Thanks to Amy Chua and her book plus subsequent coverage by WSJ, we now have a new parenting label – the Tiger Mum. When the article on her book first came out, it drew a lot of backlash from readers – I’d say that majority of them are based in the US (as are many WSJ readers) – and prompted a healthy albeit heated discussion on parenting.
Here is an excerpt from the full article:
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it’s math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.
Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can’t. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me “garbage” in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn’t damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn’t actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.
As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, “Hey fatty—lose some weight.” By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of “health” and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her “beautiful and incredibly competent.” She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)
To be fair to Chua, the article took only the extreme bits of the book and failed to highlight the fact that she was talking about her own experiences and journey in discovering that the Asian parenting style which she felt were foolproof and better were not the case. While the book is a memoir and is personal, the article depict it as a manual and worse, one of those books that play on race.
I shared this on a Malaysian forum, and participated in a few discussions going on in a couple of forms – an international knitting forum that had a subforum for Asian knitters (or people who were interested in Asian culture) and a Singapore parenting forum. The responses I received were mixed – some felt that she was wrong to say that Chinese or Asian mothers were like her; others felt that a balance was important but had stereotypical views of either society and some accepted that she made valid points but didn’t necessarily agree with her methods or the spin on the story.
When I discussed this with Nil, the first thing he mentioned was the constant comparisons between both cultures as if to hint that somehow people have some inferiority complex that they couldn’t or wouldn’t address openly. Afterwhich, he was quick to ask if we are talking about Europeans as well as Americans when we refer to the word “Western”. The article and subsequent discussions brought up memories of my own childhood and my parents’ parenting skills as well as allowed me to further look and analyse at the kind of parents Nil grew up with. The result of such rumination (definitely not under the influence grape flavored ecigs) is still somewhat puzzling as I seek to find some form of acceptance and direction to take.
Perhaps I should throw out my thoughts here and see where they take me.
More to come then.
