Wow. When I read Amy Chua’s arti­cle in the Wall Street Jour­nal that was my reac­tion. Wow. On the one hand, she upholds some sterotypes that are out there of Asian moth­ers. On the other, she tries to let us see the rea­son­ing behind the behav­ior. The one thing she does not do is to cut Amer­i­can moms any slack. At all. Period. I think the word that comes to my mind is “wimps”.

This is pretty hot stuff right now. There has been much talk about Ms. Chua’s new book on the topic, “Bat­tle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” and I sus­pect she prob­a­bly feels that her words have been mis­in­ter­preted  by some. She has voiced her view­point and I am tak­ing this oppor­tu­nity to address some of the issues in hers that are caus­ing me the most difficulty.

1. “ What Chi­nese par­ents under­stand is that noth­ing is fun until you’re good at it.”

I strug­gle with this because I don’t believe it to be true. Life is about the jour­ney, not just the end result. And we can’t all be good at everything.The strug­gle to learn some­thing new and to mas­ter it can be fun as well as chal­leng­ing. And I can have fun at bowl­ing or scrap­book­ing or what­ever even if I’m not great at it. Doing some­thing just for the expe­ri­ence is enlight­en­ing and enrich­ing. (more…)