Is Amy Chua right?
2011-05-25
To judge Amy Chua’s approach to parenting, it is necessary to ask - is the approach successful? Is the approach replicable? It is obvious that Prof. Chua’s approach has failed on both accounts.
Prof. Chua takes great pride in the fact that her elder daughter performed at the Carnegie Hall after enduring years of practice and pressure from the “tiger mom”. It is also worth pointing out that now both of the daughters are now accepted by top universities. However, it is too early to declare her approach has had any meaningful success. Performing as a child protégé is far from being a musical maestro. Similarly, enrolling in an Ivy League school is merely a small step towards one’s future achievement and career – one can even argue this is a rather insignificant step given the experience of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and countless others.
True success is not measured by income and status, but by one’s contribution to society, which often is the results of passion, leadership, ingenuity, and creativity. Prof. Chua’s results oriented “tiger mom’ approach aims at producing well trained and skillful followers who are best suited for a high salary professional job or “meet a nice guy” – perhaps this is Prof. Chua’s definition of success – nevertheless, being forced to be purely results driven in one’s early age is hardly any way to build leadership or promote creativity.
Prof. Chua clearly would like others to adopt her parenting approach as she believes many parents are not pushing their children to fully realize their potentials. Although arguments such as “Everything valuable and worthwhile is difficult” and “Most people stink at the things they love, unless you work on it” are quite salient indeed – her approach can easily lead to strained family relationship and damaged personality if not implemented carefully. One might argue that her approach worked because her family is financially well off and she, as a university faculty, has ample free time to spend on her children. For a busier parent who is less financially resourceful, Prof. Chua’s virtuous cycle is more likely to turn into a vicious cycle where parental pressure can lead to excess rebellious moves from the children, which in turn intensifies the parental pressure and strains family relationship. The fact that Prof. Chua has to tune down her pressure to her younger daughter actually suggests the ineffectiveness of the so called “virtuous cycle”.
Prof. Chua’s approach is less likely to be successfully replicated because it has yet a reasonable strategy to address failure, which is inevitable to everyone at some point. She assumes that the parent always knows better than the child in terms of what is best for the child -ironically, she did not do a particularly good job calling her younger daughter’s talent for tennis. Most importantly if the path the “tiger moms” chose for the child failed, the responsibility of failure would fall squarely onto the parents, who are naturally incapable of being responsible for the child’s whole life. Allowing each individual to taking responsibility for his/her own decision is precisely why the modern society thrives.
It would be understandable if Prof. Chua intended the book to be controversial to sell more copies, but justifying a full set of parenting beliefs based on one family’s experience is far from right.
查字典图书网