Tiger Moms book

In My Humble Opinion
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I can believe that this attitude exists. I’ve seen it. I can also believe that it’s not always as successful as the parents think; I’ve seen that too.

In the early-mid 1980s, my area (SW Houston) had a large influx of Asian immigrants. When I got to middle school in 1984, there was this one kid, Eugene, who was Chinese. I remember this poor kid well- he was chubby, wore high-waters, goofy clothing and had this godawful bowl cut(this in the days of mullets and feathered hair), as well as a lot of pimples. He was awkward as hell too. As you can imagine, he got mocked terribly. On top of that, I recall him actually crying in the middle of class because he’d made a C on a test, and was afraid of the consequences. I remember my astonishment very clearly; I wouldn’t have told my parents and just tried to salvage it by report-card time, but they were all up in his business and he’d tell them.

He wasn’t too bad of a kid, just totally alienated by the other students, and under what seemed to be extraordinary pressure. He did have a tendency toward being a little arrogant about his grades, and we usually shut him up by mocking his hair or something.

I always wondered what happened to him. Somehow I doubt he’s a happy, well-adjusted guy with a wife, kids and a house. Stinky developer/MMORPG player is more what I imagine.

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Wow. Stereotype much?

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Look, I really wasn’t describing a made up person. That’s really how he was, as ridiculous as it sounds. He wasn’t well liked or popular at all- when you’re awkward, you dress funny, have bad hair and make straight A grades, it just didn’t work like that in 1984-1987 southwestern Houston middle schools. Believe me, I’ve known enough Asians of all types to know that the stereotypes aren’t usually true, but this guy really fit the bill.

Every now and then you do run across people who are walking, talking stereotypes- it’s probably no small part of the reason that the stereotypes exist.

And Eugene was his first name, or at least his Western first name. I bet he had a Chinese given name, but that’s not what he (or most of the other Chinese students) went by.

By comparison, my friend Haol (also Chinese, also a good student, but not nearly as psychotically driven by his parents as Eugene) was a pretty normal guy- he just happened to speak Chinese.

I wasn’t trying to make fun of him, just point out that when I read the articles about the Tiger Moms, I immediately thought of Eugene and how tormented and unhappy he seemed, despite making straight As and playing in the school orchestra.

If you’re talking about my guess as to how he turned out, well, that’s just my guess.

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I’ve read it, and she doesn’t, in fact, provide that point of view entirely seriously. It’s pretty clear (to me, at least) even in the first couple of chapters that she’s poking fun at her parenting style, her inconsistencies of thought (it’s pretty obvious when she gives her family background that in trying to control her kids she was… um… not being entirely consistent with how she would have preferred to be raised), and how Worried she was About Everything. But the WSJ took out almost all references that would let you infer that – I mean, I certainly read the WSJ excerpt and thought, “Whoa, what a harsh mom, and with no sense of humor!”

For example, the part in the WSJ article where she says Chinese moms only let their kids play violin and piano, but they must play violin and piano – I read that and thought, “Ouch! Poor kids! What inflexible parents!” In the book she goes through her thought process when deciding she wants her kids to play violin/piano, and how all her friends told her if her kids wanted to play an instrument they should play recorder or (IIRC) gamelan, and it’s… funny. I laughed. You might still think it’s a little horrifying, especially depending on your parenting style, but she’s clearly mildly satirizing the process as well.

Thanks for your thoughts on language. That’s really interesting. Hm. Now I want to quiz all my math friends and see which ones are good at languages (and whether this corresponds to whether they like algebra or geometry…)

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Bumping this 'cos I just finished this book and thoroughly enjoyed it. I hope y’all are still interested in talking about it!

I think lots of folks are confused about the book’s intent. It is not a parenting manual. It’s Chua’s reflection on her parenting, and the relationships with her daughters, husband, and extended family (and two dogs). I think it’s pretty courageous. She shares a lot of incidents that clearly she regrets as a mother, but doesn’t flinch from being honest and critical of what she did - or did not - do.

As the child of moderately Tiger-esque parents, one of whom is an immigrant (she notes that Tiger Moms come in many flavors, including Jamaican), I appreciated the philosophy behind her parenting. It’s about expectations. My parents always had high expectations for me, and forewent the possibility of being my “friend” to nail that into me. By the time I was in high school my own expectations had surpassed theirs. Which was a product of them not taking half-assed efforts from me at home or in school.

My parents knew that school was easy for me, so yes, they gave me crap about anything outside of the A range. (Led me to forge an F into a B when I was in middle school, because I was sure they would kill me.) My dad was a stickler for discipline, whether it was eating at the table, shining shoes, doing chores - you did it the exact proper way or you did it again.

Did it work? I have two Ivy League degrees, have a tenure track job at a highly ranked school, and avoided run-ins with the law, etc. The schools I attended in my hometown are the lowest-ranked and have the highest dropout rates. I did have the best teachers in those schools, though. I can’t play any instrument well, either.

I can tell you this, though. I was smart enough to figure out I could get away with putting forth half the effort, and my parents picked up on this really early. So I got a lot of “stop being lazy” as a kid, and I do think, that I probably put more effort into what I do than most. (Now that I’m a TT professor, I actually think I’m encountering people who do more than me.)

Back to ol’ Amy. First, she describes her practice schedule with her daughters (one pianist, one violinist) and I kept on going back and thinking, “was she a stay at home mom?” Nope. She was a law prof at Yale. She kept the same schedule as her daughters, at every practice and recital, and gave critical feedback on all they did. None of the “good job” stuff, but pointers on how to hold the bow, fingering, etc… she knows her stuff. (I don’t recall if she played an instrument; I think she might have been a pianist as a kid.) So, for one thing, her kids could never say “I’m doing all this work…” She did it too. There’s a great passage where some of her notes to her violinist daughter are discovered by a horrified student, and she reprints them in the book.

Second, the book is an admission that tiger parenting really worked with Sophia, the eldest concert pianist. She was a compliant child and blossomed under Chua’s parenting, with few conflicts. But it was not the best fit for Lulu, her youngest, who rebelled from toddlerhood until a massive blowout in Red Square, of all places. Some of the situations are cringeworthy and you know that Chua regrets some of her choices. But Lulu states that she still loves the violin, although Chua finally relents and allows her to drop some of the violin practice so she can take up tennis, a sport she loves - even though she isn’t the best at it.

Someone mentioned the card story upthread. The story essentially is that her husband blanked on her birthday one year and hastily set up a family dinner at a restaurant, and the girls made rushed handmade cards. Chua essentially told them that she knew they were capable of making better cards with more thought and effort and demanded that they make new ones. I can totally see my mom doing that (actually, my dad would make us do it before she saw it)!

Like every parent Amy Chua isn’t perfect. I give her props for an unflinching reflection of her parenting triumphs and failures. It’s clear to me that she wants her daughters to develop their gifts via hard work (she would downplay the gift part, though it’s clear that these two young women have a real talent for music) and never shy away from a challenge.

I find myself agreeing with a lot of what she says as far as parenting philosophy. Being from a half-immigrant family, and having a peer group almost entirely from Southeast Asia - families that came to America as refugees with nothing and worked toward a middle class lifestyle - I found that my parents and my friends’ parents thought the same way. They had certain expectations for us that a lot of other kids’ parents did not, regarding grades and behavior. We were all deathly afraid of our parents, way more than cops or school authorities. And we knew if we ever got in trouble at school or with the law, our parents would take the side of the authority figure and tell us we shouldn’t have been doing X, and we wouldn’t have been in trouble to begin with.

The book is a great read… Chua is funny, can laugh at herself, and owns her failures and successes. I suppose it might get annoying when you read her generalizations about Western and Chinese parenting, but I think her tongue is planted firmly in cheek. It’s also a quick read.

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Sure, why not. I read it a few months ago, along with a few other parenting books I found more congenial.

I am not too concerned with the book’s intent, I just read the words on the page. I think there has been so much confusion because at its core, it was hastily written and slapdash. Chua wanted to write a David Sedaris book and fell way short of the mark. This worked to her benefit: the theme evidently struck a nerve, and the sheer amount of muddiness and ambiguity left plenty of room for controversy over what this book is actually doing.

The best parts of this book are undoubtedly the sections on her mother-in-law. She sounded like a fantastic woman. Clearly her husband, not raised in such a toxic household, did quite well. I come from a similar background as he does, have a few ivy league degrees, and a very successful career. I did pretty well for myself without anyone interfering in my music lessons. I even managed to play in Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, too.

What I objected to the most was not Chua’s high expectations but her talent-retarding level of involvement in her daughters’ activities, especially when the author admits quite happily that she has no particular talents in the areas where her children excel. This is monumentally arrogant and to my eye, might have made her kids worse off than if she just had high expectations but spared them her meddling.

Chua was deeply involved in the quotidian drama of her daughters’ music lessons, despite professing that she never had the talent or the chops to be a musician and only had a very workmanlike appreciation for music. Based on the content of her feedback to her daughter (in support of which she cheerfully supplies several original documents), I’d take her at her word. So Chua spends hours with Sophia every day and occasionally ships her around to top teachers. The teachers inevitably seem to say one thing in common: Sophia has a lot of talent but has terrible technique and knows nothing. The teacher would grudgingly take her on, but the fundamentals would have to be revisited. Chua should have only had to hear this a few times before it should have dawned on her that maybe she isn’t fit to teach Sophia violin and should just back off and stop impeding her progress. But no. Tiger Mom isn’t a self-critical reflection of Chua’s parenting style. It’s a 200 page post hoc fallacy. Sophia turned out well, so we are invited to conclude that her skills and talents result from her mother’s obsessive interest. Reading against the grain, it makes more sense to conclude that Sophia is enormously talented and succeeded despite all of the interference.

High expectations are fine. But being a parent does not make one a good violin teacher. If no one else would pay you to teach their kids violin, perhaps you should think twice about subjecting your own to your lack of competence. That’s probably what I find so galling about the book, that is, Chua’s unexamined arrogance and incompetence. Even in the end, she presumes to coach Lulu on tennis, a sport which she admittedly knows next to nothing about and cannot play.

Let’s leave the coaching to the professionals, people.

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ed: I think Sophia was the pianist. Like I said, I read it a few months ago.

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This is actually one of the primary challenges my husband and I face with our kid. My husband is from India. In his family, it was common practice to smack children for not outperforming others. I’m not saying that’s common in all of India, but my understanding is that kids are regularly disparaged if they don’t do very, very well in academics.

My husband expects my son to outshine all his peers. Right now. But he’s 5. So we often find ourselves in a tug-of-war over appropriate consequences for failure to achieve, whether he should be reading or not by now and his grasp on mathematics and sciences. To my husband, it doesn’t matter how old he is. He should want to do better than everyone else. To me, I think competition is healthy, but forcing backfires. My husband has already experienced this backlash and has been forced to tone down his expectations (but not entirely) for the sake of his relationship with our son.

I think Chua’s book outlines some of this back and forth. It was grossly misrepresented in the press and, truthfully, while I do think a lot of her behavior was out of line, I don’t think it’s inappropriate to expect a lot of your child, as long as you think your child is capable of achieving what you expect. With my husband, we’re often struggling with expectations - I have lower ones than he does. So we compromise.

What really sucks is that he doesn’t have any expectations for our daughter. He wants her to be smart, but he’s admitted that, because she’s female, he’ll cut her more slack than he will our son. So I have to be the heavy on her. I hope I don’t wind up like Chua, regretting how I pushed my children, but in some ways I think I’ll have to do that with my daughter because my husband’s cultural expectations apply primarily to my son and not to her. I wonder whether Chua would have felt the same regret had she had sons instead of daughters, or if she would have perhaps pushed one sex more than the other?