The Chinese Mothering tactics

So I tried out some of my new Chinese Mother parenting tactics. I am reading Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother right now. A Chinese mother writes of raising her children in strict Chinese fashion. I won't go into detail, but after reading a bit of the book I will say that my husband and I have decided to try to adopt a more strict approach to parts of our parenting. Bottom line: if we see that our children seem to have the ability to excel in something - we push it pretty hard, insist on practicing it often and for longer periods of time, and when they perform badly, be honest to them about their performance. We have decided we will try the "high expectations of you" and "less coddling" tactics of the Chinese. Now there are some aspects of the parenting the mother in this book describes that are very against my way of thinking and parenting, but for now we are trying out some stuff that I don't have a big problem with and seeing what happens. Why not? I mean we are always trying to figure out how to get the best behavior, performance, happiness from our children. So, after a recent basketball game in which my son played a particularly stale performance, I told him as much. I said that if he was not going to start playing harder, practicing more and trying harder, I would stop coming to watch. I said it was hard for me to sit on the bench watching him perform below his ability. His next 2 games were his best 2 games ever. I have also began to insist that my older 2 boys practice their music for an hour a day (a fraction of what the Chinese mother insists on). I thought that I would meet much resistance, however, after the first day of practicing for an hour where each of my boys excelled so obviously within that hour that they impressed themselves, I have not had to push at all. I say, "time for your hour" and they go do it. And they are proud of how well they are doing. Their piano lessons go more smoothly - obviously, and they are having more fun with music. This does give them less time to sit in front of the tv after school and sit in front of computer games after school, but because they are having fun with their music pieces, and feeling proud of themselves, they are not resisting. I am soooooo looking forward to their next recital. I think we will see a big jump in their ability from their last performance. The trick of this is going to be keeping us from being too busy to adhere to our new rules and practices. The Chinese only do academics and music. Being a sports fanatic and artist myself, our family has many interests, and narrowing down a couple to concentrate on without burning out on can be tricky I think. Also I do not want to forget: -Charlie wowed us all tonight when he played a computer matching game on my ipad at age 2.5 and was amazingly good at it. If he saw an animal card once, then he remembered where it was the first time he turned over a matching card. He is better at it than I am. He also watched me open up a program, play it, erase it, and open it back up again once - he then repeated it perfectly. I am impressed.