Tiger Mom parenting and the quest for self-esteem
Anna-Liza Kozma | CBC News | Posted: January 19, 2011 10:35 PM | Last Updated: January 19, 2011
No sooner had our plane touched down in Toronto than my BlackBerry began to flash tyrannically: "R we on for piano tonight?" "U missed acro-jazz - R u on 4 nxt wk?" "Atom hockey sched 4 this Sat!"
A rising panic jolted me back to Earth after an all-too-short vacation. The mad spin of kids' activities had already begun and we weren't even out of the airport.
This school year my children have suddenly become "joiners." And against my better judgment I have found myself ferrying them to crazed rounds of skiing, snowboarding, power skating, hockey, dance and horse riding.
Part of the panic came from having just read excerpts of Amy Chua's controversial new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, on the plane.
That is the one detailing her "Chinese parenting method," which prizes the virtues of three-hour-a-day piano practice and nightly math drills as the path to self-esteem and "a fulfilled life."
Normally I would gloss over these exhortations as manifestations of the North American uber-mum, someone who circles a different parenting orbit than mine.
Benign neglect is my own battle cry for child rearing. Instead of being stuck at the ivories, I happily wasted many childhood days skulking in hedgerows and building forts in ditches with my brother and our mongrel Freddie.
This probably didn't do much for our future job prospects.
But it certainly provided us with a different set of values from Chua and her immigrant parents who sent her down this forced-march road in the first place.
Insider games
One of my problems I realized on touching down in Toronto is that I'm raising three kids on the wrong side of the 49th parallel.
First, there's our unkind winters. Right now at -35 my nose hairs freeze just looking outside.
The only sane place for kids to run about is inside, which means organized activities. Power skating and hockey at the arena and acrobatic jazz at the dance hall.
Maybe when it warms up to -10 we can break out the snowshoes or skate on the outdoor rink.
Whenever I'm tempted to throw in the towel at all this running around, I hear the words of my friend Janis, mother of four, (20, 18, 15 and 12) who believes the annual soccer-hockey-lacrosse cycle is simply what you sign up for as a parent in Canada.
Encourage your kids to try whatever they want and whatever you can afford, she says
You've done your job if one of those activities sticks and carries them through those hormone-crazed teenage years — which for me hover just ahead like a dark spectre.
The problem with self-esteem
One unexpected surprise in all this was that I have seen my own kids' self-esteem soar whenever they were involved in team sports.
This was something of a revelation to me because, as the child of bookish immigrant parents, athletics was sadly neglected in our house.
Quite simply I disgraced myself on the netball court and hockey field.
Years later I am finding the camaraderie in the dressing room before my son's house league hockey games makes me want to weep with gratitude.
How can a kid not stand a bit taller when a six-foot-four parent-coach thumps his shoulder pad and says "Awesome game"?
Mind you, that raises the question of whether self-esteem should be a child-rearing goal in the first place.
My colleague Charles, father of three, (21,19 and 17) questions this obsession with installing self-esteem at all.
In fact, he points to studies that suggest believing you are great has little correlation to actual achievement and that too much groundless ego massaging can lead to anxiety and even delinquency later in life when reality catches up with you.
Making notes
But what about the virtues of disciplined music practice, as Tiger Mom Chua advocates.
This touched a nerve because the highlight of our recent vacation was an impromptu New Year's Day concert in our friends' Hampshire cottage: her daughters and their friends dropped by with their fiddle, accordion and guitars and played some numbers from their band.
One of my own parenting dreams was to have an old house filled with kids playing live music. So far, I have the old house.
Yes, there is an ancient church piano that takes up most of our living room. Alas, my kids' original enthusiasm to accompany me while I (badly) play the flute is fast waning.
Chua, a Yale law professor with an impressive c.v., admits to extreme measures, such as shutting her daughters outside in the winter without their coats when they refused a third hour of daily scales and arpeggios.
"There is a common pattern," she told Maclean's magazine, "a Western child will start with a violin; six months later the Western child will want to switch to the clarinet because the violin sounds terrible, and then four months later the clarinet turns out to be hard so their choice is the guitar."
Fortified by choice
Sure enough, after a couple of years of plunking at the piano, my son is hankering to switch to clarinet and my daughter to violin.
At least, in my daughter's case, it's for the best of reasons — the draw of an exotic and colourful teacher.
At the local highland games this past summer, my seven year old was drawn moth-like to the bright gypsy personna of fiddler, Saskia Tomkins, who was in charge of music at the children's Celtic pavilion.
Fall consisted of long drives to Bowmanville to sit at Saskia's skirts and learn how to bow Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Unlike Prof. Chua, I don't harbour hopes of Lydia turning into a virtuoso.
But I also did not choose the violin for her. For now at least it has chosen her.
Sometime soon though, she may want to give up. Why squawk through yet another rendition of Greensleeves when Facebook is calling?
Perhaps then I will take a leaf out of the Tiger Mom book and tell her that, as with many things in life, you have to work hard before you can truly enjoy an instrument.
Or maybe I will just be content for her to experiment with all kinds of music and hopefully make fun noises with her friends once in a while.
Then again, maybe next time the kids refuse to practise piano or violin, I will, like Prof. Chua, push them outside. But with their coats and mittens on.
Then at least they can go and build a fort or something.