AITA
My kid whines when piano practice gets too hard. "It's boring."
I snap back, "We don't say that. Bring back your focus, and keep practicing."
He starts pouting, clock-watching, sandbagging.
I furrow my brow and sigh. Sometimes I make a joke to lighten the mood (oh my my, mixed messaging!).
Loose sheets of music fall to the ground, due to a sudden breeze called "his arm". He bangs the keys.
I walk over and grab his small hand in my big hand, forcing him to replace the fallen paper and sit properly. I say loudly and forcefully into his face, "No! you are not allowed to hit the piano" while physically towering over him.
I can joke around with every Asian American1 male of my generation, about our fathers who: never told us they were proud of us (don't be satisfied! now's not the time to rest on your laurels); never expressed physical affection (can't sissify your sons!); never played ball or video games with us (don't model sloth or laziness, or even enjoyment!). That's if they were around. Many were busy working, often on other continents.
Whining about practice was simply never an option that could enter our brains. If we did, we either caught a beating, or had to listen to long ass lectures that would be be much more costly to our happiness, than any fleeting satisfaction that could come from whining.
And our response to such a parental attitude was such that, for those dudes who moped or harbored resentment towards their fathers, we are no longer in the same socioeconomic circles. Everyone in my circle learned to channel any negative feelings we had, towards positive qualities to point us in the right direction. It's like a caricature of CBT: put the talky-talk in its own space, and work on concrete behaviors and choices to pursue your goals.
At work, my grandfather supervised many men with many guns. At home, grandma talked non-stop, complaining and bragging and teaching hyper specific family stories, and grandfather was mostly silent. But when he spoke, that was the end of all discussion.
He hit his children, but never as a release of his own emotions. He himself was an extremely disciplined person in every aspect of his life: physically, intellectually, emotionally. If Marcus Aurelius was born as a subject of encroaching imperialism, with Confucius and Sun Tzu as his cultural inheritance, that's how I see my grandfather (through my Western eyes).
My father never hit us, but he replaced physical violence with emotional techniques that he thought were best for us. It seems to me that he applied similar ones to those taken by his peers, based on my generation's pretty highly developed talky-talk skills about our shared traumas.
He was the emotional gravity well of our small nuclear family, in the same way that my grandfather was the sun to my grandmother's moon. As child discipline, my mother would say a few words, and if that didn't work, she'd tell my father and he would give boring lectures. If that didn't work, he'd play a boundless game of emotional victimhood to shame us into right-behaving.
No hitting. It was entirely mental.
As a grown ass man who should have already developed fully, I think I'd have benefitted from my grandfather's approach. As a young man, I certainly resented the ways in which my father was neither like my American friends' fathers, nor like his own.
And yet, with my young, cute, joyful and delightful son, I want to hug and wrestle with him, and tell him I'm proud of him, and read his stories and hear all about his drawings.
But then he whines, and falls into the counter-productive patterns in which I saw myself and others struggle. We (I!) fought so hard, and successfully, to defeat them. Or at the very least, to suppress. And I fall back on my father's psychologically dark and heavy patterns. But it would be self-indulgent and harmful to my son, for me to simply enjoy his childhood.
My kid feels pressure when I'm around, and a joyful freedom when I'm not.
I want the best for him.
For sure, everyone has room for growth and improvement.
For now, I find it wild to observe how different is the valence of our four generations' expressions of father-son relationships, despite common levels of love and commitment.
this is certainly true of my Taiwanese, Cantonese, Viet, Japanese, and Korean male friends. Less true of Filipino, Malaysian and Thais (less influenced by Confucius?). My South Asian friends' experiences vary wildly based on parents' education (e.g., Doctor Patels vs Motel Patels) as well as religion -- Muslim fathers seem different from Hindu / secular fathers↩