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Me as Alice |
I attended many sleep-overs where we stayed up too late, watched far too many movies in one sitting and ate more candy than was ever allowed in my household growing up. So in reading the WSJ article I can say that my blood seemed to boil a little and I felt enrage at the suggestion that because of those things, this mother would have assumed I would turn out less than perfect. Okay, I'll admit I'm not perfect, but I doubt attending sleep-overs and participating in school plays lowered my grade point average in the fourth, fifth, sixth grade or made me a less successful kid.
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During my ballet days (hard work!) |
You have to read the article to gain the full depth of this discussion. If interested, I've made it easy, just click on the link below:
Why Chinese Mother's are Superior
Clearly, I was not the only Western American that was riled up by the Chinese mother's article. The rebuttal came only a few days after the first article, again in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. This time, it was by a Jewish mother and outlined her antithesis to parenting which included letting her children decide what activities they wanted to partake in and when they wanted to quit said activities, the copious amounts of TV and computer games they were allowed to partake in and the fact that even though her kids were allowed to do these things, they too received good grades in school. I had a problem with this article too. The mother seemed to be almost too far on the other end; not pushing her children to excel when the opportunity was there and allowing them to quit when it seemed things got a bit hard. I finished this second article with the feeling that both extreme points had been made but that I agreed with neither of them. I suppose that's what these types of commentaries are meant to do...
Rebuttal article:
In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom
I hardly ever read the Wall Street Journal so I appreciate both these articles for making me pick up the paper and become interested in what each author had to say. Since reading both pieces, I've thought about each message and the points that were made in the black and white letters typed out on the newspaper pages. Here I am, not even a parent, and I became a bit enthralled with the ongoing discussion of what was the "correct" or more "successful" way to parent is. What I realized is that this discussion reaches beyond the boundaries of parenting. I know I'll face all these decisions one day when I am a parent and frankly, I haven't really thought about how much TV my kids should watch or how many sleep-overs I will or won't let them attend. But right now, as an adult, I need to just focus on the kind of person I want to be. What new boundaries and new challenges will I set for myself. I for one, think my western parents did a very successful job raising me so now it's time for this western grown up to live successfully.
"The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences."
~ Eleanor Roosevelt