Should kids be happy, or should they be obedient? Should parents try to be popular or feared? Should there be discipline or freedom in the family? This past week has seen a nonstop flurry of opinions on these issues.
The discipline of Chinese moms has just become legendary or even proverbial, with ethnically Chinese law professor Amy Chua of Yale University proclaiming in the Wall Street Journal the superiority of Chinese Mothers in raising children. In the article, she details how she and other Chinese mothers maintain high expectations of their children and would spare no effort to get them to overachieve in every sphere of life, with the exception of sports. If a kid does not perform, she's put through more drills and/or insulted. The stated goal is, of course, to draw the best out of her.
As expected, not everybody's impressed. In fact, Chua's piece has generated quite a media hurricane worldwide. At the present time, the number of comments on the WSJ website is in access of 7,300, and an innumerable number of opinions continue to proliferate on Facebook pages, newspaper op-eds, talk shows, and who knows where.
In the LINC program, learners come from all over the world, from different cultures. Living in Canada, what are some of the cultural differences that you face in terms of child raising? How much would you adopt of the Canadian way of teaching your kids? What about the values of the people here? Some of you may wish to read the whole article and some of the comments there before either:
- Submitting a comment below by clicking on the Comments link, or
- Posting your thoughts on your own blog, with a link back to this post of mine.
Have fun!
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