If You Call That “Success”

Sara Mead and Tom Scocca make a lot of good points about Amy Chua’s dislikable, widely-discussed piece on “Chinese mothers.”    Aside from the stereotyping and assertions-without-evidence, what strikes me most is Chua’s conception of “success.”   It’s not only, as Scocca says, that Chua is implicitly patting herself on the back for her parenting without sufficient evidence that the parenting has been (in its own terms) successful.      But more puzzling to me is that she seems to define success in a manner entirely independent from the happiness or goals of children; “success” seems to consist of “attaining certain status markers that will make your parents look good.”   I would hope that if I ever raised children that my focus would be a little, ah, more outer-directed.