Battle Hymn of the Homeschool Mother

How I Went from “Model Minority” to Member of the Counterculture

Oct 15, 2024

Dear Coddling Movie Community,

You really loved LB’s first essay, and I know you’ll love this one too.

Read it and then check out her Substack, The Happy Underachiever (gotta love that title!).

All the best,

Ted

The model minority was no myth for me. It was my life growing up

I was the first person in my Korean family born in the United States. My father is a graduate from Seoul National University, which is the Harvard of South Korea. My mother graduated from Ewha Womans University in South Korea, another prestigious college comparable to Wellesley College here. Both sides of my extended family still live in South Korea. They didn’t need to emigrate for a better life. They were doing just fine there.

I grew up in the suburbs of DC.

We moved from Virginia to Maryland when I was six because of the top public high schools in the area. I just saw my highschool named in the book Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us. It was on the list for the top twenty-five high school debate teams in the country. When I was in middle school, my mom voiced her regret for moving to Maryland because if we stayed in Virginia, I could have applied to the number one public highschool in the country, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. I think she still regrets it to this day.

My family had monthly dinner parties and twice a year vacations with a group of SNU alumni throughout the 80’s and 90’s. My father was part of a network of Korean scientists and engineers. All the SNU alumni’s kids – so the kids I was constantly measured against – have all attended prestigious colleges in the US too. Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, West Point, UVA, Brown, MIT and so on. Several of those kids went to Thomas Jefferson High School.

The idea of being limited to public high schools is important because as typical immigrant parents of their generation, they didn’t want to spend any money on anything extra, unless it was for piano or violin lessons. Guilty! In addition to piano competitions, I actually took a piano final exam my senior year of high school where I had to play 10+ minutes of classical music from memory in front of two judges and get a grade. The crazy part is, I begged to take piano lessons when I was six.

When I was ten, I asked my mom for a harder piano teacher because I wanted to compete. The yearly recital at a small church was not cutting it. I was searching for rigor and a blue ribbon. It was all self-imposed. Or perhaps influenced by my social circle. One of my best friends who played two instruments ended up going to Juilliard. My mom never forced me to practice or showed concern on how I progressed in piano. In that way, she was an atypical Asian mom. But she did expect excellent grades.

Honor roll everything. AP everything. This was sort of self-imposed as well since I didn’t get any support in the form of tutoring or Kumon or even my mom checking my homework. Spending money on trying to learn something was equivalent to admitting defeat. You have a brain, why can’t you just learn it? I was expected to just do well on my own accord. Learn it myself. Sink or swim.

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Tiger Mom or Something Else?

So when I became pregnant, I thought long and hard on how I will raise my child. I didn’t want to become exactly like my mom. My parents are the extreme opposite of coddling. I was expected to be independent at barely six years old when they handed me my own house key. Babysitters cost money. My parents would make Lenore Skenazy proud. Now don’t go calling CPS. I did have an older brother who was 10 at the time, so technically he could watch me. But as any 10-year-old boy, he preferred going out to play over watching his little sister after school.

I wanted to offer my son a bit more guidance and support than my parents. And I also entertained the idea of being home for after school cookie baking—something I never experienced myself but envied in my American friends growing up.

I was jealous of my friends whose mothers were home to greet them after school. My mom’s career was at the hospital but she made it home for dinner every night unless she was on evening shift. She’s still working there today, even after a brief retirement of a few months. Yes, she went back to work at 76 years old after officially retiring because she fears if she doesn’t use her brain, she will lose it. If only more people thought like her.

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While I was pregnant, I read Amy Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I hoped it would be the manual on how to raise a smart, successful child. After all, I still held the same expectations for my son as my mom did for me – excellence. Honor roll everything. AP everything.

The backlash to her book miffed me. When I read the book, I thought this lady was impressive. She had what many parents today lacked. Cojones. Chua was very deliberate on how she raised her daughters and held firm in her beliefs. The work ethic she instilled in her daughters outshined my work ethic. She held certain nonnegotiable rules and values for her family that she never budged on. Sleepovers? Never. Practice piano daily, even on vacation? Always. Her resolve was indomitable. Fad parenting trends weren’t gonna sway her. It’s a trait to be admired, not disparaged.

Parents today need a lesson on holding firm in their beliefs and family values. In fact, I believe many Gen-X and Millenial parents can’t even name what their nonnegotiables are. And if they can, their children probably cannot. It seems parents are getting their questionable advice on child-rearing mainly from social media where it’s nearly impossible to separate the parenting wheat from the chaff.

Sure, video games are great for your son’s hand-eye coordination!

If your daughter doesn’t have tik tok, how will she have any friends?

Plop your baby on ABC Mouse in Mandarin and they will learn a second language while learning how to add too!

A Different Path

Lucky for me, I had authors like Jonathan Haidt, Lenore Skenazy, Peter Gray, Bill Stixrud, Ned Johnson, Bruce Perry, Leonard Sax, Victoria Dunckley, Erica Komisar and many others who I read to learn how children thrive—what to do and what not to do. These are not books on homeschooling, but books on healthy child development with actual research and years of experience, not an anecdote from a virtual mommy friend on a Facebook group.

When you look at their list of harmful factors of child development, traditional school and all the peripheral effects that come with being stuck inside a school all day is a major part of the equation. So I came to the conclusion that if I omit school, it is far easier to incorporate all their recommended things to help my son thrive, and not merely survive and become one of the educated sheep.

At this point in my parenting journey, I grew some cojones and bucked the societal, racial, social, and economical trend of my cohort. Me, an Asian-American “model minority” who excelled in the traditional academic environment, even with my post-college degrees, said “Nope. This is not for my son and my family. I will stay home with him.”

While my friends were sending their kids to Montessori schools or pricey private schools, I chose to take my son to the free library programs, the grocery store, and the park. While my peers are bragging about their children’s academic achievements and private school acceptances on social media, I don’t.

That in itself is also a sort of conditioning by having your child keep reaching for the carrot—the external validation—to keep them fueled. We all know the number one reason Asian parents want their kids to go to an Ivy League college is to humblebrag it to their friends at church. The minute I start spouting off my son’s accomplishments, he will find no joy in those activities. Hence I keep my mouth shut and the pressure to perform for others off.

At first it was hard telling my friends and family that my son’s not in school. Most thought my choice was just for preschool or kindergarten. A common question was “so when will you put him in school?” Now I can confidently say probably never.

What about college?

Aiming for College or Something Else?

Well, that subject is a whole other essay, but I’m not doing all this simply for him to “get into a good college.” That is not the goal of life. I’ve already lived that life growing up and it was pretty miserable. My mom made it clear that life was Ivy or bust. Well, I didn’t go to an Ivy, but my life is far from bust. I actually enjoy my life very much, probably because I didn’t go to an Ivy and get myself locked in golden handcuffs. These were my thoughts before the woke mind virus infection on most elite college campuses revealed itself. Today, I hope more people are open to my beliefs.

My son is 11 now and has never been in school. I have always homeschooled, or perhaps more accurately unschooled, for most of his life so far. I don’t follow any particular curriculum but focus on my nonnegotiables which are basics of human life. These include ensuring a foundation of healthy habits—healthy sleep, healthy food, and healthy relationships. Without these, your quality of life diminishes dramatically. If you aren’t convinced how essential good sleep is, I recommend reading Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep.

When preschool drop off was at 7:30am which was my son’s normal waking time then, it quickly became a hard no for me. Rushing out the door five days a week without letting him eat a nice slow healthy breakfast would be the first step onto a lifetime conveyor belt (for both of us) of hell. Or more accurately, conditioning. This system is training humans from the age of three to be a good worker bee.

Wake up to an alarm bell, switch classes to an alarm bell, eat to an alarm bell and even shit to an alarm bell. Kids don’t even get a chance to learn their own body’s natural rhythms. Do you know your own chronotype? Or has society already suppressed it so much you don’t trust your own body? Or rather, your own body cannot even regulate itself anymore. If so, I’m sure Pfizer or Eli Lilly has a drug for that. It is now acceptable for even preschool-aged kids to be on some type of medication.

Then there is Pandora's box on the subject of food. Please explain to me why Lunchables are approved for the school cafeteria yet most schools are now completely nut free. Peanut butter and jelly is one of my son’s favorite sandwiches and he loves pistachios. Oh, it’s for the allergy kids they say. Wait, how did peanut allergies sky rocket in the last generation in the first place? Because people followed the approved messaging—don’t give your baby peanut butter on the small chance they have an allergy.

I didn’t follow my pediatrician’s advice because it made no logical sense to me. As soon as my son started eating solid foods, I gave him a taste of peanut butter now and then. Let his immune system meet nuts. Today, we are introducing kids’ immune systems to processed junk food before allowing them to have nuts. Is it a surprise then that kids are craving processed food readily yet find it hard to eat only whole organic foods? That drinking something with 50 grams of sugar and food coloring is acceptable, yet drinking only water is not.

Healthy Relationships

I love this common question of “what about socialization?” It drives me nuts. Please show me how one gets normal healthy socialization by being in a classroom full of same-aged peers sitting in assigned seating and not allowed to talk but listen to an arbitrary authority figure for seven hours a day.

And then your whole group changes for the next school year. Onto a new group of classmates with a new teacher—all of which you have no control over what’s picked for you. Many kids don’t even get a chance to form long lasting friendships with people in their community. They have no template. Today they are shuttled from one extracurricular “enrichment” activity to another every day. Do they even know the names of their next door neighbors? My son does.

Not to mention that true and deep learning is based on relationships.

If you don’t have a strong relationship with the teacher/mentor, there is no learning. If you look back on your own school career, how easy is it to remember the subjects you enjoyed or excelled in. It was probably because you liked the teacher and they enjoyed you as a student. If you were lucky, you may have continued studying that subject year after year if the following teachers were a positive influence too.

How often do we hear about a child giving up on a particular subject because he hates the teacher? And why would a child hate a teacher? Likely, because the teacher made them feel dumb. But everyone puts the blame on the child’s ability or lack thereof to learn it, not on the relationship with the teacher.

My son would do fine in traditional school, maybe even great. He has no learning disabilities or health issues and loads of self-confidence. But he would lose his agency to work on things he’s passionate about for any extended period of time. Just this past Monday, my son worked on building a 1/16 scale radio-controlled German WWII tank with his grandfather…for a continuous four hours.

They wanted to work longer but we all had to eat dinner. The next morning, my son started back on the tank at 7:30am. None of this could have happened with a school schedule. His grandfather patiently taught him how to get this build started because the relationship is based on love. My son wants to build this tank not because he is some WWII model tank fanatic, but because the set was gifted to him by his grandfather. Show me a school teacher that will sit for 4 hours with my son for free to build this tank. Or even give the opportunity to let my son work on anything for four continuous hours for that matter. Standardized testing doesn’t count.

We all hear that being in a flow state is optimal.

That you’re so engrossed in your work and learning that you lose track of time. How does a school system encourage this when a child is interrupted by a bell every 50 minutes? How can we expect our college-aged kids to suddenly find their passion and achieve these flow states if they never had the opportunity throughout their first 18 years of life. Toddlers achieve flow all the time. But many parents unknowingly rush them out of it. When one has a passion, it’s easy to find purpose. When one has a purpose, life becomes meaningful.

Based on just these three fundamentals and how it’s nearly impossible to prioritize them in a traditional school environment, it’s no surprise that we are the most obese and depressed nation in the world.

But what will he do when he grows up? How will he get a job? Another question that drives me nuts. Who knows what he will be or will accomplish. I can’t predict the future just like elite colleges can’t ensure your future happiness. But I do know this – that the jobs of tomorrow do not exist today. I’m just ensuring that my son has enough practice to employ the skills that are required for the next generation of leaders and innovators. This isn’t something that’s taught in a classroom.

There’s no point in having wealth, if you don’t have health. And by health, I mean not only in body but in mind and spirit as well. And if you have health in body, mind, and spirit, it’s much easier to obtain wealth.

It’s still true that the model minority is no myth for me. I just go by a different definition of model minority.