Essay

Looking for the 'perfect' parent

By Benjamin Wodward

Last year, an article appeared in The Wall Street Journal that caused something of a furor. "Why Chinese mothers are superior" was the headline, and it was an excerpt from a memoir by Amy Chua called The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Chua's book presented a terrifying vision — at least to American audiences — of parenting that was uncompromisingly strict. Parents pushed their children to achieve. Practice took precedence over play. Threats were used if demands weren't met. It was the stereotypical portrait of the Asian mother — the kyoiku mama, the Tiger Mom.

Earlier this year, another article appeared — again in The Wall Street Journal. This time the French were the model of parenting in an excerpt from Pamela Druckerman's Bringing Up Bebe, her own memoir of raising a child in France. She advocates French parents' hands-off laissez faire approach to parenting. Parents are allowed to have their own lives and so are the children, although this doesn't mean that when the child is doing something wrong the parents can't say "Non!" And the result is — apparently — polite and civilized children who can conduct mature conversations with their parents.

It all seems silly, if not vaguely offensive, to Asian, American and French parents. But the debates they have caused have been as serious as they have been heated, with many pointing to what has been called a Crisis in American Parenting. What exactly constitutes American Parenting remains a mystery, but, according to what I read, its failures have resulted in a generation of lazy, directionless, demanding, overdependent, undereducated, pampered children with steadily growing waistlines. You name it, a child's every "deficiency" can be — somewhat unforgivingly — brought back to the poor parents.

A friend of mine once told me that after she'd had her first child she'd been terrified. She'd dutifully read countless parenting manuals, she'd kept tabs on all the right mommy blogs, and she had weighed the suggestions of friends and her own parents. She'd been confident as a prospective parent, but now that her child was born, she confessed that she didn't know what to do. She resorted to more manuals, and she became even more insecure that she wasn't a perfect parent from the get-go.

Obviously there is no single parenting method that serves every family best. That's just a publishers' marketing ploy or the line that busybodies take. There are just too many variables involved. What Tolstoy said of families — that happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way — isn't true. Every happy family is happy in its own way. So if there's a crisis in American parenting, it isn't one of inadequate parenthood, but the imposition of unreasonable templates for perfection on parents in America.

Shukan ST: MARCH 30, 2012

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