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Controversy over the Wall Street Journal's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" book excerpt by Yale professor and author Amy Chua heated up even further today, as a Jewish author and mother responded with a new essay in the same newspaper championing a more relaxed approach to parenting. Titled "In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom," Ayelet Waldman's essay humorously outlines differences between what she sees as the lackadaisical approach taken by western mothers and the strict regimen Chinese mothers use on their children that Chua discusses.

Whose children will succeed in life, Amy Chua’s or mine? What’s all this bother about Chinese Tiger Moms? Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has America’s female parents in a swivet. You’d have to take Sarah Palin to a NOW convention to see so many ladies mad at a fellow woman. Practically a third of the Atlantic’s April issue is taken up with Caitlin Flanagan and Sandra Tsing Loh giving Amy Chua the dickens in terms strong enough for Hillary Clinton’s private thoughts on Monica Lewinsky. My wife put it more succinctly: “This person is factory...

Amy Chua, the Yale law professor who enraged parents and morning show viewers everywhere when she published her parenting book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, must be feeling somewhat vindicated today. Chua's eldest daughter was just accepted to Harvard. Chua, better known as Tiger Mom, made headlines earlier this year for preaching the benefits of ultra strict parenting practices -- rooted in her own Chinese upbringing. The WSJ article that accompanied the release of her book was called "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" and preached a childhood free of video games, playdates, and TV and listed all the ways...

The Tiger Mother controversy sets up a false alternative between "Western" and "Eastern" parenting.  Western parenting is the liberal parenting method of coddling children and shielding them from the natural consequences of their failures in order to protect their self-esteem.  Eastern parenting is the tyrannical method of destroying a child's individuality through psychological and even physical abuse in order to shoehorn the child into a one-size-fits-all mold of perfection.  Both methods ignore basic facts of human nature and historical facts about what actually leads to success. Liberal (Western) parenting starts with the false premise that self-esteem is something a...

A certain essay appeared in the Wall Street Journal last Saturday, titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” to which one excerpted reaction from the Journal community itself was “I am in disbelief after reading this article.” The author is a Chinese mother, Amy Chua, a professor of law at Yale perhaps best known for writing the New York Times bestseller World on Fire. The essay affirms that stereotypical Chinese parenting produces stereotypical cases of success for the children raised in that fashion — impeccable grade reports, precocious competence in the violin and piano (but mind you, those instruments and no...

Fascinating and thought-provoking article that highlights an overlooked problem around the world. Conservatives understand that democracy has prerequisites, and Amy Chua's work draws our attention to some situations where promoting free-market deregulation and democracy at the same time can literally be a recipe for ethnic persecution and even genocide. As Chua notes, similar dynamics exist in some parts of the USA - she uses the American-Koreans in black neighbourhoods of L.A. as an example of this dynamic where a "market dominant" minority becomes a target for racial demagogues, leading to violence (and in the end, more poverty as investment leaves)....