I have studied parenting in the US, Japan, the Philippines, Chile, Italy, and Uganda. I have studied differences in parenting in the US, comparing Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and Asian-Americans. I am comfortable thinking about cultural differences.
But the excerpts I've read from Tiger Moms still make me flinch.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Moms is a new book written by Amy Chua, a Chinese-American law professor from Yale, talking about her parenting and why Chinese kids - or any kid whose mom act like Chinese moms - excel.
In her Wall Street Journal description of her parenting, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, Chua talks about not letting her daughters watch TV, forcing them to play the piano and/or violin, not letting them be in school plays, and refusing to let them have play dates or go on sleepovers.
She also describes screaming at her 7 year old daughter that she is garbage, and (a) threatening to give away her favorite toys (b) threatening to withhold birthday parties and all gifts for years to come (c) refusing to let her get up to eat, or (e) go to the bathroom if she didn't learn a particularly difficult piece of music by the next day for a piano lesson (not recital or performance, but LESSON).
You have to have a lot of conviction in your methods - and a whole lot of self-confidence - to have that as the teaser you hope will make people pick up your parenting book.
Moving beyond flinching
I could write a lot about what makes me cringe when I read Chua's self-description. Let me talk instead about what truths we can take from what she writes.
Psychologist Ruth Chao has done some excellent work over the last 30 years describing how Asian parents - and Chinese parents in particular - have a model of parenting based on the notion of training children, rather than the more Western model of fostering growth. Traditional Asian cultures see mothers as coaches, demanding high performance and obedience to external standards. And like coaches, coddling isn't a part of it - what matters is the child's excellent performance, which reflects both upon the child but also the whole family - the mother in particular. Failure shames the child, but also the parents. (You can see some of this in the Disney film Mulan, where the whole family prepares for the daughter's performance and the daughter's inability to conform causes profound disappointment and brings shame to the family.)
Chao argues that in this tradition, love is expressed through pushing the child to excel . Chinese mothers don't express their love through hugs, praise, and affection. Their primary means of expressing it is through discipline.
Amy Chua's description of herself seems consistent with this. Other things that she says that research supports:
High standards go a long way towards explaining cultural differences in academic performance
One of the things Chua writes about is high standards. She says that a Chinese mother would be disappointed and chastise her child for bringing home an A-. Our data says it's true. In an analysis of 9 schools in California and Wisconsin involving over 23,000 high school students, the lowest grade the average Asian-American kid said they could get without their Mom giving them trouble was, indeed, an A-. Whites said B-. African-American's usually lower. This is not a matter of valuing education. African-American kids reported the highest importance on education, followed by Asian-Americans, then Latinos, with Whites dragging down the bottom.
Steinberg, Dornbusch and Brown, analysing these data, found that within each group, the higher parent expectations, the higher grades kids brought home. Group differences in normative expectations also helped explain why some groups did better than others.
Good parenting takes a lot of time.
One excellent point Chua raises is that good parenting takes a lot of time. It does. My son plays violin. When I began his lessons in first grade - after he had begged me to start for two years - I never realized the commitment it would require FROM ME. Practicing with him an hour a day, six days a week, lessons, orchestra, regional orchestra . . . Yes, he works hard. So do I. Had I known how hard, I'm not sure I would have said yes (I like to think so, but some days . . . . )
I am writing this from Chile, and my youngest is home with the rest of the family. We chat every day over Skype. I've listened to his violin. Monday we spent over an hour going through some long, long, long division with decimal problems that he'd worked on for hours before we started on them together. Tuesday he practiced his Language Arts presentation for me and we Skyped while he glued together his poster. Wednesday it was science and more math review. Yesterday a fast quiz with me revealed that he knew almost NONE of the vocabulary he needed for a Spanish test today (45 minutes of drill with mom, solo studying this morning, and he got a 120 on it this afternoon. Practice works.).
Parents do this all the time. I used to make grumpy noises when some districts in California banned homework because it gave kids with more involved parents an unfair advantage over the already disadvantaged kids whose parents didn't or couldn't help.
I see the point. But kids learn a lot outside of school. And much of that comes with parental help. Most of the math my son knows was learned doing homework with me. That's not a reflection on the quality of his teachers or his schools. It's a matter of the time and individual attention required to master a subject that doesn't come easily to him.
Working with an adult can keep kids motivated when the going gets tough
In a recent post on play, I talked about Vygotskian theory and the idea that children develop by internalizing shared activities. Parents are particularly effective helpers because they can provide good scaffolding - just enough help to stave off frustration, but not enough to stifle struggle, creativity, and satisfaction.
Chua makes the argument that kids are naturally lazy, that nothing is fun until you're good at it, and that it's a mothers' job to force kids to get good enough at things that they should do (schoolwork, music) that they enjoy it.
I have a whole other post about Carol Dwecks' work discussing how different kids respond differently to the frustration of failure. I'm not even going to begin a discussion of whether kids are naturally lazy.
But I do know that kids are more likely to persevere at boring, hard tasks when they're doing them with someone else. And a lot of academic work is hard. And a lot of the drill required to master things like multiplication tables or algebra can be boring. I also feel - following Vygotsky - that when kids work with adults, they work better, focus more, and are less likely to practice their mistakes..
Take my son's violin. The first year he played he was at the easy part of the learning curve. Every day brought big improvements, classes were fun, and he just flew through the material. The second year is tough for both budding violinists and piano students. Both instruments are very hard. The second year is when you know the basics and refine and refine and refine and refine. You keep practicing and the payoff is small. It's frustrating. It's when most kids quit.
And most kids DO quit their instrument. I have lots of friends and family who have kids who began an instrument on their own when young but gave up after a year or so. These friends tell me that my youngest must be really motivated. That's not it.
