16 thoughts on “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother reviewed”

  1. Let me ask one question. Is fear a good guide? For me it seems this stretches to much in that area. I’m quite aware that discipline is needed but it must not be slavish obedience. We had our share of “fears, tears and blood” in Germany. It has cost many millions their lives. And never to forget China is a land without any civil rights. Agreed you started in that direction with Guantanamo, but one can not be proud of it in any way.

  2. Friedrich: I believe that Tiger Mother is drawing on 5000 years of Chinese history and cultural achievement, not basing her child-rearing on the current political environment in China. What part of my review led you to believe that I was suggesting otherwise? I should probably fix it.

    [I think that your introduction of Germans electing the Nazis and of Guantanamo is off-topic and perhaps based on confusing prose by me, but … As for China having no civil rights and the U.S. having an infinite supply of same, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration#Incarceration_rates_by_country shows that the U.S. has a per-capita prison population approximately 7X larger than China’s. We probably shouldn’t be too smug about how much better we are at politics and government. We also thought that we were better than the Chinese at engineering and manufacturing.]

  3. Sorry I did not want to imply it to your review, but the original post. (“Stupid white men critizises smart Chinese woman).

    It was my fault doing that. I’m sorry. And I just wanted to ask if you think fear is a “good” motivator. I think it’s one of the worst one can do to anyone. The example with Germany just points out where fear can led end. And the abundant civil rights are sorry “gone”. You (the US) sneak in every other life, you sneak into every one visiting the US you sneak even in nearly every bank transfer. This all in the name of “fighting” terrorism, but this is the “wrong” way. And the current Chinese way is as wrong.

    Oh agreed they “earn” plenty of money. But it’s not yours. If you’re unlucky and step on someones toe you’re out. You know the party is always right….

    I wrote in another mail what I think one of the biggest faults of the US have been that was giving up on manufacturing (well I know this is not fully true, but see you once were one of the biggest exporter cars in the US you have “more or less invented” IT. You still have remarkable good universities. But you lost your way especially in the last three years. You started socializing losses and privatizing winnings. You allowed your politicians to “ruin” you. We are not better in that regard but it all comes back to one thing.

    Putting fear into everyone. So I come back my original question.

    But let’s get to a your review than in the “context” of you other message: You wrote:
    “Chua’s manic energy and rage,”
    Now what is rage? Does rage not “inflict” some sort of reaction maybe “pressure” on the child. What is this rage good for? If I’d have a mother under which I’d constantly would suffer. Will this a “good thing”?

    And you wrote:
    “During my lifetime, China has become a lot more like the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S. has become a lot more like China. So perhaps we will need Chinese mothers. ”

    This is wrong (IMHO) not China has become a lot more like the US but the other way round. And China has started one of the most “problematic” things ever
    undertaken. Just allowing 1 child. So what does that mean in the “near” future? How many “girls” were just murdered because if there’s should be one child is must be a “son”. So should American women start to kill their girls also? This is not what I think we all need.

    We need parents that “care” but expect at the same time that “not just fun is the way to go”. We need parents that are exemplary for children. We need parents which give their children a frame. This frame has external bounds (e.g you have to live within your financial limits, the property of someone else is not to be touches) and internal bounds (maybe you can name it believe and the will for “justice”, and freedom).

    The parents are allowed to “put” on bounds for their children as they seem fit, but the most important things parent can and should do is giving their children a frame in which wrong doing and well doing is “honored” accordingly. I think it’s the way “Treat everyone as you would like to be treated”. This is what IMHO all parents should strive for.

    And this parents need something which can not just taken away from them by force (e.g through taxes or “xyCare) For that the parents have the “right” on valuable money, only if you can save for the problematic times you are “free”. Currently freedom was scarified for whatever. And freedom was never very high on the list of the Chinese. And the communists are everything but for freedom. So no we do not need Chinese mothers we need “old fashioned mums” and dads.

    You also wrote:
    “They’re both good-looking and were able to do party tricks such as read the alphabet by 18 months. On top of this Chua pushed them by hiring a Mandarin-speaking nanny to teach them Chinese (she herself speaks a non-Mandarin dialect), by starting their music lessons at age 3, and by enrolling them in the best private schools. ”

    Well does that make them “better” in any way? What does this comment imply?

    And this part:
    “therefore it is the parent’s job to choose Activity X for the kid and push the kid mercilessly until he or she masters Activity X.”

    So either be the best or dead?
    What’s better a top-notch whatever with a failed family or Joe average with an “intact” family?

    “If Chua isn’t sure that she’s right, she’s pretty sure that most Americans are wrong, with their cult of self-esteem and letting kids do whatever they want. ”

    Well is this really what most Americans allow? I do not believe that.

    I’m sorry but I can not make anything out of:
    “The best evidence that fat, drunk, and stupid might be a great way to go through life is provided by my own generation.”

    Why do you write that?

  4. Friedrich: I think we can give you a prize for submitting a longer comment than the original review! Let me try to answer your direct questions…

    What is significant about Chua, a non-Mandarin speaker, being careful to hire a Mandarin-speaking nanny? She is preparing her children to be global citizens (and maybe get a job!) as well as making an extra effort to help her children connect with their Chinese heritage.

    Is there any evidence that American parents allow their children to choose their own activities? I would say that Xbox is a pretty good example. I don’t think too many parents told their children “I want you to play Xbox and watch TV for 40 hours/week”.

    Is it better to be good at an activity or dead? As far as I know, hard work never killed anyone (though in France it is illegal).

    What’s significant about the fact that old people like me are criticizing Chua? We had it so easy that lessons from our childhood may not apply to today’s youth.

  5. I’m not sure you really described the truly startling feature of the book for American readers: just how authoritarian Chua’s parenting style was, at least until her younger daughter reached her teenage-rebellion phase. My parents also followed this parenting style, and we turned out fine (I graduated from high school at 15, and from university at 18). But they didn’t need to have the kind of battles with us that Chua describes with her younger daughter, precisely because they had more authority than Chua did. There’s an inverse correlation between authority and force: the weaker your authority, the more you end up using threats and force.

    Chua notes in one of the early chapters that she failed to give her daughters the respect for parental authority that she and her sisters grew up with. To me, authority is one of the most important aspects of parenting, Chinese or not. Children want limits; they want to know that someone else is responsible and in control. The book 1-2-3 Magic describes an approach to discipline which I like: it emphasizes clear communication (two warnings and then a timeout), with a minimum of talking. Just sitting there and telling your kids to do something, or to stop doing something, doesn’t work. My wife relayed this comment from another parent: “You can’t parent from your ass.”

    I think people often get confused about the distinction between power and force, whether they’re thinking about parenting or politics in general. Power is primarily psychological, not physical. If your child is even two or three years old, your ability to physically force them to do anything (put on a particularly set of clothing, for example) is very limited. You need to get them to internalize that if they get into a battle of wills with you, they will always lose: you have much, much greater patience, willpower, and experience than they do. You never get angry, you’re just totally serious. I don’t remember the last time we had to give either of our kids a timeout. (They’re now 7 and 9.)

    What you don’t do is make wild threats you can’t follow through on (e.g. Chua’s “I’m going to burn all your stuffed animals!”). Your kids need to take you completely seriously. If you make extreme threats, I suppose you might be able to win compliance temporarily, but only until they figure out you’re bluffing.

    Chinese and Japanese parents definitely do emphasize hard work over innate ability: rather than saying “Johnny isn’t good at math” and accepting C’s, they’d push Johnny to work harder. (What I remember: “If so-and-so can do it, why can’t you?”) And they also emphasize the importance of education. See this abstract by educational researchers Harold Stevenson and Shin-Ying Lee (comparing hundreds of first- and fifth-graders in Chicago, Taipei, and Sendai).

    Background information about the children’s everyday lives revealed much greater attention to academic activities among Chinese and Japanese than among American children. Members of the three cultures differed significantly in terms of parents’ interest in their child’s academic achievement, involvement of the family in the child’s education, standards and expectations of parents concerning their child’s academic achievement, and parents’ and children’s beliefs about the relative influence of effort and ability on academic achievement. Whereas children’s academic achievement did not appear to be a central concern of American mothers, Chinese and Japanese mothers viewed this as their child’s most important pursuit. Once the child entered elementary school, Chinese and Japanese families mobilized themselves to assist the child and to provide an environment conducive to achievement. American mothers appeared to be less interested in their child’s academic achievement than in the child’s general cognitive development; they attempted to provide experiences that fostered cognitive growth rather than academic excellence.

    Chinese and Japanese mothers held higher standards for their children’s achievement than American mothers and gave more realistic evaluations of their child’s academic, cognitive, and personality characteristics. American mothers overestimated their child’s abilities and expressed greater satisfaction with their child’s accomplishments than the Chinese and Japanese mothers. In describing bases of children’s academic achievement, Chinese and Japanese mothers stressed the importance of hard work to a greater degree than American mothers, and American mothers gave greater emphasis to innate ability than did Chinese and Japanese mothers.

  6. A minor correction:

    “I graduated college in 1982, one year into the U.S. stock market’s best 13-year performance within the last 84 years. Jobs were easy to get. Real estate was cheap.”

    Actually, unemployment was pretty high in 1982 (this was when Volcker was battling inflation by raising interest rates to 20%). The stock market is often a leading indicator (it’s done really well over the last two years as well). Unemployment peaked at 10.8% in December 1982, falling to 7.2% in November 1984.

    Of course this doesn’t invalidate your larger point, namely that kids growing up today may need to work harder than the previous generation.

  7. Russil: Jobs were easy to get for everyone I knew in the MIT Class of ’82! We had offers from perhaps half of the companies with which we interviewed. There were no H1B visas. If a company wanted a cheap engineer or scientist, it had to hire that person straight out of college. Simply being a college graduate was a relatively rare characteristic compared to today.

  8. I have a five year old daughter in kindergarten and a sixteen month old son. From what I’m reading I’m basically raising children who will have a higher chance of being unemployed and less able to obtain wealth because I’m not obessed with academic excellence at this stage in their development.

    In any case I’m not convinced that obessing over my child’s education is going to make any difference in their future success. Just reconsider that Freakonomics tells us that a child’s future success is largely decided before they were born.

  9. Well let me add a little piece of comment to Russil Wvong. As I understood and have seen in documentaries is that often chiildren have more than an grown-up working day. I think this is a wrong thing. This work however is nearly alway the same, looking into books, writing etc. … I do not think we do our children a favour just “stressing” one kind of thing. The “white collar” jobs. It would be as much important to ask them for works one usually has to be done while beeing in touch with animals. Gardening, working with tools. If we do just hope someone else will get his/her hands dirty, we’ll have to re-learn fast.

    Paul wrote about authority. I’ve my “own” idea about authorities and I prefer respect. Auhority can mean force beyond any “reason” The “negative” implications do we see every day. The auhorities do spend “our” money on things they “found” pleasant. If you do not comply you’ll be send to jail. Or have you ever tried not to pay you taxes?

    Respect must be earned and for that I meant the parents should be exemplary. They should to “right” and make clear what “right” and “wrong” means. Authority does not have to be “earned” it may come just to the point of a gun. That is what I think China and USA have become more and more. Rootless bandits saving wrong-doers and arbitrariness. Just see Lehmanns has been sunk, FuF have been “saved”. In Germany we have our share of “saving” also”…. Yes the people in power can obviously do that, but the lost any credit and respect they ever may have had.

    @philg: There are a lot of questions still unanswered: Do you think fear is a good motivator?

    And why you’d think that “The best evidence that fat, drunk, and stupid might be a great way to go through life is provided by my own generation.”

    I’m simply not understanding why you wrote that.

    The overstrething dead or alive. It Was just to make a point. The point is an honest working men/women deserves respect but the troubles we have are not the “honest” working man/women but the defrauders. And they are still in charge and we also have the same bureacurats as we did 2 years or so ago. So “honest” work does not pay, but they have the guns…. And we surrender more an more of responsibility etc to “bureaucrats” this is the “wrongest” way one can go (IMHO)

  10. Mark: If you can convince your kids that there is no shame in being average, there probably isn’t any reason to spend the hours nagging and coaching that Amy Chua spent. On the other hand, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/us/16ohio.html and similar articles seem calculated to make us feel that there is something inadequate about living at what would have been considered a good material standard of living back in the 1950s.

    Friedrich: Is fear a good motivator? I’m not an experimental psychologist so my opinion is probably not relevant. In any case, I’m not sure how applicable the question is to the Tiger Mother. Her children were not afraid of being killed or physically harmed if they did not practice or study. Perhaps they were attempting to avoid being yelled at by their mom, but that’s not the kind of fear that an experimental psychologist would use in an experiment.

  11. Russil: The study about Taiwan and Japan is interesting. We know how that works out in the U.S. and, I assume, Canada. Children of East Asian ancestry do much better in school, are disproportionately represented at the best universities and end up with high incomes. But how does it work out in Taiwan and Japan? Having more common sense than we have in the U.S., they probably send no more than ¼ of their young people to university. So is the result that large numbers of young Taiwanese and Japanese spend their chidhood studying diligently, getting very good grades, etc., only to end up working as machinists or plumbers?

  12. Vince: Your conjecture that Japan and Taiwan send smaller percentages of their current population to college is not consistent with the data in http://completionagenda.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/reports_pdf/Progress_Report_2010.pdf (see page 8). At least going by degree completion, Japan, Korea, Canada, and Russia all put more of their young people (25-34) through college. In educational attainment, the U.S. ranks 12th out of 36th among the nations surveyed by the OECD in 2009. I found the original OECD report at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/45/39/45926093.pdf and it looks as though the U.S. is below the OECD average in terms of “the estimated percentage of a 2008 age cohort that will complete… upper secondary education” (high school?).

    Page 48 of the OECD report shows that the U.S. has a lot of folks who enter college (“tertiary-type A”), about 65 percent of young adults, which is higher than Japan’s 48 percent. But Japan has more trade schools (“tertiary-type B”).

    I’m not sure we need to look too closely at these statistics. Ultimately it is easy to figure out if a young person has an adequate education or not. Between 20 and 25 percent of young Americans are unemployed, so we know that they don’t have sufficient skills to satisfy employers. I don’t think Tiger Mom’s kids would have any trouble finding a job.

  13. Vince: “So is the result that large numbers of young Taiwanese and Japanese spend their childhood studying diligently, getting very good grades, etc., only to end up working as machinists or plumbers?”

    Presumably. In Taiwan, post-secondary attendance is close to 100%, and unemployment among university grads is a problem. The second linked article suggests encouraging more students to go into vocational and technical education instead of university.

    Friedrich: “I do not think we do our children a favour just stressing one kind of thing. The “white collar” jobs. It would be as important to ask them for work which usually has to be done while being in touch with animals. Gardening, working with tools.”

    In her book Chua mentions that she had her daughters do regular manual labor.

    With Paul Krugman’s 1996 prediction in mind, I’d have no problem if my kids were to opt for trade school rather than university and white-collar jobs.

    Regarding authority vs. force, I have lots more to say, but since Philip’s post was about parenting rather than politics, I’ll save it for a political thread.

    Philip: “Ultimately it is easy to figure out if a young person has an adequate education or not. Between 20 and 25 percent of young Americans are unemployed, so we know that they don’t have sufficient skills to satisfy employers.”

    As Vince noted earlier, the US already appears to have too many people with a college education. “Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants.”

  14. I was referring to this article that I linked to last week, http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634, which shows roughly 14% of USPS letter carriers and 30% of flight attendants have a bachelor’s degree. In international terms, I was referring to what your OECD report calls “tertiary-type A”, or what much of the world calls universities, as opposed to trade schools or institutions that grant associate degrees.

    I agree with much of what you imply here. We will probably need more associates degrees in the coming years. The rapidly growing medical industry has a lot of jobs that require exactly that level of education. Also, I agree with you that our high school dropout rate is a national scandal which, interestingly, gets very little attention when the failings of our K-12 systems are discussed.

    I also agree that Professor Chua has done a great job in preparing her kids for the future. However, my impression from the book reviews that I have read is that she’d probably be disappointed if her kids went no further than an associates degree.

  15. Vince: I guess a flight attendant doesn’t need a bachelor’s degree to do her job, but the time spent as a history major in college might still be worth it to her if she works her way up to international travel. And college courses in Mandarin or Arabic could help her jump the queue to the best routes. The article that you link to contains the following: “I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning”. So basically the guy says that college = higher levels of learning. From this we can infer that the author went to college or perhaps works at a college. An aircraft mechanic therefore has a “lower level of learning” than someone with a typical college degree (i.e., one in education, business, criminology, etc.).

    I’m not sure how any of this discussion about what percentage of a society’s young people go to college relates to the Tiger Mom. She was working an entirely different level.

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