Like many Western moms I know, my gut reaction to the Wall Street Journal article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” was one of horror.
(If you haven’t read the diatribe yet, do.)
Words like “abuse” and “oppression” and “those kids are going to need therapy” ran through my head as I read Amy Chua’s prescription for parenthood that included hours of academic drilling and verbal recriminations. How could this woman promote calling her daughter ‘garbage’? How could she think that belittling language and an unforgiving requirement of excellence could be good for her kids?
Isn’t it obvious that dictating your children into submission is the wrong way to parent?
And yet…
I believe in The Bad Moms philosophy. Wholeheartedly.
I believe that most mothers genuinely love their children just as much as I love my own.
How do I reconcile this belief and my personal commitment to not being a self-righteous asshole with the knee jerk reaction I have to reading a woman boast about calling her children “garbage”?
I think, for starters, I need to recognize that Amy Chua and I clearly have different goals as parents. Her goal is to have children who achieve. My goal is to have children who are happy. Yes, as Chua points out, I am concerned with my child’s self-esteem. Perhaps this is a Western value that my Western mind simply cannot fathom not embracing.
While Chua may have gotten that value difference right, she’s dead wrong about the difference in how much I believe my children are capable of. The Yale law professor asserts that Chinese mothers are superior and push their children harder in academics because “they assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.”
In other words, according to the article, I don’t push my kid to play the violin like a pro because I’m not confident that they can. Amy, on the other hand, has no doubt demanding excellence because she knows her kids are capable of it.
OR…
I believe in my children’s strength and ability to navigate alternative routes to success. I believe they are strong enough to find happiness and a way to give back to this world even if they don’t get straight A’s or play the piano at Carnegie Hall.
And that sure sounds like a better way to parent, doesn’t it?
I don’t think so, actually.
Once I got over my initial disgust, I realized that the WSJ post provided a really interesting look inside an entirely new parenting paradigm that I’d never considered. Granted, I never would consider it and have no plans to start berating my children in public, but that’s because it doesn’t fit with my values. Amid what was obviously meant to be a shocking essay, I found a more detailed profile of a world view that – while I don’t understand – definitely exists in today’s society.
And that’s a good thing.
Whenever we get a chance to understand another perspective a little more, I think we should take it.
Even if we have to swallow a little garbage to do so.
Nice wrap-up, you did not go where I thought you were going to with that!
I agree with most everything you said! I believe that it is necessary to let kids know when they disappoint you. If they are supported and cheered on by their parents for being average then they will always view average as being enough to get by. And it will be all the more harsh when they find out in real life that doing just okay on things is not enough to succeed. And if the parents are providing a lifestyle that they achieved through a lot of effort and ambition, how will the children cope with not achieving that themselves?
My husband and I argue about this quite a bit, as he tells the kids that he doesn’t care about their grades as long as the effort has been put in and I make it quite clear that I expect grades that match their brain-power, which I believe is vast. Will they need therapy? Absolutely. ;) But I will rest easy for now, knowing that I’ve tried to support them in their endeavors, but also let them know that my expectations are high because I believe they are capable of meeting and exceeding them.
Bitchin’ Amy´s last [type] ..Our 2010 European Vacation
I read this article a couple of days ago on the internet at the same time I was watching an interview with Cheryl Kilodavis, author of “My Princess Boy”. It is her story of her young son’s desire to wear princess costumes, and by her own initial struggles to understand his preferences and deal with bullies that teased him cruelly. Her son Dyson loves pink, sparkly things.Kilodavis states,” Sometimes he wears dresses. Sometimes he wears jeans. He likes to wear his princess tiara, even when climbing trees. He’s a Princess Boy.”
I never had a “Princess Boy”. I also never had “Garbage Boy”. One wonders if the Chinese mother who called her son “garbage” would object to her son wearing a tiara as long as he brought home staright A’s and studied 8 hours a day. Likewise, would the teasing end for the Princess Boy if he spent 10 hours a day in voice and dance lessons to become the next Michael Jackson? Or would that start tiara’s and pink tu-tu’s flying off the shelf by little boy’s and their mother’s everywhere?
I would like to say that if my son wanted to wear pink dresses when he was young that I would have been cool with that. I wouldn’t have been then. I would like to say that I never pushed my children to excel in a sport, instrument or academic subject they had no interest in, but I did. And I might have called them “lazy” a time or two. Maybe worse. And in the end, I don’t think any of that matters. There are abusive parents raise wonderful, loving children. There are loving, nuturing parents who raise apathetic children that leave home and never speak to their parents. And then occassionally you are blessed with a happy child who actually likes you when they grow up. And then you don’t care if he has a tiara on his head or is dumb as a rock.
Be careful of believing things you read just because it comes from [insert same racial group here] as if it authenticates what is obviously stereotypical crazy talk. How on earth is every Chinese mother like this when statistics and community discussions prove otherwise. Beware of they stereotype trap! It’s all too easy for non-POCs to believe anything they hear from any racialized person on their own views of their racial group. But guess what? They were raised in this society too, socialized to see themselves the way the society sees them, and unless they do the hard work to unpack that baggage, they will most likely make generalizations about themselves too that fall inline with those larger beliefs.
This post seems to take the bate, which is kind of sad. For something a little more realistic, read http://blacksnob.com/snob_blog/2011/1/11/berating-your-children-into-greatness-now-with-stereotypes.html
Kandeezie´s last [type] ..When Is Being Natural Not Natural
The thing that stuck in my head was the line she wrote about how happy the girl was after she had been berated, threatened and gone without even bathroom breaks to be able to play the piano piece. Is that resilience? Is it wrong and abusive? Does it ultimately teach the girl that something that comes with the utmost costs – even food and sweat and blood – can feel the most rewarding? And if I suggest to my daughter that she table a piece if she felt she couldn’t play it, am I ultimately telling her that she can’t? I don’t think this is a clear-cut right or wrong.
But I’m also not going to start calling my daughter garbage. In French or English.
Zoeyjane´s last [type] ..The waking up part of the story
Why is the art of music required to endure the ill-informed antics of such inartistic imbeciles as Amy Chua? Her lust for fame as an old-fashioned stage mother of either a famous violinist (yet another mechanical Sarah Chang?) or a famous pianist (yet another mechanical Lang Lang?) shines through what she perceives as devotion to the cultivation of the cultural sensitivities of her two unfortunate daughters.
Daughter Lulu at age 7 is unable to play compound rhythms from Jacques Ibert with both hands coordinated? Leonard Bernstein couldn’t conduct this at age 50! And he isn’t the only musician of achievement with this-or-that shortcoming. We all have our closets with doors that are not always fully opened.
And why all this Chinese obsession unthinkingly dumped on violin and piano? What do the parents with such insistence know of violin and piano repertoire? Further, what do they know of the great body of literature for flute? For French horn? For organ? For trumpet? Usually, nothing!
For pressure-driven (not professionally-driven!) parents like Amy Chua their children, with few exceptions, will remain little more than mechanical sidebars to the core of classical music as it’s practiced by musicians with a humanistic foundation.
Professor Chua better be socking away a hefty psychoreserve fund in preparation for the care and feeding of her two little lambs once it becomes clear to them both just how empty and ill-defined with pseudo-thorough grounding their emphasis has been on so-called achievement.
Read more about this widespread, continuing problem in Forbidden Childhood (N.Y., 1957) by Ruth Slenczynska.
________________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.
I divide my year annually between New York and Shanghai. One of my common visitations in the latter city is to the area in and around The Shanghai Conservatory of Music. About four years back the school built a large new building on Fenyang Lu. Along the street side is a lower level with a string of music stores stocked with new instruments. In four of those stores I counted, literally, one trumpet, one horn, one trombone, no tuba, two flutes, one clarinet, one oboe, no bassoon, a handful of strings (but no string bass), and two-hundred pianos! The single trombone (my instrument) looked and felt like it had been made in an industrial arts school as a class project. I asked one of the clerks how many trombone students were then enrolled in the Conservatory. “Five,” he replied. I told him it would be impossible for any serious student of that instrument to plan advancement playing such useless metal and asked what brand of instruments are taught upstairs. All the trombones were imported by the school, only as needed, from Yamaha in Japan. But, why the sea of pianos?
Most parents do not want their children spending, i.e., wasting, their time on any instrument for which a student can not enter a contest and win prizes. Prizes mean medals and certificates, which Mommy and Daddy can display as their own achievements by extension. It is the major conservatories in China (Shanghai, Beijing, Shenyang, and Wuhan) which are responsible for continuing to nurture this false status, while, visually at least, giving the external impression that China is a major cultural locus of Western classical music. Anyone who has heard the wind sections of a major symphony orchestra in China will hear just how major the cultural locus is in China for those instruments. Naïve morons; school and parent alike!
For the serious student having neither interest nor ability to become a graduate of Harvard Medical School, this phony sequence of contest successes may lead to Juilliard in New York or Curtis in Philadelphia. “If a clown like Lang Lang can make it, then so can my little angel. Who is, of course, the most adept keyboard wizard to blossom since Lawrence Welk or Rachmaninoff.” Stage mothers: Away with them!
All of this clap-trap nonsense has no relationship whatsoever to two very important issues: music or Asian American. It is, with the rarest of exceptions, largely Oriental in the homeland. Atavistic immigrants from those eastern cultures or those descended directly therefrom – like the ever-psychobashing Kommandant Amy Chua – have some untested, sentimental notion that music opens doors and ensures careers in whatever direction the unmusical music student chooses; which the student is free to choose, so long as it isn’t music. (Try to figure out that one. “You are free to study physics or mathematics, so long as you don’t attempt to make a career of them.”)
For the past forty years during my own studies in medicine and music in New York I have been wedded to and worked closely with and around nurses, physicians, surgeons, and medical technicians active in all the standard disciplines. Those persons have come from all modern regions of the world. And, yes, some of my coworkers have come from the beloved Harvard Medical School. But, I can write with authority, the number of those professional persons who have had any direct contact at any times in their lives with piano or violin is insignificantly small.
No one has ever wasted time typing me as a wimp. Nevertheless, with an Amy Chua of my own only thinly masking a contempt while ostensibly trying to encourage me before the age of ten by classing me as “garbage, “lazy,” “useless,” and a host of other niceties (a savage, a juvenile delinquent, boring, common, low, completely ordinary, a barbarian) all the while forbidding me to sit on a toilet until I can play triplets in one hand against duolets in the other mechanistically en duo with a metronome might have (likely would have) set me up both for advanced training to climb The Texas Tower and chronic constipation.
___________________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.
There is a recurring theme without solid core that continues to recycle on the question of Amy Chua and her style as a mother. J.G. (unfortunately anonymous, as are most of the endorsements of Professor Chua) has written
I think it’s easy to take cheap shots at Chua, but it’s hard to argue that the average American child needs less discipline, less direction or less respect for others.
It might seem amusing to mock her (her “cushy job” and “hottie husband”), but harder to actually consider the points being made in a non-defensive way, without trying to paint yourself as the “cool mom” who prefers three martini playdates?
p.s. It seems ironic that an Asian-American female who went to Williams (fulfilling a fantasy of Chinese parents everywhere) would paint her parents as laissez-faire and herself as moderately motivated.
Posted by: J.G. | January 18, 2011 at 02:31 PM http://thecareerist.typepad.com/thecareerist/2011/01/chinese-moms.html
I, for one, have no interest whatsoever in her “cushy job” and “hottie husband.” Nor do I have any objection to her having become a millionaire from the sales of her book and that she will be well on her way to becoming a multimillionare once the planned translations of it into thirteen of the world’s languages have been completed. My uncompromising objections to Professor Chua are two-fold: her abuses of young children pursued to further her own narcissistic urgencies and her deep commitment of abuse of the art of music – of which she seemingly has no knowledge whatsoever – for reasons having nothing to do with that art. My shots at her are far from what J.G. calls “cheap shots.” They do in fact go to the heart of the problems with her that remain my chief concerns.
J.G. and most of his fellow travelers in their tepid defenses of Professor Chua continue to focus on her inherited emphasis of the sorry state of public education in The United States. What else is new?
As with most of the ringing endorsements of Amy Chua, those from J.G. are clearly from a mind not wholly engaged. He has written ” it’s hard to argue that the average American child needs less discipline, less direction or less respect for others. In his tangled syntax I’m quite sure he means – at least I’m hoping he means – it’s hard to argue that the average American child does not need more discipline, more direction or more respect for others.
J.G. has written further, “p.s. It seems ironic that an Asian-American female who went to Williams (fulfilling a fantasy of Chinese parents everywhere) . . . “ Again, but this time TWO thoughts from nowhere! What has Williams College to do with Amy Chua (Harvard, A.B. ’84)? And since when has Williams even been on the “fantasy” palate “of Chinese parents everywhere?”
Professor Chua usually receives the quality of defense she deserves.
____________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.