Furthermore, the values (trust, respect, independence, collaboration, kindness) are the vague ones of seemingly all corporations and for-profit enterprises. Amy Chua herself has said she’s never even considered whether her kids were happy or if she was kind to them, all that mattered was that her kids were better than everyone else at the things they did.

There are no down and dirty secrets, though she does have some good advice and examples of things that she has done with her own children or students. Children of such parents have higher stress levels, lower self-esteem, and higher rates of substance abuse. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It wasn’t terrible, and I got most of the way through, but the incessant name dropping and self-aggrandizing was too much for me to take. Instead of focusing purely on success and achievement, her advice highlights the unsung values you should be passing on to your children, like trust, respect and independence.By most metrics, she does live a very successful life, and taking advice from someone in her position makes a lot of sense.

When they feel they can’t tell you their dreams, or what life choices they make, they’ll stop trusting you. While she certainly did not have a privileged upbringing, her decades ensconced in an elite, tech-centric community may have left her with an unrealistic idea of what schools, bureaucracies and child-rearing are like in more “ordinary” places. She also does a lot of name-dropping of famous students she taught and famous connections her daughters have made through their work. Unfortunately, Gady’s classmates failed to recognize his merits, and selected someone else to act as the newspaper’s editor-in-chief.The first part of her book addresses the fact that a lot of us parent based on how we were parented; we either reinforce what our parents taught us, whether it be good or bad, or we are so resentful of our parents we want to do the exact opposite. We're all in uncharted territory here, and most of us are going to fall short sometimes -- especially if you're trying to raise kids while running suddenly and simutaneously running a business from your home. When it comes to parenting, it’s a known fact that we tend to raise our children in the same way our parents raised us.