Amy Chua, the Yale professor who caused a furor last year with her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has been battling all kinds of controversy. Prof. Chua's book came at a very bad time in terms of American national self-esteem. The economy was tanking, children's standardized test scores were bottoming out, bankrupt state governments were preparing to shave public school budgets to the bone .... and meanwhile the news out of China was getting increasingly uncomfortable. China was growing stronger by the day and The Economist estimated that the Chinese economy would probably surpass the American economy by 2040...no, 2030, ... no, 2025....no... 2017. And now Prof. Chua, the coldly-beautiful Yale academic with a daughter at Harvard, seemed to stick in the knife by implying that Chinese parenting was superior to American parenting. The outcry was enormous. It has often been stated that nothing can make a woman furious like saying that she's a bad mother. Bundle that up with a knock against national pride and an overall statement concerning the weakness of the American work ethic... and you will get a massive backlash.

Part of that backlash, of course, was out of genuine concern over Prof. Chua's VERY harsh parenting skills. New York Times columnist David Brooks described a few of the scenes from Prof. Chua's memoir:

Chua didn’t let her own girls go out on play dates or sleepovers. She didn’t let them watch TV or play video games or take part in garbage activities like crafts. Once, one of her daughters came in second to a Korean kid in a math competition, so Chua made the girl do 2,000 math problems a night until she regained her supremacy. Once, her daughters gave her birthday cards of insufficient quality. Chua rejected them and demanded new cards. Once, she threatened to burn all of one of her daughter’s stuffed animals unless she played a piece of music perfect.

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I've heard of numerous people having fleeting phases and bouts of baby fever that returns occasionally or at a later time..but what happens when the baby fever lasts for over a year? 

My fiance and I have been together for nearly three years and we're getting married in May and during the first couple of months of our relationship, I was very cautious about sex and making sure that we took every precaution to prevent pregnancy, simply because we didn't have stable jobs or income and we were both living with our parents at that point. Once we had been together a little less than a year, I found the idea of a creating a child with him less frightening, and more comforting and exciting and I didn't care anymore if we wound up pregnant or not.

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