Duty To Succeed: Honor Vs. Happiness In College And Career Choices

Growing up in the United States is not the same every child. Some parents expect more out of their children than others. The Academic article “The duty to succeed: honor versus happiness in college and career choices of East Asian students in the United States” written by, Lauren Dundes, Eunice Cho and Spencer Kwak tests the hypothesis that parents from East Asian decent are harder on their kids and expect more out of them compared to white parents. The article was written for college counselors to help provide them information on Asian American students and their parents. The information is being used to help college counselors guide their students’ into majors that satisfy the wishes of both the parents and students. This academic article …show more content…
In this tradition, the kids are mostly raised by their mothers and are viewed as extensions of the parents. Family honor is very important in the asian culture and parents often try to motivate their children to do better academically than the kids of their friends and family. The mother’s eternal glory comes from being able to brag about how smart or talented her kids are and what they have become. This is very different than the way most white parents generally raise their kids. In America, we generally believe in a more individualistic style of raising children. We believe that the child should want to better himself or herself for a better future in a career field that makes them happy. This is different than the Eastern Asian values which value the families’ success over the individual’s happiness. The results of the survey were exactly as I had expected when Dundes, et all stated, “about two-thirds of white respondents (67%) and their mothers (68%) ranked happiness as paramount, compared with about one-quarter of Asian respondents (28%) and their mothers (25%)” displaying the differences in views by the two different cultures. Then Dundes, et all states that, “More Asians indicated that their parents were highly influential in this decision (e.g. 48% of Asian mothers versus 27% of white mothers). Few whites (14%) but a moderate proportion of Asians (31%) did not deem themselves as possessing great influence over where they went to college” showing that majority of Asian parents have a greater influence on their chid’s education and career choices while only a small number of white parents choose for their kids on where they are going to school and what career field they are going in. Not only do Asian parents want their kids to go to the more prestigious school they also want their kids to go into the career field that