Lipstick & Lemonade

Chinese Moms, Iraqi Moms and Your Mom

Posted on 13 January 2011

Being a mom isn’t easy. I say that not from experience, but from countless hours watching Life Goes On and exactly six months of babysitting in middle school.

You have to make some tough calls. Let. Me. Tell. You.

Which is probably why everyone’s up in a tizzy over this Wall Street Journal column from Amy Chua, Chinese mom extraordinaire whose idea of good parenting is to starve her children until they can play the piano. On her long list of things her kids were not allowed to do: attend sleepovers, watch TV, or come home with any grade lower than an A.

This type of strict parenting is, according to Chua, proof that she cares more about her kids than Western parents “who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly.”

Yikes.

Based on the reactions to her article, I can gather that Chinese moms are feeling a little stereotyped (or vindicated), and that a lot of too-soft “Western” moms are wondering if all those DUIs and D-minuses might be their fault after all. Or not. I’m not taking sides here.

What Chua is describing, though, isn’t so much Chinese parenting as it is immigrant parenting, something I’m extremely familiar with as the daughter of two Middle Easterners. Don’t get me wrong — my mom never forced me to sit at the piano bench with no food or drink for hours at a time, and she most certainly didn’t tell me I was a “disgrace” (at least not until I was in my 20s). My parents were actually quite lax compared to the others in our cultural circle.

Middle Eastern lax and Western lax are two very different things though. A typical conversation in our household went something like this:

Me: “Mom, can I [whatever my friends were doing]?

Mom: “No.”

Me: “But why?”

Mom: “Because I said so.”

Me: “But [insert friend’s name here]’s mom is letting her.”

Mom: “I don’t care what the Americans let their kids do. Don’t compare yourself to your friends.”

This was always so confusing to me because, well, as far as I knew I was American. Even if my mom wasn’t.

“Pff… what a ‘fob’,” I’d think to myself as I plotted my escape from this oppressive dictatorship. I knew freedom wouldn’t come until I was 18 and hopefully enrolled in a top-ranked university (what? Rebels have standards too), but it would be worth the wait.

No more asking to do things like play Slip n’ Slide in February. No more practicing piano, because we all know that’s a total waste of time! I’d watch TV until I was blue in the face and ride my bike (without a helmet!) and play tetherball and I’d only do my homework IF AND WHEN there was time left over after all that fun. I’d be barefoot, like, all the time and leave the house with my hair wet (oooooh). I’d eat taco boats or pancakes at every meal, and cuss like a sailor with my cool American friends.

Take that, mom.

Twenty-odd years later, I still laugh at my mom’s “fobiness,” but I appreciate the boundaries it set for me when I most needed them. I’m not saying I turned out perfectly or that her way was the right way. I’m just saying that the things I wanted to do were almost always stupid.

I’m glad she forced me to eat home food instead of the crap they sold for school lunches. I’m happy I took piano lessons all those years because now I know how to read music and how else would I have enjoyed Radiohead jam sessions on my roommate’s keyboard in college? I’m grateful that she was strict when I was really young so that she didn’t have to be when I was in high school.

My mom’s approach may have been a little heavy-handed, but her rules kept me out of trouble and made me who I am today. I don’t know about you but I kind of like me.

So is Chua right about “Western” parenting? Or is there any number of parenting styles that can and do work, depending on a variety of factors both environmental and biological?

I think the answer is probably the latter, and that good parenting falls somewhere in between being your kids’ best friend and being a big ol’ meanie, but what do I know? I was a really, really bad babysitter.

Also, what do foreign parents have against sleepovers??!