This article appeared under my byline in the Obiter Dicta, on January 31, 2011.
Like Luke, my partner in editorial crime, I also had strong feelings when I read Amy Chua’s story and book excerpt. “Horrified” might not be too harsh or exaggerated to describe what I felt as Ms. Chua tells us of threatening to leave her three year old daughter out in the cold and under-dressed if the little girl didn’t practise her piano lessons. This horror was only slightly reduced by the fact that Ms. Chua apparently was bluffing, and relented when her daughter stubbornly refused to submit to this threat. Unlike Luke, however, I read the article with the uneasy feeling that as harsh as Ms. Chua’s methods seem, when she talks about Western parents coddling and over-protecting their children, she may have a point.
As parents of a three-year old girl, my wife and I have spent a good deal of time discussing this very issue. We both have experience dealing with parents who treat their children like precious snowflakes, and who carefully pilot their children through life smoothing the way until those children become adults - adults who are virtually incapable of conducting their own affairs without continued assistance from mom and dad. Neither of us wants to raise our daughter this way, any more than we want to chain her to the piano bench and make her practise for hours without a pee-break. We are navigating our way between the Tiger and the Helicopter.
Luke has addressed the more, uh, problematic aspects of Tiger Mothering in some detail, so I won’t go over the same ground he’s covered. Instead I want to shine some light at our own culture and its approach to parenting, and what it says about us and the society we live in. While there is nothing wrong with wanting your child to explore their selves and to have a certain measure of freedom growing up in order to live self-fulfilled adult lives, there are limits to how far one can take this philosophy without creating generations of self-absorbed narcissists. We as a culture are dangerously close to crossing that limit.
Modern parenting and education is increasingly placing focus on the child as the centre of her world. A Western child of the middle classes or higher will be told repeatedly that she is “special”, that she deserves special treatment from people around her, that she should take what she wants of life, that she should be free to do whatever she chooses, and that in fact she is capable of doing anything she likes. This messaging will be reinforced by parents who will engage in holy wars against any adult who dares to suggest that their precious snowflake is anything less than perfect, by teachers who are not permitted to fail children for fear of damaging their self-esteem, and by a culture that in its media messaging emphasizes a kind of hyper-individualism that places rights above responsibilities, and the Self above the community. Further, this attitude gives the child the false idea that when she leaves the nest, the people around her will treat her as her parents have treated her.
Helicopter parenting is an extension of a kind of “me-first” mentality that seems to have pervaded our culture in the last few decades. Studies have been done that suggest that we donate less, volunteer less, and care less about the fate of those around us. Narcissism as a mental disorder has been on the rise, and increasingly we live in communities where we would be hard pressed to even recognise our neighbour, let alone love them. A person who believes in placing himself above the people around him will transfer this belief to his child, and will instill this “me-first” attitude into that child. It’s this attitude that I find objectionable. It’s this attitude that is the product of Western parenting.
So where does that leave us? What kind of parent do I want to be? Well, while my wife and I aren’t going to go the Chua route, we are going to have some basic rules for our girl. For example, she’ll have to learn to read music and play an instrument. But she’ll have some choice in what instrument she wants to learn, and she won’t be forced to practise for hours on end. We’ll expect her to get good grades, but she won’t be forbidden sleep-overs or play-dates (she’s had several play-dates already). When she inevitably has a teacher who doesn’t like her, we’ll teach her that she has to learn to handle unpleasant people in positions of power over her, instead of charging off to the school to demand that said teacher be fired. We’ll teach her that she has responsibilities to her parents, to the community of people around her, and to the society she lives in, and we have responsibilities to her. Will all of this work? Only time will tell.
Amy Chua celebrates a method of child-rearing that, to my eyes anyway, borders on child-abuse. But her methods can also be seen as a backlash against a style of parenting that can be no less harmful to children. Nobody can have perfect freedom as an adult without taking some measure of freedom away from the people around them. We all have to acknowledge that we have responsibilities to others, whether to our parents, our friends or our neighbours. To fail to teach our children these lessons, by instruction and by example, is to set them up for a fall when they go out into a world that doesn’t give a damn about their freedoms, or how special they are. This failure also creates a society where each person feels entitled to his freedom at the expense of all others, a kind of Hobbesian world of all-against all. It’s this kind of society that Chua seems to be railing against.
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