Tiger Mom, meet Irish Setter Dad

One of the more talked about books this past year was Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and what is the best way to raise your kid. Seems the basic question is: Do you raise them to be career/money oriented or do you raise them to be happy?

P.J. O’Rourke offers his thoughts in this column “Irish Setter Dad.” (You have to sign in, but it's free.) Here's a snippet:

"My kids fit the success profile. I’ll bet Muffin and Poppet are accepted at the University of Idaho, assuming Wii is a Title IX thing. And Buster will be waving goodbye to Harvard while he’s still in junior high.

Amy Chua, I’ve got bad news. “A” students work for “B” students. Or not even. A businessman friend of mine corrected me. “No, P. J.,” he said, “ ‘B’ students work for ‘C’ students. ‘A’ students teach.” Teaching in the Ivy League gives you a lot of time off, Amy—enough to write a crap book, worse than Yale prof Erich Segal’s Love Story. Maybe when you get some time off again you should come to rural New Hampshire and meet the Irish Setter Dad children.

Buster, age 7, is a master of passive resistance who can turn staying up past his bedtime into Tahrir Square. He could hire himself out as a civil disobedience coach to Mahatma -Gandhi and Martin Luther King, if they weren’t dead. Poppet, 10, is a persuasive saleswoman, not to say charming con artist, who can hand you a sheet of black construction paper with a hole in it and convince you it’s a science project on collapsed super-novas. And Muffin, 13, has her own .410 shotgun and knows how to use it.

Try your Chinese Tiger Mom stuff on my kids."

In my mind, O’Rourke has managed an incredible career by appealing to the diverse audiences of The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator and The Weekly Standard, as well as viewers of Bill Maher and listeners of NPR. Author of 16 books, he is considered the most quoted living man. Don’t doubt me, Wikipedia says so!

In a 2008 LA Times column, O’Rourke shares his take on mortality, after learning that he had:

“of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.”