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.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Mainland Chinese are different. They are willing to eat more bitterness than others to learn.
The reason I’m writing this post is due to Amy Chua’s Essay in The Wall Street Journal and a response from Funny Little World where Nang Ngot wrote in a comment, “You can have a system like China that churns out smart but obedient drones. There, the collective behavior guides the intellect.”
Mainland Chinese are not obedient drones any more than all Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists or Hindus are obedient drones within their cultures.
Within every culture, each person is an individual. In China, the difference is how the individuals see themselves in relation to the whole. That does not make them drones.
There’s even an ancient Chinese saying that supports being disobedient, which explains why the central government in Beijing is having so much trouble with corruption at the local level. “The emperor lives behind high walls and is a long ways from our village.”
In simple language this means, “What the emperor doesn’t know won’t hurt us.”
Where Jews and Christians have the Bible and Islam has the Quran, the Chinese have a culture governed by a mixture of Confucianism, Taoism and in part by Buddhism.
The Chinese do not need a temple, church or mosque to tell them what to believe and how to act.
Although there is no Confucian bible, the basic guide that Confucius left behind is as significant as the Ten Commandments, the Bible and the Quran.
In Chinese culture, those guidelines were designed for living a moral life and the family teaches the children as the child grows into an adult.
The Chinese family has done this for thousands of years until it became part of the culture, as Christianity is to the West and Islam is to the Middle East.
Stanford.edu says, “A hallmark of Confucius’ thought is his emphasis on education and study.”
Nicholas D. Kristof, writing for the New York Times, says, “Perhaps as a legacy of Confucianism, its citizens have shown a passion for education and self-improvement — along with remarkable capacity for discipline and hard work, what the Chinese call “chi ku,” or “eating bitterness”.
Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, graduating with first class honors. He later studied Arabic in Cairo and Chinese in Taipei.
Kristof writes, “China used to be one of the most sexist societies in the world — with female infanticide, foot binding, and concubinage — but it turned a corner (in 1949 when Mao said women hold up half the sky) and now is remarkably good at giving opportunities to girls as well as boys….”
At China Education Center.com, I learned that many scholars believe the history of education in China started in the 16th century B.C., and Confucianism has had the largest impact on education for more than two thousand years of Chinese history.
In fact, during the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 219 AD) a form of public education was established. Not only for the elite but also for the common man so both would become better gentlemen.
In contrast, it wasn’t until 1918 that all states in the US had laws requiring children to attend at least elementary school. In 1900, only 6% of children graduated from high school. By 1996, 85% were graduating from high school.
Compared to China, the importance of earning an education in the United States is relatively new and doesn’t have as strong of a cultural component.
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 had a good laugh when I read a BBC report on China rewards online porn surfer. A Chinese college student’s addicted to on-line porn ruined his chances of getting into a top university and ended in a junior college.
Now, this student is getting even with those that feed his addiction.
Since this unnamed student from northern Shanxi province couldn’t control his addiction, he decided to wage war against the porn industry by reporting porn sites to China’s censors and ended up being rewarded with 10,000 yuan ($1,465US or £913UK).
Just how serious is China’s government in combating porn? Back in February 2010, I reported China’s Stylish Assault Against Pornography. In fact, in the war against pornography, China recruited mothers. Now China is recruiting Chinese addicted to porn.
Since that report almost a year ago, what have been the results of China’s war against porn?
Google warned to cut links to porn.
According to Politik Ditto, a Website claiming to be fighting Liberal Terrorism, “Around 1,330 people (in China) received punishments for producing, duplicating, publishing, selling and spreading pornographic and vulgar information from December 2009 to October 2010, and among them five were given prison sentences of five years or more…”
In fact, the Supreme People’s Court issued a judicial interpretation on crimes of spreading obscene content via Internet…
If you believe China is a country without morality, you are wrong! Instead of coming from the pulpit of a church since china has no established national religion as most countries do, China’s morality is measured by the government.
However, this isn’t new and has nothing to do with Communism. The measure of morality in China has “always” come from the family and the government and is often Puritanical. Under Mao during the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976), a forbidden teen romance could end in an execution.
If you read my post of Gwyneth Paltrow Popular in China, you would know that guidelines on movies in China are strict: “No sex. No religion. Nothing to do with the occult. Nothing that could threaten public morality or portray criminal behavior…”
Being “somewhat” Puritanical myself, I applaud China’s war against pornography.
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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.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
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.
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