Sitting up straight

My long-suffering piano teacher showed me a book this morning, a book written for grade school children. The book shows beginning pianists how to relax their arms while playing, so that they use their fingers, not their shoulders, to exert pressure on the keys. "One thing you never learned as a child, apparently," she sighed. "One of many things," I agreed.

I began thinking of the many things I never learned as a child. To what extent are our adult talents and abilities shaped and limited by what we learned or failed to learn when we were kids? Is it, ultimately, all Mom's fault?

If you've been awake this past week, you know about the Chinese-American author Amy Chua and her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Woman. She describes the draconian tactics to which she resorted in pushing her daughters to be the brilliant adults that they clearly are today. And competent musicians. One daughter performed at Carnegie Hall, but only after a childhood of forced four-hour practice sessions at the piano, and maternal threats to burn her stuffed animals if she failed to play a composition perfectly. (No, I haven't read the book, nor do I intend to read it. Life's too short. I'm relying on a story in the New York Times.)

Thoughtful readers of my posts may assume that Amy has my whole-hearted approval, but she doesn't. She has only my half-hearted approval. Her parenting techniques, as she describes them, fall at one barely acceptable extreme of the parenting continuum; the parent who sits before the TV every night and considers his or her child's education to be the function of the local school district would be at the other end. Somewhere in between lies the ideal approach, and I suspect that ideal balance varies from child to child. Unfortunately, the optimum balance is easier to locate in retrospect, after the kid's already grown up, than it was at the time the knowledge was needed.

The reader comments to the NY Times article, and to a follow-up column in the Times, vary widely in how they view Ms. Chua -- from admiration to suspicion of child abuse. The comments are all interesting and thoughtful, and the experiences each reader has had with his/her own children show the wide variety of child rearing approaches that can lead to the development of successful adult lives. Or, for that matter, to failures.

My own parents, like most in the milieu in which I grew up, took a rather laissez faire approach to bringing up their kids. More so than average, perhaps, even for our place and time. They wanted good grades from us, and college educations, but they pretty much left it up to us to figure out how best to achieve those results. That approach gave me an enormous amount of room as a kid for exploration and experimentation, for following my own sense of curiosity. It also gave me a lot of room to develop rather lazy habits of thought and poor self-discipline.

If I had my childhood to live over again, I'd hope for a bit more pressure from my parents, a setting of the bar of acceptable achievement a bit higher, rather than their relying entirely on my own sense of self-pride and ambition. On the other hand, I have to admit I'm glad they didn't refuse me access to the bathroom until I'd finished perfecting, to their satisfaction, the piano piece I was playing. As Ms. Chua cheerfully admits to doing.

I've known plenty of people whose parents tended toward either extreme. In general, those with the stricter parents have developed certain enviable talents -- like playing an instrument well -- more frequently than the others. But I can't really say that either approach by the parents has led consistently to adult lives that were either happier or more productive. Different kids respond differently to different parenting approaches. Parenting remains an art rather than a science.

This week's debate among readers of the Times articles is a microcosm of a national debate that will grow increasingly sharp in the years just ahead -- between those who feel that today's form of American education best develops the creativity and social skills that are needed for both personal and national success, and those who feel that the Chinese/Indian/Jewish model of hard work and, at times, rote learning in childhood teaches the self-discipline and analytical skills that Americans are increasingly failing to develop, especially compared to kids in the developing Asian nations that will be our competitors in the next decades.

As expected, I think both sides are right, and that what we need is a proper blend of the two approaches. But then, my own lackadaisical education taught me to be just that way -- non-judgmental to the point of sounding wishy-washy.

And the music still doesn't flow to my finger tips -- through relaxed arms -- as I strike the keys on the piano!