(Ecns.cn)！ Pan Xinyi, a second-grader in east China's Jiangxi Province, received a present from her mother！a Mickey Mouse trolley bag in which she can store her 3.5-kilogram books and notebooks before dragging them to school.
This load of books is not only felt by the bag, but the students who have to use them as well. A news report published by the People's Daily on Friday quoted a poem written by a pupil in Nanjing as saying: "Mom, I am under huge pressure; hearing birds' singing and feeling the seasons changing; please don't disconnect me from nature."
It is not news that Chinese students - from elementary to high school - are overburdened with school work and facing the enormous pressure of intense competition.
Their pressure at school is being added onto by parents who show a great amount of concern for their children's education. Parenting skills have come under close scrutiny amid recent discussions of mothers who are extremely strict on their children.
In the West
Amy Chua, a Chinese-American mother and a professor at Yale Law School, stressed the importance of discipline in parenting skills and criticized American parents for giving their children too much freedom.
"As every American knows, we have a serious child-rearing problem in this country, and on the whole these are problems of too little structure, not too much," Chua, who is now famously known as the "tiger mother," wrote in an op-ed in the newspaper USA Today two months ago.
Born in 1962, the Year of the Tiger, Chua said in one of her articles that the tiger is the symbol of power and might, and as the "tiger mother," she asked her daughters to take control of their daily lives and follow strict rules, such as no nights out, no TV or video games, no school activities without parents' consent, and no musical instruments other than piano and violin.
Chua's book, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," a memoir about her failed attempt to impose a strict "Chinese" model of parenting on her two teenage daughters, caused quite a stir in both the US and China, since most American parents criticize Chua's way of parenting.
In the book, translated in China as "Being a Mom in America," Chua persuaded many Chinese mothers that starving your kids of any fun is the way to go.
Chua's 18-year-old daughter Sophia, who has been accepted to Harvard, is also under pressure since the book was published - not by her mom, but by the rest of the world. "It got really painful," she says. "All these people are calling me a robot."
In response, Chua said the book was meant to "celebrate rebellion," while her Jewish-American husband Jed Rubenfeld said he never thought of it as East versus West, he felt that he and Chua were just parenting in a more traditional way.
Rubenfeld cited modern scourges such as high rates of teenage pregnancy, and alcohol and drug abuse in the US to support his argument that "permissiveness is not leading to greater happiness."
Meanwhile, daughter Sophia has vague plans of becoming a writer, thus turning her nose up at the kind of career path that Asian parents typically push for. As writers are supposed to be a tortured bunch, she will be all the more grateful for her mom's mental episodes in child-rearing when she puts pen to paper and turns all that angst into a national best-seller - thus following in her mom's five-clawed paw prints.
In another article published by the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Chua praised the parenting skills of her Chinese counterparts, who on average are stricter on their children.
"American adolescents need structure in order to nurture a strong sense of responsibility toward their parents and to do well in school. American parents should look to China for some guidance," Chua wrote.
