Individualism is one of the Americans' values

Summarize: According to Gary Althen, the most important thing to understand Americans is devotion to individualism. They like to consider themselves as separate individuals who are responsible for their own lives. They believe in something called "freedom." This allows them to choice their own decisions. However, we can see the individualism in the way of how they treat their children. One of the author's examples is a story about a mother and her son. He was at a local shopping mall, waiting in the line to buy some stuff and behind him, there were a mother and her son. He could listen to them. The boy said to his mom, "Can I get an orange Julius?" the mom said, "No, you don't have enough money left for an orange Julius. Remember, you bought that cookie a while ago. You have money for a hot dog only so you can buy a hot dog now, or you could save your money and sometimes later you could buy that orange Julius." If people from different counties heard this story, they would be wondering why that mother did that to her son. Unlike Americans, if they heard the story, they would understand why she did that to her son because Americans know that the mother is helping her son to learn how he can make his own decisions and the individualism.(American values and assumptions P 5,6)

Personal response: I agree with individualism. In fact, we have it in my country too. However, I don't agree with the above example, I mean the way that mother treated her son because he was about three years old and I don't think boys in his age would understand this. I would agree with her if she did the same thing with a boy of seven years old. In general, in my country we do treat our children as the same way. The parents are trying to make theirs to learn how they can be responsible about their own decisions. Also, they are trying to make them more an accountable for their money. For example, my parents taught me when I was young how I can be responsible for my own money. When I decided to come to the United States, they told me," You have to earn your money. Then you can go to the United States." And this is what I did, I used to work for three years and after I saved money, I came here. In the beginning, I couldn't understand why they treated me like that but later, I realized that they were right.