Review: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Being grow up as a Chinese, I was so attracted to the western ways of raising children. I always felt I had no freedom, and I didn't know what I love to do. All I thought is to excel in examinations. Now in retrospect, I realize that what I was complaining is the Chinese school system not the Chinese parenting style. Compared with Amy Chua, now I would complain my parents weren't so strict on me, especially about piano. I was such a lazy piano student and my parents didn't push at all. They care about the school scores more than piano. I had interest in piano at the very beginning, and I was me who said I wanted to take piano lesson, but after a while, I soon get bored (this also has to do with the boring teaching method of the teacher, but we have no way to get a good teacher at that time, also it's not custom to question teachers in China as Amy mentioned). Now my piano is all covered with dust. I guess this also has to do with the Chinese school system. It really doesn't allow that much time to practice. I went to school at 5:30am and came back at 10pm during high school and still had endless homework to do. While Amy's children are educated in the US, so their school system allow more time to practice, their parents have more money to get them good teachers, and more flexible time to accompany them for their music lessons.

I was always thinking that if I had children in the future, I will let them choose to do what they love to do, but now, I kind of feel that it's dangerous to totally abandon the chinese parenting tradition. I won't do such extremely as Amy did, but I do agree that practice makes perfect. We need to drill the hard part to master it, and to achieve success, and to be happy, and then want to do it more.

There is a book called 'Making Learning Whole' by David Perkins, which has a chapter about working on the hard part. I really like that, and think it proposes the same thing as Amy did. I will definitely push my children in the future to drill on the hard part. I hope I can do it too. I feel I've abandoned too much hard-working tradition since I came to the US. Freedom is really attractive but dangerous sometimes.



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