I just finished Amy Chua's book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." I do recommend it, I think--it's a fast read and well-written. It got a great deal of pre-release press when the Wall Street Journal excerpted some of the more over-the-top passages and gave the essay the somewhat inflammatory title, "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior." Ooooo--kay. The thing is, when that WSJ essay was making the internet and Facebook rounds, I read it and laughed out loud. Go ahead, click and read it. I thought some of that had to be comic exaggeration. So I really wanted to read the book when I got the chance and see what the hype was about. So when it got in to the library, I devoured it quickly. Here's the Brenna Review and the thoughts it sparked.
First, from a couple of interviews I read with her, I went into the book thinking that the essay surely had given her some undeserved bad press. But as I proceeded through the book, I admit that I found myself frankly disliking the author more than I expected to. For background, Amy Chua is the stereotypical Overachieving Asian: raised by immigrant parents, tops in her class, Harvard Law School, Yale law professor. Married a non-Asian man and had two daughters with him, and was determined to raise said daughters the "Chinese way" (her term) that she had been raised. The "Chinese Way" under her definition can be summed up as follows. If the kids aren't sleeping they're working pathologically hard at something. They're never allowed to come in second, disrespect their elders, or have any fun of any kind. It absolutely does not matter whether the kids like you or not. This book chronicles her journey of attempting to parent her daughters that way, while married to a man who didn't share that view, and while being blessed/cursed with a younger daughter who, shall we say, refused to cooperate.
Her chosen method of instilling brilliant excellence and a ridiculous work ethic into her children, besides academics (a given) was classical music, piano for the older daughter and violin for the younger. To some extent I identify here. My mom got me into piano lessons when I was a kid, mainly because she thought I might get bored at school and she wanted to give me something pretty difficult to do. Mission accomplished. Playing the piano really well is definitely difficult, and at least while you're learning it the more you learn the more difficult it gets. It was sort of a happy accident that I took to it and was good enough at it to get into the conservatory at Oberlin (though I definitely occupied a low rung there and after two years I called it quits and finished up an English major).
Reading Chua's many anecdotes of the insane amount of time, energy, and backbreaking work she put into her daughters' school and musical training, I reflected back on my own childhood. I was raised by something of a Tiger Mother, I guess. I remember in seventh grade getting a C+ in science, because I was being semi-rebellious at the time and my friends and I for some reason didn't like our teacher that year. You'd have thought I'd been caught by the police for stealing a car. Besides the major dressing-down I received, I was grounded for a significant period of time, like a month or something. I thought it was totally harsh and unfair, of course, but it worked. I didn't bring home anything worse than a B--and hardly any of those--the rest of the time I lived under my mom's roof. But compared to Chua, my mom was practically handing me joints and parking me in front of the TV to eat Doritos all day (which needless to say she wasn't). For someone reading the book as a pretty thorough Westerner, it's awfully easy to be judgmental of Chua. She frequently comes across as brutally stubborn and frankly sometimes cruel.
That said, I have to say that in many respects she has a point. As often as I disliked her reading the book, I loved her daughters. Chua reprints an essay that her older daughter wrote for a contest at school called "Conquering Juliet," about her efforts to master a Prokofiev piece, that almost made me cry it was so beautiful. Her younger daughter, the more rebellious one, eventually humbles the author, at least a little bit, and gets her to back down. Plus, it's hard to argue with success. Both kids are staggeringly high achievers. And I also have to say that Chua has an important point in another respect. She thinks Western parents make their biggest parenting mistake by thinking that their number one responsibility is to do everything they can to make sure their kids are happy.
I don't think it's wrong, of course, to want your kids to be generally happy people. But where I think we mess up is thinking that it's up to us to make that happen, when in reality we don't have much to do with that (aside from of course not actively messing them up by physically abusing them or involving them in criminal activity or something). We can in the short term make our kids happy by indulging them, letting them do mostly what they want, intervening to prevent things from going wrong in their lives, and comforting them when that plan slips up and something goes wrong anyway. But the thing is, that doesn't in the long run make anybody happy. Because, to quote the popular bumper sticker, Shit Happens, which means that it's nearly impossible to be happy all the time. And whether or not someone is actually happy is largely dependent on that person's outlook and internal coping mechanisms. According to Chua, and I think she's partly right here, where "American" and "Chinese" (again, her terms) part company is in their respective methods of giving children good internal coping mechanisms. The stereotypical "American" method is that we do that by being positive and supportive, and making sure they know that even if they mess up or something goes wrong, they're still the most awesome people in the entire world. The "Chinese" method is simply to drill any possibility of messing up out of a person, so that they can have the confidence going forward that they'll usually be the smartest person in the room, and will always be the hardest worker in the room.
I can't fully get behind Chinese parenting, at least as Chua defines it, because it often does come out pretty cruel. And not to be a spoiler, but even she comes to learn and admit that the Chinese method isn't foolproof and sometimes fails at what it sets out to achieve. And I'm also going to put it out here--I could never fully parent the way she does anyway, even if I agreed with all of her basic premises, because it's psychotically hard work and I'm not interested in being a slave to my parenting. But, I can definitely be something of a slave driver myself with the girls when they're at the piano. And they're both pretty ridiculously smart so I can tell you that sloppy schoolwork and sub-par grades will not be, shall we say, without adverse consequences. I'm definitely a believer in household chores. And I will say that I agree with Chua that I'm pretty confident that on the whole my kids love me, and if they occasionally hate me I'm 100% OK with that and I'm not going to go off and get depressed about it.
Finally, just an aside, a friend of mine makes an appearance in the book. About halfway through or so there's a passage about cutting a CD for her older daughter's audition, done by a sound technician named Istvan. As I was reading it, I thought hey, New Haven (where he lives), sound technician (which he is, among other things), physical description--that sounds my college buddy Ish! Which as it turns out, it is.
Anyway, go read the book. And tell me what you think, or what you thought if you already read it.
5 comments:
I expect those kids inherited their parents Intelligence, and the upbringing merely served to propagate moms narcissism and buried insecurities. That's one way to motivate for high achievement, but far from the only one. Motivation can also come from compassion, aesthetic creativity, commitment, altruism or just sheer curiosity and love of learning.
Piggybacking a parent's neurosis onto a child's innate talents, and calling the resultant compulsive achievement "success" strikes me as circular and vain. Adding a book to the mix is the crowning confirmation of the centrality of the author's narcissism.
Seems to me your firm, fair, fun, generous parenting of your kids is a much better model.
You make some good points, Larry, but just to be devil's advocate...
First, writing a book about your personal experiences doesn't necessarily indicate narcissism. I blog about my own experiences all the time. I freely admit to having a trial lawyer's ego but I don't think I qualify as narcissistic. Plus, she's a law professor so she has to write books anyhow.
Second, I'm not sure I agree that insisting on high achievement qualifies as neurotic. It might be, it might not. I admit that I came away from the book more conflicted than I expected to be.
You should read the book. She is kind of the anti-you in terms of parenting, I think, and as I say I disliked her more than I thought I would. But it's really a good read and a fast one, too. (Also, I think that my kids would probably argue with you about their parents being fair, fun, or generous...)
Funny you should bring this up...I had to write a "position paper" on the Wall Street article review on Amy Chua for my psychology class. Since this style of parenting is culturally-accepted -- in China -- it's not such a big deal, kids expect it. However, Chua is a first descendant, didn't grow up in China and her kids are more acculturated to Western ways (given that they live in New Haven, CT, not exactly the Chinatown of the East Coast). Will love to read the article about her children when they are parenting the third generation of Chua's -- I'm betting they'll abandon the strict parenting style and host overnights. So the literature predicts anyway....
My book is going to be titled "Battle Yawn of the Three Toed Sloth Father"
Jan, at one point in the book, Chua herself predicts that her kids will probably abandon much of what she did when it's their turn to be parents, for largely the reasons you say.
The person in the book from whom I most wanted to hear was frankly her husband, because some of the scenes she lays out made me wonder how they managed to stay married.
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