Chinese moms

Have you guys heard about this? "The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother". The author was on the Today Show yesterday and her take on raising kids, achievement, and self-esteem is highly interesting.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...S=tiger+mother

I read the article and found it thought-provoking. The views were pretty extreme in the article, but at the same time something to ponder in our very permissive society. When I look around at the "success" of many of my peers - living at home with mama and daddy even with their fancy degrees - I wonder if all of the "high self-esteem" coddling we were brought up with actually worked very well.

I am from India and my brother and I were raised more or less this way. Anything less than A was unacceptable in the house. But our parents knew we had the potential to do it and we just needed to concentrate and work hard. We both went on getting admissions in one of the best colleges and have great careers now. Absolutely no self esteem issues.

Dont even ask how many spanks and what all "names" we were called. Nothing wrong with my parents, it is just the typical parenting style there.

We are not raising DS like that. I am just trying positive disciplining and see whether we get the same results :-)

Whenever I visit India, my family will be amused when they see me giving time-outs or "talk" to DS.

I saw it too and thought she was a bit extreme. My older ds tends to be very hard on himself in school, sports, everything, and if we parented him like that he would drown. While we are pretty strict and have no tolerance for disrespect, we have found that for our kids the whole positive/negative consequences thing really works well for us. Our boys know what we expect from them and what will happen if they mess up, and so far have turned out to be really good kids. I am also very loving and affectionate with them and tell them I love them daily. While my parents were good parents, they never really told us they loved us or were very affectionate with us and that is something I always carried with me and what I would do differently when I had kids.

Yeah, the thing that is confusing to me is that my parents were really hypercritical and had extremely high expectations, and it didn't work for me. I had terrible self-esteem and could barely function because of it, I was so scared of trying that I failed before I even began. But at the same time, I think they were critical of a lot of things that I had NO control over (like my physical capabilities at sports), I was expected to excel at everything, not just academics, our family life was not nurturing or close-knit in any other way, and they also did not help me do anything at all, unlike the Asian parents described in the article who were willing to drill their child and help them to succeed. So I wonder if it's more complex than just the one factor.