I thought this week I would put my head in the lion’s mouth – or more accurately, into the tiger’s mouth – and add my voice to the chorus of cheers and jeers directed toward the Tiger Mother. For those of you who have been busy raising your children and not just reading about raising children, the Tiger Mother is Yale Law professor and menacingly Type-A personality Amy Chua. In her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, she writes of setting fire to her child’s stuffed animals, throwing a four-year-old’s handmade birthday card back in that child’s face because it wasn’t good enough for mommy, and making her kids watch tv clips of House Speaker John Boehner sobbing while he recalled his childhood. Actually, I made up the part about Boehner, but the rest, apparently, is dead true.
In interviews about her book, Chua has set fire (figuratively) to even more stuffed animals, justified parental brutality as only a lawyer could, inserted foot further into mouth, and sold more books. There’s been debate about Chinese-American parents and the demands they put upon their children. Far more revealing about human nature was Nicholas Kristof’s recent piece in the Times. He wrote that Chinese educators believe that too much discipline and a madness for testing are simply crushing creativity. You mean, it’s possible to listen to your teachers, ace your tests in school and grow up to become a bore, or worse, a banker? Happens.
Most parents get into the game with little or no practice. Sorry kids, but intellectually we don’t know what we’re doing. We’re all instinct and gut, and it works pretty well, because the relationship between parent and child is self-correcting. You act like an asshole to your kids, you get that back. If you pay attention, you can correct. The wheels come off, however, when parents, who are physically larger than children, start to bully them and take unfair advantage. That’s not nice, and that’s why the Tiger Mother Method seems wrong to me. Oh, I know she’s backlashing against the parent who says “good job” for even a bad job, and the kind of school sports where everybody gets a trophy even when they suck. That’s not real either and leads to, in Judith Warner’s words, “pathological ninnyishness in kids.”
We all have found ways to torture our children. We make them listen to the Beatles. We make them watch The Big Lebowski. We make them write things on paper. All monstrous demands and onerous tasks, but necessary. Well, maybe liking The Big Lebowski isn’t necessary, but the rest of it is, and the reason that’s good is that it helps the family, that societal microcosm, cooperate. When parents go wrong is the moment they force their experience on their children, believing without question that their traditions and past personal history will define their child’s future. That doesn’t work so well, and it seems that if you went to Yale, it can be especially bad.
One day in the mid 1970s, a pre-school teacher living in Sweden named Hilde Back decided to sponsor an African student. Hilde, a Holocaust survivor whose parents were killed in the camps, lived modestly as a refugee in the safe haven of Sweden. Every month she put a few dollars in an envelope and sent it to a Kenyan boy named Chris Mburu. This was enough to get Chris through school. (In Kenya, at the time Chris was in school, students had to pay for their primary and secondary school education. Today, primary is free in Kenya, but secondary still costs.) Chris was inspired by his mysterious benefactor who lived so far away. Not only did he become a star student, he moved on from his village to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School. He became a United Nations human rights advocate, a post he holds today.
One small act – a couple of bucks – changed his life. But it gets better. Chris decided to honor the benefactor he had never met. He established the Hilde Back Education Fund to sponsor more Kenyan students, to improve more young lives. Eventually he tracked down the 80-year-old Back and brought her to Africa to see the results of her generosity.
Hilde Back and Chris Mburu
It sounds a little like fiction, but this is the true story told in A Small Act, a documentary directed by Jennifer Arnold. Jennifer attended the University of Nairobi with Chris’s cousin, and experienced firsthand what Kenya was like. She wanted others to have the experience of a prosperous Kenya with a sizable middle class. She set out to make a film about that and discovered even more.
“My mom was Peace Corps. I come from a long tradition in my family of, ‘just do what you can to help other people.’ We all believe in that in my family. Small actions totally make a difference.” – Jennifer Arnold
Jennifer Arnold, director of "A Small Act"
Her film was initially intended to simply show a balanced view of Africa. Along the way, she discovered Chris and Hilde. As their story unfolded before her lens, Jennifer filmed in villages without electricity, using only battery power for the camera, and sometimes couldn’t understand what was being said. (She speaks some Swahili, but many of the people she filmed spoke Kikiuyu.)
A Small Act was accepted at Sundance, and while it screened there with Chris and Hilde in attendance, Jennifer tells this remarkable story: “At Sundance, audience members started handing Chris and Hilde and us checks and cash. They were all donations to the fund. They donated $90,000 over the course of 10 days at Sundance. Then a philanthropist who saw the film just donated a quarter million dollars, just based off seeing the film,” she told me.
What the film has taught her is this simple truth: If you feel like you can make a positive change once, you will do it again.
A Small Act premieres on HBO at 9PM ET, July 12. Working with Jennifer, HBO is launching a campaign called “What’s Your Small Act?” and as part of it, the network has partnered with a website called Network For Good. At selected screenings of A Small Act viewers will receive a $10 gift certificate that they can use to donate to the charity of their choice.
If you want to know more about the Hilde Back Education Fund, click here.
Acknowledgments: Hilde Back photo, courtesy Hilde Back Education Fund. Chris Mburu and Hilde Back, courtesy Harvard Law School. Jennifer Arnold portrait by Lee Schneider. A Small Act trailer courtesy Jennifer Arnold via Vimeo.
I thought this week I would put my head in the lion’s mouth – or more accurately, into the tiger’s mouth – and add my voice to the chorus of cheers and jeers directed toward the Tiger Mother. For those of you who have been busy raising your children and not just reading about raising children, the Tiger Mother is Yale Law professor and menacingly Type-A personality Amy Chua. In her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, she writes of setting fire to her child’s stuffed animals, throwing a four-year-old’s handmade birthday card back in that child’s face because it wasn’t good enough for mommy, and making her kids watch tv clips of House Speaker John Boehner sobbing while he recalled his childhood. Actually, I made up the part about Boehner, but the rest, apparently, is dead true.
