Posted By Daisy on January 25, 2011

I’ve been stuck here at Too, Too Mama for about a week, and I think the only way to push through it is to just ‘fess up that I’m not quite ready to jump in the feeding frenzy created by Amy Chua.  I’ve felt like I HAD to write about her, given the nature of this blog (and the fact that BOTH my mother and my husband say so), and I probably do at some point.  I’m just not comfortable joining in on sound bites alone, which is all I’ve had thus far.

Yes, she might be a bat-shit crazy mom destined to fuck up her kids, but that could be the media talking.  (Or, she could be playing the media to get her 15 minutes of fame. Which may or may not in and of itself fuck up her kids.)  She might have a point about Western parenting, and she might not.  She might understand the difference between “Western” and “Eastern” parenting — but she might not, and the majority of us sure as hell don’t, and we aren’t going to get any farther in our understanding from this debate as it is currently being played out.  Asian parents are likely all over the map, running the gamut from neglect, to obsession, to everything in between, just like us.  And of course there is no monolithic Asia anyway.  A Chinese parent has got a very different culture and set of mores as a backdrop than a Japanese parent or a Tibetan parent.  Same with whatever “the West” is supposed to be.  Even if we get crass and assume that everybody is in fact talking about only the U.S. (and this is not always a wrong-headed assumption), we’re one of the most divided nations in the world, and that’s reflected in our parenting strategies.  Hence this blog, right?

Am I shocked and appalled at some of the snippets I’ve heard quoted from this Tiger Mother?  Sure, but that’s kinda the point, isn’t it?  I’ll eventually chime in on the whole mess, but I have some diligence to do first.  I need to read her words in context.  I need to see what Moxie and Code Name Mama and others are saying.  I need to hear from first and second generation Chinese men and women here in the US.

After that, I’ll come back and write — and no doubt I’ll fall somewhere in the murky middle, but that for me seems to be my comfort zone.  For now, I’m off to see how I can get my hands on this book for cheap, without three months of library wait-listing like that which I experienced with NurtureShock.

Ciao,

Daisy

P.S.  NurtureShock was not shocking.  Much of it felt like a retread of what I already knew or had read or heard.  The rest was a collection of interesting factoids, but nothing deep enough to help us figure out what to DO with the information.  Example:  All kids lie — and if you think you are in tune with your own kid enough to know the difference, you aren’t.  As proved by many interesting studies. O-kay…so, now what?  Do I approach my son as Dr. Gregory House does his patients, satisfied that I will be often right and always unhappy and unpleasant?  We get zero thoughts about how to handle honesty and lying as parents.  My best synopsis of the book is that it felt like I was reading a series of newspaper articles on different topics crammed under one heading and sold like mad to a starved and desperate public.  I think that of itself says a lot more about parents than it does about children.

No related posts.

Categories: On Parenting
Tags: