Tiger Mother: Are we pampering our kids?

Welcome to the mommy wars—panzer division, said Judith Warner in The New York Times Magazine. Amy Chua’s new memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has triggered a passionate debate about proper parenting, by laying out the case for raising your kids “with an iron hand.” Chua, a superachieving Yale Law School professor herself, demands that her two daughters get an A in every class, and spend hours on homework every day and additional hours practicing piano and violin. She forbids, as a waste of valuable time, sleepovers, play dates, school plays, and extracurricular activities. Don’t even mention TV. Chua’s “mothering toolbox” is shocking, said Patricia Wen in The Boston Globe. She yells and screams to get compliance and calls her kids “garbage” if they show her disrespect; she even threatens “to burn the children’s stuffed animals.” It may sound draconian, but it works. Her teen girls are “standouts academically and musically, with her oldest girl even once performing in Carnegie Hall.”

If it takes “demented drive” to get your kid to Carnegie Hall, said Hanna Rosin in The Wall Street Journal, count me out. “In pretty much every way, I am the weak-willed, pathetic Western parent that Chua describes.” My goal is to raise happy children who will discover and pursue their own passions, not perfect little “proto-adults” fulfilling parental expectations. In the book, Chua admits: “The truth is, I’m not good at enjoying life.” Is she teaching her kids to be similarly joyless? It’s worth noting that Asian-Americans have the highest suicide rate among women ages 15 to 24, said Ayelet Waldman, also in The Wall Street Journal. Is it possible that that, too, is a product of “Chinese child-rearing techniques of shrieking and name-calling”?

Still, Chua has a point, said Mona Charen in National Review Online. Tiger Mother has hit a nerve precisely because it heightens “our awareness of how soft and indulgent we’ve become.” The reality is that our pampered kids will have to “compete with more than 2 billion Chinese, Indian, and other Asian kids who, through whatever combination of genes, culture, and technique, are outperforming us.” We could use a little more “steel in our spines”—but only up to a point. What Americans want, most of all, for our kids is not straight A’s or violin virtuosity, but what our founding documents promise: the chance to pursue happiness, as they see fit.

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