Academic

One of the reasons that I gathered together a whole bunch of law professor moms to talk about Professor Chua's book was that I imagined that the book would raise the question of balancing work and parenting.  However, the question was raised then ignored. Though Chua focuses on the tension between pushing her children and not pushing them too hard, she skips over a tension that I know she must feel: the tension between her own career ambitions and her children's success. Early on in the book, she mentions that at Yale she felt like her world was split in half: she went to work early and left in the middle of the day to begin her second job molding her children. That's what I want to hear more about.

Chua briefly describes her childhood, in which she was raised to always be the first person in her class (no ties!), then she quickly skips over a decade to depict her ensuring that her children were first in their respective classes.  Bracket for this discussion whether there is coercion in her tactics (our other posts have covered that); the bottom line is that her tactic takes an inordinate amount of time.  She pushes Lulu to be concertmaster and Sophia to be the youngest pianist at Carnegie Hall, but she doesn't talk about whether that type of motherly determination required her to not push herself to be concertmaster in her own career realm. Chua is obviously an accomplished and successful teacher and scholar, but she is spending 100 hours a week driving kids to out-of-state lessons, supervising practices and writing improvement notes.  However, we all have colleagues inside and outside Yale that are spending those hours on their own careers.  Now, I gave up being first in my class sometime in high school, so I'm quite sanguine about letting my colleagues Larry Ribstein and Larry Solum bury me in downloads while I create a balance between productivity and parenting, but I'm wondering whether Chua had to make a decision at some point that her daughters' ranking was her priority.

Balancing career and parenting is a common topic here on the Glom, and I would have loved to have read Chua's take on that.  We all have to pinpoint the equilibrium between career and parenting, and the flexibility of law teaching makes that easier than some professions.  However, our profession has a lot to tempt the Type A personality and suck up every hour she has:  article placement, book publishing, article downloads, media attention, university chairs/awards, etc.  If the Tiger Mother was raised to drive herself in the fierce competition of life, then when did the competition shift from her own achievements to creating achievements for her children?  Is this a painful shift?  When her daughters are in college, will she regret that shift in priority?  Will Chua enroll Coco and Pushkin in agility training, senior division?  Of course, as I'm writing this I realize that the last month has made Chua and her book famous, so perhaps she is rebalancing with the writing of this memoir.  However, I would have liked to have heard more about her working mom issues from the past fifteen years.