What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you\'re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it\'s math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.
Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can\'t. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me \"garbage\" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn\'t damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn\'t actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.
As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, \"Hey fatty—lose some weight.\" By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of \"health\" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her \"beautiful and incredibly competent.\" She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, \"You\'re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you.\" By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they\'re not disappointed about how their kids turned out.
I\'ve thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.
[chau inside] Chua family
Newborn Amy Chua in her mother\'s arms, a year after her parents arrived in the U.S.
Weigh in
Amy Chua will answer readers\' questions Thursday on Review\'s new blog, Ideas Market.
Write to: IdeasMarket@wsj.com.
First, I\'ve noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children\'s self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children\'s psyches. Chinese parents aren\'t. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.
For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child \"stupid,\" \"worthless\" or \"a disgrace.\" Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child\'s grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher\'s credentials.
If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.
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By John J. Edwards III
Erin Patrice O’Brien for The Wall Street Journal
Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and Sophia, at their home in New Haven, Conn.
How do we motivate our children to succeed in school, and in life? It’s a fundamental question that animates every parent’s juggle, and there are as many answers as there are families. Amy Chua, author of the new book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” shares her own forceful, unyielding answer in an excerpt published in Saturday’s Review section.
Near the beginning, Ms. Chua writes, “Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.”
Ms. Chua says that being a “Chinese mother” doesn’t require being Chinese, but it does require ignoring most of what parenting has come to mean in upper-middle-class Western societies. Where Western parents obsess over a child’s self-esteem and couch criticism in only the most oblique and supportive terms, Chinese parents “assume strength, not fragility,” and thus deploy insults and pressure with abandon.
“Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, ‘Hey fatty—lose some weight,’ ” Ms. Chua writes. “By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of ‘health’ and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image.” (Interestingly, in China, books that encourage parents to nurture their children’s independence and confidence, as opposed to focusing exclusively on high academic achievement, have grown increasingly popular, as we’ve posted about before.)
A centerpiece of Ms. Chua’s excerpt is her tale of teaching her daughter Louisa, known as Lulu, to play a difficult piano piece at age 7. Lulu struggles with the different rhythms required for each hand in the piece, finally tearing up the sheet music in frustration; Ms. Chua tapes it together, laminates it and forces Lulu back to the keyboard. As the battle rages, she eventually tells Lulu “to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic,” which draws a gentle rebuke from the Western parent in her own household, her husband, Jed. Ms. Chua, undeterred, goes back to work on Lulu, through dinner and into the night, with no water or bathroom breaks. Finally, Lulu succeeds, leading to a joyful, snuggly night at home and, weeks later, a brilliant recital performance.
In sharp contrast to Ms. Chua’s philosophy is the cult hit documentary “Race to Nowhere,” made by a parent, Vicki Abeles, who was prompted to shoot the film after her daughter started having stress-related stomachaches. The book features boys who take leaves from high school because of the intense pressures, girls who suffer stress-induced insomnia and other maladies, and rampant cheating, as students struggle to keep up, according to a New York Times feature about the film. “When success is defined by high grades, test scores, trophies,” a child psychologist says in the film, “we know that we end up with unprepared, disengaged, exhausted and ultimately unhealthy kids. ”
My wife’s and my own experience with our 9-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son is between the extremes, for now. We encourage academic achievement (and I chafe at the current pedagogical practice of not correcting our first-grader’s spelling), but we’re hardly taskmasters for perfection. And when our son, who has showed early promise at tennis, got tired of formal lessons, we let him drop them rather than, say, call him lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.
Ms. Chua will be taking readers’ questions Thursday on the Review section’s new blog, Ideas Market. Have your say here first, readers: What do you make of the rigorous methods of the “Chinese mother”? Have you tried such extraordinary strictness with your own children, or do your concerns run more toward those of “Race to Nowhere”?