Last month, a memoir called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was published. What began as just a woman venting about her coming of age as a mother turned into a giant debate that has left many individuals angry at the book’s author. The idea that the memoir I described could gain so much controversy probably seems a bit unbelievable, but the book is not as innocent as it sounds.
Author Amy Chua is a mother of two girls, whom have grown up as highly intelligent and amazingly talented. That by itself does not really worry someone or anyone, but the how of that fact is where the controversy comes from.
“‘You can’t stay in the house if you don’t listen to Mommy,’” Chua wrote.
She said that as she put her three-year-old out of the house and left her there.
I bet you are starting to see the problem here.
As she describes in her book, Chua (or “Tiger Mom”) raised her children by the way of “tiger parenting”. The practice is meant to prepare a child for their future, and since success does not appear to be an individualized thing to tiger parents, they pay little mind to their child’s unique traits. As tiger parents often see it, each child can have the same abilities, but children normally do not put in the effort to obtain those skills. So, unlike “Western parents” (as Chua affectionately calls the majority of modern parents) whom are described as treading carefully to avoid hurting their child’s self-esteem, tiger parents will go to the point of abusive to craft the perfect child.
I read one section of the book and was blown away by the verbal abuse Chua had dealt to her daughters (at least one was not even eight years old at the time), which she later explained it to be “motivation”.
Now, you are probably reading this, thinking, “Thank goodness this does not happen here.”
I am sorry to say that you would be wrong. First of all, Chua herself was raised in the American Midwest (the Midwest that has been known to include the state of Kansas). Second, tiger parenting is the extreme, meaning there is a gray area where aspects of tiger parenting can come through. Probably at least half or so of your friends and classmates have once been pushed to do something they did not like by their parents, be it music lessons, a sport, or even a hobby. Lastly, with college education becoming more important, parents, in an effort to boost their child’s “college appeal”, are beginning to put their kids in multiple advanced courses, have them join an extracurricular that is usually time-consuming, and even hire tutors for a couple of hours of afterschool school. One school district in Wash. has even taken up the Tiger Mom approach and requires any student who passes the state assessments to take honors or advanced courses.
Perhaps, tiger parenting would have upsides in the long run, but I do not know a single person who would go so far as to call their children “garbage” or kick their three-year-old daughter out of the house to get those upsides. Chua’s memoir did tell of these times as a tiger mother as much as it made people cringe, and recently, she seems to be trying to rehabilitate her reputation by saying that most of her stories were jokes. Since burning a little girl’s stuffed animals is so hilarious, you know? I do not know about you, but I am not laughing.