Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - new book about Chinese parenting

Parents Forum
601

<p>Re: Bay
I just really liked the Odysseus/Polyphemus (cyclops guy) story when I was a kid where Odysseus says ‘I am Nobody’ when Polyphemus asks for his name so when he pokes the cyclops in the eye, Polyphemus can’t yell to his fellow cyclops about who did it.</p>

<p>Also, it doesn’t seem like Amy Chua bashes western values and freedom of thinking throughout all of life (she’s not like oh, Sophia you can’t go on this trip when you’re 25 and working and living by yourself), she just doesn’t grant kids the same amount of freedom as other parents might do while they’re growing up. Two completely different things. Also, you can’t help you who fall in love with.</p>

602

<p>To me its not about whether one is strict or not or how much freedom they have. If you <em>actually read the book</em> you will see she is downright abusive. Sure there are quotes in newspapers about some of the extreme stuff, but you don’t read the book and get a sense it is more balanced than that. I finished the book and actually found her to be MORE ABUSIVE than I expected. </p>

<p>As far as I can tell, she speaks English to her kids. She lies, manipulates, threatens, and calls them horrible horrendous names and makes sick insults about them, and compares her kids to one another. She isn’t just demanding, she’s bordering on insane. Practicing continually, even when they are ill, or when the coaches recommend they resist before the big performance, or when they’ve already been at it for 6 or 10 hours. It is relentless and the abuse involved to get them to do it is just heart wrenching. I just fail to see any value in this whatsoever. </p>

<p>It’s just abuse- or should be considered abuse- in any culture. I get absolutely no sense whatsoever about the ‘lovingness’ she keeps referring to in her interviews. Just because you tell your kids, or tell yourself, “but I’m doing it because I love you dear” doesn’t make it loving or remotely healthy. </p>

<p>Moreover, none of it seems to be about her kids and their wellbeing. it seems very very very much about her producing trophy children. Their success gives her a big giant buzz and makes her imagine other ‘dreams’ of their success. She could not care less about their childhood, their actual experience in all of it. These are little performers whose continual abuse is to make HER look good and feel good about herself.</p>

603

<p>Chua painted a horrible and incorrect image of Chinese Moms. She actually gave us Chinese a bad name. According to Chua, I am very westernized. As soon as I heard about Chua’s book, I told my 16 year old son that he might be asked about child abuse at school since he has a Chinese mommy. He laughed and called her crazy.</p>

604

<p>I’ll add my anecdotal contribution to the discussion: similarly parented young man at local HS, 1st gen American, made it to Val but was subsequently dismissed from college for cheating. Adults can’t give out the message “you must win, you must be the best” without bringing ethics into the discussion. In the reading I’ve done (admittedly only the links posted here and articles in the NYT) ethics aren’t mentioned - of course, they wouldn’t, not being fit for sound bites. </p>

<p>The young man I knew was frighteningly single minded and stunted in other areas of development (socially awkward with obvious lack of confidence - perhaps because he knew he’d cheated his way to the top, something that others only learned about later). </p>

<p>As with any extreme method, there will be success stories. It’s the collateral damage I’m interested in.</p>

605

<p>Over here in London, there is a follow up piece in the Sunday Times about how her approach backfired with the daughter ‘Lulu’…</p>

<p>I agree with whoever said, much earlier on, about that this lady has rocked her PR machine…</p>

606

<p>There was a review of this book in our paper today. I showed it to my D and said, “I want you to read about this book, and then I don’t ever want to hear from you again, one word about how I look disappointed if you don’t get an A, etc etc” (which I do not do anyway–she is playing the guilttrip Mom card)! </p>

<p>Thank you Ms Chua!</p>

607

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<p>Well, that alone says volumes – because for all the talk about smart, smart, smart, it’s not SMART to employ a one-size-fits-all approach and hope that your kid falls into the group benefited. Lots of smarts and not a lot of common sense, eh?</p>

608

<p>The New York Times’ recent article notes that she was given an advance by the publisher in the “high six figures”. I am sure for that sum, they agreed that it was important to make the book as radical and controversial as possible. </p>

<p><a href=“Amy Chua: Retreat of the ‘Tiger Mother’ - The New York Times”>Amy Chua: Retreat of the ‘Tiger Mother’ - The New York Times;

609

<p>Well,in fairness apparently she didn’t choose the headline “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” for the WSJ article. But it’s a fair point that I “get” Ayelet Waldman’s sarcasm in such a way that it makes me wonder as well whether I missed some of Amy Chua’s.</p>

610

<p>^^ I also read that Machiavelli was being tongue in cheek when he wrote The Prince. Perhaps. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how it was interpreted by most readers.</p>

611

<p>^^Not if the author is alive and well. It’s her message. Most of the posts here are judgments without ever having read the book.</p>

612

<p>From the NY Times article mentioned in post #609:

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613

<p>What I don’t get is that it’s possible to want to support your children in doing their best, but not have to be mean about it. And yes, I think that forbidding your kid to go to the bathroom if she’s not getting the piano piece qualifies as mean. And sitting in a piano practice room in Greece for hours on end instead of seeing the sights qualified as completely having lost the forest for the trees. The point of the better, more cultivated, thoughtful life is enjoyment of all that life has to offer.</p>

614

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<p>That’s why she said Ivy or one of their peer institutions…which include elite state schools like UCLA and UMichigan. </p>

<p>The friend in question attended a state school that’s well out of the elite range for financial reasons (i.e. UMass-Amherst, UNH, SUNYs, etc).</p>

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<p>Saddest part is that the kids who do gain entry into respectable and elite institutions and succeed there tend to have more elements of the “second type” than the first IME. Thus, the stereotypical “Asian-immigrant parenting” techniques hurt them for little/no gain. </p>

<p>The “first type” of kid who do make it into the same institutions tend to become unglued once their “grand plan” to attend med school, law school, or become an engineer falls through because they’re not getting the grades necessary…and have a hard time functioning in environments when unsupervised by adult figures. </p>

<p>What’s worse is that they also make up the majority of the kids who flunk out or struggle to graduate from college with C-level averages. Saddest part is the majority of students I saw with this issue are mostly well-off mainstreamed Americans with what we’d now call helicopter parents. This micromanagement by adults allowed them to excel in high school…but once they hit college…they were ill-equipped to self-motivate themselves into being proactive and taking initiative and fell apart.</p>

615

<p>I’ve really been struggling with this and am looking forward for my turn with the book to come up at the library (hope the three people in line in front of me are fast readers!). </p>

<p>I’ve got some serious issues with Ms Chua’s approach to parenting, but I’ve definitely been in the room, if not with her, then with her sister moms. I sat outside an honors music class for middle schoolers and listened to two moms conversing about summer camp one day a couple of years ago.</p>

<p>One said, “Can you believe it? She (the kid) asked me why she couldn’t go to a normal camp, where you go swimming and play games all day! I told her we don’t waste time like that.”</p>

<p>And all the other mothers - not all Asian, by the way - nodded their heads in solemn
agreement.</p>

<p>On the other hand…I’m not crazy about sleepovers, either. They always seem to involve some sort of drama in the middle of the night, with repercussions for the next several days at school, not to mention absolutely exhausted kids afterwards. And absolutely exhausted parents, when they take place at your house. Did I let my kids have them? Sure. Did I like it? Not so much. Would I write a book about my feelings? Probably not.</p>

<p>I’ve asked my girls to read the article about Chua’s book. Both recognized the parenting style of some of their friends’ parents, both were relieved that my relatively strict Western style parenting never went that far. In our house, we started off very strict - example: starting with no TV, then limited TV (think Sesame Street), then slightly less limited (age appropriate elementary age viewing with parental involvement), then gradually less and less censorship until by the teen years they were encouraged to push the boundaries. The problem, as I see it, with Chua and also helicopter parents, is that they never learned when to let go.</p>

<p>Still, had anyone come in with a tape recorder and marked down some of my parenting moments, I’d probably come off pretty badly, too. (We use plastic hangers now…)</p>

616

<p>This reminds me a lot of a comment by a Harvard dean on encountering alumni returning to the campus for a reunion, that they seemed like the “dazed survivors of a life-long boot camp.” De gustibus non est disputandum, but this doesn’t seem to me like a good way to live. I recall a Harvard alumna friend of mine saying that her father had remarked to her, “You have no pleasures.” I think she was working on developing some!</p>

617

<p>On reflection, much of parenting is preparing the kid for being an adult. So, my kids went on sleepovers, discovered the pattern of exhaustion the next day, slowly learned to make sure their homework was done before the sleepover took place etc. And D3 was easily able to make the decision during her first year of college that, even though she really, really wanted to attend the midnight premier of HP7, the fact that she had an important performance the next day meant that she should give away her ticket to someone else. Would she have learned that if I’d controlled her childhood enough to prohibit sleepovers?</p>

618

<p>Yes, they don´t need to have igh school sleepovers to learn time management. All it would take would be an all night partying or an all nighter studying to understand the effect of not getting enough sleep.</p>

619

<p>Speaking from an asian child perspective…
after being raised this way for years most of my choices I make myself at this point are the same that my mom would make “for me” (depending on how you view it). That being said, its fair to say that everything that Ms. Chua does for Lulu and Sophie (both of whom I vaguely know personally through music) has to be thought of in context. They have been raised with this and they have been successful through those means and it is hard to argue that your temporary (rather insignificant…) happiness now is THAT much more important than your success, security,and happiness in the future.
Have I myself ever been unhappy? Absolutely. If a child has ever not been unhappy, I would view that to be something scary to look at when thinking about the future and the real world. Have I been unhappy because of what my mom has ever said to me? Absolutely-but hasn’t every child? However, the times that I have felt suicidal (?) are the moments when my fellow classmates who solely support the “western parenting method” (for lack of better name) make fun of me who has been raised with the “asian parenting method”.
These opinions on parenting methods and the children who are brought up under these methods go beyond just what college they go to or what their grades are. Those opinions permeate throughout the social lives of students too to an extraordinary degree…and I think that it might be nice to be accepting of a strict parenting method.</p>

620

<p>I do not believe anyone is suggesting children can’t be temporarily unhappy…but if you read the book it comes across as the entire childhood is like this…childhood is not at all insignificant! Moreover, the exact same security, success and lifetime happiness can come easily without all of this abuse (hers IS abuse). Indeed, I, my spouse, Ms Chuas husband…and millions of other Americans have had happy, joyful, creative and relatively stress free childhoods and went to top colleges, became successful and wealthy adults and so on. </p>

<p>And the problem with calling your kid names, yelling at them, threatening them, manipulating and creating constant fear in them is not about ‘unhappy feelings’ but concerns far more imoortant things such as self confidence, self-respect, joy, social development, unconditional love, and independent thought derived from sell-determination, not thinking just like ones parents. Not to mention, being able to belong and be integrated, understand and socially navigate the larger society in which one has to live, go to school, get a job.</p>

<p>I’m not suggesting this is your family or applies to you, I’m going but what I read.</p>