Happy New Year, all! I hope everyone had time to squeeze some food and family into the holiday between all that reading we had to catch up on.
Living life to the fullest is “not about achievement or gratification. It’s about knowing you’ve pushed yourself, body and mind, to the limits of your own potential.” – Lulu Chua (Amy’s daughter)
When this came out a few years ago it was enormously controversial, but I’m afraid I’m a little behind. In brief, it chronicles Chua’s attempts to raise her children with what she sees as Chinese levels of discipline: when her six year old daughter gets tired of practicing piano after only an hour, for example, she threatens that “If the next time’s not PERFECT, I’m going to TAKE ALL YOUR STUFFED ANIMALS AND BURN THEM! [emphasis original]”
Clearly, vast amounts of criticism were directed her way: for some reason, many parents do not approve of forcing your children to practice music so much they gnaw on the piano out of frustration. To my mind, however, reading Tiger Mother in an effort to learn about Chua herself is a waste of time. Chua admits the book is hardly a complete picture, and I’m not sure it’s productive to worry about her relationship with her children. The book is fascinating, though, as a way to provoke your own thinking about parenting.
Chua argues there are two possible styles of parenting, stereotyped as Chinese and Western. Chinese is high discipline, high expectations, while Western focuses on praise and having fun. Since nothing is fun until you’re good at it, she argues, Chinese parents force their children to practice until they’re good. They also have almost unlimited belief in the abilities of their children: if the child fails, therefore, they must not have worked hard enough, and so should be punished. To this difference she traces the difference in outcomes of children.
If my economics side can come out for a moment, my only real complaint is that Chua is clearly a lawyer. The book is only anecdotes: I would have loved even a few statistics. I suspect, for example, that “Chinese” parenting has a vastly higher variance than Western: drive your children that hard, and they either succeed wildly or fail miserably. It would be interesting to see if that’s actually the case in the data.
In the end, I’m sympathetic to the view that Western parents expect too little from their children, and that children might respond well to having more expected of them. Interestingly, for all the criticism lauched her way in the West for her harshness, in China, apparently, it was marked as a how-to book on relaxed Western parenting. The truth, surely, is somewhere in the middle.