Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

Niccolo and Donkey Sunday 16 Jan 2011

Here's a rebuttal also posted in the Wall Street Journal:

In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom

President Camacho Tuesday 25 Jan 2011

Amy Chua's article has made the cover of the most recent TIME magazine:

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SweetLeftFoot Tuesday 25 Jan 2011

LOL. Academic 'tennis Dads' is all they are.

Niccolo and Donkey Wednesday 26 Jan 2011

Paul Gottfried weighs in on the matter :

In her syndicated column, Betsy Hart recently expressed something less than pleasure with a recently published book by Chinese-American author Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother . Chua discusses a plan for rearing children that she applied to her daughters, who, according to Hart and Chua, are now highly accomplished young women. This method of child-rearing is based on traditional Chinese practices, and Chua prefers this form of child-rearing to the one that is now common in the United States.

Her Chinese method seems quite sensible. She assigns domestic responsibilities to her children, makes sure they do their school work, and finally, imposes compulsory practice time for learning to play a musical instrument. Chua is outspokenly contemptuous of how the young are being pampered in our society. Working parents, including mothers, who are trying to increase the family’s disposable income, throw goodies at Heather, Whitney, or Ashley. Material benefits and other indulgences have taken the place of molding offspring. Educating children means increasingly for American parents providing video games, sleepover parties for girls, and conversations that raise the esteem of those who are not really entitled to feel good about their scant accomplishments.

Apparently Betsy Hart has no trouble with furnishing such indulgences, or so I would guess from her earlier columns about her efforts as a single mother to deal with her children. Although she shrinks from the more excessive forms of coddling, she is certainly not opposed to it in principle. She even raises questions as an authorized “conservative” about Professor Chua’s suitability for our American way of life. Chua rejects “individualism, the unique American belief that we can grow up to change the world, to be anything, and not just what our parents are.” Although this belief can lead to “excesses and faults,” it has “allowed us to tame the West, to win two world wars, and invent just about everything the world uses today.” Indeed Chua is being inconsistent in how she lives her life, according to Hart. Despite her apparent anti-Americanness, “she teaches at a U.S. university and brought her daughters up in the United States, not in China.”

Allow me to observe the obvious here. American generals in the Second World War and our most renowned inventors were not like the students in my freshman classes, who can barely read and write. It is foolish to ascribe the achievements of past great Americans to parents who ran to oblige their kids. Did General Patton spend his youth watching “Sex and the City” or did Edison develop his inventive genius by twittering in class? Perhaps those who “tamed the West” were actually making arrangements for their daughters’ slumber parties.

This of course is not the case. Resourcefulness and courage do not come from being pampered by parents who feel guilt that they’re too busy making money to attend to their children’s development. Although not true of all American parents everywhere, the shoe may fit more parents than those who are the exceptions. Chua outlines an urgent social problem; and it is impossible for me to fault her for throwing away current American models for better Asian ones.

Hart’s snide conclusion that Chua is being un-American in her child-rearing methods is staggeringly dumb. American parents of my parents’ generation behaved like Chua’s parents, not like their present American counterparts. Earlier Americans would have been astounded to learn that disciplining children and imposing high intellectual expectations was un-American. “Conservatives” of the Hart generation are carrying their misguided patriotism into a glorification of what is not even traditionally American.

Contrary to Hart’s charge, Chua’s decision to live in a country whose language she speaks better than Chinese is not hypocritical. She is staying in the country in which she’s used to living. She may also enjoy the greater economic opportunity relative to China that our country affords and (despite its diminished liberty) the greater freedom to publicize her views. But this does not require a Chinese-American to disguise our problems or to celebrate our mistakes as gloriously American.

And Chua is perfectly justified in pointing to a better model of child-rearing than the one I see in practice. Having taught in college for many decades let me assure Betsey Hart that Chua is not exaggerating what she criticizes. Has Hart tried to teach a class in which no one has read any book, except for the instructor? Has she found students showing wonder when asked to identify Jesus or Napoleon? Has she encountered college students chatting on cell phones during a lecture and then being offended when asked to stop?

This is how our “kids” behave at home, and so why should they alter their behavior once in college? It may be also what they can get away with in high school. Surely there must be better ways to raise the young.

sugartits Wednesday 26 Jan 2011

So then Chinese kids arent as inclined to rebellion.

Ash Wednesday 26 Jan 2011

In Mala Fide:Why Amy Chua should be arrested for child abuse

That’s how to raise children the Chinese way – turn them into mindless, socially inept, overworked drones. Deny them the ability to learn skills that might actually be useful and force them to master ones that aren’t. Cripple their social lives and make them incapable of interacting with the opposite sex. While the American style of “self-esteem” boosting helicopter parenting is screwed up in its own way, the line about “all work and no play” apparently doesn’t translate into Mandarin.

I am so sick of ignorant white American dumbshits who talk about how Japanese or Chinese kids excel at acing meaningless exams and getting high academic marks. Those dubious achievements come at a price – they strip the child of any ability to think for himself or challenge the faulty paradigms of the society he lives in. Making your kids “be the No. 1 student” in every subject doesn’t actually make them number one, any more than all the kids in Lake Wobegon could be above average, but it DOES train them to jump through hoops like a seal. That’s the Asian way – train people to become brainless, unthinking automatons incapable of thinking outside of the box.

As an example, take how Chinese and other Asian students dominate classical music conservatories in the U.S. Yet there is not a single notable music composer of Asian extraction that I can think of. You’d think all that youth wasted rehearsing on the piano would imbue at least one of them with the ability to do more than repeat songs that dead European men wrote, but apparently not. Mind you, composing good music is by no means easy. I know I couldn’t write a song. But then again, I didn’t spend four hours a night, five days a week rehearsing Beethoven when I could have been out being a kid. (Yes, I played in my grade school bands. Laugh it up, knuckleheads.)

This is just one expression of a greater East Asian mental pathology – their inability to come up with any social or technological advancements that they didn’t steal from someone else. They can’t even build on what they thieve from others ! Asians rule the classical scene at American universities, but they can’t write a single piece of music. Asian societies mimic the nations of the West, but they can’t produce any advancements on their own. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans cannot create, only copy; they are incapable of innovating, only imitating. They are creativity parasites, dependent on other societies to keep their own moving forward. If it weren’t for the technological and cultural progress of the West, the “Middle Kingdom” would still be in the Stone Age – which is where they’ll end up anyway .

And here’s the cherry on top of Amy Chua’s story - her husband and the father of her children is a white man . Specifically, he’s Jewish. A Jewish-Chinese couple? Good God Almighty, you couldn’t cram more dysfunction and neuroses into that family if you sent the kids to Neverland Ranch. No doubt he’s your typical gelded, henpecked schmuck of the type that American Jewry excels in producing. (Old joke: a Jewish boy comes home to tell his mother he’s landed a role in the school play. She asks him which role. He says, “The Jewish husband.” She sends him away, telling him to “get a role with a speaking part.”) Nebbish Jewish guy plus Chinese dragon lady is a match made in hell.

My prediction? Both Sophia and Louisa will turn to smoking in college to calm the stress of existence, and die of lung cancer before their time. (Think I’m kidding? Pay a visit to your local quad. Half of the cigarette butts littered around the doors are from Asian exchange students, and you can always see huge crowds of them puffing away in unison.) This assumes that one of them doesn’t murder mommy dearest with a hatchet before then.

Reading this sort of story makes me thankful that my parents were neither too lenient nor too strict. Sure, they punished and grounded me whenever I bombed a test or did something stupid, but they knew when enough was enough. I could have been forced into pointless extracurricular activities I didn’t want to do or made to train for a career I wasn’t suited for by parents who wanted to live vicariously through their children, ending with a nervous breakdown at age 25 and a lead sandwich. I may be poorer and less credentialed then the Chua kids, but I’m independent, happy, and free, things they’ll never have because their delusional mother ruined them.

Niccolo and Donkey Wednesday 26 Jan 2011

Killer paragraph:

And here’s the cherry on top of Amy Chua’s story - her husband and the father of her children is a white man . Specifically, he’s Jewish. A Jewish-Chinese couple? Good God Almighty, you couldn’t cram more dysfunction and neuroses into that family if you sent the kids to Neverland Ranch. No doubt he’s your typical gelded, henpecked schmuck of the type that American Jewry excels in producing. (Old joke: a Jewish boy comes home to tell his mother he’s landed a role in the school play. She asks him which role. He says, “The Jewish husband.” She sends him away, telling him to “get a role with a speaking part.”) Nebbish Jewish guy plus Chinese dragon lady is a match made in hell.

Niccolo and Donkey Tuesday 22 Feb 2011

A dissenting view:

Think Again: Education

President Camacho Tuesday 22 Feb 2011

The crux of the issue, which would wipre away much of the controversey were it allowed to be admitted:

That doesn't mean that the American educational system isn't watered down and fucked up, but it's not really "behind" Western Europe and Northeast Asia except maybe in geography and history.

Niccolo and Donkey Tuesday 22 Feb 2011

All the immigrant kids from ex-communist countries would come to our schools and destroy in Mathematics.

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

10 posts