Jian Ping, the author of the Mulberry Child memoir, grew up in China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Her father was one of the victims. The reason she came to the US was to provide a better life for her daughter. However, her daughter grew up to become a member of “The Sex and the City” generation and resisted learning what life was like for her mother in China.
Ping could not express her feelings to her daughter, who was taking life for granted and feeling she was entitled to the lifestyle so many young Americas take for granted today.
What I learned while researching “Mulberry Child” was that many privileged young people in America may be cursed to repeat history because they are taking life for granted as if they were entitled to the world their parents worked so hard to create.
In fact, most children in America have no concept of what life was like in the US less than a hundred years ago when children were mostly treated as adults and faced severe punishment such as mutilation, slavery, servitude, torture, and death—the US has a long history of treating children this way. Source: Child Labor in U.S. History
No matter what storm comes, you must be strong!
To understand Jian Ping’s struggle with her daughter Lisa, it helps to know what Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. wrote in Psychology Today, Why Chinese Mothers Really are Superior. “On average,” Dr. Twenge wrote, “Asian parents use more discipline and insist upon hard work more than Western parents. And on average, their kids do better…”
“Mulberry Child” (the documentary) takes an in-depth look at the relationship between a mother and daughter revealing the disconnect that often takes place between immigrant parents and their American raised/born children.
Do not underestimate the negative influence of children raised to have a strong sense of self esteem.
In America, the children of immigrants are often influenced by these peers, which prepares them to become members of the “Sex and the City” generation believing they are entitled to a privileged life and that happiness is guaranteed. Most American children have no concept of how unrealistic this attitude of entitlement is.
However, it is not easy for the older generation to teach their children and grandchildren how difficult it was to survive and reach America and how much hard work and sacrifice it took to succeed once they arrived.
To understand what happens when the children born/raised in the US are disconnected from their immigrant parents/grandparents, America’s children should take the same journey Lisa’s mother provided through her memoir and the documentary of “Mulberry Child”.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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There is a difference in values and education between urban and rural parents since many Chinese in rural China never went to school or had a school close to the village while larger towns and cities all had schools.
In the last thirty years that has been changing. After Mao died in 1976 and as late as 1980, twenty percent of Chinese were literate and 80% were not. In the last thirty years, literacy has been raised to above 90%. If the average Chinese parent was a SAP, that wouldn’t have happened.
In fact, I’ve heard that Amy Tan’s (the author of The Joy Luck Club) mother’s primary concern was that her daughter speak English without an accent.
Amy Tan writes that her mother wanted her to be a doctor and a concert pianist. Amy Tan’s mother was an immigrant from mainland China and she was not a SAP parent by any definition but she wasn’t as extreme as Amy Chua either.
China’s leaders in Beijing knew that for China to modernize and prosper, the people would have to be literate and educated so starting in the 1980s, the public schools spread into rural China for the first time in history to reach as much of the rural population as possible.
However, urban education is still better than rural education. It takes more than a generation to bring about changes this drastic.
Meanwhile, the opposite is happening in the United States where the average literate person reads at or below fifth-grade level and among younger Americans we find few serious readers.
While China promotes education and is supported by Tiger Parents of all stripes, in America for the last sixty years, the SAPs have waged a war on education to make learning more fun than educational, which has damaged America’s ability to maintain its economic status in the world.
To reverse this trend, what America needs is more Tiger Parents of all stripes and fewer SAPs.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
My last post was about The Role of Religion, and I quoted Henry L. Carrigan Jr’s piece published in ForeWord magazine.
Following Carrigan’s piece was another excellent review of nine more books. This review was also seamless but written by Diane Gardner. The theme was good parents rebel: atypical ways to raise a child.
Gardner says, “Grandparents, friends, and experts all suggest the ‘right’ way to parent, and there are countless books intended to help, but many only add to the pressure.”
She writes, “while providing thoughtful guidance, they (the nine books) explore nonconforming options for parents. From suggestions on how to give birth to discipline advice…”
Gardner’s review couldn’t come at a better time as the debate rages between the SAPs (the Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness) and Tiger Parents such as Chinese-American Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, although Chua hasn’t put up much resistance.
If you do not believe a debate is raging, visit Amazon.com and read the four and five star reviews along with the following comments. Some of these people are obsessive and mentally disturbed.
Gardner writes of The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood (University of California Press), “mixed or even negative emotions about motherhood are neither evil nor uncommon…. Some parents claim societal pressures go so far as to tell them how to feel and what to do.”
In Trucking’ with Sam: A Father and Son, the Mick and the Dyl, Rockin’ and Rollin’, on the Road (State University of New York Press), Gardner says, “sometimes the more unconventional ways to bond prove more effective than the traditional family dinners and game nights,” and of First the Broccoli Then the Ice Cream: A Parent’s Guide to Deliberate Discipline (Two Fish, Inc) Gardner quotes psychologist Tim Riley and why time-outs often don’t work and suggests using more meaningful penalties instead, such as loss of TV privileges (great idea).
In fact, the emotional debate that Amy Chua’s essay in the Wall Street Journal and her memoir caused arrives at the right time as the US ponders how to improve educational outcomes in the public schools.
The key to a child’s success in school is often the parent and while most children and teens only have one or two parent/s, those same students may have as many as fifty teachers kindergarten to the end of high school.
Just reading Diane Gardner’s good parents rebel: atypical ways to raise a childwill provide more fuel for the American parenting debate that is long overdue. The average American SAP parenting model is the real reason for the failure of public education in the US.
It is time for the average American parent to change course.
Discover how Amy Chua invaded Chinaand ignited a parenting debate in the Middle Kingdom.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Those that read my work regularly may know that I was a public school teacher in Southern California for thirty years.
During that time, some of the toughest parents I met were Christian fundamentalist evangelicals and none was SAP parents (Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness).
One Caucasian student was home taught by his parents because they feared exposure to children raised by SAP parents and taught by teachers pressured to dumb down the work while inflating grades by the same SAPs.
However, when he was old enough to go to high school, he managed to convince his parents to allow him to be among teens his own age.It was obvious from the start that this tall, pale skinned Caucasian teen had been raised by Tough Love parents (probably not as demanding as Amy Chua) to be a disciplined, polite young man that earned excellent grades in high school.
When his parents enrolled him in the high school where I taught, they requested the counselor put him in the toughest teachers’ classes.
As a ninth grade student, he ended in my English class where I recruited him into my journalism class.
Most high school journalism students are disciplined and work hard.
Then, in his senior year, he became editor-in-chief of the high school student newspaper, and I was the faculty advisor. He never missed a deadline. He even managed to intern at a local newspaper his last semester in high school.
Last time we shared e-mails a few years ago, he was the news anchor for a network TV station in Palm Desert, California. He’d even spent a tour in the US Navy.
The fact is that there are great Tough Love parents in America but the average US parent according to many studies is a SAP that allows the child to spend an average of 10 hours a day watching TV, on the Internet probably on Facebook, playing video games or sending out hundreds of text messages while eating unhealthy food.
The SAP crowd is noisy and nosey.For example, I just searched Amazon for books with topics on Self Esteem and discovered 3,358 books with those words in the title or description.
When I searched Tough Love, the results came back with eighteen titles.
I also discovered that there’s a Website that talks about Self Esteem Magazines for Children. I didn’t find any magazines about Tough Love, but Chinese parents don’t need magazines to know how to be a better parent than a SAP.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
At a recent Chinese-American Lunar New Year dinner, all Asians were talking about Amy Chua’s essay in the Wall Street Journal, WhyChinese mothers are superior, and her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
They were angry with Chua. They said Chua was going to make their job as parents more difficult since most American Caucasian parents would stereotype them and disapprove.
Since most of the Chinese-Americans I know were born and raised in mainland China, I had to remind them that Amy Chua grew up in the US and was not Chinese but Chinese-American.
While her Middle Kingdom born and raised mother and overseas Chinese father raised her using perfectly acceptable, universal Tough Love parenting methods, she was also exposed to America’s evangelical atmosphere where far to many preach his or her brand of parenting, religion, politics and lifestyle as if it were the only acceptable way to live.
Among Chinese in America or China, I’ve seldom heard anyone preach what he or she believes is the best way to raise children, live and worship.
However, one of my closest Caucasian friends in the US does nothing but preach.
The consensus among the Asians I’ve heard was that it was wrong of Amy Chua to brand Tough Love parenting as a Chinese method.
In fact, it isn’t. All through history, Tough Love has been the way most parents raised children all over the globe. SAP (Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness) is the exception and is a recent, flawed belief. The SAP parenting model could be called the curse of a wealthy family or culture, which often leads to its downfall.
According to the reader reviewsfor Amy Chua’s memoir at Amazon.com, at 11:59 AM on Sunday, February 06, 2011, one-hundred-and-fifty-seven (157) people rated her memoir as a four or five star read.
Many of these four and five star reviews were thoughtful, long and well written.
In contrast, there were one-hundred-thirteen (113) one or two star reviews and most that I read were short with a few long-winded rants that seldom go into detail about the book itself.
The results show that more than 58% of reader reviews enjoyed her work or supported some level of Tough Love parenting leaving 42% opposed to her memoir/parenting style.
I didn’t count the three star reviews since they are somewhat neutral.
Then there is the on-line opinion pollthe Wall Street Journal conducted to discover which style of parenting was considered best for raising children.
The Permissive Western parenting style most practiced by SAPs, earned 37.7% of the 35,201 votes, while 62.3% voted for Demanding Eastern parenting.
The results from Amazon reader reviews and the WSJ poll on the subject seem to indicate that SAPs make up about 40% the population, which may represent the “average” American parent and child.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
I often hike in a local regional park. One Sunday while passing others on the narrow trail, I overheard several Average Caucasian American (ACA) female conversations: “I bought frozen bones for my dogs at Petco. They love them. They chew on them straight from the freezer,” or “He was so cute in his Darth Vader costume.”
This regional park is huge. It runs for miles in all directions. There are mountain lions, coyotes, rattlesnakes, deer, etc.
Although I haven’t seen a cougar yet, I’ve read of them in a local newspaper but I have seen coyotes and too many deer.
The park rules are clearly displayed at entrances. “Dogs must be on a leash under your control at all times. Dogs are not allowed on trails (yet I see them on trails all the time).”
I’ve hiked in this park for years and seldom see any dogs on leashes. However, I have seen a lot of dogs and their owners.
A few dogs are well behaved and stay close to the owner under tight control even if it is unleashed.
Many of the dogs ran around having a great time and would make good anarchists if they were humans. Their owners call to them, beg, plead and those dogs ignore the owner as if he or she was a nuisance.
I wonder if those same ACAs raised their children that way. Plenty of studies for the last few decades indicate that is probably true.
In contrast, when I’m around most Chinese-Americans, they don’t talk about cute costumes or frozen dog bones or beg dogs to behave while being ignored.
In fact, most conversations among Chinese-Americanparents focus on children and education. These parents network learning from each other where the best schools are and what it takes to get into a top rated university.
Most Asian parents are a big part of their children’s lives and daily conversations are much longer than the five minutes or less a SAP (Self-esteem arm of political correctness) parent spends talking to his or her children.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Koratsky’s book is a heavily researched, scholarly work that gathers what science has discovered since Darwin’s discoveries and fills in the gaps explaining why evolution has something to teach us if humanity is to survive.
The other choice is humanity going the way of the dinosaurs into extinction.
I started reading in early 2010 and took months to finish the 580 pages. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability level would probably show this book to be at a university graduate level leaving at last 90% of the population lost as to the importance of its message.
For months, it bothered me that so many in the United States do not have the literacy skills to understand an important work such as this (the average reader in the US reads at fifth grade level and millions are illiterate). This is certainly not a good foundation to learn how precarious life is if you do not understand how brutal the earth’s environment and evolution has been for billions of years.
As I finished reading Living With Evolutionor Dying Without It, I realized that it would only take a few key people in positions of power to understand the warnings offered by Koratsky and bring about the needed changes in one or more countries so humanity would survive somewhere on the planet when the next great challenge to life arises.
On page one, Koratsky starts 13.7 billion years ago with the big bang then in a few pages ten billion years later, he introduces the reader to how certain bacteria discovered a new way to access the energy required to sustain an existence.
By the time we reach humanity’s first religion on page 157, we have discovered what caused so many species to die out and gained a better understanding of what survival of the fittest means.
To survive means adapting to environmental challenges no matter if they are delivered by the impact of a monster asteroid to the earth’s surface, global warming (no matter what the reason) or by competition with other cultures or animals competing for the earth’s resources.
In fact, competition is vital to the survival of a species for it is only through competition that a species will adapt to survive.
The book is divided into two parts.The first 349 pages deals with where we have been and what we have learned, and the two hundred and eleven pages in Part Two deals with current ideas and policies from an evolutionary perspective.
I suspect that most devout Christians and Muslims would dismiss the warnings in this book out-of-hand since these people have invested their beliefs and the survival of humanity in books written millennia ago when humanity knew little to nothing about the laws of evolution and how important competition is to survival.
Koratsky is optimistic that the United States will eventually turn away from the political agenda of “Cultural Relativism” that has guided America since the 1960s toward total failure as a culture.
The popular term for “Cultural Relativism” in the US would be “Political Correctness”, which has spawned movements such as race-based quotas and entitlement programs that reward failure and punish success
Even America’s self-esteem movement is an example of “Cultural Relativism”, which encourages children to have fun and praises poor performance until it is impossible to recognize real success.
The current debate started by Amy Chua’s essay in The Wall Street Journal is another example of “Cultural Relativism” at work.
After reading Living with Evolution or Dying Without It, it is clear that Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother Methodsof parenting are correct while the soft approach practiced by the average US parent is wrong and will lead to more failure than success.
Koratsky shows us that the key to survival for America is to severely curtail and eventually end most US entitlement programs. While “Cultural Relativism” is ending, competition that rewards merit at all levels of the culture (private and government) must be reinstituted.
He points out near the end of the book that this has been happening in China and is the reason for that country’s amazing growth and success the last thirty years.
In the 1980s, merit was reinstituted at the bottom and most who prosper in China today earned the right to be rewarded for success by being more competitive and adapting. Even China’s state owned industries were required to become profitable or perish.
The earth’s environment does not care about equality or the relativists’ belief that everyone has a right to happiness even if society must rob from the rich and give to the poor.
This book covers the evolution of the universe, the planet, all life on the planet including the reasons why most life that lived on the earth for hundreds of millions of years before humanity is now gone; the beginnings of the human species; religion in all of its costumes; the growth of civilizations and the competitions that led to the destruction and collapse of so many such as the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty two millennia ago.
The environment and evolution says that all life on the planet is not equal and no one is born with a guaranteed right to success, happiness and fun. To survive means earning the right through competition and adaption.
If you don’t believe Koratsky’s warning, go talk to the dinosaurs and ask them why they are gone.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
In China, Amy Chua is being criticized for writing that Chinese parenting is superior to soft Western methods.
The criticism from China comes from the deep cultural roots of Confucianism and Taoism that one does not force his or her beliefs, opinions and lifestyle on someone else as being better. It is considered improper to preach. It doesn’t mean most Chinese disagree with her.
However, Chinese parents may preach to their children.
Have you ever met a Confucian or a Taoist going door to door touting his philosophy and warning you are doomed if you do not convert?
In her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chua proudly says, “My family comes from southern China’s Fujian Province, which is famous for producing scholars and scientists.”
Then sometime around 1925 as China descended into Civil War, World War II, chaos and anarchy for the next fifty years, her grandparents moved to the Philippines where her father was born. Chua’s mother was born in China in 1936.
In 1960, her parents met in Boston, which means Amy Chua’s mother was really Chinese.
Amy Chua learned from her parents how to be strict and demanding, which explains why she wrote, “Chinese parenting is better at raising kids than Western ones.”
Parents I call SAPs (the Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness) believe that any effort to control a child, burden her with rules and guide him toward a goal is child abuse. The SAP method is to encourage children to follow his or her dreams and be happy all the time.
This is how the “average” American parent has been raising children in the US for decades.
Since I was criticized for writing the average American parent is a SAP as if I meant, “all” Americans, Princeton.edu clearly says, “average people”; “the ordinary (or common) man in the street”. Another site says, “around the middle of a scale of evaluation“.
The word “average” doesn’t mean “all”. Unexceptional and exceptional people don’t count in the average, but studies say SAP parenting is average (common) in America.
The SAPs of America have evangelized this soft parenting method for the last fifty years converting many to this religion.
If Chua had written, “Chinese-American parents are better at raising children,” she wouldn’t have been criticized in China — just in America from the common SAP.
After all, Amy Chua is Chinese-American and has been influenced by America’s evangelical atmosphere of preaching and converting others. The competition is fierce since there are thousands of Christian sects, Islam, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, neoconservatives, Republicans, Democrats, SAPs and now Tough Love parents — unless the SAP mob forms an alliance with one of the other religions and lobbies for a law to make Tough Love illegal.
SAPs have already been very successful in the SAP war against spanking children as a last effort to correct an unacceptable behavior. Instead, parents are required to bribe kids the SAP way with a TV, video games, a Facebook page, sugary foods, toys and trips to Disneyland.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
China is the polar opposite of America in many ways. In China, as a collective culture, the child is an extension of the parent and is not seen as an individual.
China has been this way for thousands of years where the family is more important than the individual is and the country is more important than the family and the individual.
The rules of Confucianism emphasized this cultural structure and these behaviors were practiced, endorsed and enforced by the Han Dynasty centuries before the birth of Christ.
In contrast, the American brand of individualism, which is represented by the rudeness and rebellion we see in America today has only been in practice for about fifty years.
Contrary to popular opinion, Americans have not always been rebels. That image was born and reinforced by 20th century Hollywood films that often depict rebellious children and criminals as clever, popular heroes while turning hard working authority figures such as the police, teachers and parents into idiots and oppressors.
In fact, if you read the history of child labor in the United States, you would discover that forms of child labor, including indentured servitude and child slavery, have existed throughout American history.
It wasn’t until the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which set federal standards for child labor that the US moved toward providing a free, compulsory education for all children instead of children working in factories or coalmines or on farms as young as five.
Before 1938, instead of going to school, most American children went to work at a very early age and often labored twelve or more hours a day six days a week with only the Sabbath off.
The cultural concept that earning an education is worth the sacrifice of hard work that it demands has never existed in America.
However, China has a long history of providing an education to children of all classes as far back as the Han Dynasty since that is what Confucius taught.
In China for more than two thousand years, teachers and parents have been the heroes and are respected for the sacrifices they make to better a child’s future, which does not translate into encouraging a child to chase his or her dreams since, in reality, fantasies seldom come true and only a “few” achieve such dreams
After all, not “everyone” can become the next Bill Gates, Oprah or Selene Dion.
The collective concept of Confucianism has no room for an individual’s rights or dreams. What an American sees in China as oppression, most Chinese don’t even think about because that way of thought doesn’t exist in China’s Confucian dominated collective culture.
Hence, a Tiger Mother, such as Amy Chua, is respected for doing her duty as a Chinese parent. Being a SAP (the Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness) parent would be unthinkable.
I suspect that even if Amy Chua doesn’t sell the Chinese rights to her book, a publisher in China will steal the book, translate it and it will be a massive bestseller as Chinese parents buy and read her book to discover tougher methods of parenting.
That means Chinese mothers will be reading Chua’s book to learn what it takes to raise a child that performs in Carnegie Hall, while those mothers criticize Chua in public instead of praising her while secretly trying out what she learned from Chua.
That sort of behavior to say one thing while doing another is also common in China since Taoism is the other side of the Chinese character.
Bragging is also not acceptable until you have earned the right to brag by achieving the goals you set for yourself that no one else has ever heard of since bragging that you will be the next Bill Gates when you are a child is considered stupid and maybe a sign of a mental illness.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Any fool can be a parent, and the average American parent is a fool.
Amy Chua is not a fool.
I taught English, journalism and reading in the American public schools from 1975 to 2005. I experienced the decline of the American family while working 60 to 100 hours a week teaching, writing lesson plans and correcting the work my students turned in.
When I was born, children were still taught to be seen and not heard. Most of my generation was polite and respectful of our elders — not so today.
My mother taught me how to read and I was required to learn and play a musical instrument. For me that was the accordion. However, my parents weren’t as tough as Chua was, and I don’t remember how to play the accordion, which is something I regret.
In America, any semblance of a parent’s freedom of choice of how to raise a child all but vanished starting in the 1960s when the Self-esteem Arm of Political Correctness (SAP) became the only acceptable way to act, think, and speak as a parent.
Parents that deviated from the self-esteem model were driven underground and Chua was perceptive enough to see that.
Sophia, Amy Chua’s oldest daughter, shows what SAP has done to America’s children on page 191 (hardcover). Sophia says, “Do you know what a good daughter I am? Everyone else I know parties all the time, and they drink and do drugs. And do you know what I do? Every day I run straight home from school. I run.…”
What Sophia said is true. My wife and I heard much the same story from our daughter, and I saw this self-destructive behavior become the norm during the thirty years I was a teacher in the US public schools.
I suggest strongly that if you plan to be a parent soon or in the future, read Amy Chua’s memoir so you know what your parenting choices are.
For anyone who has a child already in school, it may be too late to reverse the damage that has been done by being a SAP
Changing a child’s unacceptable behavior can happen but the longer a child goes without being corrected, the more of a challenge it becomes.
In her memoir, Chua mentions that her husband and most Westerners believe we owe children since they did not ask to be born.
Where did this ridiculous concept come from?
The answer is SAP!
In fact, no one alive today or at any time in history asked to be born. Adam in the Garden of Eden did not ask God to create him, and God used the “carrot and stick” method to control Adam’s behavior. When Adam broke God’s one rule, He threw Adam out of the Garden and took away his immortality.
If you decide to read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, pay close attention and you will discover that Chua’s daughters did not suffer as much as some critics claim. When a Timemagazine reporter recently interviewed Chua in her home, her oldest daughter was upstairs with her boyfriend and could be heard laughing.
Children don’t have to go shopping for the latest fashions or spend a day at Disneyland to have fun. If a child is raised properly, he or she will find enjoyment in things such as reading or learning how to play the violin or piano.
Sarah and Lulu, Amy Chua’s daughters, have lived an incredible life that most children never imagine and their mother gave them the best gift of all — values and discipline.
A real parent, like God with Adam, sets rules, goals and expectations for his or her children. This is what Amy Chua writes about throughout her memoir as she explores the difference between two methods of raising children.
Life cannot be all carrots and fun as the average American SAP parent believes.
In this brutally honest memoir, Amy Chua shows us the extremes of Tough Love.
Love, by definition is not abuse and Chua does not abuse her children when she set high goals/standards for them and demanded that her daughters achieve these goals. After reading the essay, Chinese Mothers are Superior, in the Wall Street Journal or reading her memoir, if you feel she abused her children, you are wrong and have no idea what abuse is.
By expecting excellence from her daughters, Chua demands more of herself and sacrifices much to see that her children achieve the goals that are the parent’s right to decide — at last until that child is a teenager.
The Tiger Mother Tough Love approach to raising a child that Chua writes of in her memoir is not the only Tough Love parenting model.
A Tough Love parent may also set the bar as low as earning D’s or better while only praising the best the child does such as earning an A on a major assignment or test or winning a gold or silver medal in a challenging competition where few win among many who compete.
In the Tough Love approach to parenting there must be a stick and a carrot (punishments and rewards) and there must be criticism and praise. How much of a choice a child has, at least until they are a teen, is decided by the parents — not the child.
The American SAP method of raising children is not parenting — it’s child abuse.
Studies show the average American child spends about 10 hours a day in one or more of these empty activities — watching TV, playing video games, socializing on Internet sites such as Facebook or sending hundreds of text messages on a mobile phone.
Studies also show that watching TV stunts the growth of a child’s imagination.
SAP parents seldom if ever use a stick just as the word “NO” is seldom heard or enforced if used.
Amy Chua started out tough and mean and that was the right decision. She was also right when she said, “All those Western parents with the same party line about what’s good for children and what’s not — I’m not sure they’re making choices at all. They just do what everyone else does.…”
She was right.
In thirty years of teaching, I worked with more than 6,000 children and teens and met with and talked to hundreds of parents. It is sad how the SAP parents all sounded and acted the same. They were broken records.
It is easier for a tough parent to go soft than a soft parent to become tough. I learned that from my master teacher the year I was earning my teaching credential.
Children are born wild and it is up to parents and teachers to tame them and show them the proper way to behave and live his or her life. SAP parents often fail at this job.
A parent or child in a SAP family never takes the blame when the child fails a test or a class or behaves unacceptable in public. Instead, the blame goes to the schools and teachers even if the child or teen never reads, doesn’t do homework or never studies for tests.
To a SAP parent, it is always the teacher’s fault.
To a SAP parent, depriving a child of his daily dose of fun is evil.
As a teacher, I was often the victim of SAP parents and children.
When my son was born, I practiced Tough Love and his mother was a SAP. When I punished him for not following the rules, his mother accused me of child abuse.
We divorced when he was three.
After that, his mother raised him as a SAP 90% of the time. He spent the other 10% with me. When he was with me, I made him do yard work and other weekend chores while I was also doing them. I also made him read and do his homework.
During the week when my son was with his SAP mother, she called and asked me to tell him to do his homework.
My son’s SAP mother helped him become the successful waiter and bartender he is today at thirty-four. His dream, which his SAP mother encouraged, was to become a famous actor but that did not happen.
After my son’s first year out of high school, he told me he went to Disneyland thirty times. He did not earn a college education or degree. His SAP mother must be very proud of him.
I remarried and my wife is a Tough Love parent. She is also Chinese but not as tough as Amy Chua is.
In fact, every Asian and Chinese mother I’ve met was a Tough Love parent as Amy Chua points out in her memoir. I’ve read some of Chua’s critics accusing her of stereotyping Chinese mothers.
Those critics were wrong.
Most Chinese mothers practice a form of Tough Love and I often laughed while reading Chua’s book since the images were so vivid and real. Since most of my wife’s friends are Chinese mothers, I’ve seen how they are similar to Chua as parents. The mother depicted in Amy Tan’s book, The Joy Luck Club, was modeled after Tan’s Chinese mother.
When my wife and I raised our daughter, who is 19 now, we were always on the same page as far as discipline. Unlike Chua’s husband, I never disagreed with my wife’s Tiger Mother methods.
There was no problem restricting TV to a few hours on the weekend with content controlled by us.
Our daughter grew up reading books and there were no video games in our house. When I bought our daughter a mobile phone after she was in high school, I told her she would lose the phone if she used it for texting or used all the minutes that came with the plan I paid for. In four years, there was one 25-cent text message on the phone bill for her phone.
It wasn’t our daughter who used up the minutes talking on the phone. It was my wife.
I convinced my Chinese Tiger Mother wife that our daughter should be a scholar athlete, as it would help her get into a top US college. Our daughter was urged to select a sport, and she excelled in Pole Vault where she was listed as one of the top five girl pole-vaulters for her age in California. She seldom missed a practice and continued to earn A’s in her academic classes.
Both her mother and I tried to get her to go easier on herself, but she refused.
We allowed our daughter to attend a few school dances with a strict curfew. The one time she tried to get me to let her stay out later, I said no and did not back down.
She also was allowed a few sleepovers. However, at home bedtime was 9:30 with a stern rebuke by her mother if she wasn’t in bed on time.
Research shows that during the growing years, the brain does all of its development while sleeping, which required at least nine or more hours a night, and if sleep is missed, brain growth suffers.
Our daughter always had a nutritious breakfast before going to school. Each year, I asked my SAP students if they ate breakfast. Few did.
In addition, her mother and I used standardized test results to discover our daughter’s weak academic areas and strengthen them. She told her friends she had more fun at school than at home where the work her mother and I provided was often more challenging.
Of course, our daughter’s SAP raised friends felt sorry for her and this led to the same sort of rebellious behavior that Amy Chua’s youngest daughter Lulu demonstrates throughout most of the memoir.
Since our daughter had free time on her hands without video games and TV to soak it up, she taught herself how to play the piano without pressure. However, she will never play with the skill that Sophia and Lulu have for the piano and violin.
Graduating with a 4.65 GPA, our daughter was accepted to Stanford. I don’t think she will end up as a waiter or bartender as a lifelong career.
I wonder if my SAP raised son is happy knowing he may spend most of his life waiting on tables or mixing drinks for the low pay that comes with a job such as that. Then again, maybe he will win the lottery and have more time to visit Disneyland and have fun partying.
I urge everyone that reads this review to buy and read Amy Chua’s memoir. That doesn’t mean you have to be the parent she is but hopefully it will help you avoid being a SAP.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
