The View | Birth of a salesperson: is tough parenting the key to career success?
Our children’s determination not to take no for an answer may lie in how we bring them up
“You win again,” the memoirist Karl Ove Knausgaard complains to his strong-willed toddler in the second volume of his autobiography, and I know exactly how he feels.
I also have a daughter who does not take “no” for an answer. If she gets a rejection, she comes back with a new approach, a new argument, an adjusted pitch to the nasality of her whine.
I like to joke that my cave-in parenting style is strategic, a way to prepare today’s youngsters for a career in one of the few fields of employment that can’t be automated – sales. Imagine a child raised in an autocratic household, with unbendable boundaries. Would that child grow up to be someone who retreats at the word “no,” instead of pushing on?
The United States is famous for its strong sales culture, which in turn may play a role in the country’s pronounced consumerism; America is also famous for its indulgent parents. Is there a connection?
The US is famous for its strong sales culture [and also] for its indulgent parents. Is there a connection?
Yet in the past generation, many American parents have been getting stricter and more exacting – and in some cases, intentionally adhering to what they see as a more authoritarian Asian parenting style. Indeed, when I read Amy Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a few years back, I waved it around the house and vowed my spineless parenting days were over.
Research into the economics of parenting styles by professors Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti shows that rising inequality and the high skill set demanded by the modern knowledge economy is killing off permissive trends in parenting the world over.
