The Tiger Mom Book

Have you heard about the Tiger Mom book?  It was all over the news a couple of months ago—all of the outraged parents talking about how barbaric this Chinese-American woman is for not letting her daughters go to sleep-overs and making practice their musical instruments for hours each day.  A review in the New York Times called it “a diabolically well-packaged, highly readable screed ostensibly about the art of obsessive parenting.”  There were Asian adults on the talk shows talking about years of therapy required to overcome their upbringing, and child-rearing specialists weighing in about self-esteem and the importance of providing children a nurturing environment.  Comments from the public accused the author, Amy Chua, of being everything from harsh to narcissistic to evil.  But her methods, however controversial, apparently work—her oldest daughter was accepted to both Harvard and Yale (and defended her mother in an open letter to the New York Times).  And with all the bad press the book got, I thought it was interesting that two of the most sympathetic reviews were written by Sun Shuyun and Husna Haq--self proclaimed products of Tiger Moms.

It’s a stereotype of course, that Asian kids are the smartest and Asian parents the strictest.  My youngest brother used to accuse our dad of being an Asian parent whenever he felt Dad was being too strict.  For my part, when Dad asked why I was not going to be my high school class valedictorian, I replied that my last name had the wrong number of syllables.  It either had to be one syllable (i.e. Lee, Ahn, or Wang) or over four (i.e. Ravapati, Kadanthodu, or Guhathakurta) to be one of the top five in the class.  Yes, it’s a stereotype, but you have to admit, the stereotype is based on a good deal of fact.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Asian-Americans have the highest percentage of educational attainment of any race group, and in most categories it isn’t even close.  In 2009, the national average for college graduates among people 25 and older was 29.5%; the percentage of Asian-Americans who had a college degree was 52.3.

In Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua compares Chinese and Western parenting models and relates the difficulties, and sometimes pitfalls, of raising kids the Chinese way in American society.  It’s more of a memoir than a how-to guide; the author freely relates her mistakes and misgivings about her methods.  Still, she makes no apologies for her high expectations and points out that at least in the case of her daughters, the Chinese parenting style produced great success.  She writes, “There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids’ true interests.  For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly.”  

Clearly Amy Chua is unwilling to consign her children to happy mediocrity.  She teaches at Yale law school and travels the country giving lectures on her work (she's published two books), and yet still manages to find time to supervise her two daughters’ HOURS of schoolwork and music practice and lessons—in some cases a few hours away from their hometown, since that's where the best teachers live. She yells, threatens, berates, and pours hours of sweat and tears into making her daughters successful.  An example:  when her oldest daughter placed second in a weekly math drill, she made hundreds of practice tests and drilled her daughter every night; her daughter never lost another drill.  Extreme?  Yeah.  I mean, I'm pretty competitive, but I can't really get behind the "never place second in anything" mentality.  But perhaps if I had I would be better at math.  And anyway, the example demonstrates how much time and effort Amy Chua devotes to her kids.  

I already know that I do not have the energy to be a Tiger Mom.  (And my sweet husband has already warned that if we have daughters he will not be the disciplinarian.  "What, you want a My Little Pony?  Why?  A real pony would be so much better!"  That's an actual quote--I did not make it up.)  I’ve already told my very talented husband that he is going to have to be responsible for making sure our kids spend enough time practicing their music, since I, having been a very poor piano student, would feel like too much of a hypocrite.  Andnd anyway I'm not sure I have the patience to endure more than a half hour of bad violin at a time (Michelle, I don't know how you do it!).  Still, I have to give Amy Chua an A for effort, and I really do think she makes a few very good points.  I don’t want to cripple my kids by having low expectations, or by not teaching them discipline and responsibility.  I'm grateful my parents were in that way "tigers", even if they did let me spend exponentially more time playing sports than playing the piano.