A Chinese mother and child.

If you are alive and able to understand the English language, over the weekend you probably read Yale Law School professor Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” That’s the one in which she details the reign of terror to which she subjected her daughters, Sophia and Lulu, denying them the comforts that are an American child’s birthright, like watching too much TV, playing videogames, playing a tree stump in the school play, and having friends.

Instead, Chua forced them to play piano and violin until they—gasp!—became good at the instruments, and browbeat them into getting straight A’s in school. Also, she called them “garbage” to their faces if they gave her any lip.

I probably don’t need to tell you that this is not the DadWagon approach to parenting. There’s little chance Theodore, Nathan or I would spend hours enforcing mandatory piano practice, mostly because we’re drunk whenever the kids are home. Also, our kids already know they’re garbage—we don’t need to remind them.

The thing is, we have wives, girlfriends, and ex-wives, who are, in total, 87.5% Asian. (Correct?) While we Barcalounge the evenings away, we could get them to frighten our demon spawn into achieving the bare competence needed to survive in the modern world. All it would take is a mere nudge from us, and those babymamas—all first- or second-generation immigrants—would revert to their Old World standards of high expectations and easy emotional abuse. Get ready, Harvard—Sasha’s coming your way!

Or not. It’s pretty easy to criticize Amy Chua’s approach to parenting—”garbage,” really? to their faces?—but I have little doubt her children will get Ph.D.’s or M.D.’s and become, at least outwardly, successes. Maybe they’ll need extensive therapy, maybe they’ll commit suicide, or maybe they’ll be okay.

But to my mind, right now they look, well, boring. Another couple of Chinese-Jewish (their dad is Jed Rubenfeld) kids who play piano and get good grades—stereotypes. And while I wish them all the material success in the world, it’s hard to see them as anything but automatons. They may become doctors or lawyers, but so what? I’d rather my Sasha be an interesting individual first, then a successful individual. Of course, I’m not Chinese.

My wife, however, is—or nearly is. Jean was born and raised in Taiwan, and while her parents did push her to learn piano and memorize Tang Dynasty poems (which she then had to perform at dinner parties), I don’t think they terrorized her into submission. Yes, she had to complete a biology degree at Johns Hopkins before they’d let her go to fashion school, but they did relent. They even let her marry a non-Taiwanese freelance writer!

Still, I worry. I worry that one day some switch in her brain will flip and she’ll turn into Amy Chua, a take-no-prisoners monster demanding pointless grades and mastery of arbitrary skills (what, no cello?). And if it could happen in my family, it could happen in yours!

Moral of the story: Don’t marry an Asian woman. (Leave them all to us!)

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one question over the course of a week. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

I just returned from a little family trip out West. It felt like a real vacation: deep snow, my kids’ grandparents, a touch of air travel mayhem (canceled flight, two-day delay getting home, nihilists at the ticket counter).

Only technically, it wasn’t vacation. At least not for my 4-year-old daughter. She’s in preschool now, and her school’s winter break doesn’t start until next week. Despite the fact that her academic responsibilities mostly involve playing with blocks and not biting her teachers, the school calendar, as I was told when we first enrolled her, is inviolable.

So was I wrong to take her out of school? The truth is, we couldn’t have afforded to go skiing next week. We stayed with family and used frequent flier tickets that have blackout dates around the holidays. My wife, who is the newest hire at her work, doesn’t have enough seniority to get those prime Christmas weeks off. As for me, I quit my job and started freelancing last year, which has left a dent in the wallet. And in Colorado, everything, from lift tickets to that much-needed afternoon beer, is cheaper during the slow weeks of early December. Not that the right to a ski week is enshrined in the Constitution, but I have a feeling a lot of families these days are looking at the same choice: in order to take the same vacation they might have a few years ago, they’ll have to go earlier, or later, than the crowds.

I know why my daughter’s teachers take this seriously, though: preschool is  a dress rehearsal for the next dozen or so years of heavier responsibility. What seems like slow season now will become a whirlwind of late-semester projects and presentations, not to mention the stack of winter social events. It will only get more difficult to take her out of school.

I’m also sympathetic to teachers’ frustrations that classrooms would be hugely disrupted if half the class decided to take a week off earlier because it’s cheaper. Following the academic calender is the social-health equvalent of vaccinating your kid: you do it for your kid’s sake, but also because it helps the community function better. Remember that village that’s raising your child? If half the village is trying to score an early-winter lift ticket, you’ve got a real problem.

But there’s something about the tyranny of the schedule that I still can’t abide. Standing in a mile-long line at the airport on the first day of Official Vacation makes me feel less like a free spirit and more like a holiday turkey headed to slaughter.

If all else fails, then, there is this: on the way to the airport to head back home (on a Tuesday!) we drove past a red shack, not far from Highway 70, tucked into the mountains: windows shot out, sloping floor, steel girder on the roof to keep the wind from blowing it off. With a little TLC, it could be the perfect place to live off the grid, hoard canned goods, and swear off formal education forever. Not even the ATF could tell us when to ski.

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one question over the course of a week. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

Of all the ‘wagoneers, I am the one probably least prepared to answer this vital question, and not just because my daughter, Sasha, is only 2, and has yet to embark upon an academic schedule so rigorous that interrupting it precipitates a dilemma on par with the Venkman-Spengler “crossing the streams” conundrum.

Because for me, it’s a non-question. Of course you interrupt school! Yes, school is important, but school is preparation for life, and life happens when mom and dad pluck from the drudgery of Social Studies and plop you down on, say, an organic fruit farm in Malaysia or take you trekking across the frozen tundra of Kazakhstan. Homework, schmomework. For the smart, talented child (and I have no doubt Sasha will be one), it just won’t matter.

But remember! I am also a hypocrite, and in fact Jean and I are struggling to deal with the preschool version of this problem. Which is: Two years into Sasha’s young life, we’ve established a damn good routine for her. Up around 7, milk, a bit of playing, get dressed, off to Preschool of America, home from Preschool of America, a bit of playing, bathtime, 25 minutes of quasi-educational videotainment, milk, teethbrushing, bedtime stories, bedtime at just about 8 p.m. With very subtle variations, this is how it works, and it works beautifully. No fuss, no fighting each step of the way, no lingering feelings of guilt or inadequacy when the kid’s finally wrestled to bed. Many parents would probably kill to have such an easy time of it.

The problem with schedules is that they’re also prisons. Disrupt them enough and you create havoc among the inmates, and so you do everything in your power to make sure the schedule is maintained.

And yet, we need to disrupt them sometimes, and we’re finding ourselves wanting to more and more often, whether it’s dinner out at a friend’s place (we could bring her, but how to handle bed, etc.?), or odd mealtimes on weekends, or the temptation to, once in a while, skip the bath or, if she’s been naughty, put her to bed without a reading (in a funny voice) of “The Monster at the End of This Book.” But most of the time, we don’t. We bow to the schedule. It’s easier for Sasha, and easier for us, even if we’re sacrificing our social lives to an arbitrary agenda.

I hate it, though. And not just because it constrains our non-Sasha lives. I hate that principle, that as parents we sacrifice absolutely everything for the good of our children, that the benefits of regularity outweigh those of erraticism. Hell, my life has been based on randomness and unschedulability for decades, and things have turned out all right for me. Surely it’ll be okay for Sasha, right?

Maybe. Maybe we’re just waiting a little long, until she’s older and, we hope, more capable of handling sudden changes in routine. Till then we can just give her a taste, on occasion, of randomness and cross our fingers she doesn’t freak out, and someday she’ll be ready to be whisked from first grade onto the snowy Alps or the Great Barrier Reef. To hell with her teachers—she’ll be okay. After all, it’s public school.

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one question over the course of a week. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

Damn right! ‘Cause it’s not about their education, or mental or personal development—it’s about me, getting out of town, beating the airport snafus, and saving a few bucks on tickets. Who cares if junior ends up in JuCo?

Seriously, though. Having read Nathan’s post on his nihilistic travel-babies, I started wondering about the issue. His children and my oldest, JP, are approaching ages where the school doesn’t approve of them missing class so I can have a good time, and this will only increase as the years go on. Basically, all of us DadWagoners are on the clock in this regard: if we’re going to take off-peak vacations, now is the time to do it.

Only I can’t. Ever. Another fun part of my divorce is that it rigidly defines when and under what circumstances a vacation can be taken. There is, in fact, a specific clause stating that holidays cannot be planned if they interfere with the educational schedule of the child. Nicely enough, this prohibition essentially holds true for my newest addition, Ellie, as in all likelihood we’ll be taking vacation together. My ex, I should point out, hates vacation in all its forms and guises. She hates leaving the city, hates traveling, hates spending money, hates the woods, the beach, the mountains, the prairie, hates the expense, the unpredictability, and the weak slothfulness implied by even the shortest stretches spent away from one’s labors.

I disagree. Not only do I enjoy not working, but my main goal in life is to avoid work as much as possible, much like a Buddhist avoiding pain, only with festive cocktails and a sunburn. I also think that giving children an opportunity to see other parts of the world—and visit out-of-town family—is a social and developmental plus, one that, particularly with young children, is at least as valuable as what is being learned in school.

So I’m all for Nathan ditching work to hit the slopes. So what if his kids have to sleep on the floor of the airport and subsist on Cinnabon and handouts from strangers? So what if his wife gets canned and they have to move in with her parents? It’ll never impact me, because I’ll be stuck here in this urban cesspool, sweating out the days until I die, or retire, whichever comes later.