In the East
According to Chua's remarks, Western parents attach too much importance to protecting children's self-esteem, hence they tend to criticize their children in a more subtle way. Chinese parents, on the other hand, believe their children are strong enough to handle criticisms and doubts.
However, "being strict" is certainly not an honor that any mother, American or Chinese, will accept with willingness.
An anonymous mother, who lives in Wuhan, the capital city of central China's Hubei Province, posted on an Internet forum earlier this month that she had become "crazy" about her daughter's education.
She has sent her daughter, who is finishing elementary school soon, to cram schools for higher marks in order to get admission into a good junior high school, the mother wrote.
"I am a crazy mom, which I hate, but I have no choice," she wrote. "Every child is the apple of a parent's eye. Who wants them to be birds locked up in cages? No one wants to make one's own child suffer."
The article, in which the mother blamed China's examination-oriented education system as the culprit of making her daughter overburdened, has generated active responses on the Internet.
"Your words reflect my thinking," one parent wrote, while another said he was a "crazy dad" as well.
Wang Yan, a mother living in Beijing, said that she can identify with the "crazy mom" in Wuhan. "The competition is intense even in elementary schools; every parent wants one's child admitted to good high schools, which can lead to first-class universities," she said.
Education system
By the year 2007, China had 341 million minors, accounting for 26% of the country's total population.
Most Chinese students are still burdened with an excessive workload. They work extra-long hours on school days and continue to have classes on weekends and holidays.
A recent report showed that about 80% of China's primary and middle school students are not sleeping enough, getting an average of less than eight hours of sleep, even on weekends.
Heavy workloads, poor study-habits, and long commute times are believed to be contributing to the sleep deficiency.
Education experts said the atmosphere that cultivates "crazy parents" is caused by the scarcity of educational resources.
Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of 21st Century Education Research Institute, said high-end secondary schools were forced to choose talented students through an exam-oriented system in China, therefore, parents are pushing their children hard to study in order to obtain higher marks. Xiong called for an increased budget by the government in education.
Reacting to the criticism, China formulated a 10-year national education plan (from 2010 to 2020) last July, pledging to build an assignment-burden monitoring and reporting mechanism to lessen the pressure on primary and secondary school students.
However, some other education experts claimed that the shortage of high-quality secondary schools does not justify the phenomenon of "crazy parents."
Gu Mingyuan, president of the Chinese Society of Education, said parents should accept that because of individual differences, not every student will perform well at school.
"Some students may not perform very well in their early teens, but could be quite outstanding in a particular field in the future," Gu said.
"Driving the child too hard will not be any good for them," Gu said, "psychologically and emotionally."
Gu's line was echoed by Liu Ming, president of the South China Normal University, who said it is important to return to "the origin of education," in which the development and improvement of personality is the top priority, rather than marks on paper.
"Life is education," Tao Xingzhi (1891-1946), a prominent educator in China, once said. It is perhaps a good introspection for all "crazy parents."
