"Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" lol

As mentioned before, the "Chinese" style of parenting is not the same as Chua's style of parenting.

Chua's style is actually a kind of aping of the Chinese style that does basically the same things but without knowing why.  ^{Silly analogy}

Indeed, so usually people who agree with the general philosophy of Chua's parenting style simply ignore her own racist insanity and other people will generally not look beyond "crazy Chinese people and their oppressive parenting".

Laconic: my friend and I advocate Sane Asian Parenting. Our classmates don't approve of Asian parenting, period.

But the general philosophy behind Chua's parenting style is already broken; anyone who agrees with it is kind of nuts.

I mean, we've seen evidence in this very thread Chua doesn't even agree with it, or doesn't anymore at least.

EDIT @snowfox: I've gotta admit I'm not a big fan of what you're calling Sane Asian Parenting either.

It's still got the same logical disconnect as Chua's style; it's just more mild.

edited 12th Feb '11 11:58:33 AM by BlackHumor

She agrees with it. She was just backpedaling after receiving death threats.

No, I'm not going on her backpedaling, I'm going on the ending to her own book (as reported here and in that other article), which she wrote in its entirety before any death threats occurred.

EDIT: And apparently a significant number of people quoted on The Other Wiki agree with me:

Others have noted that the Wall Street Journal article took excerpts only from the beginning of the book, and not from any of the later chapters in which Chua describes her retreat from what she calls “Chinese” parenting. Author Amy Gutman felt many have missed the point of Chua’s book, which she described as “coming of age”, and states the controversial examples shown in the book “reflect where Chua started, not who she is today, and passing judgment on her based on them strikes me as a bit akin to passing judgment on Jane Austen’s Emma for her churlish behavior to Miss Bates. Like Emma’s, Chua’s narrative has an arc. It’s a coming-of-age story — where the one to come of age is the parent.”[17] Prawfsblawg, comparing Chua to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, notes that “the story of her coming to terms with the resistance and rebellion of one of her two daughters is as important and perhaps more important than Chua’s pitch for strictness. In a (massive) concession to liberalism’s concern with individuality, Chua admits that traditional discipline just won’t work with some children, including members of her own family.”[18] Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle felt the excerpts in the Wall Street Journal article failed to represent the content in Chua’s book and states that “the excerpt was chosen by the editors of the Journal and the publishers. The editors wanted to make a sensation; the publishers want to sell books” but “it does not tell the whole story.”[19] A spokeswoman for the Wall Street Journal told the Columbia Journalism Review that “[w]e worked extensively with Amy’s publisher, as we always do with book excerpts, and they signed off on the chosen extract in advance.”[20] Chua maintains that “[t]he Journal basically strung together the most controversial sections of the book. And I had no idea they’d put that kind of a title on it.”[20]

edited 12th Feb '11 6:50:57 PM by BlackHumor

@Black Humor: The scary part is, there is no "logical disconnect" in Chua's parenting - she just started with different priors ("garbage in, garbage out"). If you don't care about spiritual happiness or minimizing stress, then it's perfectly logical to act the way she does. When you have to raise a kid, it's sort of like multiple sliding scales of priorities - academic success, social success, spiritual/emotional success, etc. And you have to rate them - if you're a normal parent, they're all going to be high, most likely, but if you're given a Sadistic Choice, what would you pick? And many SAP's will pick academic success, simply because they believe it's easier to teach yourself social skills and emotional skills than it is to teach yourself academic skills. That's not necessarily evil.

Not what I meant.

Rather, the logical disconnect that maintains working crazy hard is a virtue, but not knowing why or what you're supposed to work hard at.

In traditional Chinese culture, working hard was a virtue for very good reasons (more work had a pretty consistent linear relationship to more money) and a defined goal (any job worth real money involved tests that took lots of studying for. Still for any job worth money in most Asian countries you need to pass college entrance exams, and to pass those you need to have passed high school entrance exams etc.) Chua has taken that virtue to a culture which doesn't care how hard you work at all beyond a certain point.

Once your child is getting at least Bs consistently, there is no possible goal you can have for them where getting better grades is worth pressuring them constantly to get better grades. All Bs and the ability to talk to people makes for a better doctor than straight As and no such ability, and a better lawyer, and a better computer programmer, and a better accountant...

I would agree with making you a better lawyer, a better salesperson, a better manager/businessperson, and quite a lot of other jobs, but I'm going to have to disagree with the better doctor bit. Medicine is an enormously technical field involving almost ten years of intense post-high school study, and if you are falt-out incapable of getting higher than a B in high school classes, it's unlikely that you will do well in the higher education that's required. Not to mention the discipline that you build up as you push yourself to get A's would certainly help you to be a better doctor (or lawyer, or manager...).

@black: You know what a nightmare tennis can be under a sufficiently dedicated parent?

I'd agree with you. In fact, I did agree with you at first, just look at an early bit of this thread.

But Chua doesn't change. From her perspective, she becomes so much nicer. But she's still the same lousy parent she seemed to be at first.

Tennis is just as bad as violin. Chua is exhibiting a very plain, unpleasant upper middle class desire for her and her children to move to the upper class by getting good grades and upper class hobbies.

Now, I may be wrong. I hope I'm wrong, and Chua's actually a great parent, who isn't as bad as she seems to be. But I doubt it.

@OTOH: A doctor who just pokes around in his patients without saying much is not a good doctor no matter what he does inside there.

Especially if we're talking about a doctor in a specialty that occasionally sees lethal illnesses. Nobody in the world will go to a doctor who cannot tactfully tell someone they are going to die.

@UY: I have to say I'm honestly suspicious of that description of the ending. If at least five different people mentioned on the Wikipedia article, all Westerners, think the ending was in fact a change in thinking, I don't think one sarcastic description on our forums is going to cut it. In fact I think it's only the tone the description was in that made everyone think it was so bad.

EDIT: Oh yes, and you do realize her daughter chose tennis, not her? Even by the description given in this forum, she did not make her daughter switch from piano to tennis, she let her daughter choose what to do instead of piano.

edited 13th Feb '11 6:31:37 AM by BlackHumor

@BH: Now this is where I run into problems, since I refuse to give her the satisfaction of buying her book. But as far as I can see, all she does is allow her daughter that tiny choice. Her parenting style will remain basically unchanged.

The Other Wiki has a stake too, I suspect. Of course, I accept that it's possible I'm wrong. The description I've heard is: Chua has a fight with her daughter. Chua backs down. Chua allows her daughter to drop violin and switch to tennis.

That doesn't sound like much of a change to me.

From the articles I've read discussing this, it sounds like Chua didn't really make much of a compromise. She eventually allowed the daughter to do tennis instead of piano, but still has the same obsessive demand for perfection. The difference is that since the daughter likes this activity, it's easier to deal with.

@UY: Suit yourself, but I don't think it's right to judge a book before you've read it.

@BH: True, but a few nights choosing to study rather than party doesn't really make someone completely incapable of social interaction. What Chua did to her daughters (not allowing playdates, sleepovers, etc.) was wrong. But holding your kids to high academic standards without eradicating their social lives isn't. (Oh, and just to play Devil's Advocate, being a friendly, sociable person would probably hinder your ability to tell people they're going to die.)

First part is true.

Second part is not. One of the most important parts of social skills is reading and predicting emotions. If you don't have that you are entirely incapable of tact.

You do have to have a lot of skill to tell someone such horrible news. I'm just not sure that those skills would be picked up simply by going out with friends/dates in high school. Sure, other useful job skills can be picked up at parties (how to say no, how to fake enthusiasm when you're not feeling it, how to make pleasant small talk with strangers), but the skill of how to tell people they're going to die? It strikes me as something that can only be honed by actually doing it on a regular basis.

If you've never had to deliver bad news to somebody before (break ups, "you smell awful", etc.), you won't know how to do it when you need to.

All "you're going to die" is is another version of bad news; telling someone about bad news is a fairly common pattern in social situations.

That is a strange meandering of the topic. Here I'll throw a better example.

Bush, became president of the United States of America while getting Cs in Yale. Successful? Extremely. Actually good at his job? Hm.

edited 13th Feb '11 2:04:29 PM by breadloaf

And Kerry also got similar grades when he was in college, so moot point.

EDIT: Now I'm wondering what Clinton got. I'm fairly sure Obama got fairly good grades, seeing that he did go on to get a Ph.D.

edited 13th Feb '11 3:05:37 PM by BlackHumor

^ I thought he got a JD.

Kerry was never president, so that's moot (the question was not "who would have been the better president?").

@GMH: Some kind of doctorate, anyway. I assume all doctorates are philosophical until proven otherwise.

Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar and had some kind of foreign policy degree in college. So, pretty smart.

edited 13th Feb '11 5:01:29 PM by Jordan

^ Vindication!