Zekun Chen

ASA 2

Section A01

Week 9

 Parenting is highly unique and interactive

This week, the articles “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” by Amy Chua and “Why I love my strict Chinese mom” by Sophia Chua Rubenfeld lead me to a great thinking about the interaction between children and parents. In Amy Chua’s article, she points out great difference ways of parenting between most Chinese mothers and western mothers with a lot of her personal experience of raising her two daughters, Sophia and Louisa. With her harsh and extreme traditional Chinese parenting manners, Amy Chua surprisingly succeeded in helping her daughters establish self-discipline, motivation and academically well-behave. A lot of westerns believed that those stick manners would ruin children’s psychological healthy and even conclude that Amy’ daughters would not appreciate her mother because these manners are way too harsh. However, Sophia, Amy’s elder daughter, showed up at the blog and wrote down her deep appreciation and understanding to her mum. One of the sentence partially draws my attention: “No outsider can know what our family is really like.” This sentence enlightens me that parenting is highly unique and interactive between every parents and each of their kids. What leads one person to success will not grantee the success for another people. Even for Amy’s family, Amy underwent some changes while parenting her younger daughter Louisa simply because Louisa has different personalities. Thus, we should not judge which method of parenting works more uniformly and effectively but understand that parents just use different approaches to convey love, warmth and care to their children.

Question:

1. What will happen if westerns parents apply those stick manners in parenting their sons?

2. Is it because of Amy Chua’s Asian American identity that makes this book widely controversial?