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Interesting article written in the International Herald Tribune on China’s growing obsession with Ivy League schools.  I had a teacher at Tsinghua who was studying English who wanted to go to Harvard.  She didn’t just want to go.  She HAD to go.  This was her life’s dream.

Now, eight years after the publication of “Harvard Girl,” bookstore shelves here are laden with copycat titles like “How We Got Our Child Into Yale,” “Harvard Family Instruction” and “The Door of the Elite.”

Their increasing popularity points to the preoccupation – some might say a single-minded national obsession – of a growing number of middle-class Chinese parents: getting their children into America’s premier universities.

Because government policy allows families only one child, many parents feel immense pressure to groom their sons and daughters for success and, in the process, prepare a comfortable retirement for themselves. They fervently mine the expanding volumes of child-rearing manuals – “Stanford’s Silver Bullet,” “Yale Girl,” “Creed of Harvard” – for tips on producing what the Chinese term “high-quality” children.

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When Eliana was still in the womb, our old pastor introduced us to Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Ted Tripp. It’s a parenting book that talks about raising children, discipline, roles of the parents, etc.

We’re at that stage in life where a lot of our friends are married and starting to have children, so we meet two kinds of expectant parents… The first one is the clueless type (which I think is the category we fall into) and the other is the nonchalant, “we’ll be fine type”. We are the clueless type (and still are), so we read a whole lot. Some of the books we read concerning children rearing includes: Baby Wise, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, the above mentioned Shepherding a Child’s Heart, Home Grown Kids…. and a bunch of others.

Anyways, there’s so much out there, differing philosophies, differing attitudes towards parenting, preparing for children, etc… that maybe the nonchalant types are right. Each child is so unique you can’t prepare for them all… but then again, maybe there are some basic truths that can be applied to parenting, stuff that can help you when the time comes….

Anyways, Shepherding is the latter. It presents parenting from a biblical perspective. One of the main points in the book is not to correct behavior through behavior modification, but to appeal to the heart of a child. It looks at the heart of a child as both something made by God yet has been corrupted by sin. What that means is that one needs to be aware of both the dignity and depravity in children (and even ourselves) that must be dealt with. In that sense, the heart of a child needs to be shepherded towards wisdom or else will end up in folly…

We read it (and liked it) and it helps us to see parenting from a biblical perspective. It’s not for everyone (so be warned), but the main thesis of the book involves acceptance in a few presuppositions about the reality in which we live. Even if these aren’t your basic assumptions in life, you might still find this book to be helpful.

And if you are not into reading, you can listen to some of Tripp’s lectures he did recently at a conference entitled Shepherding a Child’s Heart.

And also check out the sequel: Instructing a Child’s Heart