Tiger Moms and the Central Plan....

[redcliffsw]

As for the Chinese approach, it might reflect a sense that authorities can never be trusted with the essential job of training a child for life. Long enough experience with a central plan will tend to teach that lesson. Americans are just behind the learning curve in this regard.
-Jeffrey Tucker

http://www.lewrockwell.com/tucker/tucker186.html

[Patriot]

From that article:

The thesis was simple. American moms coddle their kids and protect their self-esteem; Chinese mothers, in contrast, work their kids hard, accept nothing less then excellence, and help the kid accomplish real things so that self-esteem is rooted in reality. The response was beyond belief, with mobs of angry mothers claiming that the author was essentially advocating child abuse.

I'm not entering the fray on child-raising techniques. Rather I would like to draw attention to something that seems to be lost in this debate: the institutional context that has led to the American tendency to let the kids grow like weeds.

The problem begins with public schooling itself. Teachers and parents alike report the widespread tendency of parents to take a strong interest in their child's education from preschool through second grade. But after the child learns to read, more or less, and life gets busy to double-income households, the job of tending to education is left to the authorities, who give off the illusion that they are taking care of all important matters.

The child is meanwhile swimming in a world of peers and the distance between this world and the world of the parents grows, and by the time the child is in middle school, there is very little connection left between the parents and the child that would allow anything like close monitoring of educational outcomes.

In way too many schools, I think more urban than rural, this is very true.  Been there, done that.  Remember too, that the self-esteem bubble was, and still is, a big theme with the Progressive movement.  The kids' self-esteem is out of control, but their senses of productive independence & humility have been neutered.  Ultimately that makes for nice little milquetoast citizens who are so focused on self that events that will ultimately enslave them go unnoticed.

Good little frogs... yes the water is a little warmer...  Oh,  look! A squirrel!