my friend has this to say, I originally saw this on FB, apparently it struck a nerve with her. She lives in singapore.
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my mum called me a failure all the time and it took over 10 years for me to actually get over it. i remember waking up in the morning when i was 16 hearing her yell at me dad "do you want your second daughter to be a screw up like the first...". i still have a math textbook from when i was 16 that had a REALLY LONG suicide note written in it about how i was trash and that Singapore doesn't need me because I'm not going to be successful and produce the 1.9 children that they need to keep the population going etc. it's really painful to see.
when i was 14 and i got into an academic stream that would not allow me to study medicine (yes, the fate of children in singapore are more or less sealed when they're 12-14, how well you do will depend on what tertiary courses you can choose because your middle school subjects are pre-requisites for your high school subjects which are pre-requisites for your university subjects). my mother tore up my report book and cried and cried and cried.
also, i can play the piano and violin. HAHAHAHAHA.
striking a good balance is still the key 
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also, i'm kinda ashamed i'm saying this, but the writer grew up in america. it's fucking different when you're the only parent who demands nothing but excellence from your kids in your neighbourhood/school. where i come from it's a NATIONAL... PAST TIME.
we also use bell-curve grading for our national exams, no matter how good you are, you may actually still get a B because 3453847538 people scored 99 marks and got an A. there's this constant manic obsession to be better than other people. my middle school was extremely competitive, school notes were HIGHLY PRIVATE. no one shared them because they wanted to keep the good shit to themselves.
students get yelled at for daring to share notes with their friends in other schools. there's this ridiculous "school-loyalty" nonsense in which sharing your notes with kids from other schools is akin to "betrayal" because then those kids would probably take your notes to their school, propagate it, and their entire school will pwn yours in the national exam -_-
exerting some good old fashioned asian spirit-of-perseverence in an american setting might actually not be a bad thing. when i was in LA last summer i noticed that my friend and i (both singaporean) wished we had freedom like american kids and her boyfriend (who's american) swears that the system is not strict enough and there needs to be more control. then we kinda concluded that there'll never be a "perfect system". as you grow up, you just have to make do with what you have.
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also, none of you would want to be tied to a the potty and get beaten repeatedly by a thin bamboo cane by your parents. i know someone who went through that.
i got beaten with the big wooden spoon you use for cooking i had a scar that didn't go away after a couple of months and when i told my mum about it, she beat me up some more!
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makes me wince a bit. That's just straight up abuse in some cases, but I agree, a balance needs to be struck.