An unfortunately over-effective means of prosecuting one’s case to the public is to present it in an “either-or” manner. Amy Chua has championed her authoritarian parenting style, Tiger-Mothering, by claiming the sole alternative is a permissive parenting style she calls “Western Parenting” – which she indeed successfully argues against. Two weeks after Chua’s essay was published, Dr. Wednesday Martin of Psychology Today debunked Chua’s “either-or” argument with solid research that favored authoritative parenting over both authoritarian parenting and permissive parenting. What is the difference between authoritative and authoritarian parenting? It is a warm relationship. An authoritative parent holds his or her children to high standards, but would never do something cold or crass like tear up a hand-made birthday card no matter how poorly the birthday card was crafted.
While children reared in authoritarian households often display many impressive competencies as adults, the most obviously missing competencies are verbal and social confidence. Chua asks us to look at the “stereotypical” Chinese child or adult raised by a tiger mother. She expects us to be impressed with the stereotype. Instead, most of us cringe. The most obvious missing element is relationship skills. As I look at my adult peers in the professional world, I see no shortage of “smart” people. But what is woefully lacking is true leadership skills. Leadership is the most challenging of all relationship skills.
Chua forbids play-dates, summer camp and acting in school plays. She doesn’t necessarily explain why each is forbidden. School plays seem to be forbidden because there is no way to quantify success and Ms. Chua is only interested in success that can be quantified. She has no means to measure the value of the verbal confidence that is built participating in a school play. In the cases of play-dates and summer camp, her problem seems to be a less-than-authoritarian training atmosphere.
In our home, we put large amounts of effort into ensuring Chloe and Philip develop healthy relationships—not merely so they can have fun—but so they can develop those ever so important relationship skills. Amelia and I invest a large amount of time talking to Philip and Chloe about their peers and their peers’ parents and how individual and group interactions play out in both individual situations as well as overall. From time to time a peer has dysfunctional relationship skills. Occasionally, the dysfunction is biological. But normally the dysfunction can be traced to the parents who are too authoritarian, too permissive or simply dysfunctional themselves. This makes for important teaching moments as we review the stories Chloe and Philip bring home. Alternatively, we sometimes encounter a child with a biological handicap whose parents invest heavily and patiently to help the child manage his or her handicap, and the results are often very impressive. These situations become converse teaching moments in which Chloe and Philip can learn about the power of overcoming one’s own weaknesses.
Admittedly, Chua’s authoritarian approach to social development is in many ways superior to what permissive parents do. Permissive parents merely let everything happen. They do not steer their kids toward emotionally healthy peers and away from the emotionally unhealthy ones. Under Chua’s roof, her kids learn to interact with adults, whereas under a permissive parenting model, kids mainly socialize with other kids. Permissive parents wonder why their kids shun their parents and other adults in favor of their peers at progressively earlier ages. I am not merely speaking about a teenager’s natural need to establish his or her personal life independently from the family of origin. The age old complaint “what is wrong with kids these days?” can be directly attributed to permissiveness in the social realm.
Still, I see Chua and her Tiger-Mothering model as lazy. Chua merely shuts the door on meaningful peer interaction. An authoritative parent manages the interactions and provides very meaningful direction whereas an authoritarian Tiger-Mother, simply forbids interactions that have the potential to promote permissiveness.
With Chloe, for example, we’ve had to teach her to accept the fact that not all her peers or peers’ families will operate according to the values we are teaching her. It can be frustrating for Chloe at times, but I believe it is going a long way toward Chloe being able to operate as a successful adult. She needs to develop the skill of managing which peers she can trust and which peers she cannot trust. And she is discovering that the trustworthiness of a peer does not always correlate with how much fun the peer is. The children of authoritarian parents and permissive parents normally don’t learn this important lesson until much later in life.
With all that said, Chloe’s experience navigating the awkward world of tween girl relationships relative to others deserves its own post without the necessity to rebut Amy Chua’s arguments in the process. In the meantime, I trust four posts in responding to Ms. Chua’s alluring arguments have been sufficient to get any reader thinking intelligently without succumbing to any kind of either-or trap. With that, I am pleased to move onward to new topics.
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