You would think that this acknowledgement, and learning of her sister Katrin's contraction of leukaemia, would finally demolish Ms Chua's house of flying daggers. But no, she seems more insistent than ever that she has been right all along, and that her daughters knew that she was right. 

My objection to Ms Chua's media blitz is that she is making vast sums of money by promoting a repugnant form of child-rearing. She insists that "the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it." 

Nobody improves from being repeatedly shamed by their parents. Ms Chua's psychotic methods may have had superficial success, but dictatorial parenting taught me little other than fear and submission. You only have one childhood and it seems a great shame to be deprived of the joy and laughter, the wonder and discovery that the world has to offer. It was the great classics of English Literature rather than endless maths drills which introduced me to courage, integrity, kindness and compassion. From F. Scott Fitzgerald, I learnt perhaps the most important lesson of all: that material success is of little consequence when you fail to grasp even "the ABCs of human decency".