Academic

My immediate reaction upon finishing Battle Hymm of the Tiger Mother was utter exhaustion.  I consider it a good parenting day if I get home from work at a decent hour, survive the homework gauntlet, get a reasonably healhy and tasty dinner on the table, and get my three kids into bed without them inflicting any serious physical or emotional injury on each other.  But Amy Chua somehow finds time to be a tenured law professor at Yale, travel around the world, supervise her children's music practice for hours every day, write pages of music practice notes, and clock her daughter doing 2000 multiplication problems a night (although in fairness, this last task may not have happened every night).  I am clearly completely inadequate at this multi-tasking thing.

But on a more serious note, I found myself reflecting on the implications of tiger parenting in light of my current position.  I recently moved into administration on the university level and thus am now spending a great deal of time on the challenges facing our undergraduate students.  As was widely reported a few weeks ago, the emotional health of college freshmen hit an all-time low this academic year -- students report feeling more stressed out and depressed now than at any time in the past 25 years.  Although this trend is no doubt due in part to the current state of the economy, something more seems to be going on -- many students today are lacking resilience.  One passage in Battle Hymm rang particularly true for me; Chua writes that when a child receives a bad grade, Western parents in essence assume the problem is someone else's fault and not their child's -- Western parents "may schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials."  Chinese parents, on the other hand, "excoriate, punish, and shame the child," and work through "dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests . . . for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A."   (I have to believe that on some level the child of a Chinese parent eventually earns the A just to get her parent to leave her alone, rather than valuing the achievement for its own sake.)  At their core, both these scenarios involve parents coming to the rescue, albeit in very different ways.  And both run the risk of children failing to internalize a drive to succeed and learning how to cope with and then bounce back from, on their own initiative, a personal failure.  To put the point more crudely, in the Western parenting world, children play on teams where everybody gets a trophy (a personal pet peeve of mine).  In the Chinese parenting world according to Chua, children are only permitted to do activities where it is already apparent they will eventually be able to win the equivalent of a gold medal.  In both worlds, the child always gets a trophy.  So is it any surprise our kids can't cope when they get to college or law school and are confronted with the reality that a grading curve means everyone, no matter how many practice tests you take, simply cannot get an A?  Western parents surely don't have all the answers when it comes to resilience, but I am not convinced Chinese parents do either.

Finally, even if we assume for a minute that Chua's parenting approach might be good training for academic or musical excellence, that is true only for solitary pursuits.  A child who never plays a team sport, or has a sleepover or a playdate (and Chua clings to her antipathy towards these even despite her increased flexibility at the end of the book) lacks the opportunity to learn how to negotiate conflict, to motivate others, or indeed to lead. This is a significant failure in our increasingly interconnected world.  So, for example, an adult who was raised by a Chinese mother may be well situated to be a concert violinist or a brilliant mathematician developing theories alone in an academic office, but would not be prepared to function effectively as a part of a team at Ford or Microsoft -- or to lead, inspire, and motivate a group of other (presumably less capable) employees there.  We have had sleepovers the past two Saturday nights to celebrate my boy/girl twins' eleventh birthdays, and I have spent the past two Sundays muttering "never again" to myself as I picked yet another cheese puff out of our basement sofa.  But after finishing the very thought-provoking Battle Hymm, I regretfully conclude that there may have to be some more messy and conflict-ridden sleepovers in my future.