It's possible that she (and other parents who share her views) dismiss these other subcultures as irrelevant. When violin, piano, engineering, sciences, and a few other technical fields are the only things that matter, why bother with anything else? I'd be interested in knowing if the rodeo crowd or the sports crowds ban their kids from sleepovers and other activities the way Chua does.
I think lives are like Mathematical Definitions. Add or remove postulates and see where it leads...
At the end of the day, it is parents deciding what they want their kids to do. And families doing stuff.
The Rodeo or Racing crowd would just laugh at Chua and Carnegie Hall. Did you know there is such a thing as Dog Pulls where dogs do tug of war?
Paul Johnson wrote an essay on Tolstoy's famous intro to Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.". Johnson disagreed saying happy families come in many forms whereas unhappy ones all have common antecedents.
But I think both men are right about happy families.
This is an interesting book. Ollestad dissects his relationship with his dad and peripherally, with his mother, and then their marriage. They had a very hippie life in many ways.
Ultimately his dad set very high standards for him and pushed him to meet those standards. His dad also had high standards for others in his life and pushed them to meet those. The young Ollestad fought within those demands, facing his fears and his relationships with lesser people. Then losing his dad and fighting to save his life in a horrible accident. Those extremely high demands gave him the skills to survive that accident.
Ollestad also goes into how he sought to instill those high standards in his son.
Ollestad's dad and Ollestad himself are far harder on their progeny than Chua is on hers and the penalty for failure is death, a much worse fate than being called garbage.
http://www.normanollestad.com/At the end of the day, who is a much more dangerous opponent on any field when each has to start from ground zero in terms of skills and knowledge development?
Ollestads are far more dangerous and far more effective.
I like Chua, but she is very ignorant of what really goes on in American families.
Here is another example. Bill Buckley and Ted Kennedy would take their kids out sailing in full gales with the kids working the decks.
