With all the uproar about Amy Chua’s “Tiger Mother” book, I’ve been thinking about how totally unlike her I am. Probably to a fault. Making them practice piano for four hours a day? Telling them a homemade birthday card for me is “garbage” and that I expected more effort? Insisting that an A- isn’t good enough? This is all utterly foreign to me. I never actually demand things out of my kids.
My approach has always been to assist them if they’re interested in something, like, say octopuses or volcanoes. Give them access to information they crave. I will do chemistry experiments with them, help them make a habitat for a new toad, or pour candles, or build a complicated fort out of hot water heater boxes. Expose them to things. We take classes, for instance. Isaac used to do baby music and then Suzuki piano and Dalcroze dance and movement. But when Isaac hated piano, I let him quit. Later on we tried cello, which again he hated, and after some angst about it I let him quit. We got started in TaeKwondo, though, four years ago, and that one stuck. He’s about to test for his ChoDanBo, temporary black belt, next week.
I got both the kids into gymnastics, which they are crazy about. Isaac is big on swimming. Elias is taking an interest in skating, and it looks like Ben will finally have a son to follow in his blade tracks on the ice. Isaac did eight weeks of horseback riding last fall and will again in the spring. Right now he’s downhill skiing on Wednesdays. Elias wants to do violin very badly, but first he has to be able to sit still for more than three seconds, so that one is still pending. His potential teacher and I have met a couple times and we’re looking at trying again in June.
As for school work, we do struggle with Isaac over his one worksheet a week. You’d think this would be no big deal, but Isaac acts like his fingernails are being pulled out when he has to learn fifteen spelling words at home. All the rest of his work is at school, which is part of the Montessori philosophy. They don’t even have grades. His report cards tend to say the same thing– he’s very bright, but totally undisciplined, unmotivated, and much too squirrely. It concerns me a little bit, but not that much. He’s 8 years old for god sakes. How much self-discipline is he supposed to have?
I let them play too many video games and watch too many DVDs. Screen time is the biggest problem with my parenting technique I think, but it’s a natural outcome of being physically impaired and home with two little maniacs much of the time. I have to lie down, and one of the only ways they are quiet and non-destructive is when they are stationed in front of a flickering image. I do feel guilty about the little brains rotting on the their stems, but then I try to reassure myself that they really do have a lot of richness in all other areas of their lives. How bad is it for them to sit down and chill and veg when they’ve been out and about all day, going from school to the library to TaeKwonDo? Not that bad, I’d say.
I think Amy Chua would say that I personally am the problem with American children today. I expect little while offering much. I’m always there, cheering them on from the sidelines. I drive them around and manage their equipment and wardrobe. It seems better to me this way. I would never want to make them feel pressured or inadequate. Does this mean that they won’t cure cancer or be the first to step foot on Mars? I don’t know. If they want to do those things, I’ll help and encourage. But it has to be their desire, their goal, their interest that drives them to do it.
What if their goal is to get to level five of Star Wars the Clone Wars: Search for R2D2, rather than to cure cancer? That would be pretty depressing, wouldn’t it? That would be why our country falls behind in the global economy. Unless of course they develop a way to shoot cancer cells with their Wii remotes, or something like that. Which they well might. Yeah, that sounds good. Let’s assume that there is a value to what they choose to do on their own.
This summer I’m getting serious about our new garden. It’s a 30’x55′ plot that Ben fenced in, with great difficulty, last summer. The kids and I have been reading seed catalogs and choosing what to grow. Each boy is going to get his own plot within the garden. I was making a big scale plan of this on graph paper last weekend, and Isaac got involved. Ultimately he got colored pencils to indicate where he wanted black and gold raspberries, and adjusted the lay-out of his plot to suit his liking. He’s going to have “Minnesota Midget” melons, for instance. Elias is going to have caterpillar plants (you can’t eat them, but the pods look like caterpillars and you can hide them in someone’s salad). I’m very happy to do a project with them that includes the part where I get to supervise from a hammock while sipping lemonade.
I’m no tiger mother. My battle hymn is “Good Job!” and the flags I march under both show thumbs up. Is this bad? I don’t know. Maybe my boys will both grow up to be couch potatoes who sit in the basement all day doing nothing. I hope not. I sort of wish my mascot were a tiger, but the reality is that it’s a three-toed sloth.
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