Enough of tiger moms and wolf dads|Comment |chinadaily.com.cn:
Enough of tiger moms and wolf dads
Updated: 2011-11-26 08:00
By Berlin Fang (China Daily)
Thomas Friedman wrote in his column, "How about better parents?" (The New York Times, Nov19), that parent involvement is key to student success.
Fed up with the status quo of American education, and desperate for an alternative model,some readers peppered the word "Asian" throughout the comments section for Friedman'sarticle. One reader wrote: " the question among the coaches was the usual, why were so manyof our top students are Asian. I asked when was the last time they had an Asian parentcomplain about too much homework."
This statement, however, proves nothing except the theory of relativity in human opinions.Asian parents in the United States rarely complain about children's homework because it is apicnic compared to what we had to go through in our younger days in our home country. But inAsian countries, like any other, complaints abound. In China, I constantly hear parentscomplain that their children cannot go to bed till 11 pm because they have too manyassignments.
Active involvement of Chinese parents is at best a myth, and the myth is running wild in themedia. After discussions on the "Tiger Mom" (Yale Professor Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymns
