The Battle Hymn Of Tiger Mother Analysis

In her article Mother Inferior?, Hanna Rosin, editor at the Atlantic, discusses that parents should rear their children in more supportive ways. By introducing Rosin’s experience of her own, Rosin also shows her objection to the child rearing philosophies that Amy Chua mentioned in the book The Battle Hymn of Tiger Mother. In general, I agree strongly with Rosin’s idea that children need to be less constrained by parents, whereas I disagree with Rosin's idea that all children have the motivation to work on their own. The author discusses how parents should do and what kinds of attitude they should have when rearing the children. The author starts by saying she is a supportive parent when rearing her own children. She disagrees with Ms. Chua’s

The author does not recommend parents to drill their children in the activities that they don't love. One of Rosin’s friends was forced to play music instrument by her mother, and Rosin’s friend became emotionless to music after growing up. Instead, Rosin suggests that parents can let children discover and choose their favorite activities so that children will be able to explore their own potential(Rosin 2). In the book The Battle Hymn of Tiger Mother, Ms.Chua did the same thing; she also gave her daughter a choice, she states, “I told [Lulu] that [Lulu] could quite the violin…which at the time was to play tennis”(Chua 212). It is very clear that if children are allowed to do the activities they love, they will put all of their efforts into improving their skills. This idea of Rosin is correct, and can be supported by the example in the book The Battle Hymn of Tiger Mother by Amy Chua. Amy Chua gave Lulu a chance to choose the activity that Lulu liked, and Lulu chose tennis and started to play tournaments. Even though Lulu lost to a low ranked player in New England at the beginning, Lulu did not give up on improving her skills. Later, she beat a player who was ranked relatively high in New England. Amy Chua also states, "I was struck by what a fireball she was on the court: how fiercely she hit, how concentrated she looked, and how she never gave up"(Chua

According to Rosin, she uses her experience to counter Amy Chua’s idea of considering all the children are lazy, and claims that Chua's idea is not true. She claims that the children are all self-motivated to strive for competitiveness and successfulness. She also says that her son is very honest even without any motivation (Rosin 2). Moreover, it would be more effective to use certain non-physical, legally permitted punishments to motivate the children to work hard because Chua states, “Children on their own never want to work”(Chua 29). Rosin's idea of children can be proven to be incorrect basing on Ms.Chua experience of how she motivated her daughter Lulu to learn to play a hard music piece. In Ms.Chua’s book, Ms.Chua mentions that Lulu was once stacked on a music piece named The Little White Donkey. However, she was not able to play this song, and Ms.Chua also knew the song Lulu was playing is a hard one, and realized Lulu was refusing to learn the song. In this situation, Ms.Chua started to forbid Lulu to get up, get water, or even go to the bathroom, just for motivating Lulu to learn the music. Soon after the prohibition of life activities, Lulu was able to play The Little White Donkey very fluently, and that also surprised Ms.Chua(Chua 60-62). I totally disagree with Rosin’s idea that all the children is self motivated. The evidence of how Ms.Chua