A few weeks ago I saw a television interview with author Amy Chua. Chua's autobiography Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother attacks the principles of western parenting. To be perfectly honest I personally have only read reviews and excerpts of the book so I only have tasted a splash of it's acerbic juices, but that has been enough to make a very definite impression on me.
For those of you who have not read the book, Chua is a Yale law professor who advocates what she considers Chinese parenting, but is actually some extreme stereotypical version of a hell bent Chinese mother gone mad. Chua did not allow her two daughters on play dates or sleepovers and she did not allow them to watch television or play video games. They were forced to practice their musical instruments, piano and violin, for at least two hours a day. When they did not play a piano piece to her liking her children were subject to all sorts of verbal abuse:
"I threatened [Lulu] with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas and no Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing [her piano piece] wrong, I told her she was purposefully working herself into a frenzy because shewas secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy,cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic."
Once when they made her birthday cards that she found unacceptable she had them make her new ones. "I spend half my salary on stupid stickers and eraser party favors" for their birthdays "I deserve better than this." When her daughter came in second to a Korean child in a math competition, she forced her daughter to do 2,000 math problems a night until her child regained supremacy in the classroom.
Chua insists that Western parenting fails children in it's praising mediocrity. She believes that Western parents are so concerned for their children's self esteem that we aren't pushing are children hard enough. In the so called "Chinese" system that Ms. Chua advocates imperfection is simply not an option for the children. This is clearly how we can get the most out of our kids.
David Brooks in the New York Times opinion pages challenges this idea brilliantly. He writes "practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls." Chua has effectively made life far too simple for her two daughters according to Brooks. By eliminating play dates and sleepovers what social context do these girls need to function in? What group dynamics do they need to learn to manipulate? And yet, most people function in groups, Brooks points out. And functioning in a group is a difficult and very necessary skill to master.
But leaving Brooks very clever criticism aside, what does eliminating play dates and sleepovers and even a bit of television have to do with academic excellence? Can't we demand excellence from our children and allow them a social life as well? My children do very well in school and they still go on sleepovers and have play dates and even watch some television. Why do we need to go to these ridiculous extremes in life to feel that we are succeeding? And what is wrong with praising a child, with making him feel good about himself if you know that he tried hard, even if he didn't get 100% on a exam? And why is success on a test more important than making a child feel good about himself? What we really have here is a clash of values not just parenting styles. What we have here are two different ways to define success, two different ways we want our children to define success. Ms. Chua's method involves an acceptance letter from an Ivy league school. The Western approach involves self acceptance. You decide.
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