Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

I am infatuated with this book.  I can't say enough about it.  I don't even know where to start!  I LOVED this book.  Amy Chua is funny and wry and sarcastic and brutally honest, exposing her ideas as well as her successes and failures in stark honesty.  So many times, I laughed at her parenting style, because I have a little bit of the Chinese Mother in me.  Just a little bit.  Not enough to demand the high levels of achievement a real Chinese Mother demands.  (Chua points out, too, that a "Chinese Mother" can be anybody.  A Jewish dad can be a Chinese mother.  It's a philosophy.)

Whether you agree with the Chinese parenting model or not, you have to concede that Amy Chua has some good points.  She refutes all the arguments you would naturally come up with against ultra-strict parenting, like, "I want my kids to like me,"  (Do all Western kids like their parents?), "I want them to explore their individuality," (with what tools?)  "I don't want to hurt their self-esteem." (Then help them develop abilities they can be proud of). Her rebuttals to those arguments are very thought-provoking.  Here's a passage from near the end of the book, after the two daughters have admitted that they are glad their mother drove them so hard.  Amy Chua says, and this is one of her rants, "All these Western parents with their party line about what is good for children and what isn't - I'm not sure they're making choices at all.  They just do what everyone else does.  They just keep repeating things like, 'You have to give your children the freedom to pursue their passion," when it's clear that their passion is going to turn out to be Facebook ten hours a day.'"  Harsh, huh?

You have to admit, she has a point.  I can tell immediately when someone comes to me to buy or rent a violin, which kids will stick with it.  If the parent says, "We'll just try it out and see if she likes it," they are going to bring the violin back within three months.  Of course the kid isn't going to like practicing.  There is not a kid alive on the planet who is capable of making himself practice, every day, all alone, and succeeding.  He will never get to the point where he has enough ability to have fun and feel confident unless someone shows him how.  So his parents will have given up without giving him the chance to succeed by expecting a commitment from themselves and the child.  Kids crave structure and challenge.  They grow on it.  It allows them to explore with the confidence that someone believes in them, knows the rules and expects them to adhere to them.  The plain truth is that parents who raise high-achieving kids invest huge amounts of time in their children, while the standard in the U.S. is just far less time spent working with children on educational or other pursuits. 

Another point the book makes, which I totally support, is the lack of respect shown to teachers and parents in out society.  The teacher/student dynamic has been lost.  While children are people with important ideas, they are also in a stage of life where their job is to learn and be taught.  The Chinese way is that the child has complete respect and obedience toward the adult.  The U.S. Army adheres to the same idea of hierarchy because insubordination could be deadly.  It is a model for success and for building good relationships.  The majority of kids who were raised the "Chinese" way demonstrate great love, respect, gratitude and admiration for their parents and the teachers who guided them.  On the other hand, what is there to respect from a parent who sits back and lets the kid explore?  That's not hard.  That's easy, and it's a copout.  That philosophy is to Chinese Parenting what a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet is to the Bible.  The pamphlet you can read in ten minutes.  The Bible you could study and build on for a lifetime. 

I'll just give you one more example:  I have three or four main suppliers for my violin shop.  One is Howard Core Company based in Arkansas.  Each time I want to place an order, the person on the phone says, "OK, what's your zip code?"  Then they look me up, as if they've never heard of me, even though I've done business with them for over ten years.  It takes them days to get around to shipping.  My favorite supplier is Patrick, a Taiwanese-American businessman in Irvine, CA, who always answers the phone himself with, "Hello CIRCE!  What can I get for you?"  If I forget something and call 20 minutes later, it's too late.  The shipment has already gone out.  I get Christmas cards from Patrick.  He knows all about my life and vice versa.  He has two daughters who are both at Ivy League schools, and parents who live with him and his wife.  Don't know anything about the temps who answer the phone at Howard Core.  I'm just saying, it's two different business models.

OK, you "just want your child to grow up to be happy."  Well, if you don't figure hard work and education into the equation, you're going to be hard-pressed to define happiness, let alone achieve it.  When I went to buy this book, I couldn't remember the title, and I asked for Anthem of a Dragon Mother at Barnes and Noble.  Between the two employees helping me, they could not decide how to spell anthem.  I am not kidding.  Amthem?  Amthum?  But I bet they had lots of time to "explore their passions" growing up.  As adults, unfortunately, they don't have the money or the success or the the time to develop those passions because they are working for minimum wage at a store that clearly has nothing to do with whatever their passions are.

The thing I love most about this book is that, if you read it with the right spirit, you will come to the frightening and liberating realization that the way you do things and have been taught to do things might not be the only good way.  Your first impulse will be to defend your own assumptions, but don't.  This book is too much fun to dismiss out of hand!  Even if you HATE the author, you will LOVE the book!  You'll probably end up loving the author, too, though, just like her daughters do, despite her mistakes and shortcomings.  For me, I'm going to be more of a Tiger Mother after having read the book.  Ari came to me this morning and said, "Ugh!  I am SO! SICK! of buttoning and unbuttoning my jammies EVERY!  DAY!"  We have a long way to go before these kids are overworked.