VANCOUVER: Move over aggressive and pushy Tiger Parents, here come the relaxed, happy & successful Dolphin Parents. In her new book on Dolphin Parenting, Dr Kang says there really is no need for parents to play tiger and better results can be achieved by showing empathy towards children and by being a dolphin to them.
In her book, Dolphin Parenting: How to Raise Healthy, Happy & Successful Kids Without Turning into a Tiger — child, youth & adult psychiatrist Shimi Kang, M.D. conclusively dismantles the myth of Tiger Parenting and offers a new, intuitive model designed to overcome the problems of both the “Eastern” and “Western” parenting styles. Dr. Kang’s “Dolphin Parenting” approach fosters sustainable skills that all children need to thrive in a 21st century marked by globalization, competition, and break speed technological advances, and financial insecurity.”
Earlier, in her Tiger Mother book, Amy Chua gave a name to—and stirred up a controversy about—an authoritarian parenting approach common in major Asian countries and increasingly admired in the West, an approach that has become aggravated by modern-day pressures and expectations.
The effect of Chua`s style was swift and far-reaching: Tiger parents felt vindicated, “helicopter” moms and “wolf” dads felt encouraged, and everyone’s anxiety level increased. In a Wall Street Journal poll regarding Chua’s response to readers, two-thirds of respondents said that the “Demanding Eastern” parenting model is better than the “Permissive Western” one. As opposed to that, Dr Kang suggests the Dolphin method instead.
She had outlined her Dolphin Parenting techniques at the TOIFA Women`s Day Celebrations in March, 2013 to an overwhelming response.
Dr. Kang is like the rest of us, a busy mother of three children trying to raise her children in an uncertain world. But there are also differences. As the fifth child of hard-working immigrant parents from India who was never in a single scheduled activity, Dr. Kang entered medical school at the age of nineteen and completed her research fellowship at Harvard. As the Medical Director for Child and Youth Mental Health programs for Vancouver, Dr. Kang has witnessed first-hand the consequences of parental pressure: depressive and anxiety disorders, high stress levels, suicides, and addictions.
DR. SHIMI KANG has worked hard to bring awareness to issues of mental health and addiction through frequent media appearances and public events. She is an award-winning, Harvard-trained doctor, researcher, and lecturer on human motivation. She is the founder of the Provincial Youth Concurrent Disorders Program at BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver and co-founder of the Youth, Culture, and Mental Health Fund for the BC Mental Health Foundation.
In these roles, she has been using Dolphin Parenting techniques since 2010 to help parents balance authoritarian and permissive parenting styles and reduce the pressures of the modern day family. Dr Kang also teaches how to maximise motivation through the Dolphin Way techniques to teachers, physicians, management and other professionals through seminars, webinars, private consultation and books. The Dolphin Way and Dolphin Parenting are techniques designed to provide the one thing that will work for every person in every situation—one’s own human intuition. (For more information, please visit www.drshimikang.com)