Amy Chua, Yale law professor and author of the derided yet oft-purchased best-seller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in which she criticizes the Western style of parenting, writes in an excerpt of her novel for The Wall Street Journal, “I’ve noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children’s self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. […] Western parents are concerned about their children’s psyches.” 1 In other words, this focus on self-esteem maintenance actually serves to stymie intellectual growth as opposed to helping it burgeon, and overall, this makes sense. If everything we do is “excellent,” “super,” or “very nice,” then what summit should we strive for if we’ve reached the apex at the age of ten-years old? This is not to suggest that encouragement is unnecessary, but when encouragement is disingenuous, then the individual is also being set up to fail when he or she is moved from the parental shelter into the world of higher education and employment where academia-driven professors and oft-indifferent bosses critique without interminable praise and pats on the back.
Moreover, consistent praise and approval might even negatively affect the way that children will ultimately feel about themselves. For example, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck “has conducted studies with hundreds of students, mostly early adolescents, in which experimenters gave the subjects a set of difficult problems from an IQ test. Afterward, some of the young people were praised for their ability: ‘You must be smart at this.’”; however, those that were praised for their intelligence “were more likely to turn down the opportunity to do a challenging new task that they could learn from,” which suggests that their unfamiliarity with failure or less-than-admired performance sets them up for a more sheltered existence, which can also lead to “anxiety and depression.”2
So, while Chua has come under fire for her extreme parenting methods – and to be honest, some are rather harsh, particularly when she calls her daughter “garbage” or “little white donkey” – she has a fine point about the dangers of sheltering children, so, why has she gotten so much flack for this? The dangers of over-praise is a theme that we are exposed to at a young age through a number of fairy tales, warning us to avoid vanity and cockiness lest we end up like the lazy rabbit who lost to the slow and steady tortoise or the three little pigs, two of which built their houses expediently without taking time to have it properly inspected for foundational difficulties that would leave them homeless after the first gust of wind (or breath as it may be).
What might be my favorite fairy tale that sheds light on this recurrent revelation is “Little Red Riding Hood,” though the moral is often mistaken and misconstrued as a warning for children to stay on the beaten path and not stray from parental instruction. However, a deeper subtext within this fairy tale is one that explores the illusory world created from the lack of strict parenting and how what might be obviously dysfunctional or malevolent is misinterpreted as normal and innocuous.
Although there are number of variation of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the tale was originally told by French author Charles Perrault around 1697, and in this tale – much like the also popular Brother’s Grimm version – the reader is introduced to Red as “the prettiest creature who was ever seen,” whose “mother was excessively fond of her; and her grandmother doted on her still more.” 3 In other words, Red was hardly the object of scorn or judgment. Instead, the excessive cosseting by both maternal figures in her family has fashioned this cloying, saccharine atmosphere, and while there are benefits to encouragement, this prefaces Red’s ignorance and inexperience when she ventures to grandmother’s house and encounters the wolf, an ominous creature who “had a very great mind to eat her up, but he dared not, because of some woodcutters working nearby in the forest.” Aside from the sexual undertones of this encounter that pits the virginal country girl, who was “the prettiest creature who was ever seen,” against another creature that symbolizes the natural hunting instinct within animal –kind, Red’s ignorance to the danger posed here – both sexually and physically – is emphasized, particularly when she exposits exactly where she’s going and how to get there. Overall, Red’s ignorance, at least in part brought on by her mother’s and grandmother’s enabling ultimately leads her into a nefarious situation.
The subtext to the original version of “Little Red Riding Hood” is also explored in 1996’s Freeway, which stars Reese Witherspoon as Vanessa Lutz, an illiterate, sexually experienced, daughter of a crack-head who is often molested by her crack-head stepfather. And while Freeway provides us with a character who is more experienced in regards to her sexuality and the violence she has witnessed, she is still ignorant to what genuine love or support consists of. What I mean to suggest is that Vanessa views cops – or pigs – as villains who continually make her an orphan by taking “her whole family away” for various infractions like prostitution, drug possession, or parole violation without seeing the dysfunctional play in which she has been cast.
Despite the fact that Vanessa’s mom Ramona (Amanda Plummer) is the obvious degenerate who is easiest to vilify for her preference for crack over her daughter, the wonkiness of their relationship is illustrated when she tries to plead her way out of an arrest by stating “[Veronica] just got out of children’s services, and I can’t afford to be busted again. They’ll take her away from me.” Here, we see a maternal side shining through, and whether it’s a cop out or not is unclear, but it is clear that Veronica loves her mother when she holds back tears long enough to be Ramona’s hands, helping her smoke a cigarette before a last hug, and chalking her parents’ recent conflict up to them “just going through a hard time, that’s all,” allowing us to see how little Veronica understands the twisted triad of her family, which also poses the question: if twisted love is all you know, does it negate the emotion?
A combination of her mother’s arrest and a desire to avoid another foster home drives Veronica to find her grandmother, her only known relative, but someone who may not know that Veronica exists. Regardless, Veronica’s car eventually breaks down and she’s picked up by Bob Wolverton (Keifer Sutherland), who turns out to be the I-5 killer, a murderer who has spent the last few weeks praying on hookers and leaving their bodies on the side of the highway.
While Wolverton’s spectacles, eloquent diction, and tweed suit with leather patches deter Veronica from assuming he’s a homicidal maniac, Freeway offers a similar example of ignorance leading to peril. While Red Riding Hood was unable to discern the danger lurking within the visibly ominous wolf, Veronica is swept up in the neat appearance and intelligence of Wolverton, unable to see the creepiness that lies underneath his façade until she is already in his Blazer and travelling down the highway. Although there is a social commentary running here about classification though appearance, Veronica has been trained to see Wolverton as someone who is not her, someone who is not a “urinal,” and this allows his to make his move by eliciting the information he’s seeking. In Freeway, it is not the grandmother’s house, but a justification to kill Veronica once he can categorize her as “garbage people,” someone who he’s “absolutely reached his fucking limit with,” those whose puerilities are “so intrinsic to your fucking nature you’re not even aware of when you do it.”
However, Veronica is unaware of where Wolverton’s hatred of these acts comes from because, to her, they are second nature and behavior learned from a laissez faire mother, step father, and foster parents who, while they may not have encouraged her actions, did little to discourage them.
In the end, perhaps the same reason why we truncate and focus on the minimal moral within certain fairytales is because our fear of exposing the youth to anything perceived as “damaging” or “self-esteem hindering” has overridden our sense of responsibility to set examples and illuminate the positive and the negative, the malevolent, the benevolent, and the ambivalent.
1Chua, Amy. The Wall Street Journal, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” 2011.
2 Paul, Annie Murphy, Time, “The Roar of the Tiger Mom” 2011.
3 Perrault, Charles “Little Red Riding Hood” http://werewolves.monstrous.com/perrault_version.htm
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Why is the art of music required to endure the ill-informed antics of such inartistic imbeciles as Amy Chua? Her lust for fame as an old-fashioned stage mother of either a famous violinist (yet another mechanical Sarah Chang?) or a famous pianist (yet another mechanical Lang Lang?) shines through what she perceives as devotion to the cultivation of the cultural sensitivities of her two unfortunate daughters.
Daughter Lulu at age 7 is unable to play compound rhythms from Jacques Ibert with both hands coordinated? Leonard Bernstein couldn’t conduct this at age 50! And he isn’t the only musician of achievement with this-or-that shortcoming. We all have our closets with doors that are not always fully opened.
And why all this Chinese obsession unthinkingly dumped on violin and piano? What do the parents with such insistence know of violin and piano repertoire? Further, what do they know of the great body of literature for flute? For French horn? For organ? For trumpet? Usually, nothing!
For pressure-driven (not professionally-driven!) parents like Amy Chua their children, with few exceptions, will remain little more than mechanical sidebars to the core of classical music as it’s practiced by musicians with a humanistic foundation.
Professor Chua better be socking away a hefty psychoreserve fund in preparation for the care and feeding of her two little lambs once it becomes clear to them both just how empty and ill-defined with pseudo-thorough grounding their emphasis has been on so-called achievement.
Read more about this widespread, continuing problem in Forbidden Childhood (N.Y., 1957) by Ruth Slenczynska.
________________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.
I divide my year annually between New York and Shanghai. One of my common visitations in the latter city is to the area in and around The Shanghai Conservatory of Music. About four years back the school built a large new building on Fenyang Lu. Along the street side is a lower level with a string of music stores stocked with new instruments. In four of those stores I counted, literally, one trumpet, one horn, one trombone, no tuba, two flutes, one clarinet, one oboe, no bassoon, a handful of strings (but no string bass), and two-hundred pianos! The single trombone (my instrument) looked and felt like it had been made in an industrial arts school as a class project. I asked one of the clerks how many trombone students were
then enrolled in the Conservatory. “Five,” he replied. I told him it would be impossible for any serious student of that instrument to plan advancement playing such useless metal and asked what brand of instruments are taught upstairs. All the trombones were imported by the school, only as needed, from Yamaha in Japan. But, why the sea of pianos?
Most parents do not want their children spending, i.e., wasting, their time on any instrument for which a student can not enter a contest and win prizes. Prizes mean medals and certificates, which Mommy and Daddy can display as their own achievements by extension. It is the major conservatories in China (Shanghai, Beijing, Shenyang, and Wuhan) which are responsible for continuing to nurture this false status, while, visually at least, giving the external impression that China is a major cultural locus of Western classical music. Anyone who has heard the wind sections of a major symphony orchestra in China will hear just how major the cultural locus is in China for those instruments. Naïve morons; school and parent alike!
For the serious student having neither interest nor ability to become a graduate of Harvard Medical School, this phony sequence of contest successes may lead to Juilliard in New York or Curtis in Philadelphia. “If a clown like Lang Lang can make it, then so can my little angel. Who is, of course, the most adept keyboard wizard to blossom since Lawrence Welk or Rachmaninoff.” Stage mothers: Away with them!
All of this clap-trap nonsense has no relationship whatsoever to two very important issues: music or Asian American. It is, with the rarest of exceptions, largely Oriental in the homeland. Atavistic immigrants from those eastern cultures or those descended directly therefrom – like the ever-psychobashing Kommandant Amy Chua – have some untested, sentimental notion that music opens doors and ensures careers in whatever direction the unmusical music student chooses; which the student is free to choose, so long as it isn’t music. (Try to figure out that one. “You are free to study physics or mathematics, so long as you don’t attempt to make a career of them.”)
For the past forty years during my own studies in medicine and music in New York I have been wedded to and worked closely with and around nurses, physicians, surgeons, and medical technicians active in all the standard disciplines. Those persons have come from all modern regions of the world. And, yes, some of my coworkers have come from the beloved Harvard Medical School. But, I can write with authority, the number of those professional persons who have had any direct contact at any times in their lives with piano or violin is insignificantly small.
No one has ever wasted time typing me as a wimp. Nevertheless, with an Amy Chua of my own only thinly masking a contempt while ostensibly trying to encourage me before the age of ten by classing me as “garbage, “lazy,” “useless,” and a host of other niceties (a savage, a juvenile delinquent, boring, common, low, completely ordinary, a barbarian) all the while forbidding me to sit on a toilet until I can play triplets in one hand against duolets in the other mechanistically en duo with a metronome might have (likely would have) set me up both for advanced training to climb The Texas Tower and chronic constipation.
___________________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.
There is a recurring theme without solid core that continues to recycle on the question of Amy Chua and her style as a mother. J.G. (unfortunately anonymous, as are most of the endorsements of Professor Chua) has written
I think it’s easy to take cheap shots at Chua, but it’s hard to argue that the average American child needs less discipline, less direction or less respect for others.
It might seem amusing to mock her (her “cushy job” and “hottie husband”), but harder to actually consider the points being made in a non-defensive way, without trying to paint yourself as the “cool mom” who prefers three martini playdates?
p.s. It seems ironic that an Asian-American female who went to Williams (fulfilling a fantasy of Chinese parents everywhere) would paint her parents as laissez-faire and herself as moderately motivated.
Posted by: J.G. | January 18, 2011 at 02:31 PM http://thecareerist.typepad.com/thecareerist/2011/01/chinese-moms.html
I, for one, have no interest whatsoever in her “cushy job” and “hottie husband.” Nor do I have any objection to her having become a millionaire from the sales of her book and that she will be well on her way to becoming a multimillionare once the planned translations of it into thirteen of the world’s languages have been completed. My uncompromising objections to Professor Chua are two-fold: her abuses of young children pursued to further her own narcissistic urgencies and her deep commitment of abuse of the art of music – of which she seemingly has no knowledge whatsoever – for reasons having nothing to do with that art. My shots at her are far from what J.G. calls “cheap shots.” They do in fact go to the heart of the problems with her that remain my chief concerns.
J.G. and most of his fellow travelers in their tepid defenses of Professor Chua continue to focus on her inherited emphasis of the sorry state of public education in The United States. What else is new?
As with most of the ringing endorsements of Amy Chua, those from J.G. are clearly from a mind not wholly engaged. He has written ” it’s hard to argue that the average American child needs less discipline, less direction or less respect for others. In his tangled syntax I’m quite sure he means – at least I’m hoping he means – it’s hard to argue that the average American child does not need more discipline, more direction or more respect for others.
J.G. has written further, “p.s. It seems ironic that an Asian-American female who went to Williams (fulfilling a fantasy of Chinese parents everywhere) . . . “ Again, but this time TWO thoughts from nowhere! What has Williams College to do with Amy Chua (Harvard, A.B. ’84)? And since when has Williams even been on the “fantasy” palate “of Chinese parents everywhere?”
Professor Chua usually receives the quality of defense she deserves.
____________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.