Amy Chua’s email in-box has become the latest front in the mommy wars. Ever sinceBattle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, her warts-and-all book on parenting the Chinese way, inflamed the mommy-blogger universe with its publication last week, Chua has been under attack. “Oh. My. Gosh,” she says, when asked how many messages she gets each day. “I don’t know—300? 600?” Many of them are notes of praise and thanks, she says. But many are vicious. “There are death threats. And ‘Go back to China, you abusive monster.’ It’s much more overwhelming than I thought it would be.”
 
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| 2011/01/17 06:29:38瀏覽1104｜回應0｜推薦15 | |
Please visit https://city.udn.com/51640/4418731 for discussion.World Stress Journal, Saturday Essay, January 8, 2011Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior by Amy ChuaCan a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?This essay is excerpted from "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua, —Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and author of "Day of Empire" and "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)" "Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't."
Tough Love, From a Chinese MotherA memoir of a woman’s take-no-prisoners parenting style hits a nerve. Amy Chua's daughter Lulu, age 13. Broadly speaking, Chua’s book is about how she endeavored to raise her two American girls, now teenagers, the way her Chinese-immigrant parents raised her. For Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, the Chinese way includes lots of rules and high expectations—and disciplinary techniques that can come across as cruel and unusual. She makes one daughter stand outside in the frigid winter weather—at age 3—for not practicing the piano as instructed, and she berates both for the sloppiness of the handmade cards they created for her birthday. The book has come to be seen as an indictment of the kind of permissive parenting that permeates the country’s affluent neighborhoods, where kids get trophies even when they lose and ice-cream sundaes just for making their beds. Now it’s Chua who’s enduring the admonishments. On Internet discussion boards (prompted by a piece in The Wall Street Journal with the headline WHY CHINESE MOTHERS ARE SUPERIOR) her critics say that she has no regard for the plight of working families, that she values achievement and status above all, and that the parenting strategies she advocates produce weak-willed, self-loathing robots destined for the therapist’s couch. Chua, whose daughters enliven nearly every page of her book, tries not to take these attacks personally, but they upset her. Her girls are confident and happy, she says, but “I keep calling in, worried about them.” She’s glad her own mother, who advised against publishing the book and is on vacation in England, “doesn’t use the Internet very well.” Chua wants to set the record straight: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is not a how-to book. It’s a memoir about her struggles with child rearing. She passes no judgment on anyone else. “I believe that there are many ways of being a good parent,” she says. “My husband”—who is Jewish American—“was raised in a very permissive, liberal family, and he came out great.” The chatterers, she says, fail to understand that her book acknowledges the limitations of the Chinese way. The narrative centers on Chua’s efforts to make musical prodigies out of her daughters by forcing them to practice three hours a day, minimum, starting in nursery school. With Sophia, the elder daughter, this authoritarian approach works beautifully: she begins winning competitions at 10. But Lulu, despite her musical gifts, rebels. The climax of the book occurs in a restaurant, with 13-year-old Lulu screaming, “I hate the violin. I hate my life. I hate you, and I hate this family!” She throws a water glass to the floor, where it shatters. The tiger mother relents and gives Lulu permission to quit so she can spend more time playing tennis—a non-Chinese-mother-approved activity. “If there’s a takeaway from the book, it’s about a search for balance,” Chua says. “And maybe the dominant mainstream permissive Western model is not ideal, but nor is the extremely strict ‘only violin or piano.’ ” While she’s at it, Chua would also like people to know she’s funny and fun. “My kids actually quite like me,” she says. Tiger Mother Chua Gets Mixed Reviews in ChinaA week after it was published in the Review section of The Wall Street Journal, Amy Chua’sessay arguing the superiority of strict Chinese parenting continues to stir debate. The argument–whether Chua’s approach to raising kids (no TV, no school plays, no grade lower than an A) is a tough-minded response to a culture of chronic underachievement or some form of well-intentioned-but-misguided child abuse–has generated 4,000 comments on wsj.com, more than 100,000 comments on Facebook, and dozens of response articles elsewhere on the English-speaking Internet, including this moving testimonial from tech entrepreneur Christine Lu.
But how has the essay been received in China? At first glance, it seems obvious that Ms. Chua’s ideas should find supporters in China, and not just because of shared cultural roots. Unlike in the U.S., higher education in China is considered a highly precious resource, available to a minority and accessed for most by means of an intensely competitive national exam. Add to that the pressures of the one-child system, and you have the perfect recipe for hard-line parenting. Yet many in China, especially in the middle class, have begun to develop an interest in the more free-wheeling child-rearing practices of the West, seen as producing more creative, socially capable and happier children. A selection of comments left by readers in response to a translated summary of the Chua essay on WSJ’s Chinese site reflects something of this conflict: Isn’t this how American elites are produced? If you don’t eat bitterness, then how do you achieve? Just sit there and wait for meat pies to drop from Heaven? – “Pushi Dahuyou” I think strictness is necessary, depending on the phase. When they’re little, children have a lot of bad habits and you have to be hard in pointing those out because otherwise they don’t understand their mistakes. When they’re a little older, you guide them gently because by that point they’re already capable of thinking for themselves. — php1988 Educating a child is like raising a tree. If it grows straight, you don’t bother with it, but if it grows crooked, you have to control it. If you just let it go, it might get all twisted, and by the time it’s fully grown all you have is a piece of conceptual art. Also: Contemporary Chinese mothers are progressing with the times, not like before when all they knew how to do was beat their children into doing their homework. The problem is now the school’s are crap!!! – whuto It’s exactly because of this b.s. style of education that China still has a feudal-slave culture…That’s what distinguishes Chinese people, absolutely no creativity. – jameszog This kind of mother must have a lot of self-loathing and insecurity, depending on her daughters to make herself feel better. This used to be common in China, but it’s slowly changing. The rules most parents set are not as unreasonable as those the mother in this essay has. – “strongly disagree” This Chinese mother has abandoned the teachings of her ancestors: “Creating without owning, working without taking credit, leading without dominating, this called primal virtue.” –Tao Te China, Chapter 10. – koalatrader In the U.S., it doesn’t take that much effort to live carefree and happy. The welfare system is good, and goods are cheap. You can get by. Not in China. With this many people, and everything undeveloped, Chinese people have work themselves close to death. – qq982838075 There are problems with translation here. Professor Chua is an “ethnic Chinese mother,” not “mother from China.” Professor Chua is the child of ethnic Chinese who immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines. She was born and raised in the United States and her the basis of her book is a Chinese-American family’s approach to educating children. Why bring China into the discussion? She never said anything about China. – lq Personally, I think sometimes you have to be strict with kids. There are times when children can be trusted to do what they need to do on their own. At those times, they need adults to watch over them to make sure they do things right. While my parents were stricter than others’ when I was young, I think they should have been even more so. Some things can only be inculcated under strict circumstances. – Han Yingxue Chinese parents adopt slave society attitudes and make their children into slaves. Parents are a child’s first teachers, and ideally act as teachers throughout their children’s lives, but you have to be careful not to be a negative influence on their development or a leech on them. Classic Chinese parents and classic Western parents both go to extremes. The best would be to find an East-West middle ground. – kpbsrs –Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin.
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