Chinese mothers

There was a fascinating piece in Saturday's Wall Street Journal by a Chinese-American mother who is a law professor at Yale. She contrasted her parenting style with that of typical American moms (and dads, including her husband). The message was that while her demands for perfection from her daughters sound autocratic and unreasonable, they produce superior children. The implication was that her methods are typical not only of Chinese-American mothers but of mothers in China as well, raising some interesting questions about the future competitiveness of our two societies.
I certainly haven't raised my children the way she did, and I suspect some of the reason is laziness and lack of self-discipline.
While her methods sound draconian, they are also incredibly time consuming. I don't think many American mothers or fathers have the discipline and determination to spend the hours working with their kids that being a Chinese mother seems to require. We all try to spend quality time with children, but not many spend the amount of time that Amy Chua seems to. I suspect her kids benefit from the amount of time and attention they get, even if they sometimes rebel at the content. She may sometimes tell them they're "garbage" but the amount of time she spends must tell them that she thinks they're incredibly important.
In one painful anecdote about forcing her daughter to learn to play a difficult piano piece, she describes spending at least four hours of yelling, screaming and listening to badly played piano. Not many parents have the energy or make the time for the sort of effort.
In the U.S., you sometimes hear about football or baseball players who are coaches' kids who spent that sort of time with their Dads. And then there's Tiger Woods. But very few parents will spend that kind of time practicing math or language or a musical instrument with a child. It's so much easier to put the kid in front of a video screen or a computer game.