Western (White) Mom vs. Chinese Mom: Who Wins?

The release of Amy Chua’s highly controversial article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” marks an extremely exciting time to be a blogger in the Asian American media world. It is beautiful to see such strong emotions fly all over the place as the article gets our community discussing their personal experiences and being honest with each other. While it is difficult to showcase all the great articles that are talking about this but some of the more noteworthy ones I found were from Jeff Yang’s SF Gate Asian Pop, Gil Asakawa’s Nikkei View, Phillygrrl at Sepia Mutiny, Frances Kwai-Hwa Wang’s Adventure in Multicultural Living, and of course, our own 8Asian commentary by guest writer Zahira.

Several days after Amy Chua released her proud statement to the world, our friends at Next Media Animation have decided to create an animation with their own thoughts on the matter. With all the high emotions being pressed on all the articles, tweets, and Facebook posts on this article, it is a breath of fresh air to see someone take a humorous stance on this matter.

Where do I stand in all of this? I’m in the middle. While I was raised by parents who did try to get me into the usual gamut of violin, piano, taekwondo lessons, SAT schools, getting A+’s, and whatnot, they did not discourage me when I pushed my own desires of doing theater throughout high school and college. I was able to go out with friends, have sleepovers, get drunk, play video games, and enjoy my youth but I was only grounded when fun time affected the quality of my school time.

I also don’t have kids and although I have an idea how I want to raise them, I cannot judge Amy Chua until I do have them and see how I will raise them when they are right in front of me. I also want to know everything without making opinions so I’ll go out of my way to check out her book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” to understand Chua better as it has been reported that WSJ seems to have misrepresented the intentions of what the author is trying to say.

So there you have it, folks! All I can say is that if you are a parent and got very much peeved by what Chua had to say, then use that as fuel to raise the kids YOU want them to be raised. There is no one true method to parenting and if you think you gave it your absolute best shot and you are proud of what you have given to your children, then I think that’s awesome.