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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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