Blanche Tang Oi-lam is something of a parenting celebrity in Hong Kong. The mother of two has published seven books and given hundreds of talks on the subject, and offers advice through newspaper columns and a Sunday radio show on RTHK.
This may seem like natural progression for a media personality who began her career as the teenage host of youth programmes. But Tang gained her insight the hard way, and she's keen that other parents won't repeat her mistakes.
While Yale University law professor Amy Chua has been singing Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Tang has been singing its lament. The wife of former deputy director of broadcasting Raymond Ng Sek-fai, Tang turned into a tigress when her eldest son, Conrad, was first admitted to elite La Salle Primary School.
Conrad would return from his Primary One classes each day with six to eight sets of assignments, she says. He did them very slowly, so they weren't always completed when he turned in at midnight. Anxious for him to do well, Tang kept a close eye on his homework and made sure he put in two more hours of study before he left for school every morning.
This made her son feel anxious and tense, which soon became an obstacle to his learning.
'Once, when I dictated a Chinese word to him, he forgot how to write the character each time, although we repeated it 10 times,' she recalls. Still, she was gratified when Conrad came home with results from his first exam: he got 80 marks in Chinese, 90 marks in mathematics and earned an average score of 88.6.