No kidding
Jyoti Pande Lavakare / February 05, 2011, 0:46 IST
Poor Amy Chua! Death threats for writing a parenting memoir? I’m so hoping she took some time off from the academic rigour of her life to invest in some meaningful relationships — you know, like the ones that are formed over sleepovers or fun summer camps? — because she’s really going to need all the friends she can get, ever since she stirred up the biggest parenting storm in recent years with The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
Chua’s memoir has made conversations around parenting intense and heated, as any social forum, real, virtual, online or offline will demonstrate. Facebook, blogs, newspaper and magazine articles across countries are buzzing with comment, opinion and analysis around Chua’s military style of extreme parenting in which she bans playdates and sleepovers for her kids and demands hours of practice and academic perfection. Every day.
Let’s face it; if Chua had been your average, stay-at-home mother raising two average, happy little girls on a piece of American suburbia, no one would be reading her book, let alone talking incessantly about it. And therein lies the crux. Chua (and her non-Chinese, Jewish husband) are professors at Yale and her daughters are straight A students who have won several classical music competitions.
But among questions being asked are, is her strict “Chinese” parenting style creating compliant, academic robots who can recite and replicate, but have no creativity and original thought, can’t self-motivate or deal with ambiguity without detailed instructions? That seems the logical conclusion, especially if you belong to the camp that believes this is why democracy has eluded China. But the more interesting question is, by denying sleepovers, has Chua been cowardly, not tough?
Limiting social interaction shields children from the cognitively difficult activities of navigating social hierarchies and hidden rivalries, thus denying them the socia-emotional growth so necessary to achieve life-goals. They are the practice sessions for workplace dynamics. Cognitive skills formed by negotiating group dynamics in cafeterias and sleepovers are what we need to cope with real-life problems and failures. And does strict control really lead to greater success? Conversely, does liberal “American” parenting lead only to self-indulgent, lazy and over-confident adults?
There is no right answer, but given India’s cultural convergence with China when it comes to emphasis on education, Indian parents might see Chua’s memoir as a validation of their own strategies. That would be fatal in an age when “parent” has changed from noun to verb — and needs constant re-examining and updating. My own parenting technique borrows from both Asian and Western strategies — in the US I went against my natural Indian tiger-mother grain to put my children in a school that placed greater emphasis on social, emotional and intellectual learning over academic rigour, rote and test-taking abilities.
I was lucky to live in a community of very engaged parents (including Asians!), and I took full advantage of the easy access to research on parenting to fine-tune what I already knew and was living. But while I diss Chua’s harsh style of authoritarian parenting, and prefer to build character over building resume, I applaud her for stoking the parenting debate and bringing it out of PTAs into the mainstream. We all have the right to raise our children in the way we want, as long as we do it mindfully, lovingly, and in their best interests — which Chua seems to have done. I also admire her courage for stating her uncompromising belief in a system that has worked for her, even if I disagree with it and subscribe to a more balanced “middle path” in handling so delicate a task. Balance is such a very Chinese notion, how did Chua miss that point?
Discipline is important and Chua is right in expecting the best from her children, but her punitively methods are questionable. No playdates, school plays, well, okay, if you must, but no bathroom breaks? Where would you draw the line? Withhold food? Love? Lock them in the closet? Hmmm. Such kids may succeed as adults, but they will definitely need to earn a lot of money to pay their therapists! We need people to play existing music scores flawlessly just as we need brilliant creators. The only real conclusion I have come to is that consistency, role modeling and balance, wrapped in a lot of unconditional love, are the key to sound parenting.
Jyoti Pande Lavakare / February 05, 2011, 0:46 IST
Poor Amy Chua! Death threats for writing a parenting memoir? I’m so hoping she took some time off from the academic rigour of her life to invest in some meaningful relationships — you know, like the ones that are formed over sleepovers or fun summer camps? — because she’s really going to need all the friends she can get, ever since she stirred up the biggest parenting storm in recent years with The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
Chua’s memoir has made conversations around parenting intense and heated, as any social forum, real, virtual, online or offline will demonstrate. Facebook, blogs, newspaper and magazine articles across countries are buzzing with comment, opinion and analysis around Chua’s military style of extreme parenting in which she bans playdates and sleepovers for her kids and demands hours of practice and academic perfection. Every day.
Let’s face it; if Chua had been your average, stay-at-home mother raising two average, happy little girls on a piece of American suburbia, no one would be reading her book, let alone talking incessantly about it. And therein lies the crux. Chua (and her non-Chinese, Jewish husband) are professors at Yale and her daughters are straight A students who have won several classical music competitions.
But among questions being asked are, is her strict “Chinese” parenting style creating compliant, academic robots who can recite and replicate, but have no creativity and original thought, can’t self-motivate or deal with ambiguity without detailed instructions? That seems the logical conclusion, especially if you belong to the camp that believes this is why democracy has eluded China. But the more interesting question is, by denying sleepovers, has Chua been cowardly, not tough?
Limiting social interaction shields children from the cognitively difficult activities of navigating social hierarchies and hidden rivalries, thus denying them the socia-emotional growth so necessary to achieve life-goals. They are the practice sessions for workplace dynamics. Cognitive skills formed by negotiating group dynamics in cafeterias and sleepovers are what we need to cope with real-life problems and failures. And does strict control really lead to greater success? Conversely, does liberal “American” parenting lead only to self-indulgent, lazy and over-confident adults?
There is no right answer, but given India’s cultural convergence with China when it comes to emphasis on education, Indian parents might see Chua’s memoir as a validation of their own strategies. That would be fatal in an age when “parent” has changed from noun to verb — and needs constant re-examining and updating. My own parenting technique borrows from both Asian and Western strategies — in the US I went against my natural Indian tiger-mother grain to put my children in a school that placed greater emphasis on social, emotional and intellectual learning over academic rigour, rote and test-taking abilities.
I was lucky to live in a community of very engaged parents (including Asians!), and I took full advantage of the easy access to research on parenting to fine-tune what I already knew and was living. But while I diss Chua’s harsh style of authoritarian parenting, and prefer to build character over building resume, I applaud her for stoking the parenting debate and bringing it out of PTAs into the mainstream. We all have the right to raise our children in the way we want, as long as we do it mindfully, lovingly, and in their best interests — which Chua seems to have done. I also admire her courage for stating her uncompromising belief in a system that has worked for her, even if I disagree with it and subscribe to a more balanced “middle path” in handling so delicate a task. Balance is such a very Chinese notion, how did Chua miss that point?
Discipline is important and Chua is right in expecting the best from her children, but her punitively methods are questionable. No playdates, school plays, well, okay, if you must, but no bathroom breaks? Where would you draw the line? Withhold food? Love? Lock them in the closet? Hmmm. Such kids may succeed as adults, but they will definitely need to earn a lot of money to pay their therapists! We need people to play existing music scores flawlessly just as we need brilliant creators. The only real conclusion I have come to is that consistency, role modeling and balance, wrapped in a lot of unconditional love, are the key to sound parenting.
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