Everywhere the ol' Bloviator went these last few days, folks were either raving or raging about Yale law professor Amy Chu's recent Wall Street Journal commentary explaining "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior." The provocative essay was really a teaser excerpted from Chua's brand-new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which touts the Chinese parenting model of demanding excellence in achievement from one's children over what Chua sees as the soft, overindulgent Western (or American) approach that favors boosting and preserving Chad or Ashley's self-esteem over anything else. According to Chua, Chinese parents simply assume that their children are both capable of the highest level of performance and strong enough psychologically to handle not just the criticism but outright denigration that comes when they fail to measure up. Chua's mother once called her "garbage" when she disappointed her, and Chua has done the same with one of her daughters.
She illustrates her faith in this "parent-as-drill-Sgt." (Pay attention, Jackwagons!) m.o. with an almost hard-to-read account of a protracted and grueling effort to force her then seven-year-old daughter Lulu to learn a difficult two-handed piano piece. After a week of unrelenting practice and taunting and goading from her mother, Lulu "announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off." With that, of course, her mom marched her straight back to the piano, threatening to haul her dollhouse off to the Salvation Army if she did not master the piece by the following day. For good measure, Mommy Dearest withheld water and bathroom breaks and warned of future Christmases and birthdays sans gifts. Lulu's complaints brought only maternal remonstrances that she should "stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic." Finally, just when Ms. Chua had yelled herself voiceless, quarreled with her husband over the matter, and even begun to doubt the efficacy of her approach:
Out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together--her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing--just like that.
Lulu realized it the same time I did. I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming.
"Mommy,
look--it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over
and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we
snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When she performed "The
Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me
and said, "What a perfect piece for Lulu--it's so spunky and so her."
There is no denying the uber-achieving Ms. Chua's gratitude toward her own mother, who was even more hard-nosed than she as a parent. Nor, so acquaintances claim, do Ms. Chua's now teenage daughters appear to hold her in anything but the greatest respect and affection. All may have ended well in this no-nonsense household, but that doesn't mean that all of Chua's Chinese-American peers endorse her argument. "Au contraire," as they say down in Notasulga, some of them are more than mildly upset to see her affirming the high-pressure, Mom-as-martinet parenting style that they feel has scarred them for life. "Parents like Amy Chua are the reason Asian-Americans like me are in therapy," one insisted.
The ol' Bloviator simply can't resist the temptation here to share the comments of a University of Georgia freshman of Asian descent who declared that for all her pressing course assignments, college was a breeze compared to life back home, where on top of the effort requisite to setting the curve in every high school class, she was expected to maintain a strict regimen of chores and housekeeping duties as well. It's a bit of a stretch to say this experience is generic among Asian American college students, but the number in this group who show extraordinary diligence and drive is certainly substantial enough to be striking.
Let me say that, personally, Ms. Chua's approach to parenting strikes me as more than a little over the top. Nor do I consider raising your own kids and teaching somebody else's completely comparable experiences either. That said, I am nonetheless a proponent of the "tough love" philosophy in both cases. The most impressive young people I know right now are clearly the products of such an upbringing, and regardless of ethnic or national origin, they stand out among their peers like a cashmere sweater on a rack full of polyester.
As a teacher, I have always been a tad on the stingy side with my praise, no doubt because the teachers who helped and inspired me the most operated the same way. Let's face it, who among us, regardless of age, is going to expend effort trying to get better or explore the limits of his or her capability, if we are constantly being told that our current level of performance is absolutely fine. This fundamental fact of human nature appears to have eluded the geniuses in our colleges of education who, for more than a generation now, have been fervently preaching the gospel of enhanced student self-esteem as the teacher's primary responsibility and object. The fruits of this approach, as I have doubtless pointed out before, may be discerned each fall when freshmen run up against the first college professor who is unimpressed by their 4.5 GPA's in high school AP courses where everyone receives an "A" or the shelf full of trophies they received simply for participating in sports or other extracurricular activities.
I was blessed to have many wonderful teachers during my public school years, none of them more exacting than Ms. Elaine Gordon, who taught me both English and French, insisting in the latter classes that we learn not simply to translate French but to speak it correctly and appropriately as to both gender and tense. Next to an honest-God date, there was nothing I craved more in high school than Ms. Gordon's approval, and I knew full well that I would never get it with anything less than the very best effort I could give. Only years later, I realized that she had snookered me. You see, in my eagerness to please her, I had unwittingly raised my own standards to the point where anything that I knew wouldn't please her didn't please me either. Come to think of it, Ms. G. must have been in cahoots with my mama, who operated much the same way.
In the short run, it's mighty tempting to uncritically shower young people, especially those you care the most about, with the kind of praise and approval that boosts their spirits and elevates their comfort level, but, in doing so, you may also be conditioning them to think that they're automatically entitled to such a response every time out, regardless of their actual qualitative performance or the effort they put into it. Unfortunately, this is not an attitude that is necessarily tempered by age. Note here, the comments of David Brooks about the roots of incivility in our severely polarized national discourse:
The problem is that over the past 40 years or so we have gone from a culture that reminds people of their own limitations to a culture that encourages people to think highly of themselves. The nation's founders had a modest but realistic opinion of themselves and of the voters. They erected all sorts of institutional and social restraints to protect Americans from themselves. They admired George Washington because of the way he kept himself in check.
But over the past few decades, people have lost a sense of their own sinfulness. Children are raised amid a chorus of applause. Politics has become less about institutional restraint and more about giving voters whatever they want at that second. Joe DiMaggio didn't ostentatiously admire his own home runs, but now athletes routinely celebrate themselves as part of the self-branding process.
So, of course, you get narcissists who believe they or members of their party possess direct access to the truth. Of course you get people who prefer monologue to dialogue. Of course you get people who detest politics because it frustrates their ability to get 100 percent of what they want. Of course you get people who gravitate toward the like-minded and loathe their political opponents. They feel no need for balance and correction.
My few but fortunate personal encounters with people whose accomplishments have brought them widespread acclaim have uniformly borne out the old saying, "The Bigger They Are the Nicer They Are." Their modesty has not been false or in any sense an affectation. I think that is because only those people who have pushed themselves to their limits are self-critical enough to acknowledge and respect those limits. I'm just guessing here, of course, but I'd bet that a great many of these folks have been the beneficiary of some tough love along the way.
