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2.33 Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011)
I am actually reluctant to review this book, because it is genuinely hard to write it without impugning the author.
There was a heap of articles and blog posts about the whole Tiger Mother concept earlier this year when the book came out (or, to put it another way, a furore), but I preferred to wait til it was available in the library. I knew it wouldn't be a keeper.
I don't want to get into whether Tiger Mothering is typically Chinese, as Chua argues but I would like to make one comment on her parenting philosophy which she summarises thus:
'Unlike your typical Western overscheduling soccer mom, the Chinese mother believes that (1) schoolwork always comes first; (2) an A-minus is a bad grade; (3) your children must be two years ahead of their classmates in math; (4) you must never compliment your children in public; (5) if your child ever disagrees with a teacher or coach, you must always take the side of the teacher or coach; (6) the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal; and (7) that medal must be gold.'
I have not thought to articulate my parenting philosophy but off the top of my head it would probably be along the lines of (1) the best thing you can give your children is a happy childhood; (2) you can't spoil a child by giving her love and attention; (3) children are all different so each should be given what they need; (4) but what they all need is love and affection.
So, it's pretty hard for me to comment on her book in any meaningful way since I just, literally, kept feeling ill as she described fight after fight with her daughters as she forced them to practice their musical instruments for hour after hour. The scene where she locked the three year old on the porch, in the snow, because she refused to practice was pretty harrowing.
I am actually reluctant to review this book, because it is genuinely hard to write it without impugning the author.
There was a heap of articles and blog posts about the whole Tiger Mother concept earlier this year when the book came out (or, to put it another way, a furore), but I preferred to wait til it was available in the library. I knew it wouldn't be a keeper.
I don't want to get into whether Tiger Mothering is typically Chinese, as Chua argues but I would like to make one comment on her parenting philosophy which she summarises thus:
'Unlike your typical Western overscheduling soccer mom, the Chinese mother believes that (1) schoolwork always comes first; (2) an A-minus is a bad grade; (3) your children must be two years ahead of their classmates in math; (4) you must never compliment your children in public; (5) if your child ever disagrees with a teacher or coach, you must always take the side of the teacher or coach; (6) the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal; and (7) that medal must be gold.'
I have not thought to articulate my parenting philosophy but off the top of my head it would probably be along the lines of (1) the best thing you can give your children is a happy childhood; (2) you can't spoil a child by giving her love and attention; (3) children are all different so each should be given what they need; (4) but what they all need is love and affection.
So, it's pretty hard for me to comment on her book in any meaningful way since I just, literally, kept feeling ill as she described fight after fight with her daughters as she forced them to practice their musical instruments for hour after hour. The scene where she locked the three year old on the porch, in the snow, because she refused to practice was pretty harrowing.
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Date: 2011-08-01 01:32 pm (UTC)I've started to get an anxious tic whenever this book is mentioned in an approving way.
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Date: 2011-08-02 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-01 05:34 pm (UTC)I'm curious about different parenting practices in different cultures. One of the first things in the article is the qualifier that she's using "Chinese mother" and "Western parents" loosely. I thought the "overachieving Asian kid" stereotype was one of the harmful ways prejudice gets perpetuated, but it's still interesting to hear how it works in at least one Chinese family.
Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld's article defending her mother points out that a lot of people misunderstood her mother's sense of humour and I wonder how much of that is a cultural thing. She wrote it when she was only eighteen, which might be too soon for her to be able to judge whether she was harmed, but it's still another side to the story.
I don't know. I'm not out to be an apologist. What I do know is that reading Amy Chua's stuff for me is equal parts horror and jealousy. I was raised to be competitive, but not that competitive, and it answers why even when I tried my hardest, I often lost. I'm envious of the way she stayed with her daughters even through really difficult practice, teaching them by example how to work hard, and the way they celebrated together afterwards when one of the girls finally accomplished something she'd been struggling with.
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Date: 2011-08-01 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-01 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-01 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-01 06:46 pm (UTC)Is this the review that you had in mind?
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Date: 2011-08-01 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-01 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-02 02:47 pm (UTC)There's certainly a lot of being offended. Also, white U.S. mothers (like most mothers in the modern connected world, I would imagine) are always worrying whether they're doing it wrong (no matter how big we talk about whatever theory we've been following). Back in the day, you learned how to raise your kids from how you yourself were raised: now parents can find books and Websites galore flacking contradictory approaches, and all the info makes it very tough to find the one true way that most human beings seem to crave. Babbling uncontrollably is an all-too-typical reaction to feeling uncomfortable.
For that matter, white cultures aren't a monolith either, and there are some elements of what Chua did with her daughters in the usual (stereotypical) U.S. Jewish child-rearing practices, and probably in other groups as well. I think her frankness and eloquence (most reviewers have emphasized how well they think the book was written) have made her a lightning rod. People are whispering to themselves Oh God, I did that too while exclaiming "Oh how horrible she is!" aloud.
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Date: 2011-08-02 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-02 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 11:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 12:28 am (UTC)>>The dominant sentiment slants more toward guilt and squirming about their own parenting<<
Very true.
>>They sure love to refer to everyone else in broad generalized strokes<<
Sadly, also true.
Oddly enough (in terms of timeing), today someone on my f-list linked to this article - "How to land your kid in therapy," about typical U.S. liberal child-rearing - which cites Tiger Mom in more measured terms than most of the original reviews: "Chua’s book resonated so powerfully because she isn’t so different from her critics ... When the Tiger Mom looked unsparingly at her parental contradictions, perhaps she made the rest of us squirm because we were forced to examine our own."
That's not to say there wasn't a lot of ugly conflation with prejudices and blanket assumptions about Asian cultures as well.
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Date: 2011-08-02 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-04 03:17 am (UTC)Quite a lot of Asian Americans in the blogosphere banded together to decry their own version of being raised by abusive Tiger parenting. It results in a lot of very real trauma even as it allegedly makes possible the Model Minority myth.
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Date: 2011-08-04 06:34 am (UTC)Thanks for the acknowledgement, at least.
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Date: 2011-08-04 06:41 am (UTC)Yes, the weird white filter over the story, and the reaction to *that*...
*sigh*
My friends list wasn't like that, but I've been pruning like mad for years. So I've seen vague MSM mentions of the white reaction, a bunch of hyphenate reaction (which I also went off-list to go look for), and a bunch of sourceland-identified Asians reacting against the white MSM stuff and utterly eliding the hyphenates.
So my sample set had me a little itchy to start with. (And I'm seeing Asian parents justifying their parenting style based on the WSJ excerpts now...for toddler kids. It's triggering to watch a small child being told, "Oh, that's good, Don't Be An Artist! That's no good, be a surgeon! Art is stupid, and for stupid people!" (rough quote of actual incident I witnessed).
*shudder*
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Date: 2011-08-04 07:52 am (UTC)I liked Amy Chua's earlier work (World on Fire) and I'm just really disheartened by this book, and all the complicated, and....*flail*.
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Date: 2011-08-02 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-04 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-02 05:22 pm (UTC)I'd be curious to hear from the other daughter too.
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Date: 2011-08-03 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-02 11:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-02 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 06:12 pm (UTC)I don't know, it bothers me somehow that it's such a fundamentally competitive mindset oriented towards outdoing other people. And it bothers me that being a "tiger mother" absolutely cannot be a categorical imperative because it would just not work.
Then again, the categorical imperative is a Western concept, so maybe that's the problem here?
Aaaaand I'm stopping now because wow, so totally not a philosophy major; I've probably put my foot far enough in my mouth already by attempting to use the term at all. >_<
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Date: 2011-08-06 12:11 pm (UTC)Better phrasing would be "it bothers me somehow that it's such a fundamentally competitive mindset that its entire existence depends on there being other, not-as-successful people to outdo."