What Subcultures Raise the Best Kids?
The 3 traits "successful" subcultures prioritize, where our beliefs, expectations, and norms come from, and could being more judgmental make you a better parent?
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Hello my fellow bar-setters! A question to start us off today…
Are some subcultures better at preparing their kids for success in life?
That question feels a tad dangerous, so let’s break it down further.
Are there behaviors and parenting attitudes that make your kids more (or less) likely to live well—to live a higher quality life and to feel a greater sense of wellbeing?
The obvious answer is: Yes! If you didn’t believe that you wouldn’t be reading this. You wouldn’t bother setting bed times, limiting screen time, or doing any of the things that fall under the category: parenting.
Obviously some habits, beliefs, and experiences are more likely to promote flourishing while others are less likely. And if there are behaviors that are more fruitful, then it stands to reason that there must be subcultures who tend to be better (or worse) at inculcating those behaviors.
This is what Yale Professors Amy Chua and Jeb Rubenfeld set out to explore in their best selling 2014 book, The Triple Package. Well, kind of, anyway…
Chua and Rubenfeld focused on exploring which subcultures tend to do better on traditional measures of success—education, health, income, occupational status, etc. They found that while most Americans feel more financially pinched, pessimistic, and stuck than ever before, certain subgroups, like Cuban Americans, Nigerian Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Jews, and Mormons, are thriving explicitly because they do things differently most other parents.
As the book’s blurb explains:
"That certain groups do much better in America than others… is difficult to talk about. In large part this is because the topic feels racially charged. The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.”
Clearly, the book relies on generalizations and we should be careful about letting those generalizations bias our expectations. Still, Chua and Rubenfeld’s findings have a lot to tell us about what traits underlie success.
What is the Triple Package?
Chua and Rubenfeld found that the most successful subcultures in America tend to inculcate three distinct, yet interrelated traits in their children:
A sense of cultural superiority: They are taught to believe that their upbringing has given them a distinct advantage—that they have a greater capacity to be successful explicitly because of their upbringing.
Insecurity: They feel a burden of responsibility to use the advantages of their upbringing. They feel pressure to meet the high standards set for them.
Impulse control: They have been trained to delay gratification in pursuit of a larger mission.
According to Chua and Rubenfeld, it isn’t enough to just have one or two of these traits. All three need to be present in order to appreciate the advantages of the triple package. In particular, the tension between superiority and insecurity creates the confidence and drive necessary for accomplishment.
You might be thinking that trying to instill cultural superiority and insecurity sounds like an awful parenting goal. But I’d argue that the triple package traits suffer from poor branding. It would be more accurate to call insecurity: “standards” and to call cultural superiority: “confidence in your values,” or “pride in your path.”
Whether we’re talking about ethnic subcultures, sports teams, schools, or impressive companies, there are no great cultures without clear expectations and a distinct sense of pride about doing things differently. This is found in the heuristics that are common amongst great subcultures—phrases such as The Southwest Difference or The Patriot Way.
With that being said, here is my re-branded version of the Triple Package:
A sense of pride in your tradition’s path
A sense of high standards
Impulse control
A Culture War Against the Triple Package
To clarify, I’m not saying that parents should put all their emphasis on cultivating the triple package in their children. There are traits other than the triple package traits that are worth emphasizing if you want to help your children to live great lives and be great people (compassion, gratitude, and a sense of humor, to name a few). Even more, when taken to extremes, the triple package traits can breed neuroses in children (Chua and Rubenfeld note this repeatedly).
But let’s avoid the presumption that the only options are to go all-in on the triple package, thus, turning our children into little balls of stress, or to ignore the merits of the triple package altogether.
It isn’t an either-or dichotomy. Triple package traits are an essential part of the, err, um… package. And, thus, it is worth noting that the triple package formula for success is a stark contrast from the mainstream norms promoted by our predominant American culture. As the book states:
“In the last half of the twentieth century, American culture declared war on both insecurity (read: standards) and impulse control, replacing them with an ever-increasing hunger for self-esteem and immediate gratification”
For generations now, we have made convenience, comfort, and superficial self-esteem the overwhelming priority in our culture. We de-valued the essential role of discipline and high standards while passing on a baseless, empty superiority that tells kids they are special just for being who they are. The chief objective guiding schools and parenting norms has been to try to make sure that no child could ever feel bad.
Given the incessant barrage of temptation that characterizes life today, the costs of adopting our comfort-based cultural paradigm are higher than ever.
Where Our Culture Comes From
“A fish is the last to discover water.” —Ethiopian Proverb
We usually don’t notice our own culture because it is the lens we see the world through. Culture is all of our basic assumptions, habits, norms, and values. It is what implants our deepest dreams, expectations, and daily pursuits. It is the reason Spartan boys wanted nothing more than to die for their homeland and modern American boys want nothing more than to become rich and famous for playing video games on YouTube.
Culture is a very powerful force—perhaps the only force powerful enough to overcome an environment littered with supernormal temptations. But our culture tends to exacerbate that temptation, rather than help us overcome it.
Unlike most of human history, the predominant culture today comes more from marketers than intentional local communities. As I wrote in Setting the Bar:
“It takes a village to raise a child, or so the saying goes. But our villages have undergone a rapid deterioration over the past decades. They show all the markers of growth—the new schools, restaurant chains, and Super Targets—but with a marked loss of connection and identity. Communities are no longer the vehicles where culture spreads and evolves so much as they are the playing field where consumerist forces manifest.
Now more than ever before, our cultural values are being formed by people we’ve never met.”
Coke’s advertising is a perfect window into the values we are trained to prioritize in mainstream American culture:
The goal of marketing is to create lifelong dependency. Marketers want to train us to think that our happiness depends on getting some product. We are trained to feel entitled to some level of convenience, comfort, pleasure, and, especially, immediate gratification. And a great way to accomplish this, as this next Coke ad shows, is to train us to believe that no one should ever make us feel bad about doing what makes us feel good in the moment.
Standards and constraints are out in American culture. Self-indulgence is in.
Consequently, many would see it as “over the top” to require weekly chores, to limit screen time, to not allow their kids to have Pop-Tarts for breakfast, or to not allow them to have a smartphone by the time they are 10.
Even if you’d respect my right to parent that way, it certainly would feel wrong for me to explicitly state that setting these constraints are what is best for kids, or that other parents should be doing the same.
You see, I used the should word. One shouldn’t should, should they? That just doesn’t sit right with our Coca-Cola cultural programming. After all, who am I to judge?
Judgment: Public Enemy Number One
Most of us have internalized that judgment is the cardinal sin within modern American life—a notion that is reinforced by millions of “Only God Can Judge Me” tattoos and that oft-cited bible verse where Jesus says not to judge others.
That line, which comes from Matthew 7, has become a trump card, often used to deflect attention from any behavior that a person would like to continue doing without being judged. It serves to eliminate any potential conversation about whether some behaviors are more or less fruitful. But this simplistic interpretation perverts Jesus’ message, both for individuals and their communities.
Dear Jesus, May I Please Judge These People?
Last fall, my church did a deep dive into Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. One Sunday, our pastor went through Matthew 7, highlighting the tension between two seemingly contradictory directives:
“Do not judge… first take the plank out of your own eye...”
and the less commonly tattooed statement which immediately follows it…
“Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs.”
In one breath we are instructed not to judge others, but also to identify who is the equivalent of a dog or a pig. Within our mainstream Coca-Cola culture, the intent of the first directive (Do not judge) is left to stand alone. But, when you keep reading, the contradictions between Jesus’s directives demand to be reconciled.
There is far more to say about Matthew 7 than I am qualified to offer, but I want to highlight a few potentially helpful insights:
Right after instructing us not to judge, Jesus states that if you take the plank out of your own eye, you’ll see clearly to help your neighbor remove the speck from his eye. He seems to be stating that, eventually, you can help your neighbor remove the speck from his eye. But first, you need to take the plank out of your own eye. And to take the plank out of your own eye requires some capacity for judgment. That judgment just needs to be focused internally.
It seems that Jesus is saying that before we can help others we need to develop self-awareness and commit to self-cultivation. Given the research on cognitive bias, personal blindspots, and on the art of persuasion, this seems like an essential directive.
In telling us not to give dogs what is sacred or throw our pearls to pigs, we’re being told to judge what matters (what are our pearls) and treat what matters like it is sacred. This is what wisdom is—a capacity to discern what is fruitful from what isn’t. In other words, wisdom is a capacity for good judgment. Jesus seems to be saying that we should clarify what matters most and discern what environments and support systems will help us move toward that goal.
A couple lines later, Jesus instructs that we need to enter the narrow gate, rather than the wide, and also that we should watch out for false prophets. He clearly seems to believe that we need a capacity for good judgment, but, as the original plank in the eye imagery indicates, that we really shouldn’t judge others. The best way I can make sense of this is:
We need to make a distinction between behaviors and people. Living well requires us to judge what behaviors are better or worse, but we should try not to make judgments about the quality of the people who do a behavior or what bad motives might underlie those behaviors. Lots of prostitutes and tax collectors turned disciples, after all. And it is worth remembering that we’re all a little less righteous than we believe.
We need to judge between what paths, behaviors, and relationships will be most fruitful.
But, also, we need to strive to account for the way our self-serving biases distort our interpretation of events so that we can better approach others with empathy and love.
What is Love?
At the risk of simplifying and distorting this message, I think that this is all about loving each other better. In fact, Jesus alludes to that within Matthew 7:
“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”
But love and kindness are also terms that are frequently perverted in modern culture. Under the guise of love and kindness, it has become common for adults to inflate grades, feed kids Pop-Tarts for breakfast, give kids a trophy every time they put on a uniform, or to do for kids the work those kids should be doing themselves. Such norms gratify kids in the moment, but they make them a lesser version in the long run—less capable, less purpose-driven, less resilient, more selfish, and more impulsive. That’s pretty mean to do to someone.
By contrast, author, Harvard professor, and Christian apologetic Arthur Brooks offers a definition of love that I, err, um… love:
“Love is willing the good for another.”
To will the good for another requires us to make a judgment about what is good.
So, it would seem that, to love well, we have to judge well.
Some Practical Implications From All This Philosophizing
The first and most obvious directive that I hope you take from this is to go get a tattoo that says: “Do not throw your pearls to pigs.”
Nothing cooler.
More than that, however, I hope you see that to thrive in the modern world requires intentionality and good judgment.
The chief values of mainstream culture are: comfort, convenience, and immediate gratification. The chief message of modern culture is that you are enough… that all you need to do is to accept yourself as is, ignore the haters, and focus on whatever you want. Your purpose is yourself.
This sounds nice but it is a horrible worldview to seed in our next generation. It is a ticket to a hollow, depressing, low-grade existence.
You cannot go with the flow and expect good things to follow. The triple package traits matter and they are available to us all.
Our kids need a value system and a way of living that they believe matters.
They need real, inspiring expectations about the kind of adults—adults of vision, mission, and integrity—that they should become.
They need to cultivate discipline and good judgment so that they can become that kind of adult.
Most of all, they need to learn to live for something bigger than themselves.
We must make these values a top priority, again. They will matter far more than expensive travel ball, lavish birthday parties, ceremonial recognition, and all those other things that parents usually put first.
Thank you very much for reading and sharing with the other bar-setters in your world!
Have a wonderful week and, as always, carry the fire!
Shane