crazy chinese mother

the miracle worker is awesome

lol, I totally believe that children enjoy crying. It's a full body experience.

Seemed relevant and at least more fun than these articles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkN9VdjgDwM

oh, the mudede article. didn't read it, cuz the few bits i skimmed were making me furious. something about his blithe insistence that his own half-baked "philosophical" observations = incontrovertible truth makes my blood boil. but the quote makes a lot more sense, somehow, coming from him. maybe that's because i long ago accepted that he's a complete tool, and also an occasionally interesting writer.

who is he

okay, that second excerpt from the mudede article is hilarious (and horrible, of course). wanna read the whole thing now.

Is Mudede the intellectual Maddox?

he's a critic who's been writing for the stranger for quite a while now. nearly from the beginning, at least 10 years going. largely sticks to film, hip hop and a "police beat" log. used to be heavily into the idea of african-american science fiction, but he hasn't written about that in a long time. sort of a shame, cuz i like his writing/thinking on the subject. clearly shooled in philosophy, criticism as an academic discipline. guess he grew up in the US and zimbabwe? anyway, he's a great speaker. seen him read and lecture a couple times, very entertaining.

fucking "shooled"

oic, ty

I did my best to let my son know how I felt about his drawings: They were terrible and that was not surprising because he was a boy.

lol @ this

Shit I was taking that article seriously doh.

Then I read this bit and almost lost it:

Parents who fool their poor children into believing they are interesting have done them a great disservice. Often, nothing can undo or mend this damage, and the child grows into an adult who says anything to anybody because he/she has been long convinced that anything that falls out of his/her mouth is made of gold. Such adults are almost always lonely and turn to animals for friendship.

so is he trolling? is it satire?? i just dont even

i think he's being sincere, in a snarky sort of way, but putting it across through a field of sarcastic trolling. the last line is a joke about a film he wrote, inspired by real events, concerning a man fatally doinked by a horse.

was it about Mr. Hands??

yeah, it's as boring a movie as you could make, given the subject matter

mudede wrote mr. hands??

being an adult vs being a kid would be a great poll

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Monday, January 10, 2011 5:44 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Has anyone done this yet? I want it to be a poll, but I'm not ready to make a poll right now.

my mom is chinese

hard as a liberal relativist to answer these sorts of questions. i'm comfortable opposing honor killings, female circumcision, the death penalty and other "normal" cultural practices that i find abhorrent, but not so comfortable condemning this.

pretty sure this is just because you don't feel as strongly about this as you do about those things and so your mild dislike is failing to overwhelm your moral-judgement gag reflex. it is okay to just think this is kind of uncool, nobody will be oppressed.

like i don't think there should be u.n. action to make chinese parents allow a B+ now and then but i still think it's kinda lame

yeah, that's a sensible distinction. chinese lady: be more cool.

wouldnt care to be in a room w/this lady or likely her weird lil success zombie offspring

lol matt yglesias makes a good point

The larger issue about Chua’s piece is that it just seems very strange for her to be so worried about this. On the list of problems typically experienced by the children of Yale Law School faculty “not successful enough” comes way below “has dysfunctional relationship with mother.”

are you people fucking stupid that article is brilliantly written in a lot of place holy shit

my mom is chinese

― buzza, Monday, January 10, 2011 9:12 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

this is totally not surprising

Mudede's article made me scared to ever go near another human at risk of procreating :(

apparently the chinese-mother article is a teaser for an entire book she's written on the same subject. i saw an ad in entertainment weekly.

(it says that at the bottom of the article but i'd missed it)

would love to get husband "jed"'s perspective

according to entertainment weekly, "jed" was "fine with the chinese strategy as long as the kids were also raised jewish". two great tastes that taste great together!

hakkalically jewish eh?

actually wait maybe it was time magazine, i can't remember. (WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE LOL)

My friend's Chinese mother had trouble sleeping last night because Chua article pissed her off so much.

i think its as valid a way to raise kids as any, but it seems like a really exhausting parenting style 2 me

― Princess TamTam, Monday, January 10, 2011 4:56 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

otm. everybody's talking about how grueling this must be for the kids, but it gotta be damn hard on the parents, too. time-consuming, emotionally demanding, just plain exhausting.

― carles marx (contenderizer),

i feel like this is the point for her, though. if she's not exhausted she's not doing enough.

what shines through for me is that this woman has absolutely nothing going on for her except her kids (which is fine) (though her husband probably disagrees) but unfortunately has decided to channel her obviously prodigious talent for management and stick-to-it-iveness into this totalitarian vision for her children. and of course it will "work" in the sense that her children will get good grades, etc, in the same sense that stalin's plan "worked" in the sense of industrializing russia

in the era of both parents working full-time though it's hard to see how this template could really be applied across the board - can you imagine her list of requirements for a childminder??

xposts haha yeah, jed. man. the way she writes about him reminds me of polly filla in private eye, always mentioning "the useless simon"

I'm not sure I can buy this "of course it will work" thing. Well, maybe it will with her children, but I have a feeling there are many who are "fragile" enough to completely buckle or show extreme behavioural difficulties in the face of an authoritarian parenting regime that involves calling them worthless when they fail to get As or whatever.

gotta break a few eggs i guess

but yes, i agree

http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/local/massri/images/Peter-the-Great_1.jpg

"this woman has absolutely nothing going on for her except her kids"

she's a yale law prof isn't she? HAVING IT ALL

also she has a book deal let's not forget

books lol

well obviously it backfires sometimes - a lot of well-intentioned approaches to parenting do

according to entertainment weekly, "jed" was "fine with the chinese strategy as long as the kids were also raised jewish". two great tastes that taste great together!

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, January 12, 2011 7:53 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol almost all the halfie (hakka?) azns i knew grewing up were chinese/jewish. the han are actually one of the lost tribes.

On a less extremist tip, has anyone read Po Bronson on modern western kids getting overpraised?

http://www.npr.org/tablet/#story/?storyId=112292248

Where did this whole "praise your kids for every crappy little thing they do" thing start? In a parenting manual? In academic research? As a spontaneous overcorrection to mistakes of the past?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0Qfn689ZA

I'm not sure I can buy this "of course it will work" thing. Well, maybe it will with her children, but I have a feeling there are many who are "fragile" enough to completely buckle or show extreme behavioural difficulties in the face of an authoritarian parenting regime that involves calling them worthless when they fail to get As or whatever.

― Alba, Wednesday, January 12, 2011 8:07 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

one of the most comforting things that I found out after I moved to HK and spending time in China was that, though yes the Chinese do value education, there are tons of underachieving and middling children over here too. and tons of parents who don't really GAF. it's like, yes, chinese people are normal just like the rest of the world.

how did human life start

normal, disgusting, savages

Well yeah, but she's not writing about Chinese children, she's talking about "Chinese children", dayo.