What do Michelle's mother's habits and beliefs reveal about her as a mother? What value do you see in her approach to parenting, and what would you do differently?

"My mother was always trying to shape me into the most perfect version of myself" (p. 18). What do Michelle's mother's habits and beliefs reveal about her as a mother?

What value do you see in her approach to parenting, and what would you do differently?

Michelle's mother was driven it seemed by appearances. She took great pride and put lots of energy into maintaining her own hair, clothes and general appearance. From Michelle's POV this was to great excess as the piles of creams and cosmetics was ever growing on her vanity. Michelle found this expectation of beauty hard to live up to and felt inferior and unloved by her mother. Not only because she could not live up to this high bar = but neither did she want to. Even as a child she saw the hyperbole of her habits and found it difficult to find anything in common with her mom.

Every mother tries to instill in her daughter good habits and beliefs, which really means passing on to her daughter her own habits and beliefs, whether she is as meticulous about them as Michelle's mother was or not. While Michelle felt her mother's efforts were overbearing, again that is often a normal reaction between a daughter and a mother - young daughters often rebel at their mothers' suggestions about the ideal way to look or behave. I think her mother succeeded in instilling her own habits and beliefs in Michelle: witness Michelle's efforts after her mother's death to honor her mother and to learn to cook the dishes that her mother prepared for her.

I think part of the problem was not only the normal daughter rebelling against the mother scenario, but the struggle between being raised in Korea and being in America. The cultures are different and value different things in many ways. That had to come into play in their relationship and how they went about things, especially the emphasis on beauty and skin care. But food brought them back together. It was one thing they always agreed on.

I think that many children believe they have let their parents down when they take alternate routes to happiness than parents envision. It appeared that Michelle's mom had very high expectations for her and was not content that Michelle insisted on following her own way until the end. I've always thought that I can't live my children's lives for them. You hopefully have raised them to find their own happiness.

Most parents would find their children rebellious in one way or another. I feel the children are just trying to find their own way in a world that uses “modeling” to the nth degree. Michelle wanted to do things her own way and her mother never relinquished her way. This book exemplified that diversity can mean more than one thing.

I hate to use generalizations, but many Asian families have very high expectations for their children. I work with a Chinese woman and she complains frequently that her daughter has gained weight, didn't get an A+, missed a question on a test, is dating a boy with a lower degree than her, isn't dating anybody, etc. I really don't offer much of a response, because I wasn't raised with those types of expectations. I have told her repeatedly that I have different values. This must have been difficult for Michelle who was more of an artist/free spirit.

I have a number of students who speak about the pressure to meet their parents' expectations and the challenge of blending and balancing two distinct cultures. This is one of the things that drew me to this book. It did not make me look back and wish that my wife and I had done anything differently, but I definitely thought of the book when my adult son recently called to thank us for stressing certain things when he was younger.

I thought her style of parenting was much too harsh and instilled so much guilt and self-doubt in her daughter. I thought often she was cruel.

I don’t think the book fully explains the parenting style. The mother’s understanding of the effect of her parenting would be nice to know. As barbarae above mentions the parenting often seemed cruel and very egocentric to the mother. I would like to know more about whether this was cultural based or specific to this mother. I think the book leaves the impression it is cultural based, or the clash of cultures. I am not so sure that is true. The tension between the author and her father also alters our ability to evaluate parenting ability.