Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Our family had reached a breaking point: my eldest son was in first grade and was tired all the time from a combination of school, music, sports, church, and lessons in Mandarin on Sundays. The reason he was taking Mandarin wasn’t to honor our family heritage (we are not Chinese-American), but because of a random phrase that his piano teacher had uttered in passing when he was five: “The children in my studio who go to Chinese school are the best ones at memorizing music as well,” she said. “Something about learning all those characters must strengthen their brains.” That was enough to send me into a flurry of Mandarin-mania, and within six months, my son was learning all about…
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Tuesday, January 25, 2011
By now, you’ve surely heard about the infamous Wall Street Journal article entitled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” based on Amy Chua’s new book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. As I read the WSJ excerpt, I cringed at Chua’s methods of imposing her brand of perfect parenting on her two daughters, such as never letting her kids go on playdates or calling them “garbage” when they displeased her. I thought I was hard on my own kids by making them practice their instruments every day, but Chua astonished me with the lengths to which she does the same, as she forces her young daughters to practice well beyond five hours on their violin and piano, threatening to throw away their favorite…
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Friday, January 21, 2011
I’m a little late to the party, but this is the first of two separate posts I’ve written about the whole “Tiger Mom”controversy: I was in a celebratory mood. Not an hour before, I’d walked across the stage at Constitution Hall in Washington D.C., welcomed the piece of paper declaring my new standing as a high school graduate, and thrown up my mortarboard with joy, flinging away four years of late nights, stressful exams, endless cram sessions, more than a few heartaches, and everything else that went along with attending a competitive public high school in the suburbs of our Nation’s Capital. I was still feeling giddy at dinner with my family at a posh steakhouse when my father revealed what he…
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Thursday, October 7, 2010
I read an article in the New York Times today that stopped me dead in my tracks. No pun intended, speaking of the title of this post. The article was entitled Picture Books Languish as Parents Push ‘Big-Kid Books’, and I found it completely sobering. Amongst the choice quotes in the article was this one from a bookstore manager in Washington, D.C.: “I see children pick up picture books, and then the parents say, ‘You can do better than this, you can do more than this.’ It’s a terrible pressure parents are feeling — that somehow, I shouldn’t let my child have this picture book because she won’t get into Harvard.” I admit, the “she won’t get into Harvard” hits a sensitive spot…
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