Or is this woman dead annoying? (Dragon Mother article in Sunday Times)

[ragged]

Amy Chua article in the Sunday Times -- I can't link to the ST version, but I think this Wall St. Journal piece is good-as identical.

I'm in 3 minds about it:

1. It's just one persons's perspective
2. It's a blatent brag fest
3. It's factually wrong and perhaps even defamatory in so many ways. If 25% of humanity are ethnic "Chinese", they can't all be high achievers, can they?

Related discussion here, too.

Read this last night and was totally shocked. I think its a bit more acceptable in America to behave this way with your children.
On one hand, she will most likely have extremely talented and successful children.
On the other hand, I simply couldnt be in combat with my children day in day out. I will sit on them if homework is not done dilligently but thats it, I wont freak if they dont get A's. Then again unlike the author DH and I are not Yale professors so the chances of our children being geniuses are fairly slim. B's will probably be our zenith!

Clearly, the Tiger Mother is too extreme.
There must be so little joy in their household.

However, I do agree that too many parents (of whatever ethnicity) have very low expectations of their children.

Words like pushy and aspirational are bandied around as if they were dirty.
There is the idea that high achieving children are all utterly miserable.

There is also the snobbery involved. Middle class parents who push their children are to be derided. They have, I'm told often, sharp elbows.

However, Mothers like mine, dirt poor and uneducated, who pushed her daughter like crazy to achieve, are somehow to be praised.

BLB. but surely making it about a given culture was the agenda of the writer. She was the one to say 'all asian parents are like X'. If others then say, well, that's not true or it might be true but the downside is Y adn Z, how is that racist?

many kids of Chinese in UK schools have parents who came here from mainland China
they usualy vame her to do their Phds
(that was explained to my by my chinese friend)
so the pool of genes is already with advantage as thir parents are high achievers themselves

her daughter was never alowed to do anything outside of school work, not even read books unless she was on holiday
she was top female in her year at A levels in London
then got to read PPE in Oxford

But what does she do when, if, her DD's simply cannot achieve high A's in certain areas? I got As and A+s for all of my GCSEs except for maths, I got a D for that. No amount of screaming, pushing and threatening would have changed that. In fact, I had one teacher who used to get so frustrated with my ineptitude with numbers that she used to humiliate me in front of the class to try and get me to work harder. I was already doing my best, fact was I was rubbish at maths. She was convinced that because I was good in other subjects, that I was merely slacking in this one. I credit her with making me afraid of maths. I still panic when I have to work things out in a short space of time or without a calculator. Having said that, I am getting more confident with numbers mainly because DH is excellent with maths and has shown me methods of working things out mentally. It's bollocks that pushing ruthlessly always works.

katiestar
I didn't wonder if a 3 or 10 year old still played their instrument
but if 25 or 30 year old kid od a chinese mother still did it, in leisure time or possibly even in an orchestra...

I disagree with "nothing is fun until you're good at it"
It's true that the breakthrough moments when you see the results of your hard work are priceless but there are lots of things in life that have "flow", things that you don't have to be good at to enjoy
I also don't understand why nobody is adressing the fact that China is not a post-industrial society, so the mind-set is quite different to the West because of this. Also, in places in Russia, achieving in the arts was the only way out of poverty.

I make her do things even if she started crying because I think it is within her capability and she is just trying to get out of

Wow! Do you see how damaging this can be?

My mum tore up several pieces of my homework once because I dared to write my a's as 'a' instead of the 'normal way'. I redid about 3 different subjects & each of them had an 'a' somewhere...so had to redo it. Through tears.

I was so humiliated. There were no rules at school about how a should be written, it was her that didn't accept it. She was yelling at me, insulting me, we didn't get dinner that night because she was too busy 'teaching' me. I finally did it, way past bedtime. I went to bed hungry & humiliated.

I remember it to this day. I was 8.

in places like Russia

I read the Sunday Times article with horror and, I have to admit, a grudging admiration for her sense of conviction (if not her parenting methods).

The final paragraphs did make strike me as the most telling, however:

"Happiness is not a concept I tend to dwell on. Chinese parenting does not address happiness. This has always worried me. When I see the piano- and violin-induced calluses on my daughters? fingertips, or the teeth marks on the piano, I?m sometimes seized with doubt.

But here?s the thing. When I look around at all the western families that fall apart ? all the grown sons and daughters who can?t stand to be around their parents or don?t even talk to them ? I have a hard time believing that western parenting does a better job with happiness.

I?m really not sure why this is. Maybe it?s brainwashing. Or maybe it?s Stockholm syndrome. But here?s one thing I?m sure of: western children are definitely no happier than Chinese ones."

I have to say that after finishing that entire article, whatever I think about her parenting, her book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" sounds absolutely fascinating, and she's a good writer too.

lala - very well made point.

To be honest, I see underachieving children in the school where I volunteer. Ther parents don't insist they do any of the very few tasks set for them ( a list of five spellings, reading etc).
These children are not blissfully happy.

onetoo she didn't though. She quite clearly says that not all chinese parents are like that, and that plenty of non-chinese are. She was talking about actual documented and studied cultural differences which are prevalent in particular cultures.
That is quite different from people here flinging about sweeping generalisations with nothing more than my friend says to back it up.

you're all talking about it being damaging. You are looking at through your own cultural veil that you can't see past. Yes to you it is damaging. Yes to your mind it is bad for self-esteem etc. But these are things your culture has deemed to be very important, and not all cultures agree with you. Others might say how damaging of you to pander so much to your silly notion of self-esteem to the detriment of their ability! If you know they can do something and you let them fail so you don't hurt their feelings, you have failed as a parent. In fact its cruel.

I'm not saying you should agree with that. What I am saying, and I don't think anyone is listening at all, is that cultures value different things and have different ways of doing things. You do not have to agree. But at least try to see outside your narrow ethno-centrism to see it from another angle.

HatiFatner I live in Asia and I agree with you that the education they receive does not train them to think . There is no independance of thought. The Japanese hire computer analysts and consultants from all over the world because they cannot analyze. there is also a lack of original thought in general, a dearth of creativity. I think Japan is worse than CHina in this respect, though

Completely agree with your post BuzzLightBeer

Completely agree with BuzzlightBeer and Litchick

BLB, I agree. It's the inferences drawn about 'Asians' that I find dodgy, as I said above, the idea that they 'lack creativity' or some such nonsense.

This is the issue - are children born or made. I 've always thought it was 50/50.

I remember my children telling me about a boy in their class who didn't dare go home one night as he hadn't got an A in one subject - he was scared of his parents.

We all have, within the law, to achieve our own balance of encouragement and fun at home.

As someone said above the Chinese in England tend to be pretty focussed. The other Asians around me are too particularly ugandan asians whereas the Somalis were penniless and uneducated and tend not to do so well so yes I agree that educational background and aspiration does have an impact on how the chidlren do once they are here.

But China is not that different over there with lots of ours of night school and fierce competition for the right schools.

All interesting stuff. Litc is right that some parents (and sadly some schools) have very low expectations too. Often how well children do is down to that as much as anything else. For example state school children are not less clever than many at private schools so why would children at 10 in sdome private schools be learning very hard choral music in latin in parts and the primary lot being singing wheels on a bus with tamborines? Simply because the teachers and parents are not prepared to put in the effort and there is huge dumbing down.

I can't speak about the asian cultures - not somehting I know much about, but I do think some cultures value creativity more than others.

I have absolutely no respect for the woman.

She is a bully, she emotionally abuses her children.

I don't agree with the idea that it is not abuse because she is from a different culture. She may be ethnic Chinese, but she lives in US so she knows fine well what is socially acceptable in the west.

If a Somalian family living in London had their daughter circumcised (ie. mutilated) would you accept that because it is part of their culture? Of course not.

I almost feel a bit sorry for her, as her behaviour is a result of her upbringing but she chooses to carry on this style of parenting with her children.

xenia I don't just think it's children either.
I see adults underachieving all the time.

Perfectly intelligent able people.

Yet they spend all day in a job they hate and all evening watching TV or surfing Facebook.

sieglinde Believe me, anyone who has had anything to do with the Japanese education system will tell you that it stamps out creativity from a very early age.

There has to be a balance.

I was not pushed by my parents, and left school with useless Higher Grades.

Being a bit "pushy" is good, most children need a bit of a push.

Sitting back and letting your child take subjects in school that will be of no use to her when she tries to apply for a Uni or College course is wrong.

yes that's it Litchick creativity is not valued in Asian cultures as much, at least not today (it was in the past, clearly, as they have a great cultural heritege)
That does not mean it is inferior , just different. But it is overly PC to say it's "nonsense" to describe the Japanese as lacking in creativity. IT's not nonsense at all, it's a cultural quirk, emphasized by problems in the education system

MdmeL - I agree.

I also think as a parent I often have to overcome my innate desire to be liked by my children. Some of the things I expect of them, they are not going to like. One. Bit.

I think this is especially true of teenagers.

I was reading an artcle in the same paper about Annie Mac, the radio presenter.
She says her parents were extremely motivated and her Dadls favourite matra was 'do it now'. It peed her off as a teen.

Howver, she has now named her successful production comapnay, you've guessed it Do It Now Productions.