"Wreck-It Ralph" Is A Tiger Mom's Worst Nightmare

I just saw the new movie "Wreck-It Ralph" with my two kids. I have to say that we all loved the movie. My son liked the action. My daughter loved the neon-tinted Sugar Rush scenes. I appreciated the nostalgia of the early video game characters brought back to life by the movie.

Afterwards, while I was thinking of all the cultural humor embedded in the film, I realized that my kids will probably never have the same understanding of American humor as I or most children do. Sure they were both born in the U.S. but that doesn't mean they LIVE in the U.S. You see, my wife is doing her hardest to make sure they don't grow up like American children.

She is horrified by how American kids are raised. She absolutely abhors the way children here play video games and watch TV seemingly for hours at a time. She keeps our children busy to make sure they don't have any opportunity to stray from her sure path to success. Kumon is forced upon them every day. If they're not sitting at the kitchen table doing that, they are practicing their piano or playing ping pong. Though we have a Playstation 3 in the house, the children don't even know it exists. They have never been allowed to play a single minute of it for fear their brains might become addled by Sonic the Hedgehog. When I play, I have to do it at night after they have gone to bed. That was the condition I had to agree to before she would allow the machine in the house.

The other main portion of "Wreck-It Ralph" involves scenes that take place in a video game filled with sugary desserts. My daughter loved all the scenes filled with gum drops, doughnuts, candy canes and ice cream. There is one reference to Oreo cookies that got the whole audience laughing. But again, this is all forbidden fruit. As I've mentioned before, my wife HATES American desserts. The children can have as much salty, vinegary food as they want but anything sweet is strictly limited. She blames them for the high rates of obesity and diabetes in Americans. She's partly right. But I feel anything in moderation is okay whereas for this tiger mom sugar is equivalent to poison.

So it saddens me that my kids are so isolated from American culture. Their mother wants them to achieve success in the U.S. but at the same time she wants to shield them from life in the U.S. Granted she's not doing this out of malice. She is reading directly out of the Chinese playbook for becoming a prosperous adult: a single-minded focus on hard work and intense study with little time for slothful pursuits like video games and snacking on unhealthy foods. Though our kids may succeed with this regiment, I think they will have lost some of the pleasures of life in doing so.