<p>Alibab-- the Chua family already had money. She wrote two previous books and it’s evident that they had a lot of disposable income from their description of their lifestyle and extensive travels. I’m sure their ability to be full pay was never in jeopardy. Jealousy’s not good for the soul, you know.</p>
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<p>Sounds like my Peace Corps service! It was AWESOME!</p>
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<p>Sure. Elitism is all about whom you reject. You set an arbitrary standard and collection of acceptable activities/forums, and then gather with a bunch of people to make it hard to get into them for reasons of economic and political power, with special exceptions for people who you think will be useful (very smart or talented people), and there you have it.</p>
<p>Elitism has nothing to do with freaking out at your children. If only she knew…</p>
<p>Alllllll thattt cashhhhh. The book wasn’t even that well written. She probably could’ve written it in one weekend. I ended up returning the book at the book store. It was way overpriced, short and unorganized.</p>
<p>I didn’t even say the book was to earn money to pay for her daughter’s college tuition. Ha.</p>
<p>I don’t think the book was written out of a desperate need for money. TigerMom and Dad bought a NYC condo a couple of years ago for $3.22 million:</p>
<p>[Yale</a> law professor spends $3.22M on Upper West Side | BlockShopper Manhattan](<a href=“http://manhattan.blockshopper.com/news/story/205419-Yale_law_professor_spends_3_22M_on_Upper_West_Side]Yale”>http://manhattan.blockshopper.com/news/story/205419-Yale_law_professor_spends_3_22M_on_Upper_West_Side)</p>
<p>Last summer, they sold a different condo for $2.7 million:</p>
<p>[Law</a> profs sell Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen condo for $2.7M | BlockShopper Manhattan](<a href=“http://manhattan.blockshopper.com/news/story/1000094784-Law_profs_sell_Clinton_Hell_s_Kitchen_condo_for_2_7M]Law”>http://manhattan.blockshopper.com/news/story/1000094784-Law_profs_sell_Clinton_Hell_s_Kitchen_condo_for_2_7M)</p>
<p>They don’t live in Manhattan - they live in an “enormous brick manse” in New Haven:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-tiger-dad-is-handling-his-newfound-infamy-2011-1[/url]”>We Know About Tiger Mom, but Who Is TIGER DAD?;
<p>Tiger Dad has also just written a book.</p>
<p>Are these Chinese TigerMom and TigerDad?</p>
<p><a href=“CNN”>quote</a> – Like many other American teens, 14-year-old Nick Heras wants to be a professional quarterback someday. </p>
<p>Unlike most teens, he has left home and moved across the country to attend an elite athletic training program. His family foots a hefty bill for Nick’s dreams: More than $50,000 a year. </p>
<p>“I knew I had to leave and do this program if I wanted to be serious about football,” he says.</p>
<p>In this increasingly competitive generation, some parents enroll toddlers in expensive Mandarin classes and fight to get into them into the best preschools. That pressure is perhaps as extreme as in sports. </p>
<p>For parents like Nick Heras Sr. and his wife, supporting their child’s desire to become a sports phenom takes more than financial sacrifice. It requires time, patience and the hope that one day their efforts will pay off in the form of a full-ride to college.</p>
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<p>[Going</a> to extreme measures for child athletes - CNN.com](<a href=“Going to extreme measures for child athletes - CNN.com”>Going to extreme measures for child athletes - CNN.com)</p>
<p>I thought it’s over, but now Tiger Mom is in Time latest print edition! Looking at the huge house she’s living in, I guess she knows what she’s been doing. We are here worrying about how to finance our kids’ college education while she’s busy counting her money.</p>
<p>Yeah, but if any of us slacker parents called a child “garbage” or threatened to burn their toys (unthinkable for most if not all of us) we’d likely lose custody of the child or end up with legal bills that would sink us…</p>
<p>Yeah–a married, wealthy, Ivy League educated law professor mother threatens to withhold the bathroom from her child to ‘coerce’ her into practicing her musical instrument and the result is a book, publicity and a debate over whether or not she was kidding and whether or not this is good parenting.</p>
<p>But a single, welfare, high school dropout mother threatens to withhold the bathroom from her child to ‘coerce’ her into stopping all that screaming and yelling and the result is most likely a visit from child protective services, not a debate over whether or not she was kidding.</p>
<p>Skrlvr ftw.</p>
<p>When the mother was on the Joy Behar Show, she did alot of backpedaling. Kept telling Joy that if people don’t get things that it’s a cultural thing, implied that she is kidding about some of this stuff and people just don’t get her deadpan humor,etc. Joy told her she better write another book then to explain herself because lots of people obviously don’t get it.</p>
<p>I haven’t read all of the posts in this thread. Elsewhere, including here [Amy</a> Chua?s Tiger Dad: Where Was Husband Jed Rubenfeld? - The Daily Beast](<a href=“http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-01-20/amy-chuas-tiger-dad-where-was-husband-jed-rubenfeld/]Amy”>The Daily Beast: The Latest in Politics, Media & Entertainment News) I have seen more speculation about the father. In another context, he is quoted as saying:
I am curious why someone like Chua-intelligent, with an exemplary education, prominent and respected in her field, and clearly “comfortable” financially would court this kind of notoriety. Is fifteen minutes of (in)famy just another marker of “success” despite the cost to you and your family’s privacy and, I imagine, the regard of your peers? (Or are those peers just green with envy at all of the money you are raking in?) You used to have to wait until the children of dysfunctional parents wrote their memoirs to find out about this stuff.</p>
<p>Sunday Morning on CBS is covering this book today.</p>
<p>Amy Chua is everywhere! There was just a piece this morning on CBS Sunday Morning this morning. Crossposted with smileygerl.</p>
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<p>It’s much better to watch coverage on Simone Dinnerstein.</p>
<p>It’s ironic that the Chinese in China are actually trying to learn from Americans and reducing the number of hours kids spend in the classroom per day so that they can have a life. I guess that it’s a good thing that people learn from each other.</p>
<p>Clearly, as a result of her “Chinese Parenting” Chua’s two daughters will be incredibly successful (within themselves). But what about being successful as team players, as members of society? How can anyone so wrapped up in their individual success - whether in their academics, music, anything - ever learn to collaborate with the people around them and work together to create something on a greater scale? </p>
<p>Chua’s daughters don’t seem prepared to handle the real world. True, they have a fairly elite social standing, and won’t ever have to live in a ghetto. But even the idea that they cannot have playdates, sleepovers - life in the real world is about interacting with the people around us to create change for the better in our society. How will these two ever achieve that?</p>
<p>I think that the whole bluh haha is an “elite” thing. A Yale law professor wrote a book and the elite media pick it up and blow it up. It’s true that Chinese culture values education, but the means to achieve it are far from uniform. Stereotyping is never a good thing.</p>
<p>coolweather-- Sure, if that dad called his son a piece of trash to encourage him to throw the ball farther.</p>
<p>I didn’t think the CBS Morning Show coverage was very good, but part of the problem is that Amy Chua won’t stick to one story. I heard her quoted on the Today Show as saying that if she had to do it all over again, (with regards to her parenting), she wouldn’t do anything differently. Now on the CBS Morning Show I heard her describe her book as being about the mistakes that she made as a parent. I’m going to be so glad when her fifteen minutes of fame are up.</p>
<p>It doesn’t surprise me she is back pedaling, she is doing what people who make inopportune statements or writings do all the time, claim she was misinterpreted, etc. Yet if this was a book about her path with her kids and even lamenting mistakes, why did she allow the WSJ article to be titled “Why Chinese mothers are superior”. If her intent was to say how far overboard she went, then why allow that? She has never said that the title wasn’t her own, so why?</p>
<p>As to why she would publish this book, I don’t think she did it for financial reasons, I think it was ego. From everything I could tell, they don’t need the money, so why? My answer is that she was playing the same game that she writes about in her book, that when doing things,you should be #1 and so forth. So she writes a book about her parenting her daughters that basically says, in my opinion, “Look at me, I am the worlds best parent, because look at what my style of parenting produces”. And while she does admit failures in the book, with the daughter who rebelled, the overall tone is more that the daughter that rebelled is wrong rather then maybe her methods are not always the best. I wouldn’t be surprised if the tiny bits of backpedaling in the book weren’t insisted upon by editors,to try and tone it down.</p>
<p>Problem is, she expected hossanahs, and what she got was a firestorm from people who were appalled, who basically said much of what people on here have about her methods. She expected people to agree with her vision of things, and many people don’t.</p>
<p>I was talking to a Chinese friend of mine and he said that she is basically nuts, that most of the people he knows (Chinese friends and family) think she is a nut job who missed the point, that she went back to the very things that they themselves or their parents wanted to get away from in China, the rigid controls, the rigid approach to things, the absolute paths that they saw in that society. Instead of what they do, instill the idea of hard work and dedication to doing things,that whatever they do try to do the best, work at it, but let the kid find what they are passionate about, instead we have the manic “I know best, this is the only way you do things”…and they resent it, especially because people are going to look at their kids and question what they are doing. </p>
<p>As far as this being the ‘elite’ press bothering about an ‘elite’ family, of course, otherwise no one would care. And Chua and her publisher are using the Elite press (I would laugh if some idiot tea party type tried to paint the WSJ as “not elite”), she agreed to the article in the WSJ and worked on it, so who is using who?</p>
<p>As far as why the firestorm rages, in part I think it is because they don’t want to give Chua or her methods credibility, there are far too many people, including some posters on here, who don’t distinguish between parental caring, involvement and setting high standards, and what she is doing. We already in some ways are adopting this kind of mentality in education, not so much in demanding a lot from students, but rather in turning education into some sort of competition where “#1” is all important, or that all that matters in education is what is on a test or what it ‘gives you’.People are cheering on Chua as having ‘the answers’ when they can’t even frame the question, let alone the answers, and that is what worries me. </p>
<p>Put it this way, Chua and her ilk are not putting their kids on instruments like this or forcing them into music because they believe music has special value on its own merits; they put them in music because most of them believe that either playing an instrument at a high level gives advantage to high level college admissions or is somehow a requirement of being ‘upper class’ or of “refinement”. Being in that world, this is from the horse’s mouth, and also, despite all the claims about the passion of Chinese and other Asians for classical music, Asians are a tiny portion of the listening audience or concertgoing audience in the US, despite the fact that music programs at all levels have high percentage of Asian students. Go to Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Symphony Hall in Boston, the LA Phil, SF Symphony, and it is the came story I am told. </p>
<p>What is interesting is that in the US specifically, there has been incredible achievement over the years, even though most parents in this country didn’t parent like Chua did. It would be interesting to talk to Nobel Prize winners and high level musicians and artists and engineers who really created things, people like Steve Wozniak (Apple founder with Jobs), to see how they grew up, I would be willing to bet that while many of them had parents who demanded they work hard and so forth, I would also be willing to bet that few of them had parents who controlled every aspect of their lives like her. Someone posted that China is looking at the west for inspiration on some things, the Chinese leadership has said outright that they look at the innovation and creativity of other countries and want to try and find ways to encourage the same thing, and they are saying that many of the ways kids are educated in China doesn’t work towards that…yet Chua is falling back to the very thing many in China are looking to get rid of or modify.</p>