Profiling a Blog

The Blog I have chosen the write about is titled Harvard Mother – A Quest to raise a successful child. This should instantly grab my attention, I mean all mothers (especially Asian) want their children to go to Harvard (mainly because big shot names like Harvard excites them) and want to raise them to be successful so they may attend such schools. This blog is written by a woman named Lulu, the Harvard Mother who wanted to blog about raising her new son as she is forever grateful to how her mother raised her. She believes the reason she is now a Harvard Business School graduated (thus the name and often bragged about through her posts) is because of her mother. The concept of this blog seemed quite fitting but some posts are quite strange.

Harvard Mother has not been writing for long, in fact only starting late last year. She has some followers and a few comments here and there. Perhaps it is a new blog but as I read deeper I really doubt any other mother would be interested in her posts. Though they might, her writing style seems stiff and robotic, too straightforward and not entertaining at all.

One of her posts where she proposes the idea that success would include a good balance between a child’s IQ and EQ (http://harvardmother.com/2012/01/17/138/). I liked this idea as my mother often brought up IQ and EQ to explain the people around us. And I do agree, being successful, you need to be smart and personable.

In the post Harvard Mother constructs a 2x2 Matrix with IQ against EQ and split them into 4 quadrants.

·      High IQ and Low EQ

·      High IQ and High EQ

·      Low IQ and Low EQ

·      Low IQ and High IQ

She goes on to describe each quadrant, about the characteristics of a child within those quadrant and what she would do to move her own son to the High IQ and High EQ quadrant which is the most desirable. She uses ‘geeks, nerds and Asians’ for the High IQ and Low EQ quadrant and ‘cheerleaders’ for the Low IQ and High EQ. For her to use stereotypes makes me feel very uncomfortable and shows she is not using a modern and open mind. Additionally she uses made up words like ‘momtervention’ for if her son was every in the Low IQ and Low EQ quadrant. Further more she uses her son in this discussion like he is some guinea pig she will later test on when he is of age.

However she does have useful posts if mothers do need guidance in certain fields. I guess coming from a business school she can shed a little light on the finances of raising a child, especially sending them to college. (http://harvardmother.com/2012/01/03/how-much-should-you-save-for-college/)

However her child is still a 4 month old infant and perhaps she should talk about parenting issues that she will face in the near future before wondering about college admissions and essays.

Some of her general ideas are worth talking about in my own blog however I do not like the way she writes and anything after the first two lines are useless to me. For me I want to write about problems and issues that parents face as the years go by and give it my own voice and spin off the issue. I don’t want to tell the readers what to do but simply show my side and see what everyone else thinks.