I’ve been trying to figure out why Amy Chua, aka The Tiger Mother, gets under my skin so much. On Christmas Eve, The Wall Street Journal published a follow-up piece of hers, which dealt with the relatively hands-off approach she and her husband adopted when their daughter (or “tiger cub”) went off to college. At first blush, it might seem like the sort of anti-helicopter statement that we tend to applaud on this site. But it turned out to be as exasperating a mixture of caricature and self-promotion as her more well known columns last year, just as mired in unsettling assumptions about children, life and human nature as before. I’ve commented at greater length at the bottom, ht RT:
Tiger parenting is often confused with helicopter parenting, but they could not be more different. In fact, the former eliminates the need for the latter. At its core, tiger parenting—which, if you think about it, is not that different from the traditional parenting of America’s founders and pioneers—assumes strength, not weakness, in children. By contrast, helicopter parenting—which, as far as I can tell, has no historical roots and is just bad—is about parents, typically mothers, hovering over their kids and protecting them, carrying their sports bags for them and bailing them out, possibly for their whole lives…
For most kids, college is their first experience truly on their own. Tiger parenting prepares kids for just that moment. For kids who are used to hearing “You’re amazing, that’s great” in response to whatever they do, it must be pretty shocking to fail at something. Tiger cubs, by contrast, are typically resilient. It’s empowering for them to know that you don’t need to be brilliant to succeed—that hard work can fix just about anything…
If anything, I’ve found that tiger cubs raised in America have really high emotional intelligence. For one thing, they’ve spent their whole lives maneuvering around their crazy, strict parents. For another, they don’t tend to be prima donnas, because tiger parents are brutally honest.
A lot of parents today are terrified that something they say to their children might make them “feel bad.” But, hey, if they’ve done something wrong, they should feel bad. Kids with a sense of responsibility, not entitlement, who know when to experience gratitude and humility, will be better at navigating the social shoals of college.
When I’m not the Tiger Mom, I’m a professor at Yale Law School, and if one thing is clear to me from years of teaching, it’s that there are many ways to produce fabulous kids. I have amazing students; some of them have strict parents, others have lenient parents, and many come from family situations that defy easy description.
It’s also clear that tiger parenting means different things to different people. For me, it’s ultimately not about achievement. It’s about teaching your kids that they are capable of much more than they think. If they don’t give up, don’t make excuses and hold themselves to high standards, they can do anything they want in life, break through any barrier and never have to care what other people think.
That last part, of course, is a blatant untruth and disqualifies any claim to “emotional intelligence” the piece may be boasting. But never mind the dishonesty about the (obvious) underlying obsession with achievement, or the complete unacknowledgement of tragedy or compulsion: this is the pop-parenting equivalent of religious people talking about the “graciousness of the Law,” i.e. that regardless of what it may seem or feel like, the real purpose of Command/Demand is love, not judgment; that Control actually exists in the service of mercy, rather than being the vehicle by which someone comes to grips with their need for mercy. In other words, what your child really needs is for you to stand against them (as if they didn’t have enough standing against them already). The parents’ job is to reinforce the voice of accusation – pioneer bootstrapping, indeed! This is tough love all the way, especially during the years when a child is most apt to internalize it. We can make distinctions between the ‘first use’ and ‘second use’ of the law all we want, but it doesn’t stop the self-justifying human from using it’s-good-for-them reasoning as an excuse for all their/our most dictatorial impulses. Chua may be immune, but I doubt it. What I don’t doubt, however, is the power of shame as a motivator when it comes to parental approval.
Ultimately, as much as Chua demonizes helicopter parenting, her approach isn’t any less controlling. A tad less fearful of the outside world perhaps, but that’s not saying very much. (That neither leave much room for G-O-D is beside the point). At least helicopter parents understand the parent to be the child’s helper as well as protector, maybe even friend on occasion. The “helicopter” part is simply what happens when the helping becomes (too much of) a source of identity/purpose for the parent, rather than an act of love for the child, and the protecting gets swallowed up by paranoia and woundedness. Truth be told, helicopter parents are a little easier to sympathize with, especially given the compulsive dimension – they obviously can’t help themselves. Tiger parents, on the other hand, almost flaunt their reserve, which is somehow more offensive. As the Seinfeld cab driver once said, “Smugness is not a good quality!”
Standing with your child, being their advocate – and letting them know you are – does not necessarily entail letting them run the show, or steamroll parental good sense. If anything, it gives you a stronger leg to stand on, without being so future-oriented that neither you nor the child enjoy their upbringing. Just ask Dorothy Martyn. And maybe that’s my main objection: the whole Tiger thing sounds so incredibly joyless.
The real question, of course, is why yours truly would expect anything different from Chua, why on Earth I keep holding out for even the smallest bone to be thrown in the grace direction. This is a Yale law professor after all – if she did it this way, she wants to believe that with enough grit and determination, others can too. Her gospel is one of agency and admonishment, and given her achievements, why wouldn’t it be? If Chua is presenting herself accurately, she would likely have little to no entree into either the concept or reality of Grace… She would see it as the height of irresponsibility, nothing more.
Suffice it to say, I would hate to read her book on marriage.
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6 responses to “The Tiger Mother Strikes Again!”
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That “if they don’t give up or make excuses” quote is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read. I hope her kids (and mine) find comfort when they fail despite their BEST efforts. Because that’s the only kind of failure that really hurts.
Good post. Thank you for so eloquently expressing the problems with Tiger parenting: lack of grace, lack of joy. As a mom who could have tiger-mom-tendancies (if she had the energy and willpower!), this is a good reminder to give my children grace and to take joy in the growing-up process.
This is SUCH an interesting phenomenon to discuss on mbird, DZ! I’m just catching up on the past couple posts on it. I guess I get kind of nervous about the cross-cultural discussion, being as white as I can be, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt. I studied Chinese and Chinese culture all through college and lived in China for a bit, and while I was there, I couldn’t help but think all the time that young people my age did not respond/react to their upbringing in the ways that I assumed they would. Truly, never have I witnessed a culture so steeped in “law”, and yet, the equal and opposite reaction to the law (which I expected) I could not find. Sure there were instances. But in general, people responded well to that kind of a system and more or less preferred it. Even the (very few and usually covert) Christians I got to know did not at all explain their conversion as an escape from a legalistic background or worldview. Their main emphasis was of course on the discovery that there really was a God. And not just any God but a God who came for them, died for them, and gave them a great and meaningful purpose in the world (usually, to love others and spread the gospel). So the contrast was more sharply with the atheism of the culture than it was with the rule of the culture. Certainly there was an understanding of grace and forgiveness, and that was central. But it was central because they were now simultaneously accountable to and forgiven by a real God. Existential freedom from societal/parental pressures just didn’t seem to be an issue of concern for many of them.
Now don’t get me wrong, being the red-blooded American that I am, when I walked down the street and saw school boys and girls with Chairman Mao patches on their backpacks, the first thing I thought, if I’m honest, was “Stockholm Syndrome.” Perhaps many of my Chinese friends should have been more concerned with the shortcomings of their own culture than they were! The thousands (maybe millions?) of suicides related to university acceptance every year in China (based on one single test, by the way) is staggering.
But the point that I guess I’m trying to make is that we do need to be careful how quickly and easily we contextualize, modernize, and Westernize the gospel, especially when we begin to imagine that “the gospel” is what our own experience of it has been. It was primarily the discovery of God in Jesus Christ that changed the lives of my friends in China and the same is true for us (whether our personal issues often stem from tiger parents or helicopter parents).
And just to be crazy for a moment…Though (or because?) I am a law/gospel guy through and through, I do wonder if I’d prefer something like tiger parents to helicopter parents. Of course, the method is only as good as the content so if they’re both pushing some kind of atheist/narcissistic achievement for its own sake, then to heck with them both! But if what they seek to instill in their kids is something akin to the Law of God (even the Thao for that matter), I wouldn’t write it off altogether. In my opinion, the soft trend in American parenting today (which Chua is right to call novel) is as lacking in “grace” as the harder parenting of many, many generations before, because it lacks the love of goodness that is a prerequisite for grace. Our forefathers in the faith who understood and passed down the message of grace to us, and who were wiser and nobler than we in articulating it, were almost certainly getting their asses kicked as kids, were they not? 🙂 They knew what grace was because they knew what goodness was, and because they knew the pain of falling short. Only a man as conscientious (and perhaps tormented) as Martin Luther could preach such a world-changing message of grace.
Of course, tiger and helicopter are pendulum swings and I don’t mean to argue for either. I certainly don’t want my kids to be as tormented as Martin Luther! So, yes, the tiger mother is way overboard. But if we just swing the other way and start protecting our kids from the law and all its consequences, I’m not sure we’ve brought them any nearer to the gospel. We may be more Western, but not more Christian.
Thoughts?
Amy Chua’s writing on the subject of child rearing is generally oblivious and tone deaf. She makes me angry.
Having said that, “tiger parenting” is not her invention. Nor is she its exemplar. So, you can look at the key ideas of that method of parenting and evaluate it without having to countenance her smug smirk. Many years ago, a Korean-American lawyer who writes as “The Korean” on a blog called “Ask A Korean” addressed this in a very comprehensive way. I was not convinced (as I raise my own kids quite differently from a Tiger Mom style), but you should give a read (it’s genuine and thoughtful) if only to be less agitated by the annoying Ms. Chua.
http://askakorean.blogspot.de/2011/01/tiger-mothers-are-superior-here-is-why.html