursday, November 11, 2010

'Little Emperors', little thugs

I witnessed an horrific little vignette on the subway the other week.

A Chinese family - father, mother, and a boy of about 11 or 12 years old - were hurrying to board my carriage.  As they got on, the boy was throwing a huge stroppy fit about something or other, whining angrily at his father.  His father lost his temper with him and cuffed him quite heavily over the top of the head.  The boy promptly turned around and shoulder-charged his mother violently in the back, to make her move down further inside the carriage.  In fact, he did it twice.  Despite his tender years, he was already an inch or two taller than his mum, and quite a chunky lad.  It obviously hurt her quite a lot - both physically and emotionally.  She rolled her eyes in anguish and glanced towards her husband hoping for some gesture of support, but he chose to ignore her and leave his bratty son unadmonished for this public assault.  She herself didn't dare to say anything - whether from unwillingness to scold her little darling (at least, in public), or from fear of him, or from not wanting to make her husband 'lose face' by taking on his responsibility to discipline the child.

Sadly, such ugly little scenes are all too common in this country.  There was a notorious example captured in photographs 18 months ago where a similarly psychopathic little runt publicly humiliated his mother - shoving and slapping her, yanking on her hair, and ultimately getting her in a choke-hold! - for several minutes because she had tried to resist buying him a toy he'd demanded.  I've seen quite a few similar incidents myself here in Beijing.  Most commentators blame the 'One Child Policy' - suggesting that single children tend to be over-indulged by their parents and grandparents (the so-called 'little emperor' syndrome), and are poorly socialised with other children.  However, I rather fear that the extraordinarily poor parenting I so often see here, and the well-springs of violent rage that so often become manifest in both children and adults, must have wider and deeper causes.  I think this country is still traumatized by the mass hysteria, the mass violence (and the mass homicide) of the Cultural Revolution years - and probably will be for another generation or more yet.

9 comments:

Man in Black said...

To paraphrase a recent 'historical' bit by Colin Quinn, I think it's deeper than that...

5000 years of growing population putting increasing pressure on resources means aggravated by warfare, famine, and political pogroms conducted at shockingly frequent intervals means that, evolutionarily speaking, everybody we meet are descended from the assholes.

The nice kind types, the ones who waited their turn and were patient with their fellow human...yeah, those fuckers were killed off long ago.

We exist day to day, with such DNA that remains.

omg said...

That's awful. But from these examples it looks like the next generation is turning toward violence, so that won't be helpful.

Sadly, there is questionable parenting all over the world. I saw something the other day that, while not anywhere near what you've recounted here, made me cringe. A mother specifically told her child not to open a drink in a store. He asked why, she told him why, and he started opening it. She said, "Don't you dare! What did I just tell you?" And he untwisted the cap a bit more, making excuses about how he'd already drunk most of it, so there wasn't much to spill. And she said, "Don't you do it." And he did it, and she [i]laughed [/i] and said, "Oh, you!" I was appalled.

Don Tai said...

Awful to see, but common. This little Emperor syndrome from China is also imported to my Mandarin area of Toronto, where on a good day you can see kids throwing fits at our local Chinese malls.

While there may be some bad parenting involved, as if any parent is really great, I see cultural differences coming into play. Chinese kids are spoiled rotten by the parents and grandparents and disciplined by teachers and their school environment. When the school does not discipline enough the kids can get out of hand. In Canada parents discipline the kids and the school tries to teach them basic education. Teachers here cannot discipline kids anyway, due to legal issues. When you combine Chinese parents that do not discipline their kids with Canadian schools that cannot discipline the kids, the combination gets really out of hand.

In China as the kids grow up and graduate to a higher grade the school discipline gets stricter and the problem solves itself. Chinese teachers can still use rulers and straps on kids to keep them in line. There is also guilt from the Gaokao. Here in Canada the use of a well placed ruler by a teacher, even with parental consent (I have consented) would get you charged by the police with assault, and your teaching career destroyed.

China is different, not worse and not better.

Froog said...

Don, interesting point about the interaction between school and parental discipline - but I'm not convinced that is such a difference between China and Canada (or, more widely, 'the West').

While they may not be the legal or cultural restrictions on the use of corporal punishment here, my experience has been that most teachers - at least, at the better schools in Beijing and Shanghai - are terrified of attempting to discipline children because of a possible negative response from influential parents. We regularly hear horrific - though hopefully isolated - stories of teacher brutality here, but I don't think it's really very commonplace; not, at any rate, in the bigger cities or the 'model schools'; perhaps it's more of a problem in less prestigious city schools and rural schools.

Anyway, I wouldn't want to conflate 'discipline' with physical chastisement. I think that is perhaps a major part of the problem that I perceive in China - that parents too easily resort to violence, whether vocal (abuse and shouting), emotional (tears, tantrums and sulks), or physical (slaps, and worse)... with each other, and with their kids. It's not surprising the kids adopt this currency in their own behaviour.

Discipline ought to be about setting out clear and reasonable rules, and insisting on their observance consistently; enforcement should really be about firmness and resoluteness of manner - about psychological dominance, not physical threat.

Froog said...

OMG, how nice to hear from you again!

No, I don't by any means want to suggest that bad parenting is a uniquely Chinese problem. It's just that it does seem to be especially common here, and, in combination with certain other... well, shortcomings in the national temperament, shall we say, this threatens to become a massive social problem for problem. And, given the size and influence of the country today, China's problems become the world's.

One of my dearest chums (non-Chinese) is, alas, also one of the world's worst mum's - veering wildly between smothering affection and over-the-top anger, often, it seems, almost in the same sentence; and issuing endless utlimatums, almost none of which are ever followed through on. Her little horror - 4 or 5 now - is actually pretty well behaved with everyone else, but he plays her up something rotten. I can't really blame him.

I wonder what they were doing in your local supermarket, though?

Froog said...

MiB,
I'm very sceptical as to whether there are any specific genes for arsehole behaviour. If there were, we'd ALL be rapists by now (and I mean actual rapists, not just potential rapists).

I believe these behaviours are predominantly culturally-based. I hope they are. My hypothesis that Cultural Revolution PTSD is responsible for much of the borderline (or across-the-borderline) psychosis we see in China today is actually quite an optimistic analysis. If this is true, we might start to see a major improvement over the next few decades. (Although I fret that it might take quite a long time to shake it off completely. Just as it takes considerably more than a decade for the higher education system to fully bounce back from a decade-long shutdown, so the psychic scars of the collective brutalisation of an entire nation will not be easily salved. These things have a way of being passed on from one generation to the next, by subtle and often unknowable mechanisms. It bothers me that the current generation of parents of teenagers were mostly born during the Cultural Revolution [or immediately after it, when its shockwaves were still coursing through their families], and the grandparents [who are so often the ones doing the bulk of the child-rearing] are the Red Guard generation. I don't think the Chinese will have this out of their system until there's no longer anyone around who lived through that era, or anyone who was raised by someone who lived through that era.... and maybe not until there's no-one who was raised by someone who was raised by someone...)

If, on the other hand, you have to go all the way back to the 'century of humiliation', or the Manchu invasion, or the Jurchens, or the Mongols, or..... well, we're all fucked. Not just China, but all of us.

Hopfrog said...

I was watching a Discovery special the other week (I forget the name) in which a group of scientists were able to trace back the world's genetic tree to a single man, an Adam if you will. Not a biblical Adam, but a genetic one that lived in ancient Africa. I also believe there is a ridiculous portion of the population who can trace their heritage back to Genghis Kahn.

I tend to agree that genetically people are pretty much the same. It might not be a genetic de-evolution that has taken place but I certainly wouldn't rule out an environmental one. Not only do Chinese parents and children seem to be products of a wounded national psyche, but Chinese leaders as well. It almost seems akin to co-dependency or the vicious cycle of child abuse, where most abusers had been abused themselves. Every time I hear a Chinese official warn that such and such nation will "bear the consequences" I always feel as if its coming from a place of incredible insecurity.

Drifting off tangent I suppose, granted this wounded national psyche probably plays some role, but certainly a more significant role is the one child policy. Regardless of nation of residence, I've always found that a spoiled only child is usually a public terror with his parents and friends. I've certainly seen it growing up with them here in my own country.

But China, they have have engineered the largest upbringing of spoiled rotten little children that the world has ever known. Ever since my visit in 2007 I've wanted to take some time off and teach in China, but if there is one thing that keeps giving me second thoughts, its the thought of how difficult it will be to try and reach a generation of little emp....errrrrr... spoiled rotten brats.

Don Tai said...

Parenting, the fine art of flying by the seat of your pants trying to convince everyone, yourself included, that you know what you're doing. Arse in the air, warts and all, your kids see the true you and exploit this fact. The little peckers sure are cute, though annoying.

Not all Chinese kids in China are spoiled brats. Yes, there are quite a few, but no matter how the parents try their darnedest, some still emerge as good kids, largely unscathed by Chinese culture.

Froog said...

"Unscathed by Chinese culture", Don? Ouch!