#tigerparents

Just saw Parenting Untapped Ep 13 – Aly and Meiqi share a heartfelt conversation about growing up with a strict, high-achieving parent and how that relationship changes over time. It’s a beautiful reflection on parenting dynamics and the journey from strictness to friendship!

Annual Lunar New Year CUHK Reunion Dinner #cuhk #chosenfamily #tigerparents (at Tai Wu Restaurant) https://www.instagram.com/p/BuQMtt2ndLB/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=c67r5y99xqwi

"In 2008, the year Mr Woods won his last major, 12% of Americans aged six or less were playing organised sport, up from 9% in 1997, when he won his first. Yet a growing body of research suggests that specialisation—the intense, year-round practice of a single activity at the expense of others—is dangerous for the youngest athletes, while picking a sport later on is in fact more likely to lead to an elite athletic career. Focusing on one sport as a youngster greatly increases the risk of injury [..] high-school athletes who specialised sustained 60% more new lower-body injuries in a year than did those who played a range of sports. That gap still existed after controlling for gender, age and sport; more than a third of football, softball, volleyball, basketball and tennis players considered themselves specialists. These results are consistent with other research. [..] young tennis specialists are 1.5 times more likely to do damage to themselves than generalists are, while the odds of injury triple for youth baseball pitchers that complete 100 innings in a year. [..] Striplings that specialise also have a higher risk of burnout. They practise the same sport relentlessly, which can leave them fatigued and stressed in their early teenage years: [..] children who become sport stars tend to do fewer hours a week of serious practice in their eventual discipline than those who don’t quite make it. Collectively, elite performers only put in the extra shifts in their late teens. Similarly a study from Denmark found that “near-elite” athletes tended to start their sporting careers earlier than did those who became the real deal, who had done less training as adolescents but had surged ahead by their twenties. [..] Athletes who pick a single sport later have longer to try a range of them—which means they can pick the one that is the best fit, rather than a discipline that they have been ushered towards by early growth or ambitious parents. They can also benefit from new skills learned in other games. Novak Djokovic has credited his flexibility and rapid movement on the tennis court to his years skiing. Conversely, those who knuckle down prematurely are at risk of limiting their motor-skill development, according to a 2015 paper, which recommends “more opportunities for free, unstructured play” and “periodised strength and conditioning” to promote movement and limit injury. In spite of these findings, professional teams are pursuing the best underage talent ever-more aggressively. Premier League football clubs reportedly scout players as young as five; FC Barcelona’s famed youth academy has a team of children born in 2009. These programmes risk selecting players who are merely the most physically developed. This is one of the contributing factors to the “relative age effect”, whereby professional athletes are more likely to be the oldest—and therefore the biggest—in their age groups. In Premier League football academies, 45% are born between September (the cut-off for age-group teams in the UK) and November, while only 10% are born between June and August. Surprisingly, the same bias exists even once players approach adulthood. A study in 2011 found that baseball players who were young for their draft classes—even by a few months—tended to go on to outperform the average production from the slots where they were chosen. Their older counterparts generally performed worse than expectations. This research has significant implications. Not only is so-called “tiger parenting” a recipe for a joyless childhood—it is detrimental to a youngster’s chances of later success."