Tiger Mother Meets Oprah?

I’m guessing Tiger Mother Amy Chua isn’t gonna show up on the Oprah Winfrey Network?? Or is she?

Is anybody watching OWN? I’m not because I don’t have cable or satellite dish (I moved to a new state several months ago and decided to live without it for a while). I’m not a huge TV watcher so I can’t say that I really miss anything, but I’ve been curious about this new network that sprang into life with the new year. Is it possible to create and inhabit what a New York Times media critic called a “no cynicism zone”?

I’ve been trying to think about Amy Chua in an Oprah-like way, sans “mean-spiritedness” (the same mean-spiritedness that Oprah has banned from the new network and from her programming in general). But it isn’t Oprah that’s really helped me. It’s a mental habit borrowed from rhetorician Peter Elbow described (and prescribed) in a book called Embracing Contraries. Elbow considers the wisdom of practicing “methodological belief” (interpretation through the assumption that the person speaking has good reasons, good motivations and good intentions for what s/he is saying) before employing “methodological doubt” (the Descartes-inspired critical stance that the contents of consciousness -– my own and any other’s intuition and claims -- must be subject to scrutiny). These two habits of mind, practiced together and in the recommended sequence, yield a richness of understanding that just isn’t available with either belief or doubt.

But my fellow blogger Amy Shuffleton, talking about Amy Chua in an earlier post, reminded me that in practice it’s not belief before doubt; it’s belief and doubt and belief and doubt and belief and doubt … practiced in a complementary rhythm. The trick is not to get stuck in belief or doubt.

It seems to me that the Oprah Network could get caught in a broken record of belief, the mirror image of the MSNBC/Fox differently-directed revolving doors of doubt. If Amy Chua’s makes it to OWN, it will be a signal that Oprah and her network team realize that mean-spiritedness and cynicism are not the same thing as doubt. And that doubt and belief can walk hand in hand. Richness of understanding is the result.

I’ll have to get my satellite dish hooked up to watch it.

The Orchestra is What's Hard, Tiger Mother

Intrigued by the responses to “Battle Cry of the Tiger Mother”, I finally tracked down the Wall Street Journal article by Amy Chua, drawn from her recently published memoir of motherhood, that sparked the discussion. When I read Chua’s writing, I was at first, predictably, appalled. Then I got to her comment that a Chinese child getting a B “would never happen” and realized that I’d encountered the icy humor that other commentators advised readers to watch for carefully. Aha, I thought, she’s trying to be funny. Then I read on and was appalled all over again.

Not by her draconian measures. After all, she was kidding about some of that, right? And even if she wasn’t, one should pause and think carefully before scorning other people’s child-raising, right?

I was appalled, rather, by the two, highly problematic axioms that Chua’s logic implies: 1. What every parent truly hopes for is a mathematical or musical prodigy, who gets all As (except in drama and gym), and 2. Tiger Motherhood is what it takes to raise such a child.

The problem with the first is that it straitjackets not only individual children but all of human culture. Violin and piano music is lovely, but how dull the world would be if all our children played nothing else! Not to mention that with no orchestra, all those violin virtuosos would have a limited repertoire.

As for the second, ironically, Amy Chua falls headlong into the great conceit of contemporary American parenting: that by looking inwards, and focusing all our efforts on our own children, we can thwart the socio-economic forces that threaten them. Judith Warner’s commentary hits the nail on the head:

The terror of losing ground is the ultimate driving force in the middle- and upper-middle-class American family today, and however unique Chua’s elaboration of it (simply by marrying a Jew, and not a Chinese man, she worries that she is “letting down 4,000 years of civilization”), however obnoxious and over the top her attempts to cope, she is hardly alone in believing that, in her carefully considered ministrations, she will find the perfect alchemy that will allow her to inoculate her kids against personal and professional misfortune.

Just think what mothers like Amy Chua could accomplish if they turned outwards, towards all our children -- a task more demanding yet more effective than Tiger motherhood -- instead of back to the piano bench over and over again.

My favorite comment, though, comes from David Brooks, who calls Amy Chua a “wimp”. “Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention,” Brooks points out, “but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls.”

The orchestra is what’s hard, not the violin.