MARILYN PENN: MADE IN CHINA MARKETED IN NEW YORK
http://politicalmavens.com/
The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal featured a front page article written by Amy Chua, a Yale Law professor who is plugging her forthcoming book which I won’t plug for her. The article that is excerpted from her book is titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” and the editor’s subtitle is “Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids?” Actually, that question is inappropriate because it’s not Ms. Chua’s intention to create happy kids – her focus is on raising successful, high achieving kids and by objective standards of accomplishment (performing at Carnegie Hall), she seems to have succeeded. This begs the question of whether genetically bright and musically gifted children were programmed for success with or without Ms. Chua’s draconian methods of parenting. Many other talented musicians have sprung from households where the provisos did not include the rigid restrictions Ms. Chua imposed and many other high-achieving students have succeeded without the Asian philosophy of child-rearing. The notion that endless practice is essential for high performance has been exhibited by people as far removed from Amy Chua as the parents of: Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters, Tonya Harding, Yitzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman and countless others.
Though Ms. Chua may smile smugly at her photogenic daughters’ outcome thus far, there are undoubtedly even some Asian children who are by nature duller and less endowed than these two girls. One shudders to think of what would have happened to them under the supervision of a Chinese mother obsessively driven to produce a shining star. The Chinese mother sees her children as an extension of herself which is why Ms. Chua is happy to use her daughters as pictorial accessories for promoting her own book. There’s no need to question whether the girls were consulted for their cooperation – their privacy would be of no consideration for a parent who sees her children as proper subjects for a book before they reach an age of consent. In this respect, Ms. Chua has done a very western thing, thrusting her kids onto a publicity bandwagon not to promote anything they have done but to market herself and sell her book.
I liked Ms. Chua’s brief discussion of the difference in how Western and Chinese parents feel about self-esteem. Westerners begin with the premise that their children’s psyches are fragile whereas Chinese assume that they are strong and therefore do not require constant re-enforcement for modest or mediocre performance. I would have wished the same for Ms. Chua’s parenting. She and her Jewish husband are obviously intelligent,productive people who were statistically likely to produce children of similar capability. Had Ms. Chua trusted that her children’s default endowments, along with her husband’s and her excellent examples would have been sufficient motivation for their desire to work hard and succeed, she could have relaxed and let the kids do their own heavy lifting. By imposing her restrictive credo on them and crediting that for their accomplishments, Ms. Chua sells her children short and appropriates their achievement for herself. Yelling at a child, publicly shaming her and not letting her go to the bathroom might produce compliance at practicing a piece on the piano but does nothing for instilling the pride that comes with being a self-starter and knowing that you’ve truly conquered something on your own.
Ms. Chua mentions the Chinese understanding that children must spend their lives obeying their parents and making them proud. This may be a cultural trait among Asian people but in the west it’s considered a psychological aberration. Reading Ms. Chua’s article and sensing her pervasive self-promotion as the salient factor in her children’s success, I couldn’t help thinking that this was an article illustrating the Chinese attitude towards child-rearing as practiced by a western media-savvy narcissist. If PBS decides to host an upscale reality show to rival the Kardashians, the preening Ms.Chua and her lovely daughters are there for consideration.
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