I am so down with Amy Chua’s “Tiger Mother” parenting.

Screaming? Threatening? Pulling my hair out? Excoriating my kids without restraint, hovering over them like a Dementor, all to get them to the right place?

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Remove the hyperbole from Amy Chua's controversial book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," and there are still valuable lessons for many parents, Petula Dvorak says.

Heck, yeah.

I am a Chinese mother. But, sadly, I can muster that kind of energy for only about two hours a day – before we fly out of the house for school in the morning and once again when I am completely desperate to get them into bed at night.

Chua, a Yale Law School professor, is more consistent than me in applying her technique, employing all kinds of outrageous tactics to get her daughters to practice violin and piano, get straight A’s and succeed.

I am behaving like a lunatic just to survive, not to produce prodigies.

Chua’s parenting confessional, a book excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal recently and buzzed about by thousands since, was the kind of detailed and honest talk that most mommy groups get to only after the third pitcher of margaritas.

Just a couple of months ago, we were all talking about the documentary “Race to Nowhere” (“The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture,” the movie poster says) and the stress felt by kids with full class loads and daily test drills who look out the window and say they don’t get to play outside anymore. Earlier this month, The New York Times had a story about the movement to restore children’s play.

There we were, hand-wringing about our poor, overscheduled and stressed-out children: “Is both ballet and gymnastics too much?” “I’m afraid the preschool curriculum may be too intense.” “Should we cut math club to Saturdays only?”

And suddenly, here comes praise for the retro school of Pat Conroy-esque discipline, tough love and tight-lipped disapproval that therapists have made millions helping to erase.

Chua says she’s got the formula for valedictorian grade-point averages, Carnegie Hall recitals and Ivy League yes-letters that we’re all supposedly drooling over.

She argues that Chinese parenting – the relentless drilling, pushing, punishing and bullying of children – is superior to the supine, tentative and undemanding style of Western parenting. A true Chinese mother, she says, doesn’t allow play dates, sleepovers, television time, video games, sports, school plays or any other extracurricular activities.

But let’s take the hyperbole out of her deadpan essay and see if there’s something to learn from her.

Chua describes an episode where she forced her daughter, then 7, through a screaming, hours-long piano practice session that turned the house into a war zone, all to learn a difficult piece that the girl wanted to give up on.

Her husband asked Chua to ease up; the daughter tore the piece to shreds; Chua persisted. There were threats, ultimatums and more arguments. But then there was a magic moment when it all clicked, when the girl played it once, then a second time, then over and over again, smiling.

“Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America,” Chua said.

Plenty of people have been horrified by this story, calling Chua an abuser who has scarred her daughter.

I totally got it.

My parents had some Tiger in them, though they were from Czechoslovakia, not China. Like so many immigrant parents, they were convinced that their children could achieve anything in this country through relentless hard work.

The scene at the piano echoed my father’s Quixotic drive to make me good at one of the things he loved: skiing.

I know, piano would have been so much more useful for college admissions and more fun at cocktail parties. But he is a thick-fingered, Eastern European outdoorsman, so skiing it was.

I remember getting a lump in my throat when the first snowflakes fell one year, knowing the mountaintop drills would soon begin again. He yelled at me, berated me, brought me to tears.

I was not a naturally gifted skier, and he pointed out all my flaws, Tiger Father style, as my goggles fogged up and the snot froze on my face.

We usually ended the day in a mutual huff, me having bombardiered down the slope, cartwheeling and rolling, simply trying to keep up with him.

The day eventually came when he stood between moguls the size of Volkswagen Beetles on a horrifying run called The Gunbarrel, rolling his eyes heavenward at how pathetic I was, and he missed the moment I zigzagged past him.

He scanned the run above him, cursing that I was dawdling. Meanwhile, I made it to the bottom with a bunny-hop nimbleness and knees-together precision that no one – except for him – ever thought I could achieve. I was 6 years old.

Yes, he did smile at me across the dinner table that night. And this is really the only story he still tells about me when he wants to brag.

My skiing didn’t get me into college or bring me glory or fame. But I’ve got to think that some kind of bigger life lesson about practice, persistence and success was etched into my fiber that day on the mountain.

And maybe that is the lesson to take out of the Tiger Mother’s playbook.

Parents today might be too quick to let kids avoid the upward climb of practice, failure, practice, improvement, practice, success.

That kind of parenting is exhausting, time-consuming and hard. And I need to do more of it, especially when it actually means something.

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