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| Squatting Tiger Poster |
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In contrast, in his lengthy discourse on the education of children, Montaigne aims his advice mainly at the upbringing of boys, sons of noble families in particular, though he himself only had a surviving daughter. (Unfortunately, he delegated the education for his only daughter to the care of the feminine contingent of his household, who admonished her for things which he did not find objectionable.) To him, the goal of education is to bring the child up to become a person of character and understanding, a far cry from the concerns and obsessions of all the "tiger" moms and "dragon" dads of the present day. (I've attached a scanned copy of part of the essay, Of the education of children, for your reading pleasure.)
To me, there seems to be a fundamental problem with general discussions on parenting, especially on the part of the mothers, and that is that it is difficult for the parents to 'disassociate' themselves from their offspring when they are old enough to develop a distinct person-hood; there is a sense of "proprietorship" that is hard to shake off, so much of the expectation and anxiety exhibited towards offspring is tied up with the desire of the parents to project or extend themselves into the lives of their children, to mold them into what they wish they had become but didn't.
To me, there seems to be a fundamental problem with general discussions on parenting, especially on the part of the mothers, and that is that it is difficult for the parents to 'disassociate' themselves from their offspring when they are old enough to develop a distinct person-hood; there is a sense of "proprietorship" that is hard to shake off, so much of the expectation and anxiety exhibited towards offspring is tied up with the desire of the parents to project or extend themselves into the lives of their children, to mold them into what they wish they had become but didn't.
5 comments:
One of the problems that I’ve found in discussing parenting with other people, whether they have children of their own or not, is that it is a very personal issue. People generally take it as an attack on them when you parent differently than they do or differently than they were parented—if you don’t do what they do or what was done to them, you must think that their way is wrong. Now of course there is truth in that since the way I parent is the way I think is best. Otherwise, I’d parent in some other way that I thought was right. When two ways of parenting are inconsistent with one another, it must be that the other person’s way of parenting is wrong. I think that this is why instead of intellectual discourse about the book, there seems to be a furor about it, which is laden with ad hominem attacks on the author and the culture it purports. If you read David Brooks’s article in the NYT entitled “Amy Chua is a Wimp”, you can see an example of what I’m talking about.
Then, there is also the issue you mention about parents wanting to mold their children into what they wish they had become but hadn't. I am reluctant to comment too much on the book right now, since I'm only about 50 pages into it, but I have made an observation about this model of mothering. It has occurred to me that since success is practically unattainable on the Chinese mother's model of success, this kind of mothering lends itself to repeating through subsequent generations. Only one person can be the best at any one thing, so those who are left behind take with them that sense of failure and try to help their children succeed in the way that they couldn't. And so it goes on generation after generation.
I have much more to say, but as I am in the throes of mothering myself, my youngest daughter is unhappy with her father and so I must tend to her.
I'm so glad that you've chimed in; I can't wait to hear the other thoughts you have about the subject. I'm sure you can write a dissertation about it if you're so inclined...
Speaking as a person of Chinese (Taiwanese) descent, I'm not sure if there is really such a thing as the "Chinese" mother's model of success. The type of expectation that Amy Chua has for her daughters is probably not that far off from that of her colleagues at Yale towards their own children, but maybe they don't put their children through the kind of wringer that Amy Chua put her daughters through. I almost think that the suspicion that some of David Brooks' readers have about this whole debate is right - it smacks somewhat of an elitist's attitude.
My mother had wanted me, her only daughter, to be "beautiful", "lady-like", and a believer in the Christian faith. Alas, I failed her on all three counts.
Yes, of course there isn't any such thing as a Chinese mother's model of success. I am just going along with Chua's terminology in the book. She had to call the mothering she was talking about something, and so she chose to talk about "the Chinese mother". I was taking "the Chinese mother" as she takes it--as a description of the type of mothering she was raised with and with which she raises her daughters. I've coined the "Chinese mother's model of success" to keep with her terminology. And, yes, surely there are American mothers, too, as Chua readily acknowledges, who are "Chinese mothers" even though they aren't Chinese mothers.
My father had wanted me to be a lawyer and wealthy. I failed on both counts : ) As for beauty, well, I have always been too fat or too thin. Go figure.
I'm with you there.
The book has unfortunately given a bad rep for the ethnically Chinese mothers everywhere, whether they are tiger-like or not. I'm sure that the term "Tiger Mother" will be among the first ones added to the urban dictionary from 2011.
It seems to me that loving your children and being a decent human being oneself are the essential ingredients to successful parenting. You can have a lot of squirrely ideas but they won't screw things up if those two things are in place.
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