Educational Toys To Fatten The Brains
Yale Law School professor Amy Chua has recently made headlines with her assertion that traditional Chinese parenting styles are remarkable for raising super-achiever children.
In her Wall Street Journal article titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” Ms. Chua proudly announced that her two daughters were never allowed to “attend a sleepover, have a play date, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or have fun with computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A.”
And that’s only for an article.
She goes on to provide information at length in her best-selling “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” at once a chronicle and a how-to that issues her now Ivy League-bound kids – not to mention, by implication, herself.
No educational toys as such but piano and tennis and other upper middle-class activities.
Without a doubt, no respite at all save such activities; otherwise, it’s work, work, work in the form of school, school, school.
Tough?
Yes, tough love, as Ms. Chua would refer to it.
And her kids, while much more self-sufficient now as young adults, are remarkably ambivalent on their mother’s parenting style, filled with criticism (especially from the younger one) but tellingly shy of outright condemnation.
It’s not that Ms. Chua won’t believe in play as such, exactly, but that, evidently, she feels play and learning can and should coexist – in terms of educational toys, one might point out – only with an emphasis on, say, efficiency: tennis and piano and violin lessons not only give a way to relax, preferably speaking, but also are actually esteemed and even helpful expertise.
Certainly the Chua household has had its share of traditional educational toys – puzzles and blocks and so forth – but one wonders whether the were quickly swapped out by violin bows and tennis rackets!