Parenting – Why some cultural groups seem to do a better job
‘Tiger Mom’ spurns out another bestseller – a bit racist but true?
NEW HAVEN – Social media is currently hyping a soon-to-be published book by America’s notorious ‘Tiger Mom’, Amy Chua, author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and her husband Jed Rubenfeld. Both are Yale law professors.
The new book The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, ready for global distribution in February this year by Penguin, is preceded by a massive PR-campaign aimed at plucking some of America’s most sensitive nerves: eugenics, racism, cultural superiority, and sheer nonsense.
Professor Chua observes, simply put, that some cultural groups are more “successful” than others in having their children succeed. Amy Chua has a Chinese background and says that her children excelled because of a “triple package” formula: a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control. The authors believe that such traits are found in certain immigrant groups such as the Jewish (her husband is Jewish), Chinese, Indian Americans, and Cuban exiles, etc.
The press release reads a bit like the evil twin book of Thilo Sarrazin’s 2010 Geman bestseller Germany Does Away With Itself in which the Berlin top economist and politician reckons up for us why certain immigrant groups do not succeed. Ah, those negative Germans…
Chua’s suppositions are destined to divide America and the global parenting world. Not to mention politicians and scholars, teacher guilds and your neighborhood. Mind you, the Jewish, the Indian, and the Chinese mothers all over the planet will be carefully monitoring this debate too. You may be dreading to think that all they yearned for was another race or cultural superiority debate, no?
The Triple Package isn’t per se a parenting book like her previous Battle Hymn; but it would be difficult to not interpret it as a self-help book for America’s striving families (one book for each household, perhaps) because of Ms. Chua’s global reputation as tiger mom and maternal chauvinist.
Amy Chua doesn’t need a Yale professorship, she is a celebrity, rich and famous. But the Law school gives her a prominent platform. While the large majority of American intellectuals don’t boast about their cultural traits in public and shun the eugenicist debate – remember Harvard’s former president Larry Summers who was forced to resign over similar racist antics? – some hard-working but insecure moms and dads may find in Ms. Chua’s new book exactly what they were looking for to make them and their children succeed in life: become more Chinese and marry a Jew. Just kidding. Here‘s her book again.
Image credit: XiXinXing/Shutterstock.com
Read Article at Yahoo.Shine. (by Beth Greenfield)
