More On The "Tiger Mother" Controversy

By John McDonnell

My last post got more attention that any other post I've written for this blog. It was about the new book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua.

This book has generated a firestorm of controversy, especially after Amy Chua wrote an essay in the Wall St. Journal about it, titled, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior". Chua is getting a lot of flak from bloggers everywhere, and it seems every parent has a strong opinion about her thesis, which is basically that Western parents are too soft on their kids.

Amy Chua has struck a nerve, because that subject is one that every parent I know struggles with. Get a group of parents together these days and invariably the talk turns to their children, and before long they're telling stories about how soft their kids are. Oh, they don’t use words like “soft” or “spoiled”, but that’s the gist of the stories.

If you have teenagers, it’s easy to go on a rant about the sense of entitlement they have, how they whine about the few chores they're asked to do, how they have more money and toys and gadgets than any other generation in history, and so on.

A lot of Western parents these days are asking questions like: Are we raising our kids right? Have we given them too much? Should we have been more demanding, asked more of them? What kind of people are they turning into? Now along comes this Amy Chua person to reinforce our worst fears.

You were too easy on them, she says. You gave them too much, and didn't ask anything of them in return. You should have taught them how to work harder, how to deal with adversity, how to respect their elders, etc., etc.

It's true that when I compare my childhood to the one my kids have, it's like I came from a different planet. I grew up in a house that was hardly bigger than some of the garages I see in the affluent suburb where I live. Of course I had no cell phone, computer, video games, or cable TV, but in my house we didn't even have our own phone line. We had what was called a party line, where you shared the phone line with another house, because the rate was cheaper. We had a big black phone on the wall in the kitchen, and if I wanted to call a friend I had to stand there and talk amidst the hubbub of a family of six, then be ready to hang up in an instant if someone on our party line started dialing the phone on their end.

But it goes further than just being deprived of material possessions. Parents back then demanded more of their kids, and they weren't shy about it. There was a lot of yelling in our house, especially around report card time. It was a kind of yelling that got very personal, and in today's world it would probably be called abuse.

Apparently Asian parents still do this, because Amy Chua admits that she called her daughter "garbage" once when she was particularly angry at her, and another time yelled herself hoarse when her daughter couldn't play a piano piece right.

I have never yelled at my kids like that, because I decided years ago that I didn't agree with that style of parenting. I thought there was a better way, one that wouldn't tear down my kids' self-esteem. I can't help but shake my head in wonderment, however, on the rare occasions when I do raise my voice just a tad, and my kids tell me to stop yelling at them. "Yelling?" I say. "You call that yelling? That's not yelling. I know yelling, and what I did is definitely not yelling."

Would a little more volume in my voice have toughened my kids up, made them more resilient and better able to handle life's down times?

Maybe. But you can't go back, and as I said in my last post, I'm basically happy with how my children are turning out. They are happy, confident, and outgoing. They have opinions, and they're not shy about expressing them. They haven't gotten straight "A's" but they seem able to handle a lot more than just schoolwork in their lives.

The jury's still out, like I said before. But I'm not going to be one of those parents who lacerates myself with guilt because some writer comes out with a glib formula for child-rearing. My parents did their best, but I feel I improved on their methods.

And besides, what worked 30 years ago is not necessarily going to work in today's world. The world my children live in is light years from the one I lived in at their age. They need to be confident, flexible, and adaptable if they’re going to succeed in the the next 30 years. They do not need to be rigid rule followers, because the rules are changing every day. 

These kids need different skill sets to survive in the 21st century.

And learning how to deal with a “Tiger Mother” is not one of them.