The Observer

Amy Chua claims that soft western parenting fails because it stops children from fulfilling their potential, whereas her hardline Chinese approach gets results. Journalist Toby Young and psychologist Oliver James have their say.

Toby Young, journalist and campaigner for “free schools”: The problem with western parents, Amy Chua says, is that we assume our children are fragile, delicate creatures. We think they'll be permanently damaged if we push them too hard or express our disappointment if they're under-achieving. Chinese mothers, by contrast, will chastise and ridicule their children, confident that they're strong enough to take it. “Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them,” she writes. “If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.”

A lot of this is exaggerated, of course, and I'm sure many Chinese mothers will resent being stereotyped in this way. But I like Chua's lack of ambivalence about her own values. She knows her own achievements are based on back-breaking labour – she's a professor of law at Yale – and wants her daughters to be as successful as her. She doesn't have any truck with the trendy notion that children should be allowed to flower in their own way. Her daughters aren't allowed on sleepovers, they've never watched TV or played computer games and they've never appeared in school plays.

And, yes, they always get As. Apart from in drama and PE, which don't count.

She claims that Chinese children make for more robust adults, having been galvanised in the hot-house of the Chinese parenting academy. The problem with constantly boosting our children's self-esteem, telling them they're budding little geniuses when they manage to add 2 + 2, is that we're setting them up for a fall. We send them out into the world with an inflated idea of their own abilities and the moment they come face to face with a tough competitor – one of Ms Chua's daughters, for instance – they collapse like a house of cards. Bye-bye, self-esteem. Hello, depression.

This sounds like a good reason to be a bit tougher on our children, but is it? You're the psychologist, you tell me.

Oliver James, psychologist and author: Chua is right that the great majority of exceptional achievement in many domains is the product of hothousing, not in our genes. Whether it be the Williams sisters, Michael Jackson (who, along with his brothers, was whipped by his father if he did not come straight home from school and practise singing and dancing until bedtime for every day of his childhood) or Tiger Woods, such stars' parents hijacked them as vehicles for their own ambitions by coercing them to focus on a particular skill to the exclusion of any other gratifications from a very young age. While the vast majority of prodigies do not go on to be exceptional adults, it's true hothousing is the main cause of exceptional skills in most fields. For instance, studies of musicians show that from childhood onwards, compared with "mere" orchestral players, soloists practised for more hours, under more pressure to do so, from earlier ages.

The evidence also shows that indiscriminately positive praise for children, as opposed to praise for specific efforts, leads to bloated, unreal self-esteem and is one of the reasons for the epidemic of narcissism now afflicting the USA.

However, there is also very robust evidence that offspring of perfectionist, over-controlling parents whose love is conditional on performance do worse than ones whose parents love them for "who they are".

It's not just that such children are at much greater risk of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and substance abuse. Overall, paradoxically, they actually do worse academically.

Presumably we agree that we both want mentally healthy offspring who have the skills to do well in fields they enjoy…..

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