It’s been hard to miss this book in the month or so its release. Several days before it came out, The Wall Street Journal ran an article about it under the headline “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior: Can a regimen of no play dates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids?” At once, it seemed, Tiger Mom and her views on parenting became the subject du jour in the media, as the book cruised to number 2 on the New York Times Best Sellers list.
I decided it was worth a listen. In hearing Chua read her own book for Penguin Audio, one gets a sense for her intensity. The memoir itself is not nearly so confrontational as the media storm would have you believe. Yes, she advocates a child rearing style that accepts “nothing but the best” from children and refrains on principle from saturating them with praise. Yes, she takes to that philosophy to an extreme, e.g., “the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.” Yet there is an underlying wistfulness to her account of applying these methods to her own daughters. Despite years of playing the manipulative bully “for the sake of the children’s future,” Chua ends up meeting her match in the forcefulness of her younger daughter’s teenage rebelliousness.
As father of a sixteen year old myself, I am sympathetic to the pressure parents feel these days to ensure our kid’s futures in what often feels like a downwardly mobile society. From offering the best possible education to over-scheduling “free” time to early specialization in sports, the seemingly rational response to making one’s way in a meritocracy can create a sort of collective cultural madness. What distinguishes my friends and I from the Tiger Mother is more a matter of degree than of kind.
I dislike Ms. Chua's extreme positions, but her desire for her children to do their best and her willingness to invest her time and energy to help them achieve that is what all parents need to do. In my experience, praise also helps.
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