My 5-year-old, Katie, has big ideas. Sometimes she talks about them, sometimes she draws them and sometimes she even tries to execute them.
Monday morning, she found in the playroom a small headlamp that once was attached to an elastic headband.
“Mommy, do you have the stretchy headband thing for this?” she asked.
“No, but you can look for it.”
Katie didn’t want to look. She wanted to create.
She took a sheet of printer paper and began cutting strips. She taped two strips together and held it to her forehead.
Not long enough.
So she attached a third piece. Measured. Not long enough.
This continued until she’d created a paper-and-tape headband that would fit her noggin.
Then she clipped the flashlight to the new headband and crowned herself.
Flop. Crash. The light fell to the table.
She reattached. It fell again. She tried fastening it with tape. No good. Adjusted the placement. Nope.
Her design was flawed. There is no way that paper can support so much plastic and metal.
I could have told her as she launched the project that this would happen, and we probably could have avoided the tears of disappointment that followed her 10th and final attempt at forcing that flashlight to stay on her head.
But she would have missed out on cutting, taping, measuring and discovering. She would have missed an opportunity to make a mistake and learn from it.
And I would have missed yet another opportunity to help my daughter learn to manage disappointment.
After the crying, we talked about how to improve her plan. I explained that the headlamp needed something heavier and thicker to clamp onto. It told her that it could also attach to a hat.
Katie just moved on to her next project (creating her own American Girl catalog with paper, tape and markers). And I wondered how Amy Chua would have handled a similar scene.
Chua is the Yale Law School professor who has Americans passionately debating parenting styles. Her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago. In the essay (provocatively titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”), Chua describes how strict she is compared to traditional Western mothers.
A sample:
“What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up.”
Would Chua have insisted that Katie keep designing and prototyping until she had in fact produced a functional headband? Would she have treated the episode with the same tenacity in which she demanded her own daughter master a tough piano piece? (Chua threatened to withhold meals and future gifts to coerce her daughter to work at the piece until perfect. The 7-year-old wasn’t allowed to eat, drink or use the bathroom in the interim.)
The question, of course, is moot.
For one, if my daughter lived in the Chua home, she probably wouldn’t have time for imaginative play and unsupervised exploration, what with the hours of required academic and music practice.
And, honestly, I don’t care what one woman — albeit a well-educated, successful woman with brilliant kids — thinks about how I raise my children. I bristle at many of her tactics (and vice versa, I’m sure), but they’re hers to use.
I do appreciate the discussion. I think most of us are due a correction in our permissive parenting styles, in our emphasis on feelings too often at the expense of discipline, in our willingness to allow children to speak disrespectfully to their peers and adults.
But I refuse to tell Katie that she’s “lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic” when she wants to give up on a task — whether it’s mandated piano practice or a self-directed project.
She’s only 5, but she deserves respect, too.
Tyra Damm is a Briefing columnist. E-mail her at tyradamm@gmail.com.
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