May 15, 2013 • 34 mins
Are Chinese children raised with a greater sense of family loyalty than kids in the West? Join Caroline and Cristen as they discuss Eastern parenting practices, the Chinese principle of filial piety and how family devotion affects Chinese kids' success.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to stuff mom never told you. From House to
works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline. And before we go any further, Caroline,
we need to thank listener Jennifer for this podcast we're
gonna do on filial piety, which is a Chinese cornerstone
(00:30):
of family life and child rearing. And Jennifer wrote into
us saying, hey, you should look into filial piety, and
she also sent us a ton of scholarly research that
has been done on filial piety. And there is no
faster way to our hearts than to send us an
email full of journal articles. That's right, Yeah, I learned
(00:51):
all sorts of stuff about Chinese families I never knew, right,
because I feel like so often on the podcast, obviously
we focus on Western families, western parenting, whereas this whole
filial piety thing first came into the news. I would
stay with Amy Chewa a couple of years ago, who
wrote The Battle Him of the Tiger Mother and started
(01:12):
this whole debate with an excerpt that was published in
the Wall Street Journal where which was titled why Chinese
mothers are superior? And all these Western moms were like,
oh what um, but a lot of the stuff that
she talks about is loosely based on filial piety. And
then even more recently, I heard on NPR that starting
(01:34):
this summer in two thousand thirteen, the Chinese government is
going to be allowing parents to sue their adult children
for violating filial piety. Essentially, they're not taking care of
their elderly parents, Well enough, you're gonna get sued kids. Yeah,
And it's it's interesting that that idea is so embedded
(01:56):
in their culture that suing your own children overtaking care
of you would even be an option because I know,
for instance, my parents would not ever think in those terms.
You know, my dad is a big planner of financial guy,
so you know he has all these things set up
to protect him and and my mom when they get older.
(02:17):
They would never think that it would be their daughter's
responsibility to take care of them. Yeah. A lot of
times that we think of family litigation, it's more the
kids taking their parents to task in court. But in
China it's a unique situation because by enforcing in a sense,
filial piety, it's a way of providing a safety net
for the massive population of seniors, which is expected to
(02:42):
grow by nearly five hundred million people in the next
forty years. So the government saying, hey, you know what,
we can't take the entire cost of that burden, so kids, hey,
step up. Because filial piety has been such a foundational
tradition for centuries from millennia, yeah, and it was part
(03:04):
of several different philosophies and it it from there grew into,
like Kristen said, being that cornerstone of Chinese culture. And
the earliest appearance of the character for Xiao, which is
the word for filial piety, Uh is on a bronze
vessel dated to the last years of the Shang dynasty
(03:24):
or perhaps the earliest years of the Zoo dynasty around
one thousand BCS. So this is no like modern you know,
communist era China policy. This goes way back right, And
initially Shao had more of the sense of providing food
offerings to your ancestors, but then it evolved to encompass
service to both living parents and ancestors, and it ties
(03:48):
in a lot with u Confucianism, which is more of
a humanist school of thought where rather than you know,
living your life to honor, say odd, you live your
life to honor the world and especially to your family.
That's more. You think of that more in a religious
(04:09):
and air quotes sense of extreme devotion. So sheao was
a major concept in Confucianism, and Confucianism was established as
a state orthodoxy during the Han dynasty, which was characterized
by the official promotion of filial piety, and the dynasty
systematically made unfilial conduct actually a punishable crime, which sounds
(04:32):
familiar to this this lawsuit thing that you're talking about,
and rewarded acts of filial piety, and with few exceptions,
during this dynasty, emperors even adopted chiao as part of
their official titles. Now, she also had sort of a
double edged effect. This is coming from researcher Donald Holtzman,
who talks about how this centrality of the homage that
(04:56):
children render to their parents and ancestor were ship in
Chinese culture created a strong tie binding succeeding generations to
one another. It's it's very common, for instance, even still
for multiple generations to live under one roof in China,
and so it explains both it's enduring character, but also
(05:16):
at the same time the difficulty of adopting it to
the modern world, which is uh, something that will will
get into more in terms of the Chinese government really
trying to reinvigorate the sense of filial piety among Chinese
adults who are our age, who might not have grown
up in in such at a time when it was
(05:37):
so rigorously taught and enforced. But shao Jing or the
classic a filial piety was basic to classical Chinese education
and was part of school curriculum right up into the
twentieth century. And what those specifically we're talking about with
filial piety, it's not just you know, saying, oh, you know,
be nice to your parents, honor your parents, obey them,
(05:59):
respec act them. But if you look at classic text,
like the Paragons of filial Piety, those examples get pretty extreme.
I mean, it's it's things like there was There was
one one of the stories is about a son. A
lot of it is based on like the son's relationship
(06:20):
to the parents, and one of them is about a
son who goes off into the woods to you know,
hunt or gather something, and he leaves his mother at
the house and a guest arrives and the mother apparently
is so excited by this guest that she bites her
finger nervously, causing it to bleed. And while the sun
(06:42):
is miles away from home, all of a sudden, at
the moment she bites her finger, he feels, you know,
disturbance in the forest and then rushes back home. And
of course, you know, her fingers fine, but she is
overjoyed that her son is you know, so so so kind.
And I mean it even gets into you know, stories
of not to be gross. If you are eating right now,
(07:05):
you might want to pause because there's one story, for instance,
about a son testing his parents stool to find out
whether or not everything's okay with them because they're ailing,
you know there, his parents are sick, and so he
eats their poop to find that that's that's the early
Chinese version of everybody poops exactly. But I mean, but
(07:28):
that is the extremity and and these these extreme examples
are honored saying, oh you are you know, you're a
paragon of filial piety because you will go to such
great lengths to make sure that your aging parents are
healthy and happy. Right, but all of these early texts,
as you've hammered home just now, focus mainly on the
sun's and the son's subordination. Where they do talk about
(07:53):
daughters women daughters in law, it's really about how the
daughter in law needs to be devoted to her husband's family.
And this really created a lot of conflict between daughters
in law and parents and law and these clan based families.
And we have the scripture on Young Woman Yea, which
was written as Confucianism was on the way out. And so,
(08:14):
you know, we've talked about a lot of social movements
in the podcast and about how people reach back to
more conservative times when society is rapidly changing and scary
things are developing, and this is just one more example
of that. They're like, let's write something to show women
how they need to behave because all of this rigamar
role that's happening as Confucianism is leaving us. So the
(08:36):
scripture focused exclusively on the role of the daughter in law,
whose conduct is portrayed as pivotal in ensuring harmony in
the family, and classified women according to their social and
family roles, and this type of focus was pretty unprecedented.
The scriptures moral rules really served to reinforce the Confucian
sense of propriety for women and reflect this perceived need
(08:58):
to reassert moral order at a time when the Confusion
orthodoxy was losing its hold on the elite Chinese society.
So in contrast to those Confucian texts up to that period,
which usually kind of ignored women and they're like, you
know what, you need to be obedient and nice and
sweet and cute, but let's really talk about how the
(09:18):
suns need to obey their parents and be reverent, this
scripture praises women for loyal and filial service to their
parents in law, thus trying to really hammer home that
status quo. So in in the change, it really only
reinforced the same right there, Like, oh, by the way, hey, women,
you're supposed to also be really reverent, but not to
(09:40):
your parents. Once you get married. It has to be
to your parents in law, right, because long these lines
of thought. For men, their shall or filial piety is
genetically determined because they're born of sons and thus they
need to carry out this filial party. But for women,
it's expected to shift to her husband's ancestral linear at marriage.
(10:01):
So you know, it's like, you know, it's when your daughter, yeah,
you know, be good to your parents. But then once
you get married and stuff, you're gonna have to devote
all of your attention to your husband's parents. But then
in uh seven thirty a d I believe the Book
of Filial Piety for Women comes out because the writer
understood that the Book of Filial Piety, though gender neutral,
(10:23):
was implicitly addressed to males. And this was attributed to
an official's wife. Yeah, and the primary goal of this
writing was to expand the Book of Filial Piety for
women and girls that same idea of oh wait, things
are changing, we need to tell women what to do.
So the moral vision was that seemingly small acts can
have major consequences and can transform others in ever widening circles.
(10:46):
In other words, Hey, so you're hanging out in the
kitchen all the time, but don't worry. You can still
have effects on society. You can still exert moral influence
over your husband. Let's say, who can then go out
and affect change in the local government or local village.
Who can then, you know, affect the nation and the empire.
So they're like, don't worry, women, you can still be
(11:08):
important from the kitchen. Well, and that and The maternal
role though, was highly um emphasized because one of you know,
like a good Chinese mother seeks to educate her children
and almost to um a what we might think in
more Western terms as to as to a severe extent,
(11:29):
Like there was an article that I ran across that
was written by Amy Tiger mom Chua which she goes
over to China to interview do these profiles on for
self made female billionaires because apparently China has more female
self made billionaires than anywhere else in the world. And
she's talking to one of them and uh and talks
about how even still she you know, practices tenants of
(11:53):
filial piety. So when her sons come home from school,
they don't go play sports, they have to sit down
and practice Chinese characters for two hours because she's being,
you know, a good mother enforcing those you know, the
kind of hardlined I guess educational tactics. Yeah, according to
that book of Filial Piety for Women, it's interesting to
(12:14):
look at what constitutes a good woman, you know, the
mother who educate her children versus what is considered to
be an immoral woman. So a good woman, you're a
wife who admonishes your husband. You keep your husband in line,
but you're immoral and unfilial if you dare become jealous
of your husband's concubines, How dare you let your husband
(12:34):
be happy? Why don't you well? And even after your
husband passes away, a good woman is considered one who
does not remarry. Um, but let's move forward. I mean,
like we said, this is going back to ancient times.
But it's incredible that shaw has endured for so long,
and even today it's been singled out as a key
(12:56):
to preserving Chinese tradition and identity. But not so surprisingly,
along with the modernization that has happened, perception of gender
roles has rendered the development of filial piety a lot
more complex because you know, you know, women are are
certainly not quite as keen on sticking to those good
(13:20):
good wife and mother kinds of ideas versus bad wife mother.
They just want to be you know, women, and be educated.
And you do wonder, I mean, there is the issue
of the one child policy, and so I am interested
in how you know, Okay, so in ancient times you
shifted your filial piety when you married your husband to
(13:41):
his parents. But what about if you are the only
child and you are a girl and you don't have
a brother to stay behind, and you know, express that
reverence to your parents. So it's interesting as things change
in China adopts new policies, but looking at how society
has changed and how this change and just have affected
filial piety. Um, there's been some rapid urbanization since the
(14:06):
nineteen seventies. This is coming from elderly Chinese and Pacific
RIM countries, social support and integration. Those rapid changes In
Hong Kong with the progress of compulsory education in particular,
the younger generations have found themselves better educated than their parents,
which leads to them, you know, earning more money, more skills,
and that has actually kind of devalued the status of
(14:29):
elder So, you know, I want to say kids today,
kids today aren't necessarily as likely to run to their
parents and say what do I do? Tell me what
to do? It's more like, well, you know, what's your opinion? Well,
and it's not only that there's the radical shift of
kids even just moving out of the home. I mean
that's a big thing where you know, but if you
(14:49):
think about in more rural communities, kids are growing up
these days and leaving going thousands of miles away to
more urban centers where they can get jobs, leaving parents
in these areas to take care of themselves, whereas a
while ago that would be unheard of, right, and you know,
I talked about how it would affect women, especially in
this one child policy society. There was a two thousand
(15:12):
three study and Gender and Society that looked at how
filial piety was working and how women played into that,
and they found an evidence of decline in the patrol
local tradition of caregiving, a gender division of parental care tasks,
and a strong social pressure that influences that caregiving behavior.
(15:32):
And their research indicated negative effects for the women who
are now caregivers, as they are likely to live longer,
but be more financially dependent and have fewer children available
to help them. So these women are kind of stuck
between a rock and a hard place nowadays, you know,
expected to care for their parents, care for their husbands,
and if the husband passes away, they're kind of juggling
(15:53):
both families and not having enough help, you know, in
their caregiving duties. And on top of that, um there's
a study from the Journal of Aging studies from May
two thousand two which examined the strength of the traditional
confusion filial piety, which would step in like in those
(16:13):
situations you're talking about, and you know, and basically instruct
the children to take care of their aging mothers and
and the study found that not surpresently these tenants are
eroding and um. Recently, this is as of two thousand
and twelve, the Chinese government has issued an updated version
(16:34):
of the twenty four Paragons of Filial Piety in an
attempt to, like we said at the top of the podcast,
to reinvigorate kids to essentially pay more attention to their parents. Um.
But as The New York Times reported in September of twelve, uh,
some of the Chinese people are are straight up just
turning away, um from old school filial piety because it's like, well,
(16:58):
the world has changed, and you know, I try to
call my parents and talk to them, but I can't
be there all the time, right. And there has been
a backlash and people are ridiculing these new ideas because
they're kind of striking. A lot of people is out
of touch in this nation where millions are leaving the
countryside in search of jobs, and cities every year. For example,
(17:20):
one of those new paragons of filial piety is take
one's parents traveling frequently, And if you're one of the
country's two hundred and fifty two million migrant workers, you
can't actually afford to do that. And nearly eleven million
rural migrants arrived in Chinese cities in twenty eleven alone,
most likely leaving those aging parents behind. So people are
(17:41):
going in search of opportunity and can't always get back,
you know, and take an hour's long trip to see
their aging parents. Right, And the Chinese government is also
having to deal with a massively negative effect of its
one child policy, which has left a ton of emptiness.
And on top of those kids who are leaving home
(18:02):
and going far, far away. Um emtin us now make
up fifty of Chinese households, and nearly half of the
five million people over sixty live apart from their children.
I mean, if we think about today in the United States,
the whole issue of the aging baby boom or population
social security and the question of whether or not that's
going to take care of them, think about China, you know,
(18:24):
where even just familial support can't be as guaranteed as
a as a safety net, you know, on a lower
run from you know what the government might be able
to provide. Yeah, and fortunately, a study in the Journal
of Family Issues in March two thousand six found that
(18:44):
these only children were as likely to plan on helping
their parents as were those with siblings, and we're actually
more likely to intend to reside in the same city.
But it's it's the thing of like, well, if you're
going where the money is and the opportunity is, that
single child is kind of being torn in two directions
and is not always able to stay with their parents
where they're needed and so but luckily, according to the study,
(19:06):
the only children seemed to feel especially responsible for their
parents happiness. So maybe we're just going to end up
with the generation of kids who are completely stressed out
and don't know what to do. That sounds like it
sounds like everybody, yeah, yeah, say so. Um. But one
thing we have not really touched on though is communism,
because obviously, you know, China has been a communist society,
(19:30):
and there is a study in Aging and Political Policy
that came out in October of two thousand and eight
looking at how today's Chinese Communist society sort of meshes
with filial piety, and it found that although Chinese communists
have found filial piety to be ideologically repulsive, they have
(19:51):
nevertheless tolerated it and even use it as the basis
for a welfare network to support the elderly in villages.
I mean essentially like kind of saying again, well, hey,
you know what we've gotten to, got this free support
network that we can tap into. Yeah, let's guilt these
kids into taking care of their parents so we don't
have to. Well, so, how does all this change when
(20:13):
when families moved to America or you know, moved to
any other country outside of China. Really um A in
October two thousand to study in the Journal of Family
Issues interviewed middle class Taiwanese and Hong Kong immigrant families
in California. And although three generational cohabitation may have declined
once they reached America, so once these these nuclear families
(20:35):
shrink a little, the author found that the family still
remains the nexus of care networks and economic ties among
Chinese immigrants, and so immigrant adult children do maintain the
cultural ideal of filial piety, but they do it differently.
They end up. In the study, they found recruiting home
care workers as fictive can and they say that the
(20:58):
public care doesn't indicate the demand nishment of family bonds,
but rather reinforces kin connections as channels for circulating economic
resources among these people who are new to America. So
it sounds like for a traditional Chinese family, it's it's
not as though if they were to leave China they
leave all of their you know, traditional Chinese morals behind.
(21:19):
They take it with them. And there's a process of
a culturation that happens in which you you know, adapt
traits from one culture and mix it in with another. So, uh,
there was a study in Marriage and Family Review in
January of two thousand nine to look at those effects
of acculturation on these Chinese families, and it found that
(21:40):
there is some intergenerational conflict that will happen when it
comes to parenting in Chinese American families that were associated
with youth distress above and beyond just ac culturation gaps.
So basically saying that you know, beyond just the typical
growing pains if you will, that might occur, um, the
study highlighted some some more direct distress. Yeah, It's interesting
(22:05):
because they pointed out that maybe these Chinese parents should
increase parental warmth and decrease parental over protection, to which
Amy Chiwa would be like, whatever, yeah, I mean her
whole thing. I don't. I don't feel like we've gone
into a great detail on what she had to say
in Battle Him of the Tiger Mother Um. Basically, she
(22:26):
talked about how her two daughters were, for instance, never
allowed to go to sleepovers, never allowed to go to movies,
like all of these typical things that we would associate with,
you know, the good times of being a kid. No,
she was kids would not be doing the thing because
they would be practicing violence, practicing piano, practicing studying for school.
(22:48):
And she says, hey, you know what, do I sound
like a jerk? Yeah? I know that I do, and
I know that this is in direct contrast to the
more lenient Western parenting styles, But guess what, my kids
are gonna go Ivy League all the way. One of
her daughters had already played piano at Carnegie Hall, et cetera.
And while everyone, well a lot of the commoners flipped
(23:11):
out saying that she was, you know, issuing cruel and
unusual punishment and robbing her kids of a childhood. Um
her kids. One of her daughters actually wrote a response
piece to It's saying, I'm grateful to my mom for
doing this. You know. Yeah, Chua basically said it was
her way of showing love, like I believe in my daughters.
I believe that they can achieve all this stuff. And plus, hey,
(23:34):
they owe me. I'm their mom. They owe me to
obey me and do what I say so that they
can grow up to be productive members of society. And
these attitudes, I mean, that's just that's that's one example,
but these attitudes do carry over. Um. There was a
study in Basic and Applied Social Psychology in two thousand
that looked at Chinese New Zealander families, and researchers found
(23:57):
strong acceptance of filial piety obligations even in there, and
the felt expectations they found were stronger from elderly parents
than from grandparents, and the younger generation rated expectations on
them higher than did the middle age. So part of
that could have to do with the fact that as
we're you know, modernizing, and as families adapt to being
(24:20):
in different countries and in different cultures, the middle aged
children of older parents are more accepting of the idea
of Okay, well this is what my duty is, this
is what I do. But it's those younger generations that
are kind of chafing under these obligations. But I wonder
if that does change as you get older and once
you become a parent yourself and start understanding all that
(24:43):
goes into parenting and the you know, probably wanting like
a m said, like a little bit about payback, but
you know, support in return for the support that she's
given her kids. Although I'm sure that some people listening
to say that as support, like there there's still people
who are not going to agree with UM, this kind
(25:05):
of parenting UM. And I did want to look into
whether or not filial party has positive or negative childhood outcomes,
and from what I could gather, you know, it's often
correlated not so surprisingly with UM lower disciplinary problems, higher
(25:26):
school achievement, not so surprisingly if kids are being you know,
forced to do many hours of homework or extracurricular work
on top of school and all in all, you know,
by the numbers, it seems like it has good impacts.
Although I was not able to find a more detailed
(25:46):
study for instance, interviewing children about you know what what
how does this actually make you feel? You know, if
you are you might be performing well on paper, but
you know, it is so much in contrast to the
kinds of westerning parenting styles that we would normally think of, um,
but I am curious to know more of like the
(26:08):
those long terms effective because we you know, we do,
we cherish that whole like parental warmth. And I mean
even thinking today about attachment parenting and helicopter parents where
you know, on on the whole flip side of this,
where you know, a lot of American parents are almost
just like hovering their kids and babying them to to
(26:29):
a large extent. And I'm not I'm just I'm saying that,
like as a broad generalization. I'm not saying that all
parents do that. I'm setting up a contrast there. Please
close that email you are about to send to us exactly.
But there was a study that came out in in
the American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences Journal that
(26:50):
supported the idea um that maybe Chinese students do hold
higher expectations regarding their personal filial norms just and because
filial piety was at the center of that Chinese culture
and Confucianism. In the West, there's less emphasis on that
familial and community obligation and more on the individual darn
(27:12):
you Protestantism, uh, the study says in in not those words,
but basically, you know, the individualism of of Protestantism versus
Confucianism taking care of your family and your community. Well, so,
this study looked at Eastern and Western kids and and
looked at their expectations and their attitudes towards taking care
of their families, and they actually found that young people
(27:34):
in some Southeast and East Asian cultures seem not to
practice filial behavior willingly towards the elderly in general. Rather,
they reluctantly accommodate these social norms and expectations of the elderly,
these things that have been in their culture and that
they're just expected to do. Young adults and Western cultures, though,
who aren't expected to do these things, tended to believe
(27:55):
that they were doing it very well because they didn't
have the same weight of those exctations on them. So
when they did help out their parents or grandparents, they
were like, oh, yeah, I'm doing I'm doing a great job.
This is great. Yeah, it's like you you come over
for Mother's Day, Father's Day, you know, the bars is
very low. And and and again I'm not saying that
all American kids are like that, but absolutely the bar
(28:16):
would be lower. And so you know, it doesn't take
quite as much to feel like a really good kid. Perhaps. Yeah,
and this whole conversation about filial piety is is not
our argument for you know, us raising our our children
under these you know, Confucian traditions or anything like that.
But we wanted to take Jennifer's suggestion and explore filial piety, um,
(28:42):
just to get a snapshot of what is going on
in the rest of the world in terms of how
parents raise their kids. And especially you know, China is
such a fascinating example because size wise, you know, it's
it's comparable to the US, bigger than the US, and
it's and it's a society that that we hear a
lot about, but I don't think that we we really
(29:03):
talk about in terms of how say, families get along. Um.
So we thought it would be a hopefully an enlightening
exploration of that. Yeah, and I would love to hear
from listeners who maybe had that traditional upbringing, or they
are currently raising their children and that more traditional upbringing,
or maybe people who had parents who were just totally
(29:26):
like whatever, yeah, or you know, and and on the
flip side of that, there are just as many people
who think that, you know, Amy Chua, etcetera, are completely
and totally crazy. You know, I'm sure there are plenty
of people who would hear this and say, no, that
kind of stuff is completely outdated. So wait, we know
we need to modernize our our parenting, but I do
(29:48):
I do think though sometimes there is maybe more room.
It makes me at least feel like maybe there's more
room in my life for some filial piety. Yeah. So yeah,
with that, send us your thoughts. Mom Stuff at Discovery
dot com is where you can send your letters. You
can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or send
(30:08):
us a message via Facebook. But Caroline, let's take a
quick break and then we will get to a couple
of those messages. And now back to our letters. Hey, Kristen,
I have a letter here from Natalie about our our
Secretary episode. She just found us recently and and she
said she couldn't help but download the Secretary episode. So
(30:32):
she says, I am a proud administrative professional, but my
title and its perceptions frustrate me. I don't like to
be called a secretary because most folks think I do
work a train monkey could do. However, on our very
first informal meeting, my boss said I am the glue
of the office and nothing should happen without my say.
So that's set the bar for me, and the only
reason I don't make the final decisions is because of
(30:53):
chain of command and technicalities. Otherwise, I'm the one coaching
my boss is on what needs to be done. I
don't want to be the boss because I don't want
the stress, but I want the reward to me. It's
a win win. Moreover, even though it is understood that
the nature of my work is secretarial, our company has
instituted a different title that has given only to a
select group of admins who pass exams and certifications. Otherwise
(31:15):
they are simply secretaries and do not enjoy our special title.
I love my job, but I confess I wish I
could get over myself and stop getting cranky. When people
call me a secretary, I politely correct them and move on,
though I remember they called me a secretary and hesitate
to help them with something really easy but really difficult
for them in the future. I can be a brat,
(31:35):
I know, thanks Natalie, and I don't think there's anything
wrong with gently correcting people. When people call flight attendant sturidisees,
I non gently correct them by kicking them in the
ship right throwing hot coffee in their face. No, no, no.
Well I have one here from Caitlin and this is
in response to our episode on stuffed animals, and my goodness,
(31:59):
we have received so many delightful stuft animal stories and
here is one of them. When I was sixteen, my
mom and I went on a college road trip checking
out a few schools I was interested in. In somewhere
between Pennsylvania and Ohio, my beloved little white dog, Scruffy,
went missing. I'd had him for nearly a decade at
(32:19):
that point, and honestly, he went everywhere I did, even
as a teen. If I was leaving a zip code overnight,
he was coming with me, and losing him was a
big deal for me, and my parents were very sweet
about it. Starting my freshman year of college, my mom
began finding new Scruffy's on eBay on Valentine's Day, Christmas,
a few random Tuesdays as well. I was handed a
(32:40):
box with a new friend, but they were never exactly right.
One had a Santa hat, one had a rose in
his mouth, and one was a size too small. The
miracle of miracles, my mom found me a scruffy that
was nearly identical to the one I had misplaced. For
several years after college, I was traveling regularly for work
and posted pictures of my buddy Scruppy on my blog
(33:01):
and Twitter so my parents and friends could check in
with where I was and what I was doing. People
were generally great sports about getting their picture taken with him,
and even as a mid twenties something, I was happy
to have my buddy in my bag with me at
all times. Anytime I hear a story about adults being
judged for their stuffed animal friends, I get a little frustrated.
As an only child with a very active communication and
(33:22):
not super stable health with pretty bad asthma allergies, I
found solace in my little white dog, and I'm not
ashamed at all that as an adult I still do.
I like having him with me, and it's a reminder
of my family and friends who love me. So thanks
to Caitlin for that endearing tale of Scruffy and here
here's wishing you and Scruffy many years of happiness and health.
(33:46):
And thanks to everybody he was written in with their
stuffed animal tales and everything else to mom Stuff at
Discovery dot com. You can also again find us on
Twitter at mom Stuff Podcasts on Facebook. You can follow
us on Tumbler at stuff mom Ever Told You dot
tumbler dot com, and now you can watch us on YouTube.
That's right. We come out with a brand new video
(34:07):
three times a week at YouTube dot com slash stuff
Mom Never Told You, and you should be a doll
and subscribe while you're at it. And if you'd like
to read up and get a little smarter this week,
you can head to our website it's how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(34:28):
Does it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to stuff mom never told you. From House to
works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline. And before we go any further, Caroline,
we need to thank listener Jennifer for this podcast we're
gonna do on filial piety, which is a Chinese cornerstone
(00:30):
of family life and child rearing. And Jennifer wrote into
us saying, hey, you should look into filial piety, and
she also sent us a ton of scholarly research that
has been done on filial piety. And there is no
faster way to our hearts than to send us an
email full of journal articles. That's right, Yeah, I learned
(00:51):
all sorts of stuff about Chinese families I never knew, right,
because I feel like so often on the podcast, obviously
we focus on Western families, western parenting, whereas this whole
filial piety thing first came into the news. I would
stay with Amy Chewa a couple of years ago, who
wrote The Battle Him of the Tiger Mother and started
(01:12):
this whole debate with an excerpt that was published in
the Wall Street Journal where which was titled why Chinese
mothers are superior? And all these Western moms were like,
oh what um, but a lot of the stuff that
she talks about is loosely based on filial piety. And
then even more recently, I heard on NPR that starting
(01:34):
this summer in two thousand thirteen, the Chinese government is
going to be allowing parents to sue their adult children
for violating filial piety. Essentially, they're not taking care of
their elderly parents, Well enough, you're gonna get sued kids. Yeah,
And it's it's interesting that that idea is so embedded
(01:56):
in their culture that suing your own children overtaking care
of you would even be an option because I know,
for instance, my parents would not ever think in those terms.
You know, my dad is a big planner of financial guy,
so you know he has all these things set up
to protect him and and my mom when they get older.
(02:17):
They would never think that it would be their daughter's
responsibility to take care of them. Yeah. A lot of
times that we think of family litigation, it's more the
kids taking their parents to task in court. But in
China it's a unique situation because by enforcing in a sense,
filial piety, it's a way of providing a safety net
for the massive population of seniors, which is expected to
(02:42):
grow by nearly five hundred million people in the next
forty years. So the government saying, hey, you know what,
we can't take the entire cost of that burden, so kids, hey,
step up. Because filial piety has been such a foundational
tradition for centuries from millennia, yeah, and it was part
(03:04):
of several different philosophies and it it from there grew into,
like Kristen said, being that cornerstone of Chinese culture. And
the earliest appearance of the character for Xiao, which is
the word for filial piety, Uh is on a bronze
vessel dated to the last years of the Shang dynasty
(03:24):
or perhaps the earliest years of the Zoo dynasty around
one thousand BCS. So this is no like modern you know,
communist era China policy. This goes way back right, And
initially Shao had more of the sense of providing food
offerings to your ancestors, but then it evolved to encompass
service to both living parents and ancestors, and it ties
(03:48):
in a lot with u Confucianism, which is more of
a humanist school of thought where rather than you know,
living your life to honor, say odd, you live your
life to honor the world and especially to your family.
That's more. You think of that more in a religious
(04:09):
and air quotes sense of extreme devotion. So sheao was
a major concept in Confucianism, and Confucianism was established as
a state orthodoxy during the Han dynasty, which was characterized
by the official promotion of filial piety, and the dynasty
systematically made unfilial conduct actually a punishable crime, which sounds
(04:32):
familiar to this this lawsuit thing that you're talking about,
and rewarded acts of filial piety, and with few exceptions,
during this dynasty, emperors even adopted chiao as part of
their official titles. Now, she also had sort of a
double edged effect. This is coming from researcher Donald Holtzman,
who talks about how this centrality of the homage that
(04:56):
children render to their parents and ancestor were ship in
Chinese culture created a strong tie binding succeeding generations to
one another. It's it's very common, for instance, even still
for multiple generations to live under one roof in China,
and so it explains both it's enduring character, but also
(05:16):
at the same time the difficulty of adopting it to
the modern world, which is uh, something that will will
get into more in terms of the Chinese government really
trying to reinvigorate the sense of filial piety among Chinese
adults who are our age, who might not have grown
up in in such at a time when it was
(05:37):
so rigorously taught and enforced. But shao Jing or the
classic a filial piety was basic to classical Chinese education
and was part of school curriculum right up into the
twentieth century. And what those specifically we're talking about with
filial piety, it's not just you know, saying, oh, you know,
be nice to your parents, honor your parents, obey them,
(05:59):
respec act them. But if you look at classic text,
like the Paragons of filial Piety, those examples get pretty extreme.
I mean, it's it's things like there was There was
one one of the stories is about a son. A
lot of it is based on like the son's relationship
(06:20):
to the parents, and one of them is about a
son who goes off into the woods to you know,
hunt or gather something, and he leaves his mother at
the house and a guest arrives and the mother apparently
is so excited by this guest that she bites her
finger nervously, causing it to bleed. And while the sun
(06:42):
is miles away from home, all of a sudden, at
the moment she bites her finger, he feels, you know,
disturbance in the forest and then rushes back home. And
of course, you know, her fingers fine, but she is
overjoyed that her son is you know, so so so kind.
And I mean it even gets into you know, stories
of not to be gross. If you are eating right now,
(07:05):
you might want to pause because there's one story, for instance,
about a son testing his parents stool to find out
whether or not everything's okay with them because they're ailing,
you know there, his parents are sick, and so he
eats their poop to find that that's that's the early
Chinese version of everybody poops exactly. But I mean, but
(07:28):
that is the extremity and and these these extreme examples
are honored saying, oh you are you know, you're a
paragon of filial piety because you will go to such
great lengths to make sure that your aging parents are
healthy and happy. Right, but all of these early texts,
as you've hammered home just now, focus mainly on the
sun's and the son's subordination. Where they do talk about
(07:53):
daughters women daughters in law, it's really about how the
daughter in law needs to be devoted to her husband's family.
And this really created a lot of conflict between daughters
in law and parents and law and these clan based families.
And we have the scripture on Young Woman Yea, which
was written as Confucianism was on the way out. And so,
(08:14):
you know, we've talked about a lot of social movements
in the podcast and about how people reach back to
more conservative times when society is rapidly changing and scary
things are developing, and this is just one more example
of that. They're like, let's write something to show women
how they need to behave because all of this rigamar
role that's happening as Confucianism is leaving us. So the
(08:36):
scripture focused exclusively on the role of the daughter in law,
whose conduct is portrayed as pivotal in ensuring harmony in
the family, and classified women according to their social and
family roles, and this type of focus was pretty unprecedented.
The scriptures moral rules really served to reinforce the Confucian
sense of propriety for women and reflect this perceived need
(08:58):
to reassert moral order at a time when the Confusion
orthodoxy was losing its hold on the elite Chinese society.
So in contrast to those Confucian texts up to that period,
which usually kind of ignored women and they're like, you
know what, you need to be obedient and nice and
sweet and cute, but let's really talk about how the
(09:18):
suns need to obey their parents and be reverent, this
scripture praises women for loyal and filial service to their
parents in law, thus trying to really hammer home that
status quo. So in in the change, it really only
reinforced the same right there, Like, oh, by the way, hey, women,
you're supposed to also be really reverent, but not to
(09:40):
your parents. Once you get married. It has to be
to your parents in law, right, because long these lines
of thought. For men, their shall or filial piety is
genetically determined because they're born of sons and thus they
need to carry out this filial party. But for women,
it's expected to shift to her husband's ancestral linear at marriage.
(10:01):
So you know, it's like, you know, it's when your daughter, yeah,
you know, be good to your parents. But then once
you get married and stuff, you're gonna have to devote
all of your attention to your husband's parents. But then
in uh seven thirty a d I believe the Book
of Filial Piety for Women comes out because the writer
understood that the Book of Filial Piety, though gender neutral,
(10:23):
was implicitly addressed to males. And this was attributed to
an official's wife. Yeah, and the primary goal of this
writing was to expand the Book of Filial Piety for
women and girls that same idea of oh wait, things
are changing, we need to tell women what to do.
So the moral vision was that seemingly small acts can
have major consequences and can transform others in ever widening circles.
(10:46):
In other words, Hey, so you're hanging out in the
kitchen all the time, but don't worry. You can still
have effects on society. You can still exert moral influence
over your husband. Let's say, who can then go out
and affect change in the local government or local village.
Who can then, you know, affect the nation and the empire.
So they're like, don't worry, women, you can still be
(11:08):
important from the kitchen. Well, and that and The maternal
role though, was highly um emphasized because one of you know,
like a good Chinese mother seeks to educate her children
and almost to um a what we might think in
more Western terms as to as to a severe extent,
(11:29):
Like there was an article that I ran across that
was written by Amy Tiger mom Chua which she goes
over to China to interview do these profiles on for
self made female billionaires because apparently China has more female
self made billionaires than anywhere else in the world. And
she's talking to one of them and uh and talks
about how even still she you know, practices tenants of
(11:53):
filial piety. So when her sons come home from school,
they don't go play sports, they have to sit down
and practice Chinese characters for two hours because she's being,
you know, a good mother enforcing those you know, the
kind of hardlined I guess educational tactics. Yeah, according to
that book of Filial Piety for Women, it's interesting to
(12:14):
look at what constitutes a good woman, you know, the
mother who educate her children versus what is considered to
be an immoral woman. So a good woman, you're a
wife who admonishes your husband. You keep your husband in line,
but you're immoral and unfilial if you dare become jealous
of your husband's concubines, How dare you let your husband
(12:34):
be happy? Why don't you well? And even after your
husband passes away, a good woman is considered one who
does not remarry. Um, but let's move forward. I mean,
like we said, this is going back to ancient times.
But it's incredible that shaw has endured for so long,
and even today it's been singled out as a key
(12:56):
to preserving Chinese tradition and identity. But not so surprisingly,
along with the modernization that has happened, perception of gender
roles has rendered the development of filial piety a lot
more complex because you know, you know, women are are
certainly not quite as keen on sticking to those good
(13:20):
good wife and mother kinds of ideas versus bad wife mother.
They just want to be you know, women, and be educated.
And you do wonder, I mean, there is the issue
of the one child policy, and so I am interested
in how you know, Okay, so in ancient times you
shifted your filial piety when you married your husband to
(13:41):
his parents. But what about if you are the only
child and you are a girl and you don't have
a brother to stay behind, and you know, express that
reverence to your parents. So it's interesting as things change
in China adopts new policies, but looking at how society
has changed and how this change and just have affected
filial piety. Um, there's been some rapid urbanization since the
(14:06):
nineteen seventies. This is coming from elderly Chinese and Pacific
RIM countries, social support and integration. Those rapid changes In
Hong Kong with the progress of compulsory education in particular,
the younger generations have found themselves better educated than their parents,
which leads to them, you know, earning more money, more skills,
and that has actually kind of devalued the status of
(14:29):
elder So, you know, I want to say kids today,
kids today aren't necessarily as likely to run to their
parents and say what do I do? Tell me what
to do? It's more like, well, you know, what's your opinion? Well,
and it's not only that there's the radical shift of
kids even just moving out of the home. I mean
that's a big thing where you know, but if you
(14:49):
think about in more rural communities, kids are growing up
these days and leaving going thousands of miles away to
more urban centers where they can get jobs, leaving parents
in these areas to take care of themselves, whereas a
while ago that would be unheard of, right, and you know,
I talked about how it would affect women, especially in
this one child policy society. There was a two thousand
(15:12):
three study and Gender and Society that looked at how
filial piety was working and how women played into that,
and they found an evidence of decline in the patrol
local tradition of caregiving, a gender division of parental care tasks,
and a strong social pressure that influences that caregiving behavior.
(15:32):
And their research indicated negative effects for the women who
are now caregivers, as they are likely to live longer,
but be more financially dependent and have fewer children available
to help them. So these women are kind of stuck
between a rock and a hard place nowadays, you know,
expected to care for their parents, care for their husbands,
and if the husband passes away, they're kind of juggling
(15:53):
both families and not having enough help, you know, in
their caregiving duties. And on top of that, um there's
a study from the Journal of Aging studies from May
two thousand two which examined the strength of the traditional
confusion filial piety, which would step in like in those
(16:13):
situations you're talking about, and you know, and basically instruct
the children to take care of their aging mothers and
and the study found that not surpresently these tenants are
eroding and um. Recently, this is as of two thousand
and twelve, the Chinese government has issued an updated version
(16:34):
of the twenty four Paragons of Filial Piety in an
attempt to, like we said at the top of the podcast,
to reinvigorate kids to essentially pay more attention to their parents. Um.
But as The New York Times reported in September of twelve, uh,
some of the Chinese people are are straight up just
turning away, um from old school filial piety because it's like, well,
(16:58):
the world has changed, and you know, I try to
call my parents and talk to them, but I can't
be there all the time, right. And there has been
a backlash and people are ridiculing these new ideas because
they're kind of striking. A lot of people is out
of touch in this nation where millions are leaving the
countryside in search of jobs, and cities every year. For example,
(17:20):
one of those new paragons of filial piety is take
one's parents traveling frequently, And if you're one of the
country's two hundred and fifty two million migrant workers, you
can't actually afford to do that. And nearly eleven million
rural migrants arrived in Chinese cities in twenty eleven alone,
most likely leaving those aging parents behind. So people are
(17:41):
going in search of opportunity and can't always get back,
you know, and take an hour's long trip to see
their aging parents. Right, And the Chinese government is also
having to deal with a massively negative effect of its
one child policy, which has left a ton of emptiness.
And on top of those kids who are leaving home
(18:02):
and going far, far away. Um emtin us now make
up fifty of Chinese households, and nearly half of the
five million people over sixty live apart from their children.
I mean, if we think about today in the United States,
the whole issue of the aging baby boom or population
social security and the question of whether or not that's
going to take care of them, think about China, you know,
(18:24):
where even just familial support can't be as guaranteed as
a as a safety net, you know, on a lower
run from you know what the government might be able
to provide. Yeah, and fortunately, a study in the Journal
of Family Issues in March two thousand six found that
(18:44):
these only children were as likely to plan on helping
their parents as were those with siblings, and we're actually
more likely to intend to reside in the same city.
But it's it's the thing of like, well, if you're
going where the money is and the opportunity is, that
single child is kind of being torn in two directions
and is not always able to stay with their parents
where they're needed and so but luckily, according to the study,
(19:06):
the only children seemed to feel especially responsible for their
parents happiness. So maybe we're just going to end up
with the generation of kids who are completely stressed out
and don't know what to do. That sounds like it
sounds like everybody, yeah, yeah, say so. Um. But one
thing we have not really touched on though is communism,
because obviously, you know, China has been a communist society,
(19:30):
and there is a study in Aging and Political Policy
that came out in October of two thousand and eight
looking at how today's Chinese Communist society sort of meshes
with filial piety, and it found that although Chinese communists
have found filial piety to be ideologically repulsive, they have
(19:51):
nevertheless tolerated it and even use it as the basis
for a welfare network to support the elderly in villages.
I mean essentially like kind of saying again, well, hey,
you know what we've gotten to, got this free support
network that we can tap into. Yeah, let's guilt these
kids into taking care of their parents so we don't
have to. Well, so, how does all this change when
(20:13):
when families moved to America or you know, moved to
any other country outside of China. Really um A in
October two thousand to study in the Journal of Family
Issues interviewed middle class Taiwanese and Hong Kong immigrant families
in California. And although three generational cohabitation may have declined
once they reached America, so once these these nuclear families
(20:35):
shrink a little, the author found that the family still
remains the nexus of care networks and economic ties among
Chinese immigrants, and so immigrant adult children do maintain the
cultural ideal of filial piety, but they do it differently.
They end up. In the study, they found recruiting home
care workers as fictive can and they say that the
(20:58):
public care doesn't indicate the demand nishment of family bonds,
but rather reinforces kin connections as channels for circulating economic
resources among these people who are new to America. So
it sounds like for a traditional Chinese family, it's it's
not as though if they were to leave China they
leave all of their you know, traditional Chinese morals behind.
(21:19):
They take it with them. And there's a process of
a culturation that happens in which you you know, adapt
traits from one culture and mix it in with another. So, uh,
there was a study in Marriage and Family Review in
January of two thousand nine to look at those effects
of acculturation on these Chinese families, and it found that
(21:40):
there is some intergenerational conflict that will happen when it
comes to parenting in Chinese American families that were associated
with youth distress above and beyond just ac culturation gaps.
So basically saying that you know, beyond just the typical
growing pains if you will, that might occur, um, the
study highlighted some some more direct distress. Yeah, It's interesting
(22:05):
because they pointed out that maybe these Chinese parents should
increase parental warmth and decrease parental over protection, to which
Amy Chiwa would be like, whatever, yeah, I mean her
whole thing. I don't. I don't feel like we've gone
into a great detail on what she had to say
in Battle Him of the Tiger Mother Um. Basically, she
(22:26):
talked about how her two daughters were, for instance, never
allowed to go to sleepovers, never allowed to go to movies,
like all of these typical things that we would associate with,
you know, the good times of being a kid. No,
she was kids would not be doing the thing because
they would be practicing violence, practicing piano, practicing studying for school.
(22:48):
And she says, hey, you know what, do I sound
like a jerk? Yeah? I know that I do, and
I know that this is in direct contrast to the
more lenient Western parenting styles, But guess what, my kids
are gonna go Ivy League all the way. One of
her daughters had already played piano at Carnegie Hall, et cetera.
And while everyone, well a lot of the commoners flipped
(23:11):
out saying that she was, you know, issuing cruel and
unusual punishment and robbing her kids of a childhood. Um
her kids. One of her daughters actually wrote a response
piece to It's saying, I'm grateful to my mom for
doing this. You know. Yeah, Chua basically said it was
her way of showing love, like I believe in my daughters.
I believe that they can achieve all this stuff. And plus, hey,
(23:34):
they owe me. I'm their mom. They owe me to
obey me and do what I say so that they
can grow up to be productive members of society. And
these attitudes, I mean, that's just that's that's one example,
but these attitudes do carry over. Um. There was a
study in Basic and Applied Social Psychology in two thousand
that looked at Chinese New Zealander families, and researchers found
(23:57):
strong acceptance of filial piety obligations even in there, and
the felt expectations they found were stronger from elderly parents
than from grandparents, and the younger generation rated expectations on
them higher than did the middle age. So part of
that could have to do with the fact that as
we're you know, modernizing, and as families adapt to being
(24:20):
in different countries and in different cultures, the middle aged
children of older parents are more accepting of the idea
of Okay, well this is what my duty is, this
is what I do. But it's those younger generations that
are kind of chafing under these obligations. But I wonder
if that does change as you get older and once
you become a parent yourself and start understanding all that
(24:43):
goes into parenting and the you know, probably wanting like
a m said, like a little bit about payback, but
you know, support in return for the support that she's
given her kids. Although I'm sure that some people listening
to say that as support, like there there's still people
who are not going to agree with UM, this kind
(25:05):
of parenting UM. And I did want to look into
whether or not filial party has positive or negative childhood outcomes,
and from what I could gather, you know, it's often
correlated not so surprisingly with UM lower disciplinary problems, higher
(25:26):
school achievement, not so surprisingly if kids are being you know,
forced to do many hours of homework or extracurricular work
on top of school and all in all, you know,
by the numbers, it seems like it has good impacts.
Although I was not able to find a more detailed
(25:46):
study for instance, interviewing children about you know what what
how does this actually make you feel? You know, if
you are you might be performing well on paper, but
you know, it is so much in contrast to the
kinds of westerning parenting styles that we would normally think of, um,
but I am curious to know more of like the
(26:08):
those long terms effective because we you know, we do,
we cherish that whole like parental warmth. And I mean
even thinking today about attachment parenting and helicopter parents where
you know, on on the whole flip side of this,
where you know, a lot of American parents are almost
just like hovering their kids and babying them to to
(26:29):
a large extent. And I'm not I'm just I'm saying that,
like as a broad generalization. I'm not saying that all
parents do that. I'm setting up a contrast there. Please
close that email you are about to send to us exactly.
But there was a study that came out in in
the American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences Journal that
(26:50):
supported the idea um that maybe Chinese students do hold
higher expectations regarding their personal filial norms just and because
filial piety was at the center of that Chinese culture
and Confucianism. In the West, there's less emphasis on that
familial and community obligation and more on the individual darn
(27:12):
you Protestantism, uh, the study says in in not those words,
but basically, you know, the individualism of of Protestantism versus
Confucianism taking care of your family and your community. Well, so,
this study looked at Eastern and Western kids and and
looked at their expectations and their attitudes towards taking care
of their families, and they actually found that young people
(27:34):
in some Southeast and East Asian cultures seem not to
practice filial behavior willingly towards the elderly in general. Rather,
they reluctantly accommodate these social norms and expectations of the elderly,
these things that have been in their culture and that
they're just expected to do. Young adults and Western cultures, though,
who aren't expected to do these things, tended to believe
(27:55):
that they were doing it very well because they didn't
have the same weight of those exctations on them. So
when they did help out their parents or grandparents, they
were like, oh, yeah, I'm doing I'm doing a great job.
This is great. Yeah, it's like you you come over
for Mother's Day, Father's Day, you know, the bars is
very low. And and and again I'm not saying that
all American kids are like that, but absolutely the bar
(28:16):
would be lower. And so you know, it doesn't take
quite as much to feel like a really good kid. Perhaps. Yeah,
and this whole conversation about filial piety is is not
our argument for you know, us raising our our children
under these you know, Confucian traditions or anything like that.
But we wanted to take Jennifer's suggestion and explore filial piety, um,
(28:42):
just to get a snapshot of what is going on
in the rest of the world in terms of how
parents raise their kids. And especially you know, China is
such a fascinating example because size wise, you know, it's
it's comparable to the US, bigger than the US, and
it's and it's a society that that we hear a
lot about, but I don't think that we we really
(29:03):
talk about in terms of how say, families get along. Um.
So we thought it would be a hopefully an enlightening
exploration of that. Yeah, and I would love to hear
from listeners who maybe had that traditional upbringing, or they
are currently raising their children and that more traditional upbringing,
or maybe people who had parents who were just totally
(29:26):
like whatever, yeah, or you know, and and on the
flip side of that, there are just as many people
who think that, you know, Amy Chua, etcetera, are completely
and totally crazy. You know, I'm sure there are plenty
of people who would hear this and say, no, that
kind of stuff is completely outdated. So wait, we know
we need to modernize our our parenting, but I do
(29:48):
I do think though sometimes there is maybe more room.
It makes me at least feel like maybe there's more
room in my life for some filial piety. Yeah. So yeah,
with that, send us your thoughts. Mom Stuff at Discovery
dot com is where you can send your letters. You
can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or send
(30:08):
us a message via Facebook. But Caroline, let's take a
quick break and then we will get to a couple
of those messages. And now back to our letters. Hey, Kristen,
I have a letter here from Natalie about our our
Secretary episode. She just found us recently and and she
said she couldn't help but download the Secretary episode. So
(30:32):
she says, I am a proud administrative professional, but my
title and its perceptions frustrate me. I don't like to
be called a secretary because most folks think I do
work a train monkey could do. However, on our very
first informal meeting, my boss said I am the glue
of the office and nothing should happen without my say.
So that's set the bar for me, and the only
reason I don't make the final decisions is because of
(30:53):
chain of command and technicalities. Otherwise, I'm the one coaching
my boss is on what needs to be done. I
don't want to be the boss because I don't want
the stress, but I want the reward to me. It's
a win win. Moreover, even though it is understood that
the nature of my work is secretarial, our company has
instituted a different title that has given only to a
select group of admins who pass exams and certifications. Otherwise
(31:15):
they are simply secretaries and do not enjoy our special title.
I love my job, but I confess I wish I
could get over myself and stop getting cranky. When people
call me a secretary, I politely correct them and move on,
though I remember they called me a secretary and hesitate
to help them with something really easy but really difficult
for them in the future. I can be a brat,
(31:35):
I know, thanks Natalie, and I don't think there's anything
wrong with gently correcting people. When people call flight attendant sturidisees,
I non gently correct them by kicking them in the
ship right throwing hot coffee in their face. No, no, no.
Well I have one here from Caitlin and this is
in response to our episode on stuffed animals, and my goodness,
(31:59):
we have received so many delightful stuft animal stories and
here is one of them. When I was sixteen, my
mom and I went on a college road trip checking
out a few schools I was interested in. In somewhere
between Pennsylvania and Ohio, my beloved little white dog, Scruffy,
went missing. I'd had him for nearly a decade at
(32:19):
that point, and honestly, he went everywhere I did, even
as a teen. If I was leaving a zip code overnight,
he was coming with me, and losing him was a
big deal for me, and my parents were very sweet
about it. Starting my freshman year of college, my mom
began finding new Scruffy's on eBay on Valentine's Day, Christmas,
a few random Tuesdays as well. I was handed a
(32:40):
box with a new friend, but they were never exactly right.
One had a Santa hat, one had a rose in
his mouth, and one was a size too small. The
miracle of miracles, my mom found me a scruffy that
was nearly identical to the one I had misplaced. For
several years after college, I was traveling regularly for work
and posted pictures of my buddy Scruppy on my blog
(33:01):
and Twitter so my parents and friends could check in
with where I was and what I was doing. People
were generally great sports about getting their picture taken with him,
and even as a mid twenties something, I was happy
to have my buddy in my bag with me at
all times. Anytime I hear a story about adults being
judged for their stuffed animal friends, I get a little frustrated.
As an only child with a very active communication and
(33:22):
not super stable health with pretty bad asthma allergies, I
found solace in my little white dog, and I'm not
ashamed at all that as an adult I still do.
I like having him with me, and it's a reminder
of my family and friends who love me. So thanks
to Caitlin for that endearing tale of Scruffy and here
here's wishing you and Scruffy many years of happiness and health.
(33:46):
And thanks to everybody he was written in with their
stuffed animal tales and everything else to mom Stuff at
Discovery dot com. You can also again find us on
Twitter at mom Stuff Podcasts on Facebook. You can follow
us on Tumbler at stuff mom Ever Told You dot
tumbler dot com, and now you can watch us on YouTube.
That's right. We come out with a brand new video
(34:07):
three times a week at YouTube dot com slash stuff
Mom Never Told You, and you should be a doll
and subscribe while you're at it. And if you'd like
to read up and get a little smarter this week,
you can head to our website it's how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(34:28):
Does it how stuff works dot com
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