When I was a child, Chinese New Year was about going to see the big celebration in downtown DC, then getting Dim Sum at our favorite lavish restaurant.  My brother, sister and I would read the information about the Chinese zodiac and argue over which sign was better, the Tiger or the Dragon.

After reading Gloria Pan’s blog post about Dragon Mothers, I find myself having the same argument – with different themes.  I very much saw my family described in Pan’s description of the dragon mother.  Not so much with the tiger mom.

When I first read Amy Chua's now-famous tiger mother article in the Wall Street Journal last year, I was sitting at my kitchen table amidst the usual post-Christmas neutron bomb wreckage of our house, my feral children were off the hook, and I was only reading the newspaper because I was dawdling over an already-blown work deadline.

Suffice to say, the article was yet another thing that made me feel guilty - as though the balancing act of my life just wasn't holding up and the people suffering most were my children. They weren't playing Carnegie Hall. I couldn't even get organized enough to get them interested in team sports.

But then I found myself helping my older son with his science homework and urging him on with "Matthew, the world NEEDS you. You're smart, you're talented and the world is in trouble. You don't have the choice not to engage. The world needs all your talents to help face its many challenges."

“WTF?” You might ask. “Why would an elementary school student even UNDERSTAND, much less be motivated by such a question?”

Well, meet the Dragon Mother, whose goal for her children is to raise WORLD CITIZENS and GAME CHANGERS.

We may not be earning varsity letters (or even doing super great with some of our grades at school), my children are active and engaged citizens.  And they have been since they were in Baby Bjorns.

Matthew helped me staff a non-profit booth at the Feminist Expo when he was just learning to walk. Andrew attended his first Rally for Women's Lives in the stroller, while his older brother excitedly proclaimed: "if you don't agree with the President in OUR country you can walk past his house and SHOUT at him." That was about as good a summary of the first amendment right to free speech as I've heard - especially articulated by a toddler.

The boys help me organize moonbounce fundraisers - required entrance fee old books and a twenty dollar donation to a non-profit group with a literacy program for children with imprisoned fathers. I never realized they understood anything but the "moonbounce and cake" part until Matthew made these parties and fundraising for this non-profit  a centerpiece of his 5th grade candidacy for student government.  Not to mention, he put together world-class campaign materials.

And Election Day has always been a HUGE holiday in our house.  The boys pull the levers in the voting booths, then emerge from the precinct covered with "I voted" stickers.

Well, of course Election Day is as big as Christmas -- we've typically built up to it by canvassing voters on various issues and anxiously scanning Google for articles about our issues and candidates.

In fact, in the last Presidential election cycle the children cheered Obama through every debate.  They threatened that if I voted for Hilary in the primary, I couldn't come back home. In the general election, we knocked on so many doors for Obama in Virginia that we took photographs of our blistered feet.

Speaking of Christmas, one year Matt asked Santa for an end to global warming.

Because of all this engagement, they aren't afraid to ask tough political questions at the dinner table. Sometimes it's like a mini-focus group, as when number one son queried "what's going on with those hippies raping people on Wall Street". That lead to an interesting discussion on "spin".

More than civic engagement, however, my new identifications as a "Dragon" mother (vs Amy Chua's "Tiger") is that I'm not interested in my children's achievement just for the sake of achievement.

Their development is for something - to give their gifts back to a world which has already so gifted them. Not everyone gets economic security and access to education and a loving home and a king's ransom worth of toys on holidays. I strive to teach them how privileged they are - and that to whom much is given, much is expected.

This isn't all, though. A parent learns that a child's talents and views may not be the same as their own. So my boys are gifted at mathematics and chess and science and computers, whereas I never met a book I didn't like or an algebraic equation that didn't make me want to break out in hives. And one of my sons perhaps voted Republican once too often for my taste in the voting booth with his father as he is more than willing to argue back at times.

But this is what parenting is all about. Not about creating mini-me's, but about nurturing their strengths and passions so they can be the best they can be. So computer camps and science camps and after school chess club, bring it on.

And when Matt programmed his own video game and started getting his vast network of fellow gamers to play it online he set up a pay wall to raise money for the aforementioned charity.

To me, that's better than Carnegie Hall.