How Much Free Time Is Too Much?

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Let's dive in to this week's topic:

Amy Chua’s provocative memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” has set parenting blogs on fire since being published last month. In the book, Chua, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of two best-selling books on free-market democracy and the fall of empires, according to the NPR story about her, defends the traditional Chinese model of parenting that she has used in rearing her daughters, Sophia and Louisa.

To call her strict is like saying the sun is merely “hot.” But to adopt the tough love ways of the Tiger Mother, says Chua, is to assume strength instead of fragility in your child. And to do so drives them to nothing less than success. Getting there, however, requires what Western parents may see as punishingly hard academic work and a schedule that does not consider any extracurricular activity other than practicing the piano or violin to be beneficial to the child.

The Tiger Mother approach to parenting rejects play dates, sleepovers, watching TV, playing video games and any other activity you can think of that the average American kid does during “free time.” And that’s because there is no “free time.”

Chua’s parenting style raises myriad questions, but let’s just start with this one: