The new year has started off with a bang – Chinese fireworks exploding over the American child-rearing landscape. Amy Chua’s new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has re-ignited the age-old debate about strict versus permissive parenting.
As a Yale law professor and Chinese-American mother of two daughters (now 18 and 15), Chua wrote a memoir about her triumphs and tribulations while raising her children with extremely high expectations and, by current American standards, severely strict methods of enforcement. She asserts the wisdom of never accepting a grade lower than an A, of insisting on hours of math and spelling drills and piano and violin practice each day (weekends and vacations included), of not allowing any playdates or sleepovers or television or computer games.
A book excerpt in the Wall Street Journal this month (titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html
created an instant firestorm of over 1 million online readers and 7,000 comments, as well as a wide range of TV appearances and debates, from the Today show to the Colbert Report, and an appearance on the cover of Time magazine this week. Why the uproar?
For one, Chua provides vivid descriptions of various encounters with her children in which she made one practice a piano piece through tears all night long, without water or bathroom breaks until she mastered it, how she called one of them “garbage” after the girl behaved disrespectfully, how she threw out a hastily-made birthday card and told her daughter “I reject this. I deserve better than this – and expect something that you’ve put some thought and effort into.”
These anecdotal stories are being retold and creating an uproar of tiger-hunting by many parents who wince at the thought of inducing such shame or guilt on their children – or at the memory of receiving such as a child. Our current culture is terribly torn between providing our children carefree happiness, protecting them from undue stress, and propping up their self-esteem, while also wanting them to be battle-tested and able to handle adversity and succeed in today’s competitive global society.
Based on her upbringing and her own childrearing, Chua is saying you can’t have it both ways. She (and her husband apparently) made a conscious choice to go for the pursuit of excellence as a path to happiness and life satisfaction. She believes that by challenging her children to push past their self-doubts and weaknesses, to accomplish something they didn’t believe they could accomplish, they receive the hard-earned gifts of self-efficacy and self-confidence that can never be taken away. She believes this resilience will serve them best in life.
And, surprising to some, Chua insists that “everything I do as a mother builds on a foundation of love and compassion.” She talks about assuming her children are strong, not weak and fragile, and that her unshakeable belief in their ability to meet high expectations ensures that they can and will persevere through life’s hardships.
As opposed to the one-dimensional portrayals of Chua as a vicious tiger mother who is barely above eating her young alive, Chua reflects more thoughtfully about the strong foundation of her convictions, the challenges from rebellious teenagers that led to productive compromises, and even some regrets that she learned along the way.
What can we learn from this mother’s struggle to do right by her children, and from her memoir that provokes us into re-examining the principles we believe best serve our own children? Indeed, what can we learn when we stop fearing or fighting the tiger, and perhaps tame it instead?
While not endorsing all her strategies or extreme examples, Chua touches on some age-old wisdom that current psychological research supports. Integrating the two, here are the take home messages from a tamed-tiger-mother approach that I find most worthwhile.
1. Real self-esteem can only be developed the old fashioned way – you have to earn it. When you protect your child from struggling with difficult tasks, you prevent your child from developing a sense of mastery and competency. Rather than having the confidence that they can overcome adversity, many children today show low frustration tolerance, short attention spans, and emotional fragility.
Set a reasonably high expectation for your child with the reassuring belief that they can work through it to achieve it. Teach, model, and practice the necessary skills. Then give them the space to experiment – to discover for themselves what works and what doesn’t. Celebrate challenges and foster a “can do” spirit. Remember the saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going!” and put it into practice.
2. View failure not as a character flaw or a personal loss, but rather as a lesson to be learned from – a valuable clue or hint guiding you towards your ultimate success.
Children don’t need to be threatened, name-called, or shamed by mistakes, but neither does it serve to let them walk away from defeats so easily. Effective parents, like coaches or personal trainers, know they need to sometimes pull a child through what looks like an impossible setback, often occurring just before the moment of breakthrough to a higher level of functioning.
3. Praise effort, not ability. As Carol Dweck’s rich program of research shows, when kids perform well on a difficult task and are congratulated for their ability (“You must be smart at this.”), they are LESS likely to want to try more difficult tasks in the future. They are afraid of giving up the prestige of being identified with a seemingly fixed character trait (“being smart”). But when kids are praised for their efforts (“You must have worked really hard.”), they are MORE likely to pursue and succeed at even more difficult tasks.
These children understand that they can effect change and accomplish greater things by exerting more effort, by persisting. They look forward to challenges not as some threat to their integrity, but as a golden opportunity to grow.
4. Practice makes progress. (Yes, if you like, perfect practice makes perfect.) Either way, without some repetition and drill, your brain will not master the skill, and you won’t be able to perform it effortlessly and consistently. Any top performing athlete or dancer or musician will tell you that they practice the fundamentals of their craft over and over again until they develop “motor-memory” and can do it automatically, without conscious thought. Only then can they take their game to a higher level, where they see and make connections that others only dream of.
Modern neuroscience shows quite clearly the different brain regions that are active when novices versus experts attempt tasks in any field. Higher-order thinking, creativity, problem-solving, and “in-the-zone” pleasures occur only after the fundamentals have become automatic. And automaticity only occurs with focused, accurate, practice.
5. As always, start with a clear, conscious choice of loving-kindness for your children. If you give your child guidance – both playful and stern, reassuring and challenging – while coming from an honest place of love, then your children will most surely thrive.
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