Somebody had to say it.
Amy Chua is shocking many Americans with her new book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” — which outlines her strict parenting philosophy, modeled after her own upbringing.
Chua believes that children are capable of more than they think they are, and that parents should have high expectations to demonstrate how much they believe in their children. The Chinese, she says, don’t believe people are born with innate talents — success is a result of hard work.
To that end, Chua raises her daughters the same way her Chinese immigrant parents raised her: to value hard work and excellence. In her household, perseverance is mandatory and blaming others for one’s failures is not allowed.
The girls are also expected to get straight As, play piano and violin, and be respectful to adults — especially their parents. They aren’t allowed to have playdates, attend sleepovers, watch TV or play computer games.
While Chua’s rules seem harsh, and her methods aren’t for most of us — Chua admits she screams at her children and calls them names (which many would consider abusive) — her observations about “mainstream” parenting are dead on. She has given American parents a big, fat and much-needed dose of reality.
That was clear during Chua’s interview this week on “Today” — where Meredith Vieira could hardly contain herself.
Like so many modern parents, Vieira’s chief concern was Chua’s daughters’ self-esteem. Ignoring all the other issues at stake, she honed in on the most titillating aspects of Chua’s methods — like the time Chua told her younger daughter that if she didn’t play a piano piece perfectly, Mom would take all her stuffed animals and burn them.
Chua chuckled and explained that this tactic is part of a “tough immigrant mentality” — and, in the proper context of a loving family environment, quite effective. If her methods appear extreme, Chua said, that’s mainly because Americans praise their children for completing the simplest of tasks and treat them with kid gloves out of fear they’ll damage their self-esteem.
In fact, as Chua told Vieira, “The Chinese approach might be better at promoting self-esteem than the more coddling, Western approach.”
Indeed, the self-esteem movement of the last several decades is parenting malpractice.
The right word for what we want our kids to have is confi dence — and confidence comes only from mastering something you hadn’t yet mastered, and that takes work. Very hard work.
Adults can’t give children true “self esteem”; they must earn it. Telling little Johnny he’s great just for being born doesn’t make Johnny confident — it makes him arrogant.
Vieira also proved Chua’s point about American parents being too lenient. The author offered examples of what children in America are allowed to do: get pregnant, use drugs and alcohol, spend all their free time on Facebook and texting. When Chua mentioned pregnancy, Vieira quickly jumped in to insist, “But we don’t actually condone that!”
She might as well have said, “Teenage pregnancy isn’t our fault”; she certainly showed that evading responsibility is indeed an American trademark.
Of course we condone teenage pregnancy — whose fault is it, if not ours?
But it’s Amy Chua’s larger message that we most need to focus on: “It’s funny that we’re calling [my parenting values] Chinese values,” she said. “I always thought of them as American values. My book is about reclaiming some aspects of the more traditional Western parenting that maybe we’ve lost.”
Amen to that.
Suzanne Venker (suzannevenker.com) is an author and former teacher.