Parents may support their child’s activities in a generation. Most parents seem to have enjoyed growing up in their own generation. So with this understanding, parents usually recognize and tolerate their own children being in a new generation. They may be amused or puzzled by some the slang children use, but they will accept their children’s new games and different enthusiasms.
The majority view is supportive, but some parents oppose the children’s current culture. For various reasons, particular parents want to take control of what their children learn. A parent in opposition will discourage or even punish their children for belonging to the youth generation. Parents who oppose generational activities likely grew up without belonging to any generation themselves. As adults they may want to be the educators. Schooling may be compulsory but authoritarian parents can bring in after school extra lessons and homework.
Forcing children into extra hours of study has mixed effects; it may get children higher scores in school work, but the children will lose enjoyment of friends their own age and be cut off from learning through generational activities.
One widely read example of a parent who opposes children’s free choice is Amy Chau (2011) author of ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.’ This book’s big impact occurred in America where the family live, and was discussed in China. Amy Chau wanted her two daughters to learn from extra studying after school. Her girls had to study serious musical instruments like the piano and the violin. As a parent, their mother forced them into activities after school hours. Enjoying friends, a school drama or playing sports, she regarded as being idle and wasting time. The purpose of her strict education was to prevent personal life being from being fun with friends. Instead, Chau makes clear that her daughters had to received good educational grades and practice at length to gain skill in orchestral music. This mother believed that extra work after school would get her daughters admitted to high status universities. Other activities were seen as a waste of time and an embarrassing failure.
Chau reports that most of the parents at her girl’s school were modern ‘Western’ parents who opposed her authoritarian style of parenting. They thought it bad for children never to pick their own activities, play with other children, or choose their own friends. Without using the word explicitly, Chau tells us that most parents support the ‘new generations’ that come along with each cohort of children. In her book there exists a sociology of happier children and better living in society that has not been recognized or named.
Interestingly, the empirical evidence in ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’ does not entirely support the author. In practice it did not turn out that Amy Chau got her own way with everything. She admits that her daughters gave her ‘a bitter clash of cultures.’ Her younger daughter won concessions such as being allowed to play tennis. What Chau ends up telling us is that those supporting the use of modern media using generations will be a large majority. There will exist a few who, perhaps from having authoritarian traditions in their past, oppose youth generations but these won’t be more than 20% of the adults and will have trouble passing their methods on to future generations.
The deep question here is why the popular majority of families accept new media using childhood and youth, but seem unable to advocate for it against the small minority who come from generationless backgrounds.