I had the (mis?) fortune of reading an article about the superiority of Chinese mothers. I should disclose that I'm not a parent and won't ever be a mother. In my defense, I sincerely want to be a parent, and my dad used to tell me I would grow up to be a mom. I doubt I shall ever be Chinese, at least not ethnically.
It's funny to read this and see how it intersects with recent musings on law and grace. Again, I have no real experience being a parent—but I do have experience being a child, and I suspect that this is often the way we interpret being parents. And I have friends who have been parented in different ways, one in particular who reminds me often that the law always accuses. Even in the gracious things his parents say, he hears law.
Regardless of where you fall on the parental spectrum ("Western parents really are too lenient" or "Chinese mothers are foolish!"), I think the article does a very good job of showing how the law works (or doesn't) in parent-child relationships.
While I'm tempted to deal negatively with the article, I think it is perhaps better to look at things positively. In This Momentary Marriage, Piper argues that one of the primary purposes of normal marriages is to raise children who are disciples of Jesus. (He is not so uncouth as to deny the full blessings of marriage on the infertile, and that's not what this blog post is about anyway.)
One of the first things that struck me was that none of the goals of parenting that the author of the article takes seriously include anything particularly meaningful in a Christian context. She expects straight As, musical talent, no fat, no backtalk, and support in her old age.1
I tend to agree with Piper that our primary responsibility as Christian parents is to train our children as unto the Lord—not to produce great artists, good mathematicians, or sufficient earners. Metrics of success are often elusive, and when they're dominated by law, they are usually idolatrous. This, at least, is anecdotally consistent with the sorts of things I have talked to with friends.
I would concur with Paul Zahl (Grace in Practice) that grace really demolishes our human standards for success. Success in the human sense is almost always defined in a legalistic way, or a lawful way. The successful Chinese mother breeds children who match her definitions of human success: good finances, academic skills, et c. These successes are all based on human judgment, not on God's grace.
In the end, what I have found among my friends is that parents who treat their children in a legalistic fashion always hear the voice of law even when the speaker is trying grace. The barriers erected against grace and the gospel are often extreme in these cases.
For example, in the giving of praise, one suspects ulterior motives. One friend always describes his parents encouragements as the "Yes, but" variety: "Yes, you've done well, but you need to improve this." The Yes is a concession to the devastation of the No to follow. All he really wants is a plain Yes, but now even if they were to give it, I think he would suspect an underlying trend of No, whether it was meant or otherwise.
Another way this has reared its head among my friends and acquaintances is the rejection of compliments. It is a very similar phenomenon to the previous paragraph. There's actually a fantastic example of this in the article:
Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)
(Let's ignore for the moment that all this Chinese mother has done is to absorb and intensify a culturally bound definition of beauty. If anything, this Chinese mother is speaking as the worst of the Western mothers would.)
Why would a compliment make anyone feel like garbage? Because they are so used to hearing the Law that they can no longer discern grace. The article's thesis is that speaking only Law is the solution to this problem of the crisis of self-esteem. In some ways, it's certainly more honest than speaking Grace with Law right behind.
The problem is that this injures the ability of the one subjected to such a brutal treatment. Hearing law accustoms us to hearing it always; encounters with grace are always fraught with the suspicion that it is really law in disguise. This greatly damages self-esteem, because it is impossible when having heard Law to see anything other than its description of you: an ugly failure, one who is unable despite his best efforts to live up to the standards you ought.
Interestingly, grace destroys our self-esteem as well as the Law, but it does so in the admission that we are broken and need a Savior. Grace forces us to accept that the description the law provides of us is really true. The gospel always begins by telling us who we really are: sinners in need of a Savior. But it counters the law by showing us the solution in the person of Jesus Christ. It promises the great blessing that we shall be like him someday—indeed, that we shall finally be restored to ourselves.
By contrast, the legalistic perspective is driven by personal effort, where one's aspirations are fixed on essentially temporal things whose merits are rarely, if ever, eternally felt. In the end, I suppose we may have fulfilled our parents' aspirations by earning more money than they, by staying younger longer, by performing in Carnegie Hall—but our money and youth will be spent, and death will claim not them only but also the memory of our performances and achievements.
[1] We see both sides of the argument about children caring for parents in Scripture. For example, Paul writes to the Corinthians that the parents ought to lay up for the children, and not vice versa. To Timothy he writes that children ought to care for their widowed mothers rather than foisting their care on the church. Clearly context should rule in the interpretation of the passages (especially since the passage in Corinthians seem to reference his coming to Corinth as a pastor-parent). Yet one cannot escape that the idea of parenting in the Christian context is primarily a "pay-it-forward" variety, not a "pay-me-back" variety.
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