Why Chinese Mothers are Superior...??

[rani]

Did anyone read today's article in the SCMP? They found HK's "Tiger Mum".

Her 10-year-olds (twins) are swimming champions, judo brown belts, sailing veterans and chess maestros. Their own "tiger mother", gets them up at 5.30am every day but Sunday for swimming practice.

[suvi]

I agree with carang about the inherit problem Chinese language introduces to the learning process. Children in Hong Kong start learning Chinese characters when they are three years old and apart from a few exceptions there is no other way than memorization to do it.

Unfortunately the same technique is then applied to everything else. It gets you through the A-levels but not beyond. I've heard that the dropout rate from HKU after first year is high as the students cannot adjust to the different learning methods required. Having gone to a local school here myself as a teenager I completely understand that. I could ask any of my classmates what does it say on the page 72 of a particular text book and they could quote it word by word. If I'd ask something that required combining information from different sources, most of them would be lost. I hope the changes in recent years introduced to the secondary schools mitigate the problem. Yet I would not like to plant the seed of memorization as a sole technique into my own children at that young age and fortunately I have the luxury to avoid it.

I remember reading from my geography book when I was 12 that Chinese children of the same age do not know enough characters to read the newspaper, which to me was incomprehensible as I had been literate for 5 years already. My benefit is my otherwise useless native language Finnish that happens to be a phonetic language. While the grammar isn't as straight forward as Chinese grammar (I suspect with my little knowledge of Cantonese), the fact that literacy among young native speakers can be reached in matter of months sometimes just weeks makes an impact.

Finnish as a second language is apparently one of the most difficult languages to learn. I wouldn't therefore compare how difficult or easy it is to learn Chinese or English as a second language but how difficult or easy it is for a native speaker to learn how to read and write and what implications it has. Personally I'm grateful I could walk into a library at age 7 and pick up any book I liked and even more so that my parents allowed me to pick anything I liked.

As for the article, a great piece to stir up a conversation but cannot support even in the name of tolerance child abuse disguised as a piano lesson.

[Gataloca]

Now I remember that when I was in the University, back in the US, heard that many people from Mainland China applying for the MS degree in Computer Science had very high score on the English test part of the GRE, not because they were good at English, but because they take a dictionary and memorize each word and meaning..... It is just crazy!
Posted via Mobile Device

[tomogotchi]

Shocking is all one can say to this. Perhaps chinese mothers should ask for an A.I child (robot = artificial intelligence). Raising an unemotional misfit of society is the outcome! Hardly surprising that western men choose asian girls to play with, they only know one answer 'yes sir'!

It ‘s one thing to debate on different parenting philosophies/styles on this forum, another to make your own presumptions and racist comments on this forum. It’s really sad that you had to make such a comment here.

For me who is from Japan where the parenting style lies somewhere between Chinese and Western cultures, it was indeed shocking to read Amy Chua’s article. I don’t understand the article had to be so provocative, because elsewhere she mentioned that she realized her tiger mum parenting technique had flaws and backfired on her second daughter. Her own father also seems to have said that the strict parenting might have worked for the first daughter but was maybe not suitable for the second one. At the end of the day, each child is unique, and each family is unique. You just have to figure out what works best for your child and your family.

[thanka2]

Don't take this too seriously because it came from Cracked.com but I did enjoy reading it:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19026...-china_p2.html

[banane76]

Wow, that is a shocking reaction to the article (above quoted from camsurrey's post). I think the exerpt taken from her book was to provoke strong reactions and to get people to buy her book. I agree with Tomogotchi that every child is different and every family is different and that you need to figure out what works for your child. Of course we all want our children to excel, but I don't agree with Amy Chua's extreme methods. We want them to experience as much as possible and give them the tools so that they can make decisions on their own--hopefully ones that won't cost them too much pain...we all have to make our own mistakes to a certain degree.