“What happens from here depends on how much effort the mother puts in,” the teacher tells me in her office after class. He breaks into a coy smile and pulls one out from behind his ear. They sit with backs straight, hands on their laps and papers in the middle of their desks with two sharpened pencils to the right, lead facing forward. The other children, about ten of them, are already practice-dressed for exam day, wearing white polo shirts and navy-blue shorts or skirts. I see him eyeing this new, hushed environment. I take a seat at the end of the parents’ row and pray that Taro will sit through class obediently. They do want a kid who will get into a good school so they can boast about that in their brochures. They don’t want a kid who will disrupt the class. The cram school is checking him out before offering enrollment. I walk gingerly over to a group of parents sitting in the back of the room at an exam prep school. It's a tale that will resonate with all parents as we try to answer the age-old questions of how best to educate our children and what, truly, is in their best interests versus what is in our own. Helicopter parenting or free-range? Amid this frenzied debate, how does one find balance and maintain a healthy parent-child relationship?ĭear Diary Boy is an intensely personal, heartwarming, and heartbreaking chronicle of one mother and child's experience in a prestigious private Tokyo school. Public or private? Competitive or nurturing? Standardized or individualized. While set in Japan, their struggles in the school's hyper-competitive environment mirror those faced by parents here in the US and raise the same questions about the best way to educate a child-especially one that doesn’t quite fit the mold. Together they would climb the rungs into the country's successful elite.īut it didn't turn out that way. Taro would wear the historic dark blue uniform and learn alongside other little Einsteins while she basked in the glory of his high achievements with the other perfect moms. When her five-year-old son passed the rigorous entrance exams to one of Japan's top private elementary schools, Makihara, a single mother, thought they were on their way.

'A heart-wrenching, revelatory and shocking memoir that opens a fascinating window into the world of traditional Japanese education.' -Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Political TribesĪn intensely personal, heartwarming, and heartbreaking chronicle of one mother and child’s struggle to fit in at a prestigious private elementary school in Japan.

Dear diary