Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

How do you as a parent protect your child and make sure it is happy and becomes successful in the future? It is incredibly difficult to determine what is the best way to raise a child and most parents have their own subjective opinion on how to bring up and protect your child.

In the article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” from “The Wall Street journal” January 8, 2011 Amy Chua discusses the importance of Geographical and cultural differences when it comes to the upbringing of children.

Amy Chua is married to a Western man and she has most likely observed a few differences concerning how Western and Chinese parents raise children, which is the reason for why her article focuses on this specific difference.

The difference that Amy Chua appoints is also seen through multiple of her personal experiences. “…I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage…when I mentioned this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized.”

Throughout the article Amy Chua tries to reason with the Chinese way of upbringing in an attempt to persuade the reader to believe that Chinese parents are not as punishing and insensitive as their reputation suggests.

One of Amy Chua’s key points in the article is that “nothing is fun until your good at it” and she also believes that this idea is one of the fundamentals of Chinese parenting and the reason why “Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids”.

She believes that you have to be strict and force your child to do things they might not want to do, to teach the child discipline and make sure the child is going to have a successful future. This opinion is based on Amy Chua’s trust in the fact that once you have made sure your child is good at something the child will become motivated and happy and strive to become more successful on its own^[1].

Most of Amy Chua’s methods, such as forcing her daughter to sit and play the piano with no breaks and threatening her with no lunch, dinner and Christmas until she learns the piece^[2], may seem very extreme and unheard of for most of the Western population.

Therefore it is very important that she truly expresses the happiness of her daughter to the reader to display how well the “Chinese” parenting methods work, which she also does.

“After that she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn’t leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up.”

This quote is also a very good example of how well Amy Chua makes use of the form of appeal, pathos. Her clever use of pathos throughout the text makes her seem less like a cruel and heartless mother which makes it easier for her to persuade the reader and convince them that this approach to a child’s upbringing might not be as harsh as you originally thought.

Another prominent form of appeal in the text is logos which is clearly shown when she refers to a study^[3] that backs up her statement that there is huge different between Western American mothers and Chinese mothers when it comes to parenting.

Additionally Amy Chua is also writing a significant amount about her own experience with her methods and she even listed her own daughters rules and talks about her personal stories and experience to give a clear example of how she raised her daughter, which all helps building up her ethos and makes her arguments seem more valid and because of this as well as the fact that Amy Chua is a Chinese parent herself she becomes a more reliable writer.

By doing this Amy Chua is ensuring that the reader is engaged in the text.