“Letting their mothers choose the anagrams didn’t threaten their sense of control” in the same way that it did for the Anglo-American children. The Anglo-American children valued a different sort of autonomy, one that let them dictate their own preferences. They saw themselves as separate from their mothers9. For the Asian-American children, forming a healthy self-identity is not at odds with being accountable to their parents. If you believe that your mother’s goals are a logical extension of your own, you aren’t doing something “just to please your mother,” as Westerners might consider it.
