Here are some of the things that my four children of a Jewish mother were always allowed to do:

• Quit the piano and the violin, especially if their defeatist attitude coincided with a recital, thus saving me from the torture of listening to other people's precious children soldier through hackneyed pieces of the juvenile repertoire, plink after ever more unbearable plonk.

• Sleep over at their friends' houses, especially on New Year's Eve or our anniversary, thus saving us the cost of a babysitter.

• Play on the computer and surf the Internet, so long as they paid for their Neopet Usuki dolls and World of Warcraft abomination cleavers out of their own allowances.

• Participate in any extracurricular activity they wanted, so long as I was never required to drive farther than 10 minutes to get them there, or to sit on a field in a folding chair in anything but the balmiest weather for any longer than 60 minutes.

• Quit said extracurricular activities, especially if their quitting coincided with league finals that might have demanded participation on my part exceeding the requirements stated above.

In the days since this newspaper published Amy Chua's simultaneously entertaining and infuriating excerpt from her new book, 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,' my two elder children, 16 and 13, have devoted a remarkableamount of time to raging against the essay and crafting compelling and bombastic rebuttals to be delivered to Ms. Chua herself, should they ever encounter her.

I am more than a little astonished. I say with confidence that neither of my children has ever before bothered to read a single word of The Wall Street Journal. I don't think that I could have screamed or threatened them into doing so, not even if I'd tossed them outside in the middle of winter, to cower barefoot and freezing on the front step. So to Ms. Chua I express my gratitude. It seems to take a Chinese mother to force my Western kids to read the paper.

Were I crafting my own bombastic and compelling rebuttal to Ms. Chua, I might point out, as others have, that Asian-American girls aged 15 to 24 have above average rates of suicide. I might question the hubris of taking credit for success that is as likely to have resulted from the genetic blessings of musicality and intellect as from the 'Chinese' child-rearing techniques of shrieking and name calling. But I have a feeling that she knows that.

More importantly, if I did write such a rebuttal, I'd risk being called a hypocrite by my own children. Sophie, my oldest, would remind me of the recent evening when I stared in stony silence at her report card, sniffing derisively at her father's happy congratulations.

'What?' she said. 'I got 5 solid As.'

I shrugged.

'Ayelet,' my husband warned.

My daughter narrowed her eyes at me. She knew what was coming.

I pointed at the remaining two grades, neither a solid A. Though there was not the 'screaming, hair-tearing explosion' that Ms. Chua informs us would have greeted the daughter of a Chinese mother, I expressed my disappointment quite clearly. And though the word 'garbage' was not uttered, either in the Hokkien dialect or in Yiddish, it was only because I feared my husband's opprobrium that I refrained from telling my daughter, when she collapsed in tears, that she was acting like an idiot.

The difference between Ms. Chua and me, I suppose