Quotes from Amy Chua

What the Chinese parent is conveying to the child is not that 'you've got to get A's or else I won't like you.' On the contrary, it's, 'I believe in you so much, I know that you can be excellent.'

I really feel that most things are difficult at the beginning and they become fun, something you love, only after you've worked at them. Making children do something hard can, in the long run, be a great parental service.

I'm willing to be different than other parents and go against the mainstream.

There's a lot of rudeness and sullen behavior and kids that are very entitled and spoiled, just buy me more stuff. I didn't want to raise kids like that.

The Romans thought of themselves as the chosen people, yet they built the greatest army on Earth by recruiting warriors from any background.

Both of my girls have very high self-esteem because they were both able to master certain things; I should think that's good for their confidence.

China is doing lots of things right. It's investing in education and R&D, it's opening up, it's more cosmopolitan than it's ever been. I think it's very likely that China will continue to explode economically and certainly become a superpower.

The Chinese mom is not the helicopter mom. I would never do their homework for them. It's all about: Take responsibility, don't blame others. Be self-reliant. Never blame the teacher.

I think there are many ways to raise great kids. From what I can tell, Ayelet Waldman's kids are interesting, strong, and happy, and if that's the case, that's good parenting.

Some parents let their kids sleep at other people's houses, where they drink alcohol, watch TV for hours and God knows what else. But if you say you have to get all A's and practice the violin for two hours, then they consider that abusive. That upsets me.

There's something suspicious about saying, 'I'm just going to leave my child alone and let her pursue her passions.' You know what? I think most 13-year-olds' passion is sitting in front of the TV, or doing Facebook, or surfing the Internet for hours.

I'm a slave to my dogs and go out with them almost every day. They are poorly behaved if they don't run. They really act up.

Westerners often laud their children as 'talented' or 'gifted', while Asian parents highlight the importance of hard work. And in fact, research performed by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has found that the way parents offer approval affects the way children perform, even the way they feel about themselves.

There's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.

Florence saw childhood as something fleeting to be enjoyed. I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for future.

I'm not holding myself out as a model, but I do believe that we in America can ask more of children than we typically do, and they will not only respond to the challenge, but thrive.

Group identification can powerfully reinforce these conformity effects. In experiments similar to Asch's landmark study, subjects have been found to conform much more when presented with judgments said to come from members of an in-group, and much less when judgments are said to come from out-group members. And it's not just that people tend to think what their fellow tribe members think. They will do what their fellow tribe members do—even to the point of savagery.

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it[...] Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun.

The Fourteenth Amendment was not only revolutionary in its own time. Birthright citizenship remains extremely rare even today. No Asian country grants it. No European country grants it. In fact, the United States is one of only a very few developed nations to recognize birthright citizenship (Canada is another). If anything, the trend is in the opposite direction. France eliminated birthright citizenship in 1993; Ireland, in 2005; New Zealand, in 2006.

You can tell who the Chinese are because they're the ones with the longest last names. That's because they felt that they had to 'out-Thai' the Thai and because the Chinese weren't allowed to take on Thai surnames that already existed

Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams. This

Liberals have cried wolf too many times. If everything is racist and sexist, nothing is. When Trump, the real wolf, came along, no one listened.

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and

The impulse to form group identities and favor in-group members has a neurological basis. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists have scanned people's brains while conducting experiments similar to the one just described. Their findings, as one writer puts it, suggest that: "group identification is both innate and almost immediate.