Kids are Entitled? Amy claims 'I deserve better'

Oh deary me. 

In an effort to explain, she says, that the book is her own coming of age story --a memoir of how she learned to become a better parent and to let her daughter give up the violin-- and how people don't seem to be getting the joke, she's interviewed on Friday, January 14, 2010.


During an interview with CBC, Amy Chua digs her hole just a little bit deeper:

... even a generation or two ago here, there was a lot more of a sense of like you owe your parents a sense of decency, a sense of respect, a sense of gratitude and I really don't like a lot of what I see today, which is a lot of these kids that are very pampered and very entitled and want more more more, buy me more equipment, buy me more iPhones, buy me more this ...

I find it mildly ironic that I was just looking over Alfie Kohn's review of permissive parenting research (there is none) and increasingly narcissistic children from generation to generation (there is none of that, either) or any evidence that helicopter parenting is damaging (nor any of that), and here is Amy having a bit of a rant about what is 'wrong' with all these children raised the 'wrong' way. 

Excuse me while I quote someone else on the subject for a moment:

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.*

It is, as Kohn points out, an item of faith that children are more narcissistic than ever before, that helicopter parenting is problematic and that permissive parenting is fruitless and creates unsuccessful children. Except the research simply does not exist. In fact, the research that does exist:

... published in Pediatrics, discovered that there is indeed a parental practice associated with children who later become demanding and easily frustrated.  But it’s not groovy, indulgent parenting.  It’s spanking.

But I want to give Amy a shovel, so she can really dig in. The hypocrisy between what she states as her values and her own attitude: oh my! From fairly late in the interview, as she really gets to chatting (referring to the child's making of a birthday card):

I think that you can do better and I think that you owe me a little bit more, and I think that people balk at that, too: 'oh my god, she wants more'

Sorry, could I just highlight that? Maybe bold and italics: I think you owe ME a little bit more. 

This, in the midst of a thought-free rant about the sense of entitlement in children. I wonder 'are you looking in a mirror, here?'


From earlier in the interview, regarding the same anecdote:

Nope, this is not good enough. You know, when it's your birthday, I spend my whole salary hiring a magician and baking you a cake and having big parties and buying all these party favours and getting waterslides and I deserve better than this...

Okay. First, this is a four-year-old she is talking to. The 4yo is the reason she spends buckets of money on lavish parties? Who is running this household? Seriously... 


And, to be pedantic about her point, let me once more pick out the phrase that I believe --were it said by someone, 4, 14 or even 24, would be gilded and plastered onto a Youth Entitlement Wall of Shame somewhere:

I deserve better than this.

Do I have to say anything at all here?

_____________
*quoted from Hesiod, 8th century BC

Does parenting the popular way have to oppress kids?

An astute friend on an email list reminded me: 

Ever tried re-framing a parenting decision by imagining whether it would be okay to do to your spouse or another adult?

Imagine an alternate version of Chua's book giving relationship advice: "[insert group/racial descriptor] Marriages are Superior" containing descriptions of the dominant spouse treating their powerless spouse in the way that Chua treats her children....

... and imagine
that throughout they are touting themselves as the ideal that other's should strive to achieve.

I doubt very much that any publisher would dare publish a book like that.

I do like to think of parenting decisions in that way, which is more or less just the Golden Rule: Would you like to be treated that way?

Amy Chua's tempest-in-a-teacup book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother seems to be the whole opposite: treating children in a way that she absolutely refuses to be treated: with contempt, superiority, intolerance and raging entitlement. For more about that, see this post: Why One Chinese Mom is NOT Superior...


Would you keep a job after your boss called you 'garbage' or refused to allow you to use the washroom or eat until you'd performed a task the way s/he wanted you to?

Isn't this more or less why people are not allowed to own people?

I am reminded of Alfie Kohn, and his ever-so-insightful ideas, from Unconditional Parenting: 

Why should an adult's preference win?

Sheerly on the basis that it is an adult's preference?

This is where I stopped, when my children were really, really little: if it's only my idea of what's the right thing for them to do right now, not some real need or real emergency, why is it supposed to matter to my kids? 

More to the point, relating to Chua and her controlling and demanding schedule: is it really supposed to matter to me to the tune of a 4 hour power struggle?

To me, it's obvious that dinner time is arbitrary. Sure, whole swaths of the population will agree that dinner time is 5pm or 6pm or 7:30pm or 8pm. What's that got to do with anyone's hunger? 

What's it got to do with any child? 

As I have said ever since Ford came up with it as a slogan: a million people can absolutely be wrong, and why not? What possible force in the world can stop a million independent people from making the same erroneous choice, even if it's buying a Ford, driving drunk, or arguing in favour of head-shots in hockey.


So what if, ostensibly, a billion Chinese agree that the 'right' way to raise children is to decide for them what is their art, which school subjects matter the most to them (or their future), what they are allowed to do, what is valuable for them to do with their free time --if they are even deemed to have any?

Even if a billion Chinese people do agree (and I would expect that at least four probably don't) with Amy Chua, that doesn't make her (or them) right. It just means they agree. 

Perhaps they've been swayed by similar arguments. 

Perhaps they have been told, one way or another, for their whole lives that they must. 

Perhaps they haven't really thought about it and have never felt any pressing reason to think about it.


Or perhaps it doesn't matter, really, to any child growing up anywhere, who else agrees with Amy Chua...maybe because she's wrong.