Tiger Mom Amy Chua Taps Into America's Growing China Complex
Fri, January 21, 2011 
RedTracker| This week’s TIME magazine puts Tiger Mom Amy Chua’s condemnation of America’s parenting styles within the larger context of America’s growing “China complex”.
Writer Annie Murphy Paul references President Obama’s acknowledgement that America has arrived at a “Sputnik moment” and the growing awareness that another country is pulling ahead in a global contests we assumed was ours permanently.
At AOC, we argue that America’s sense of being the center of God’s “divine right mission” for the world has caused us to become myopic and focused on the promise of religious ideology, rather than progress in science and new ideas.
Coupled with liberal elite parents who believe their children are flawless copies of themselves and entitled to the best of everything in life because … well because … we are hard pressed to understand how America will compete in the future.
Our problem goes far beyond jobs that are outsourced to cheaper labor countries. America’s children spend more time in front of the TV than in the classroom.
The top corporate leaders in the US tell the business media that they will be creating jobs and hiring in other countries because America’s kids can’t cut it. Why don’t we listen to these business leaders?
American Kids Aren’t Inherently More Gifted
TIME’s Paul reminds readers that much research supports Amy Chua’s argument that American parents do children no favors by praising every little dittie out of a kid’s mouth as “gifted” and “extraordinary”.
Research at Stanford by Carol Dweck says that some kids (a minority) who are complimented constantly on their intelligence will turn down tasks that require them to learn. They don’t want to expose the truth about themselves.
Hara Estroff Marano, editor-at-large for Psychology Today and author of A Nation of Wimps, counsels:
“Kids who have this well-earned sense of mastery are more optimistic and decisive; they’ve learned that they’re capable of overcoming adversity and achieving goals.” Children who have never had to test their abilities, says Marano, grow into “emotionally brittle” young adults who are more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.
Rote Learning and Creative Thinking
Research also supports Amy Chua’s insistence that rote practice is good for kids. The brain eventually changes, so that the tasks — playing the piano chords, for example — occur automatically.
Once this happens, the brain has made mental space for higher-order operations: for interpreting literary works, say, and not simply decoding their words; for exploring the emotional content of a piece of music, and not just playing the notes. Brain scans of experimental subjects who are asked to execute a sequence of movements, for example, show that as the sequence is repeated, the parts of the brain associated with motor skills become less active, allowing brain activity to shift to the areas associated with higher-level thinking and reflection.
Can Bravura and Confidence Carry America?
What is undeniable at this time in America is that educationally, we are not competing well against kids in other countries. The inevitable “don’t worry, test scores aren’t important” headline follows the next day, advising American’s not to sweat the statistics.
American kids rank #1 in confidence, say the divine-right pundits, and that counts more than anything else.
We disagree with that thinking here at AOC. I worked years in Asia and am intimately familiar with the differences in expectations of kids here and there.
Living in New York, I’ve watched Asian families arrive in the US, working around the clock in small grocery stores, sleeping in the back room, all for the sake of their children, who are expected to excel academically in return.
Hyper-Parenting
It’s not clear that the majority of American parents expect excellence from their children.
Perhaps the news stories of parents rejecting a B on their kids report cards as evidence of teacher fault, or physically attacking the coach for taking a poorly-performing kid out of a hockey game just make better reading. Perhaps American parents aren’t as out of control as the media reports suggest.
It is absolutely true that major corporations are contacting parents explaining that they cannot come with their kids to job interviews, and ‘no’ they can’t complain to human resources or file an EEOC complaint if their child isn’t hired. This trend I know to be real.
To underscore just how off balance we have become in America, a leading spokesperson for the NRA suggested this week that American kids be required to take a course in how to handle a gun, when they are in high school.
Listening to him on Parker-Spitzer, I was astonished.
In God We Trust
Our math and science scores are deplorable globally, and we’re throwing out art programs that are clearly demonstrated to improve education scores in unrelated subjects because we lack the funding. What is our solution to the crisis?
The ideology kings of America are focused on spending precious financial resources teaching our kids how to shoot straight.
Perhaps we deserve to get trounced by the Chinese or the Brazilians or the India. Perhaps America won’t become the #2 country in the world. How soon before we are #3 or #4?
Ok, ok. I know . . it can’t happen. God will prevail on behalf of the United States of America. Jesus will protect his flock from losing the top spot. Prayer is the answer.
While I agree that prayer and spirituality are an important focus in our lives, it’s doubtful that God will be riding in on his stallion, Tombstone, Arizona style, to save us from ourselves any time soon.
What if God is a bigger task master than Amy Chua? What then my fellow Americans?
More reading:
Amy Chua | Chinese Mothers Know Tough Love Is Best
Jewish Mom Ayelet Waldman Answers Chinese Tiger Mom Amy Chua
First generation American, daughter of South Korean immigrants, Michelle Rhee shares many of Amy Chua’s tough love ideas.
DC School Chancellor Michelle Rhee Resigns with Mayor Fenty’s Defeat
See also: American Students Score Pathetically Against Chinese on 200 PISA Test
Reader Comments (2)
Anne, I full agree this "china complex" as it is called is a very real thing, and a very dangerous thing. This current furor (furor? sheesh... were they not so pathetic they'd be hilarious sputterings of embarrassed indignation) over the "tiger moms" is not the first time you've hosted portions of this debate here on your pages.
The fact is while the United States of America won the second world war the cultural consequences of that victory set in motion several things that may very well turn out to be the destruction of the nation. President Eisenhower left office warning the nation of one of them, the dangers inherent in allowing a military-industrial complex to gain power within the culture. His warning was timely, it isn't hard to see the shadow that evil printed in blood on the last fifty years of history. That warning was in the realms open to a soldier turned statesman, the level of the geo-political. He could not warn of the cultural threat born of the same source that half a century later has left the nation he served so well in such grave peril. The debilitation of America's children into incompetence is certainly not the work of any single factor, but I will maintain there is a single enabling factor acting as trigger mechanism on all the others, and that factor which must be utterly purged from the culture for the United States of America to have any real chance of survival was created by the greatest victory ever won in warfare.
Sociologists even more than psychologists must depend on statistics, the mathematical concepts of distributions, the classic bell curve and the various deformations seen in that curve when some single force impacts a large percentage of the population the curve is set to represent. Any one bell curve can, of course, only represent accurately a very limited scope, a tiny peephole into the lives of the population it represents, a peephole always facing in the same direction in those lives, always focusing on the same single question. When such a peephole is properly positioned the resulting understandings are immense, truly massive. When such peepholes are poorly positioned or erroneous they are of course equally potent at generating confusion and wasted effort.
In the matter now before us, how to deal with this issue of the documented failing competence of America's children compared to their global competition I will assert the correct location for that key and critical peephole into understanding falls on this question, along this axis of thought so heavily influenced by exposure to warfare: Are you AFRAID FOR your children, or are you AFRAID OF your children?
It is easy to see how exposure to warfare could become a fear for the children, it is easy to see how the parent who fears for the safety and well being of their child will do all they can to prepare the child to meet the challenges of survival in the face of danger knowing from hard experience there will come a time they will be gone and their child must stand alone. It is not so hard to understand such an attitude, not so hard to see it at work in many places. It is the attitude seen in the Chinese mothers, the tiger moms.
The harder question to be understood is what could implant so much fear OF the children as to create the situation now seen in the United States where many, if not most, major mechanisms of the society are structured to weaken and minimize the competence of the children. The incompetence of the children is fact. The mechanisms that created that incompetence are transparent, for those who wish to know the mechanism of the betrayal is not hard to find. Nor was the evil worked in secret, warnings were very public dating from the mid 1960's (in the writings of one Dr. Max Rafferty think his name was, if nowhere else). It didn't happen overnight, it didn't happen in secret, it was tolerated and encouraged, and every evidence of logic says it was the result of fear not for the children but of the children.
I have a theory as to why and how such fear got implanted into the American culture, I will say my theories set the affliction that consumed Tail Gunner Joe at the far end of the same curve that contains my answer, but it's time for me to be polite and sit back down so maybe someone else will talk.
Americans won the second world war? Really? Maybe that's the problem..... Maybe it's time for Americans to stop thinking the US is the number one country in the world.
My three children went many years to school in Canada, France and Germany, speak multiple languages, learn and study, eat healthy and keep TV to a minimum. Enough time for hobbies and friends, to develop into a well rounded person.
I also believe in God and in life in general to not make myself crazy and worry about the future of my children.
I have chinese friends in Hong Kong, who say that China is great in copying very well, from products to copying everything the teacher tells the students. No imagination, no thinking for themselves. That's not the future role model for me or my family.