An Open Letter to "Tiger Mother" Bashers

Not since the furor over Charles Murray’s scandalous/scandalized The Bell Curve has a book struck such a raw nerve across America as Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Chua’s central thesis is that strict parenting, which she characterizes as Chinese or Asian, produces more accomplished children than more lenient western parenting techniques focused on self esteem.

Chua is either a savvy self-promoter or completely tone deaf (I suspect the former) and is largely responsible for the histrionics her book has inspired. Her provocative op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was full of unyielding statements, such as: "Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight A’s. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, ‘You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you.’ By contrast, Western parents struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out."

The squall of reaction to Tiger Mother from upper-middle class America includes a Time Magazine cover story “Tiger Moms: Is Tough Parenting Really the Answer?” that calls the book, “Mommie Dearest for the age of the            memoir." Not to be out-done, the New York Times ran an op-ed column titled “Amy Chua is a Wimp.” Even venerable and literary Kirkus is running a tongue-in-cheek contest to title Tiger Mother’s sequel. (My entry is: Funeral Dirge of the Lemming Child.) The blogosphere is lit up with commentary about Chua, some mean and personal. In recent interviews, Chua expresses dismay at the level of animosity directed her way, and re-casts her book as a tribute to her parents rather than a swipe at western parenting. In making these claims, she sounds like a politician clarifying an awful gaffe—and deserves as much sympathy.

But aside from the messenger’s missteps, the Tiger Mother thesis deserves real attention. A recent study conducted in Hong Kong and California examined children as they: 1. Take a short exam, 2. Sit with their mothers and the graded exam in a break room, and 3. Re-take the exam. The study revealed that the American students improved slightly between the first and second exam; parental attention during the break was principally focused on telling the child what she/he did well. The Hong Kong students, however, improved markedly between the first and second exam; parental attention was focused on examining mistakes and assuring the child would not make the same mistakes again. Another study shows American adolescents are generally satisfied with high-average grades like B and B+, while children in Asian countries are rarely satisfied with equivalent grades.

These studies suggest that that biggest gap between the children of “Tiger Moms” and western parents is the level of expectation, and the parent’s willingness to be a tutor and taskmaster. Of course some American parents are certainly tigers in their own right, and I have seen a few Asian parents who are, frankly, pussycats; the Chinese vs. western dichotomy is overly simplistic. But there is a general consensus in this country about two things: 1. our children are, overall, not achieving academic excellence, and 2. our children, overall, spend too much time Facebooking, X-Boxing, MTV-ing, and hanging out at the mall—all activities that distract from academic excellence. Chua is probably right to suggest that the most-common ingredient in under-achieving American children is indulgent parenting.

A spank on the butt is now considered Neanderthal; parents assure that every child on every Little League team gets the same trophy; thirteen year olds have their own cell phones with unlimited texting accounts (of course, paid by their parents). Parenting is about trade-offs and too many parents of my generation have opted to treat their child’s material comfort and self-esteem as paramount. When our children bring home a D on a math test we rarely give up successive weeknights tutoring them and forcing them to study five times as hard for the next exam. Sometimes, we tell them that “Math is difficult” or, much worse, that a mediocre teacher has failed our little genius. I am no apologist for weak teachers—I hope Michelle Rhee’s tenure-yanking reforms catch on—but children spend less than 25% of the week in school (only 36 of 168 hours), and that leaves a ton of time for committed parents to fill in shortcomings at school. If a child is under-achieving, check the tiger-mother quotient of the parents before blaming the school.[i]

Amy Chua is not the wimp, we are.

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[i] This presumes a two-parent family and stable home. Clearly, some parents are in a much tougher circumstances. This blogs responds to the educated, upper-middle class parents who’ve taken such umbrage with Chua’s thesis.