Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.....(WSJ article)

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 acitivities the way Chua does.

As an example, the stage mother culture of pushing your kids like crazy into acting is well known. But someone who won't let her kid be in the school play might dismiss them. Dunno.


Val

I see a mother at gymnastics who might fit the mode. Good points Austin.

Ren

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.

I thought that was very interesting. It was similar in thought to a lecture I heard from some children's behavior professor from Harvard, though she broke down parents in 3 categories. She worked more with middle school kids and problem behaviors.

Ren

A little more decidedly tongue-in-cheek than Chua, and not aimed at selling a book (not that there's anything wrong with that!):
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/14/american-mothers-superior/

It was a good article. But she does acknowledge that her college wouldn't accept her now, great SAT scores or not. It is a different world from the 70s. And she hope her 12 year old will find a similar school. The problem, like she writes, those foreign students have a 4.0 GPA and great scores. Between India and China there are 6X as many of them. Take 2X off for India since 800 million are in poverty, but still, they do not have enough universities yet to accomodate and they are looking for spots. I want my kid to have a spot.

On Morning Joe today, they were talking about Amy Chua -- of course. All these successful people talk about how strict their parents were growing up and they were successful and perhaps Americans have gone too soft and maybe a call to move towards the center and more "Chinese style" parenting.

I do not want a college for my kid that will take her, I want a college for my kid that she wants.

Ren

Kcab I love that thought. It's so universal, such a practical measurement.

I've been thinking about all of this for several days, and it has seemed to me that nestled within this discussion is the notion of scarcity; that is, that certain approaches to helping our children learn and grow are driven by the idea that various resources are scarce (elite preschool spaces, selective university admissions, particular kinds of job opportunities, and so on), and that these specific resources are those which are necessary for our children ultimately to have a satisfying adult existence.

Obviously, one needs for certain basic resources (food, warmth, shelter, love) not to be scarce, but I wonder if it would be interesting/useful/thought-provoking to reframe some of these other questions in terms of abundance rather than scarcity? Certainly it would seem to me to be potentially both very freeing as well as conducive to creativity to view life as offering an abundance of possibility; what could our school/work/hobbies/parenting look like if we embraced a vision of bountiful opportunity? What could our kids' lives look like?

And I want my child to be happy, self-confident, assured, relaxed and well equipped to cope with what life throws at her more than I want her in college.

You might enjoy this take on the Chinese mothers article:

[url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-steinberg/post_1605_b_811329.html][/url] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-steinberg/post_1605_b_811329.html