The Underachiever's Guide to Tiger Parenting

So Chinese mothers are superior, our children are never going to make it to Carnegie Hall and we've all wasted a lot of time on those now discredited Celebrity Parenting Theories. In our defense, the diaper bags were fabulous.

But that is no reason to feel bad about ourselves. In fact, as so-called "Western parents," we are pretty much immune to such feelings. Inferiority complexes are for people too lazy or unimaginative to find someone to feel superior to. You may quote me.

We don't care how Amy Chua did it. We are just happy at the end of the day to sit down with a glass of red wine and reflect on the fact that none of our children are home yet.

We don't care whether they're playing the violin or the kazoo, as long as they don't spend too much time practicing where we have to listen to it.

Does that mean our system of parenting has nothing to recommend it?

Are we, as Chua accuses, producing lazy and overly-indulged children who can't remember which day the garbage goes out and whose extracurricular life is crowded with frivolous entertainment? Duh. Who cares as long as they're at someone else's house?

And if they never make it to Carnegie Hall? That is one more place we won't have to drive them.

Photo: The kids are all right.

From the Underachiever's Archives: Motherhood is the New Black

Comments

Are you trying to hamper your children's growth? Get it? Hamper? No? Never mind.

Posted by: Audubon Ron | January 20, 2011 at 11:00 AM

Children raised in the Western retail tradition spend hours in big box stores where they devise their own curriculum, as demonstrated here by my daughter and niece.

This was, I believe, an exercise in fashion design. Their interest in laundry is limited to producing it.

Posted by: Suburban Kamikaze | January 20, 2011 at 02:27 PM