Let the (race-baiting) mommy wars begin.
Are you a Chinese mother? Do you wish you were? I’m not asking about your family’s country of origin. No, I’m talking about your parenting style. Because, as we all know from Amy Chua, the Yale Law School professor turned parenting self-help author whose excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal last week exploded into mama culpa bloodbath, Chinese mothers are a symbol of uncompromising superiority.
By Western standards, Chua’s definition is almost archaic: Chinese mothers embody the high-standards, no-excuses, love-means-never-having-to-say-it’s-okay-you-did-your-best, tough love, deep shame parenting style that has long been relegated to the head mistresses of 19th-century novels.
Chua claims to have never allowed her daughters to:
- attend a sleepover
- have a playdate
- be in a school play
- complain about not being in a school play
- watch TV or play computer games
- choose their own extracurricular activities
Motivated or just plane mad?
The list of childhood no-no’s goes on followed by anecdotes in which she browbeats her daughter into mastering a song before a piano recital. She admits to threatening, berating, screaming, depriving the child of food and even the bathroom. (Est training lives on!) Whether you think Amy Chua deserves a “best mom in the world” mug or a visit from men in white coats, the editorial itself is a breathtaking if shameless display of internet confessional and it’s garnered her all the publicity she’ll need to kick her book onto the bestseller lists.
Chua scares me. Not just because she sounds so blithely self-righteous about some of the creepy, sometimes downright absurd things she’s done to her kids, but because part of me admires her. She’s touched a nerve – a squishy insecure spot between my heart and my mind. Let’s face it. We all want our children to experience the pleasure of excellence. We want our children to learn how to work with passion and intensity and determination. We want them to learn early and often that that the seed of inspiration needs buckets of perspiration to grow to fruition. And as a nation with pathetic high school graduation rates, high levels of obesity and media addiction, we all know we’re raising a lot of kids who don’t understand cognitive sweat or any kind other kind of sweat for that matter.
Sure, Chua’s methods can work for some kids, but for others they’re just plain damaging. God forbid if she’d given birth to kids with Down syndrome or serious dyslexia.
Battle of the straw moms
The real problem is that Chua embraces a false dichotomy – there are the so-called Chinese parents (which she acknowledges includes some other insanely achievement-oriented parents from other backgrounds) and then there’s everyone else: slacker moms and dads who don’t really believe in their children, who accept second rate performance under the auspices of love and understanding. This specious duality ignores decades of educational and parenting research which suggests that the most successful parenting style means both setting high standards and encouraging kids to develop an internal source of discipline and motivation, which requires a subtle touch. When I think about this sort of parent, Barack Obama’s mother comes to mind. Yes, she woke her son up at 4 am to keep him on track with his American curriculum while they were living in Indonesia, but her parenting style didn’t include berating or dictating every last detail about his life.
Bushwhacking a path between parenting extremes requires nuance – something in this day of hyperbole and quick fixes isn’t terribly popular. Instead of following a pre-ordained set of rules, you have to think deeply about what you’re doing with each individual child. In the end, those who veer off the beaten path (and we know there are a lot of you) may not sell a lot of self-help books, but you may get something even better: kids who know their own mind and pursue learning for its own sake.
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