Crouching Tiger, Hidden Parent

These days, you read a lot about the clash between supposedly Confucianist discipline and supposedly Western-Enlightenment discipline as ways of developing children who are either successful or creative, or both. To me, proponents of both are attempting to bake cakes using either flour alone or using butter and sugar with no flour.

In the former approach, you will be successful. You might get a lovely piece of rock-hard inflexible gluten that will last forever, or something softer but edible. In the latter, you will always get something edible, but it won't last.

The great news is that life tends to add whatever you missed out on. Parenting is not the sole determinant of most lives. It's the most important in most cases, but how much more important it is compared to environmental and peer influences varies and has varied greatly from place to place and across historical periods.

Think about that greatly scientific Enlightenment household, the Victorian classical stereotype. I think it might have been as gruelling, or more so, than the modern 'Chinese' tiger-parent style so recently lambasted in the newspapers and magazines.

Modern parenting based on reason is certainly a success by accident in a majority of cases, judging from the desired outcomes as opposed to the actual outcomes. And since the mid-1990s, we've known a lot more about how human brains work — and the child-rearing literature hasn't caught up with the truth yet.