Flowers Fall

Ding, Ding! The Middle Way Wins Again

by Bethany Saltman, January 31, 2011

Two articles about parenting came to my attention recently and have gotten me thinking. Both are interesting in their own right, but side by side they are even more compelling.

The first one I came across is by Karen Maezen Miller, a Zen priest and author of Momma Zen. It’s called “Not Teaching Children to Meditate” and was posted on her blog. Her main point is that “Children don’t need to learn to mediate. Parents do.” She believes that children are “exemplars in the art of being” already, and that “how you behave in your home is their spiritual upbringing. I think we have to be careful with all forms of ideological indoctrination, and that is what spiritual training is in children: the imposition of a set of abstract beliefs and ideals.”

The other I heard about on the radio. It is by historian and Yale Law Professor Amy Chua, and was published in the Wall Street Journal. Titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” the piece is an excerpt from Chua’s forthcoming book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. In it, she describes how she, as a Chinese mother (the Jewish Dad seems to be in the background), has raised two Carnegie Hall, performing, uberkids, beginning with a list of things her girls have never been allowed to do:
• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin

So on the one hand: an American Zen mom saying that she trusts her child’s innate goodness and capacity so much that she doesn’t even want to meddle as much as it would take to teach her to meditate. (I am glad the Dalai Lama’s parents and handlers didn’t feel this way.) Miller writes, “Isn’t it funny that the fact that our children are undistractedly doing what we don’t want them to do absolutely drives us crazy?! They don’t yet have problems concentrating! We more often have trouble loving and accepting them as they are, trusting that they are changing and growing all the time, and usually doing what they need to.” I hear what she’s saying, but….full-body-and-mind begging to play ONE MORE GAME OF UNO, PU-LEASE, IT WILL MAKE ME SO HAPPY may well be what Azalea really “needs to do,” but as her parent, I believe that what I need to do is “indoctrinate” her regarding a few “abstract ideals,” spiritual and otherwise, such as: Enough’s enough.