“We’re all behind our baseball team! Go get ‘em, Tigers…”

1968. A resplendent fall day. Detroit. Mickey Lolich pitches his third win against the St. Louis Cardinals. The Tigers win the World Series! Joyous pandemonium erupts in the streets. My mother gives her blessing for my brother and me to go honk the horn in the garage. We lean on it so hard our poor Ford Falcon never sounds the same, its mighty blare muted to a nasal “fnerr” ever after.

As neighbors come home from school and work, a spontaneous block party breaks out. Barbecues, pop, tons of potato chips. Laughing, singing. “Go get ‘em, Tigers!” For a nine-year-old boy, even one who is always picked last for baseball, it is Heaven.

Until.

My mom makes me go inside and do my math homework. I can still feel the sting. It was so unfair. So… so… Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother-ish.

Amy Chua’s controversial new book, as everyone on the planet has at least heard by now, is unsettling. Not just because Chua’s parenting frequently crosses the line into lunacy (which even the author admits), but also — perhaps mainly — because Chua is frequently right. At least partially.

Kids need discipline. Kids need someone to force them to do their math homework even during the most exciting party of their entire lives thus far. In fact, to this day, only my wedding reception tops the ’68 Tigers.

But am I bitter? Hardly. In fact, I hope I have that same discipline as a parent that my mother had then. Look, I am a stay-at-home-dad, therefore you know I am an Enlightened Guy, sensitive to emotions and all that crap. I firmly believe in kids playing and learning as much as possible simply by having unstructured fun. I never drilled my kids on their alphabet or any of that other Type-A madness. I teach them the way my Old School schoolteacher parents taught me. We read for the fun of it, I answer their questions, and let osmosis do the rest. And my older daughter still managed to learn at the same prodigious rate as Amy Chua’s. I say that not only to boast (if I didn’t brag at least a little, what kind of dad would I be?), but mainly to reassure you that, while the Tiger Mother approach does get results, other approaches can work just as well — and might even save the ol’ psychotherapy budget down the road.

Sure, Western Parenting, as Chua defines it and too many Westerners practice it, is absurdly lax these days, focusing on self-esteem to the detriment of self-respect, self-confidence and, of course, math skills. But her notion of Chinese Parenting is just as out of whack. Whatever happened to balance? When I was a propeller-head college student listening to the late night paeans of Eastern philosophy from the Liberal Arts majors, Balance was the ultimate goal and indicator of self-mastery. Not Tiger-Mommy-Dearest fanaticism.

Kids need a push. Kids need a cuddle. Tough love and gooey love. The yelling of the coach and the cheering of the fans. Just like they need a balanced diet. With an occasional cookie. How hard is that to figure out?

Today my home is the North Side of Chicago, and my kids root for a different team than I did. But when the Cubs win the World Series (quit laughing), we will party hard enough for the memories to last another century. Even factoring in a break for math homework. And my wildly successful kids will remember it as fair in the final calculus.

Because they’ll never doubt that I’m all behind my baseball lovers. Go get ‘em, tigers.