A Wall Street Journal Blog says, “On Saturday (January 8), Review ran an excerpt from Amy Chua’s new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The article, titled Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, attracted a lot of attention, generating more than 4,000 comments on wsj.com and around 100,000 comments on Facebook.”
Amy Chua’s response to that attention had already generated 387 comments as I was writing this post.
In fact, there was also a lot of energy in the Blogosphere with critics calling Chua a fascist and a child abuser while others supported her tough love style of mothering.
The Question and answer format of Amy Chua’s response is at the WSJ Ideas Market Blog.
At the end of the question and answer piece, The Wall Street Journal asked this question: “Which style of parenting is best for children?”
There were two choices:
A. Permissive Western parenting
B. Demanding Eastern Parenting
I was not surprised at the results since Amy’s Tough Love Tiger Mother method of raising her children is probably the norm for most of the globe with America being the exception.
Of 24,424 votes cast, Permissive Western Parenting earned 8,938 votes for 36.6% of the vote and Amy’s Demanding Eastern Parenting style earned 63.4% or 15,486 of the votes.
Historically and culturally, the Demanding Eastern Parenting method is common throughout all of Asia and may have spread from China over a period of more than 2,000 years starting with the Han Dynasty, which is when Confucianism was adopted as the dominant philosophy of life for China.
However, America’s Permissive Western Parenting style (born with the U.S. self-esteem movement) didn’t appear until about a decade after World War II and recent studies show it has serious flaws, which I feel could eventually bring down the American republic.
The Tough Love Tiger Mother approach to parenting has been around for more than two thousand years. I’d say that’s plenty of time to see if it works since it is older than Christianity and Islam. If you are curious to discover more reasons why the Tiger Mother approach works best, learn from In Defense of Tiger Mothers Everywhere.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Thanks to an old friend, I recently read Amy Chua’s excellent January 8, Saturday Essay in The Wall Street Journal of Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.
That essay activated the dendrites in my dyslexic, PTSD challenged brain, which started to buzz with ideas for this post.
Then I thought of my mother, who defied the early tide of Positive Self-Esteemism that started to wash America clean of common sense as early as the 1950s. I shudder to think of what might have happened to me if she hadn’t done that.
Most “isms” have something to offer. Capitalism offers that a few get filthy rich. Socialism offers protection for the working class from greedy capitalists so the workers at least have food and shelter.
However, Positive Self-Esteemism has nothing to offer. It is a cancer eating the young minds of the most powerful nation on the planet.
Amy Chua, a professor at the Yale Law School and author of the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, may be on a crusade to save American education by pointing out why Chinese mothers do a better job raising children that go on to do better in school.
Don’t you find it interesting that bad American teachers are blamed for the academic failure of many American students, while most Chinese-American students learned from those same teachers and go on to academic success anyway? Our daughter, who is Chinese-American, had bad teachers too but she also had mean parents, and she was accepted to Stanford University after graduating from high school with a 4.65 GPA.
Horror of horrors, as a child, our daughter had no telephone or TV in her room and no video games. Instead of watching TV nightly as most American kids do, she had to read. The TV was on only two hours a week to watch 20/20 and 60 Minutes.
In her Wall Street Journal essay, Chua says, “What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up.”
Amy Chu talks of her book, Day of Empire.
I despise Positive Self-Esteemism as much as or more than America’s Founding Fathers despised democracy.
I learned the hard way years ago how wrong Positive Self-Esteemism was. I taught for thirty years as a classroom teacher in the public schools and was in the trenches being shot at on an annual basis by the politically correct troops spreading this cancer.
In fact, we teachers were told to stop using the word “work” to describe the assignments we had our students doing because studies pointed out that American kids don’t like work. It was also suggested that we correct student work with green ink instead of red because red makes kids feel bad.
However, back in 1952, I was fortunate. For a brief time my mother defied Positive Self-Esteemism and taught me to read when educational experts decided I would never learn to read or write. A decade earlier, the same verdict had been made of my brother and he died illiterate at 64.
At 17, my brother Richard had already been in jail and was drinking booze and doing drugs. He was cutting school too. Why go when you cannot read?
Without knowing it, due to my older brother’s behavior, our mother learned the hard way that Positive Self-Esteemism was wrong. She didn’t blame bad teachers or the schools as many American parents are doing today.
After mother heard the verdict that her youngest son would also be illiterate, she drove home in tears. Both my mother and dad [due to the Great Depression they both dropped out of school at fourteen to work and never graduated from high school] loved to read. The thought of me not sharing a passion for the written word was too much to bear.
By the time we reached home, mother decided to teach me behind closed doors where none of the early shock troops of Positive Self-Esteemism could accuse her of being an abusive parent.
To motivate me, mother used a wire coat hanger and mean language. If I complained, mother hit me with the coat hanger and accused me of being stupid.
I learned to read and write.
When mother was 89 and near death, she asked my forgiveness for being mean to motivate me to read. Mother said she had lived with guilt for what she had done for more than five decades.
I replied, “Mom, I wished you had told me this before. There is no reason to feel guilty or ask me for forgiveness for teaching me to read by being mean. If you hadn’t done that, I would have followed in Richard’s footsteps. Without being able to read, I may have gone to jail as he did. Thank you for using that coat hanger. Thank you for being mean and forcing me to learn.”
A few weeks later my mother died.
My brother spent fifteen years in jail, was an alcoholic and dabbled seriously in drugs. All those flaws didn’t matter to me. I still loved my brother.
He died having never read a book. In fact, if he were alive today, he wouldn’t be able to read Amy Chua’s work.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
I’m sure that Amy Chua had no idea she was about to light a Baby Boomer fuse that would explode when she wrote her essay published in The Wall Street Journal about Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.
In 2000, Paul Begala, a political strategist for President Bill Clinton, wrote in Esquire, “The Baby Boomers are the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self aggrandizing generation in American history.”
Begala was right.
The Boomers also gave birth to the narcissistic, self-esteem generation.
Amy Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother went on sale today (January 11, 2011), and my wife and I went to the local Barnes and Noble and bought a copy.
Nancy (not her real name), who works for Barnes and Noble, told us of an experience she had substitute teaching in a girls P.E. Class. She said there were about 150 girls. Half were Asian and half were Caucasian. When Nancy told them to sit and read or do what they wanted, the Asians took out books and studied. The Caucasians started to text, do makeup and gossip.
Studies show that the average American Boomer parent talks to his or her children less than five minutes a day and more than 80% never attend a parent-teacher conference. Boomer parents are so self-absorbed with other interests that TV, the Internet, video games and other teens raised many of their children.
However, when Chinese mothers come together, their conversations focus on their children and education, which explains why studies show Asian students have the lowest incidence of STDs, teen pregnancy, illegal drug use and the highest GPAs, graduation rates from high school and highest ratio of college attendance.
What do you think Boomer mothers talk about when they get together?
A close friend of mine, who isn’t Chinese, read Amy Chua’s essay and many of the comments attacking Chua for her tough stance as a mother. He said it is obvious that Chinese mothers love their children and American mothers don’t because love means sacrifice.
The vicious responses I have been reading on Blogs and in some book reviews are obviously a guilt reaction for not being good parents. The truth hurts.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Dan of The China Law Blog mentions a post at Gina in Shanghai, another Blog. He summarizes Gina’s post with “Chinese view Western women to be like the women in “Sex in the city”.
Then he finishes his brief post with a question “How do you feel about attitudes toward sex in China?”
Actually, I don’t think I have an opinion on that topic.
After all, how others behave or think is not my problem to carry around like a burden, as Gina seems to be doing.
Does this episode of “Sexy Beijing” hosted by Sufei support the “Sex in the City” Stereotype Gina is talking about?
Then I clicked on the link that took me to Gina in Shanghai to read her longer post.
I discovered that Gina is from Palo Alto in the US, which isn’t far from where I live in the East Bay.
Reading her post, I sensed her frustration but also saw her inability to accept others for who they are and what they believe. From what I’ve learned, 85% of an individual’s personality is formed by the environment he or she grew up in and only 15% comes from genetics.
In fact, the multitude of environments in China are very different from the US, where most people grow up as if they live in a jar expecting the rest of the world outside the jar to learn how to act and think like them as if all Americans were the same–isn’t that a reverse stereotype?
In her conclusion, Gina wrote, “There are frustrations with the way we are treated differently, and that the way we look comes associated with really heavy assumptions about our personality, our behavior, our way of life, and even our country…”
When I finished reading Gina’s post, I thought how Americans do the same thing to the Chinese—stereotype them with heavy assumptions about their personalities, their behavior, their way of life and even their country.
Most of those assumptions are supported by American politicians and the Western media and of course maybe individuals such as Gina when she says, “At first, I found these statements funny, but this quickly became something that made me incredibly angry and defensive. As a woman who is quite proud of my independence and my personal choices, I hated being pigeonholed into this ‘morally degenerate’ category. But it seemed like a losing battle…”
That poses a question—is there a double standard when it comes to sex or is it because women and men are different genetically and they grow up in different individual environments?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Left Coast Voices posted a piece about Liu Xiabo, a leader of the Chinese democracy movement, who won the latest Nobel Peace Prize. My response turned into a seven part series.
What is the freedom that Liu Xiabo wants for China?
From today’s Western democratic perspective, it means the individual is king and may do whatever he or she wants even rape children, murder and steal with the knowledge that his or her rights are protected regardless of the crimes and suffering caused.
Then there is the Western, Christian concept that even violent murderers and/or rapists of infants may ask God for forgiveness, and that forgiveness will be granted no matter the crime—no matter the suffering caused in society.
Meanwhile, in China, other than restrictions on political dissent and a limited number of religious choices, the people are free to live any honest lifestyle he or she can afford to support, as is the case in the West.
As for religious freedom in China, that is not important to most Chinese since Religion in China has been characterized by pluralism since the beginning of recorded Chinese history as far back as five thousand years.
Chinese religions are family-oriented and do not demand the exclusive adherence of members.
Generally, the percentages of people who call themselves religious in China have been the lowest in the world. This does not mean that most Chinese do not believe in heaven or God.
They just do not need to belong to organized religions such as Christianity or Islam.
In fact, evidence in the West says that political dissent isn’t an important freedom since about half of the West’s eligible voters don’t vote anyway.
After all, nonvoters in America are too busy enjoying many of the freedoms that are now enjoyed by the citizens of China.
However, I admit that I enjoy my First Amendment rights as a US citizen, or I might not be writing this Blog defending China’s right to decide its political future.
As a US citizen, I do vote and express my political opinions, but I don’t stage public demonstrations as Liu Xiabo did in China. If you study the Chinese Constitution, you will discover that what he did could be considered illegal in China’s collective culture.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
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