How to raise second-gen kids who can outcompete H1B visa holders

Note: This post has no advice about raising ultra-competitive kids.

I wasn’t planning on a post this week, but it turns out the appointment of

Sriram Krishnan

to the White House stoked a lot of anti-Indian sentiment all through Christmas day on Twitter. The hate is purportedly focused on people on H1B visas (like me) taking away jobs from Americans. But even the most suave ones give themselves away by asking why Germans aren’t being given these visas.

There’s plenty to say on this topic. I wrote a thread of long posts. I also have a thread focused on how a 110 years ago too there was similar hate for Indians.

I came to the US on a student visa, and stayed on on an H1B visa. My daughter, however, is born in the US. As is my husband, whose family ranges from those who fought in the Revolutionary War to refugees from WWI, as well as recent immigrants. In 20 years, are my kids going to be whining about H1B visas on one side, complaining about DEI initiatives on another, and spending their days angry?

My friends, mostly Indian immigrants, think the solution is to invest in the best education for their kids, be strict with them, and let nature take its course. After all, Indian kids are leading everywhere in the US and that’s because of our strong focus on academics.

My husband’s friends, who all have blue-collar boomer parents, think it’s all about letting kids pursue their dreams, and life, uh, will find a way. To them, working in science and technology isn’t the only path to a fulfilling life, and while wealth is desirable, they’d rather be poor following their dreams than rich doing something they don’t believe in. They concerted-cultivate their kids but don’t believe in pressuring them or being strict.

Vivek Ramaswamy has a take on this that I half-agree with, and half totally disagree with:

Vivek’s parents were high-achieving AF, sent their kids to private school and encouraged them to be high-achieving as well. As are most immigrant families, especially Indian and Chinese ones. He must have struggled with not getting to do all the “normal” American kid stuff, and now finally thinks he’s won because of that parenting, which raises winners. So obviously, he’s going to say something like this.

But…. in the Bay Area, I see many offspring of such competitive parents. Most don’t do better than their parents. They went to the best public schools, followed all the rules, and didn’t get that far. They either didn’t get into a great university like their parents did, or they did, and had some failure to launch happen after, or they are leading perfectly mediocre lives. Many move to cheaper parts of the country because they can’t afford to buy homes near their parents, and when their parents pass, they sell the house and take the money. If you play board games a lot, you’ll find a lot of young Asian men who live in their parents’ homes and their only joy is the board games. Some go on to be high-achieving in non-STEM fields and then become people their parents don’t recognize… like this man I met whose parents were early engineers at Apple. He, OTOH, was an anti-vaxxer who was struggling with underemployment after a PhD in education.

If any of these people were still applying for jobs, they would have blamed those with H1B visas too.

So… what gives?

What leads to burnout?

One of the things parents most worry about is their kids just doing nothing and failing to launch. This happens in Japan, India, America, and I suppose even Singapore. You think with enough discipline, this won’t be your kids. Is that sufficient?

I don’t have answers for this. But projecting from people around me, if you have, from an early age, obeyed constantly and not had enough opportunity to try things on your own and build confidence, this could be an issue. If you believed in one way of life, then went out and realized you’re not prepared for “real” life, you just want to withdraw and not keep challenging yourself, and it feels preferable to just coast.

A lot of former gifted kids end up here, performing well below their potential. I’ve tried to understand this phenomenon, and one issue here is when they were young, their parents managed to provide an environment where they could learn to read early, be nerdy, etc, and base their whole self-esteem on being smart. But when they got older, their parents maxed out on being able to provide that kind of environment or nurture them in smarts - you can’t really do this for your kid studying Physics at Berkeley - and the kids couldn’t figure out how to set this up for themselves.

There were, I suppose, a lot of such people in the aftermath of 2008. They graduated with a lot of promise, things went wrong, and they couldn’t keep themselves in an environment nurturing their smart side, and just lapsed slowly into underemployment and never regained confidence to break out of that.

I haven’t seen very many Indian-American kids in this situation. Possibly because their parents work on guiding them through college and their first job. They can do so because they have advanced degrees themselves.

But we’re also going to get to here at some point. We can’t all be high achievers, just based on the law of large numbers, once selection pressures wear off.

The mediocrity of American culture

The average person in every culture is, by definition, average. American culture is no exception, nor is Indian culture. The average person doesn’t have a college degree and doesn’t move out of their hometown usually. There are people in Bangalore who think Infosys is a bus company.

But there’s something about who and what we venerate that makes a difference in how we lead our little lives.

Like Vivek Ramaswamy says in his post, there’s an issue with how the Everyman in a lot of American shows targeted at kids/teens is someone who is very pointedly not into academics and the person who is is treated as a joke. A notable exception is Doogie Howser MD which I used to watch as a teenager and though a lot of the themes went over my head, it was in stark contrast to something like The Wonder Years where the nerdy kid was shown as having allergies and being unattractive (both these shows were on 4pm to 5pm on Star World 20 years ago, which is why I compare them).

The whole problem here is summarized in the book Hold On To Your Kids by Gabor Mate and Gordon Neufeld - peer attachment. Children are expected to be independent, but they are children after all, and they end up emotionally attached to other children instead of grownups, and as a result end up doing things that other children approve of, not stuff that wins the approval of grownups. This gets priced in in how grownups deal with kids as well, leading to the overall dumbing down of culture. Most notably, children can’t handle vulnerability so they are uncomfortable when other children around them are nerdy or interested in something, because curiosity is you being very vulnerable. They deal with this by being unkind to the vulnerable child. This is what leads to the anti-nerd nature of American schools on average. While things have changed in the past 20 years, it hasn’t been for the better. Things have gotten more siloed and those with parents passionate about technology and such go to different schools than the rest. So the kids in the nerdy schools are stressed out from the pressure cooker environment, and the rest of the kids have no exposure to people studying hard, so even the ones who would have studied hard won’t if they are left in the bad schools.

I don’t have children in school yet, but it feels a big part of this problem came from No Child Left Behind and everything after that that had school education on a downslide.

Coming from a school in India that didn’t have lights in the classrooms and no sports facilities save a municipal ground we shared with goats and the rest of the city, I didn’t understand why Indians worked so hard to buy homes in the best school districts. The per-capita spending in the “bad” schools was so much better than what we had, big tech companies were donating to these schools, teachers all had education degrees, and they at least had lights in the classrooms and water in the bathrooms…. what was the problem? As I get closer to having to put my kid in school, it becomes abundantly clear the problem isn’t money, it’s culture. Teachers can’t control the class, parents don’t nurture curiosity in kids, kids get into fights and people barely care, and there’s just ongoing low-grade shittiness that makes it hard for anyone to learn.

Low-income schools in India have a lot of problems, but they are NOT like this.

I can’t help feel that a part of it is the highest culture the average American aspires to is defined by Hollywood, but in India, even the poorest child from the least academic household will be taught to pray to Saraswati.

This was probably not a big issue in postwar America, or even Space Race America, because the people lauded in culture were astronauts and codebreakers and scientists who built nukes and rockets.

But now it does seem like an issue. I’m glad for Oppenheimer, but the average depiction of programmers in Hollywood is so bad. The last movie I watched which made science seem fun, relatable and exciting was The Martian, and that was nearly a decade ago. I can’t shake the image of the “tech billionaire” in Don’t Look Up, and it’s appalling that came from Adam McKay. The Social Network is still the movie that defines Silicon Valley and it is less than flattering, and somehow the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is told as the quintessential Silicon Valley startup story. The reason that these are the depictions that catch on fire instead of the actual work that goes into building LLMs and semiconductors is because big media seems to be on a mission to take down Silicon Valley as well. Everyone has their own reasons to be part of this machine, but the end result is science is not cool for Americans.

Entrepreneurship is cool. Show business is cool. These are great for soft power and they are what unleash the monetizing of innovation. But the hard power behind this comes from ideas and manufacturing and core science and lots of consistent hard work at boring things. And this comes from the government funding hard science, which needs people’s support to happen.

There’s a lot that’s gotten political about science as well which is causing its own problems, but that deserves a big ass post to itself.

To sum up, where I differ with Vivek Ramaswamy is that “normal” should have enough room for even being nerdy, which I’m not sure it currently does. Life is about much more than competing with China. America was able to compete with Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia without ruining the quality of life of the average engineer, and that was possible because science was cool enough and NASA was respectable enough a career that everyone from all sections of society aimed to be good at science.

The problem with raising doctors and engineers

My only real options for a life that didn’t involve being stuck living paycheck to paycheck were being a Doctor or an Engineer. Thankfully children in America don’t face that kind of choice. There are many many fields where you can make a great living without connections or generational wealth.

I have family who came to the US a decade or two before I did, and they have children in college now, most of who studied computer science and work in tech. But the most successful among them say they don’t want their children to get into tech.

Working in any scientific field is all-consuming. Outside of tech, they often don’t even pay all that well, and if they do, it’s really really hard to break in. At least with pharma, you’re making drugs that cure baldness, but B2B SaaS doesn’t really infuse one with a sense of purpose.

When I see Asian-Americans in Hollywood, it feels like they all brought a rigor and middle-class ethos to their work that helped them be much more successful than their competition. So one generation of this leads to success. It’s the subsequent generations that end up having a problem. Take for instance Madhuri Dixit - her husband is a doctor, and her children are studying machine learning at USC and interning at Apple. But similarly placed actors are not able to have their children pursue something rigorous despite their wealth.

It takes a lot of involved parenting to get children into a professional field, especially a STEM field where it’s best to learn the basics in your teens in a college program. Part of this is due to the unsupportive culture that considers STEM something only for nerds, but STEM fields in the US are also incredibly rigorous. The admissions process is incredibly competitive as well. And managing a tech career is really hard if you don’t come from a white-collar background.

Let’s say you manage all this somehow. But then the economy can go belly up. Or college admission policies change suddenly, and your children aren’t able to get into a program that ensures a good first job. Or they do, and you can’t afford it. There’s just too much that goes into making a qualified doctor or engineer, and that pipeline feels unsustainable. That’s not even going into having children in the Bay Area with both parents working in tech, and other such delectable challenges.

H1B life sucks but not in the ways you think

So obviously, there’s a huge STEM professional shortage in the US. There will always be a STEM professional shortage, because there’s so much to build, and America is where we’ve all decided we’re building literally everything. This is changing - I’m seeing hardware grads go to China and South Korea to intern, software grads go to India. I came across an Ivy kid who interned in Assam, of all places, and that blew my mind. Things are changing. But for now, America is the destination for everyone who dreams of building.

I didn’t particularly want to move to the US, honestly. But after an engineering degree, I found myself wanting to do more research on machine learning algorithms, and the options to do so in India were quite bleak back then. My friends and I all came in like “Oh, I’m going to clear my loans and then move back home, parents are important”. A few years later that turned into “my wife wants to also pursue her degree here”. Then it was “I’m too invested in the green card queue, can’t leave”, followed by “Can’t sell my house in this economy”, and currently it’s at “Don’t want to disrupt kids’ education”. But plenty of friends did go back home, gave up their place in the green card queue, sold their house, and put their kids in PSBB.

But… this is what H1B life is like. It’s not typically living paycheck to paycheck and having no options and being exploited. Any stress and exploitation come in the form of golden handcuffs - seh lenge thoda we say, and stick with the awful job until our stocks vest, or our promotion comes through, or we make enough to buy our parents a house. Going back home is more a blow to our pride than the end of life as we know it. Most people on an H1B have one foot out anyway, and has a backup plan, be it managing their parent’s shop or farm or teaching maths tuition.

The downsides come in the form of not being able to quit your line of work and do something else. Many women I know on visas really wanted to be SAHMs when their kids were little but couldn’t without subjecting their families to even more precarity. We don’t have time to volunteer at our kids’ schools. We can’t take time off to take care of loved ones even if we can financially afford it. We can’t pursue show business because they don’t sponsor work visas typically. We can’t take six months off to upskill and then apply for better jobs. At one point, when I was waiting to switch from a student visa to a work visa, I didn’t even buy a full 12-pack of paper towel rolls because I didn’t want the hassle of having to throw them away when I had to urgently leave the country.

Many Americans like to imagine being on an H1B visa as kind of like when Saudi sheiks take your passport and have you herding their goats and camels in the desert sun for 15 hours a day and whip you when you don’t. It…. really isn’t.

Maybe it’s less “freedom” than Americans think because you can’t quit on a whim to pursue your passion, but… I got six months of paid parental leave, and Amy Poehler was trying to be funny on SNL on her due date. Hollywood has unions, and yet my favorite show 30 Rock demanded more of its writers than any job I’ve had. Donald Glover wanted to take a week off to audition for Community, but quit instead because he realized he couldn’t - one of the writers had a baby and he got like three days off… most single-cam shows are like that. I’ve never been told to avoid eye contact with the CEO like the staff on Ellen.

In any case, post- green card, my friends all seem to work for small startups, start their own ventures, take time off to be parents, and other such high-risk high-reward stuff.

Could we be paid more? Yes, but so could most people. Most people from blue-collar backgrounds don’t know you can negotiate your pay. Once people realize it and figure out the cultural nuances, though, they negotiate ruthlessly, and Indians are no exception. In any case, folks on H1B I know aren’t hurting for money.

The anger against H1B employees

There seems to be an undercurrent of distrust in the American people that the common man’s issues are thrown aside so the people at the top can play their 5D chess. American manufacturing jobs were shipped to China to achieve foreign policy goals, so this isn’t something unfounded. But it gets a bit crazy - I’ve heard people in the Bay Area say Israelis are rich because they are plied with money from the US government.

Everyone seems to be afraid of their jobs getting offshored or worse, having to train their incompetent H1B replacements. I’m going to nitpick here and say the employees were probably on L4 visas as the jobs were likely outsourced to a services firm - no company is going to lay people off and then find enough immigrants in the open market to replace them as fulltime employees. If they wanted cheaper, more compliant employees, they’d just hire women. The problem here seems more like right-to-work policies more than anything, and layoffs seem to be common whether or not there are cheaper replacements.

Most Americans have no clue about how immigration works. Heck, I have no clue how immigration to India works. Like any topics we know a little about, we just pick catchphrases and a sense of doom and mix them up.

So… how do you raise American kids who’ll take all the STEM jobs?

I have a four-year-old so I don’t have any proven methods. What I have are hunches.

There needs to be a strong pro-science environment both in and outside the home. A lot of parents pick private schools just to ensure this. This is not sustainable, but it is all you can do in a personal capacity.

Schools and school policies need to change. You can’t discontinue algebra and calculus because some kids find it hard. Teachers need to be given more autonomy so they can teach their subjects well enough to their students and maintain order in the classrooms.

More than anything, parents need to be appraised of the important job they have with their children. Parents from high-nurture backgrounds know this already due to their experience, but if the median culture is yapping about how coddled children are and how they need to be left to their own devices from infancy, then the culture that emerges is one of neglect. Your kid will pick up more science-adjacent concepts from spending time with you than from daycare staff or even school teachers.

I notice kids as young as four spend all day in kindergarten and then more hours in afterschool care instead of with parents. I dug a bit more, and a lot of parents can have their kids home earlier, but they are told by the culture that more organized activities are better for their kids. Spending long hours away from family and in the care of overworked teachers and aides means there is more peer attachment than learning by watching grownups, and this inclines them less toward learning and more toward following pop culture and kid-oriented media.

Media needs to be more pro-science as well and not be focused on unfounded buildups and subsequent takedowns of figures in science and technology - the whole Theranos media debacle seems wholly unnecessary.

The hard part, even after all this, is to keep your kids from dropping out of STEM fields in college in favor of something easier. This was my biggest challenge, and I wouldn’t have managed without my father’s faith in me. There’s a larger question here on how you can nurture resilience in children to stick with hard things, but what most grownups need to do so is a sense of purpose and a sense of confidence. Underlying this needs to be a sense of autonomy and a strong self-esteem that isn’t conditional on achieving things.

This gets easier if you, the parent, have a strong idea of why STEM is a good idea. It needs to be deeper than how much money it makes or what glory you can achieve.

Is Indian Parenting Somehow Superior here?

Yes, but not in the way you think.

The memes about Asian/Indian/Tiger parenting are all about how strict parents are. That’s all Asian-Americans assume their parents’ parenting has been about because they haven’t first-hand experienced Western parenting.

The thing that binds me most strongly to my parents is the deep sense of their sacrifice and connection. It’s not the stuff they said they did, it’s the stuff I noticed them doing. It’s all the corners I saw them not cutting when they could quite easily have, all the times they held my hand when they need not have. Sure, they expected high grades, but I remember most the little mnemonics my mother and I came up with when trying to memorize long poems.

All parents do all these things the best they can, but the problem with Western parenting guides is they tell you explicitly to not do these things. Mind, parents still end up doing as much of this as they can, but when the culture tells you it’s wrong to hold your children to high standards or spend a lot of time with them, there’s little an individual parent can do. I feel like the things valued in Indian parenting promote a strong connection between the parent and the child making it easy to have high standards without disrupting the bond. Parents are held to high standards too, and the culture tells children to listen to their parents. Parents don’t feel as much anxiety about damaging children by enforcing standards. One of the scariest things in Western society is how there exist authorities that can take your children away if you’re suspected of neglecting them the least bit, and everyone from teachers to passers-by is given more weight than the parent. It’s horrible that cases of egregious abuse exist that necessitate this, but it does feel like these are tools to harass and scare regular parents more than to actually protect abused children.

HOWEVER. High standards and strong connection aren’t the only ingredients of success. I notice a lot of highly educated Indian parents micromanaging every aspect of their child’s physical experience. Don’t walk this way, don’t climb there, don’t touch that. All parents do that, but I feel it is most pronounced moment-to-moment with Indian parents. This is supposed to be discipline, but it makes children more uncertain of their physical space, I think. Though… I see more and more American parents doing this as well.

What American parents do well is allow their children to take risks more, to try things more, to manage themselves autonomously more. Under this type of parenting, children learn to trust themselves and their lived experience more. This helps them be more decisive, set their own standards, advocate for themselves better, and pursue their curiosities better.

The problem then is their motivations and desires come from media and peers, and that’s how you get more kids wanting to be a Youtuber than astronaut.

With Indian parenting, everything depends on the lens the parent takes. The place where it gets bad is the achievement-orientedness of the parent manifests as conditional self-esteem for the child. But that comes in much much further down the line, and by then, the kids already have a career in tech.

Ultimately, it comes down to what is culturally valued. American parents have no problem holding their kids to high standards with sports and independence. If they value science, they’ll do that too. There aren’t very many cultures in the US that love learning for learning’s sake, though. But in India (and most of Asia), there are. And that’s what gives us the advantage now.

What’s the point of life, though?

To create value for shareholders with B2B SaaS.

I do feel like the whole world is messed up from having to work for large faceless corporations alongside people we don’t care that much for.

For most of our history, we worked alongside people we considered family, and worked as much as we needed to provide for us and our loved ones. This whole argument about H1B visas is about who thrives better in this artificial environment where you prepare from childhood to work all day on things you don’t really care for, alongside people you have to pretend to like, just so you have enough to finance your metabolic syndrome. Entire parenting strategies are being invented to shape kids to thrive in this environment. It’s not limited to STEM, mind you.

The solutions that people have come up with have included creating your own business, being an internet creator while living in Thailand, or working in a tourist destination teaching people to surf. And Americans backlash against worker bee culture by not even teaching their children times tables because they shouldn’t have to memorize useless facts.

I’m not sure those things work on a societal scale (though it bothers me greatly that no one does times tables in US schools these days).

I don’t know what else does. But this feels unsustainable, and this feels like just another symptom of things crashing and burning. I don’t know how things will be fixed.

All I know is it is futile to tie your self-esteem to this stuff. It feels better to tie it to family and our connection with the divine. And that’s what I ought to be inculcating in my kids.