Parents form citizens: on TIger Mother

Great blog post on Tiger Mother by Amy Chua
(she is the memoir author, not the blogger)


So Whitman thought that democracy needed a mythos and Hatch argues that the Second Great Awakening helped to shape the common people into a new force that drove political democracy, but it was Horace Mann who helped get the public schools going and that common education has been an essential factor in conveying whatever national mythos we've got as well as schooling us in the habits of democracy.  (How many small Americans cast their first votes in an election for first grade representative to their elementary school student council?)  All this is true and so is the fact that families form us.  After reading this blog about Amy Chu's memoir, Tiger Mother, I'm thinking about the role of family in shaping the attitudes and practices of citizenship. 

I'm going to paying attention to Tocqueville's treatment of family life, if he has one.  Certainly his section on the importance of inheritance laws is connected to family life.  He is insightful about the ways that expectations about inheriting property inform psychology and identity.  But he wrote in a time when real estate was more central to well-being than it is today; though one must note that he appears to have anticipated our attitudes.

Chua writes today and she has stirred up quite a storm of response by American parents who take her memoir as a judgment on their own practices of parenting.  Jen Westmoreland Bouchard offers an insightful response to the responses as indicative of widespread attitudes about the relationship of competence and self-confidence, and success and happiness.  I recommend reading Bouchard's comments.  I also wonder if she is correct that many parents assume that students whose self-confidence is low ought not be pushed toward competence least their confidence plunge further; if she is correct that many believe that happiness can be had without success and thus their children should be shielded from potential failure; and if Tocqueville would regard this state of affairs as evidence that we have succumbed to democracy's danger of equality of mediocrity.