Best of both worlds

Cultural child rearing differences between China and the West are in the spotlight and 'tiger moms' are both loved and feared. By Yuan Suming.

She wants to get tanned in the summer, but her mom covers her up and says boys don't like suntanned girls. She dreams of becoming a photojournalist or art teacher, her mom wants her to aim higher. She likes to voice her opinion, her mom expects her to be obedient. It's a battle growing up in the United States for Christy Aumer, who has a Chinese mother and American father. She is a child caught between cultures.

The youngest of three daughters says her father had more of a say about how she was raised compared to her two sisters, so she had more freedom than them when growing up. "My sisters never had a sleepover," Aumer says. "I am the only child in my family that had sleepovers."

Aumer says her life is a tug of war between Western ways and the Chinese values her mother tries to inculcate in her. Her plight is highlighted by the storm about parenting models stirred by Amy Chua's book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a bestseller. Chua is dubbed a "tiger mom" because, though she lives in the US, she insisted on Chinese values while raising her two daughters.

Cultural conflicts within the family, it seems, are unavoidable due to the differences between how Chinese and Americans educate their children.

Liu Haiyue is the father of a 10-year-old who was surprised to be told by his son one day that he was not supposed to make a sound when eating soup.

"He had learned American table manners," Liu's wife Chen Tingting says. "In China, it's OK for people to slurp their soup and make a noise. I don't know whether I should ask my husband to change his behavior, or explain to my son that this is the Chinese way of doing things."