2.33 Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011)

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

2.33 Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011)

I am actually reluctant to review this book, because it is genuinely hard to write it without impugning the author.

There was a heap of articles and blog posts about the whole Tiger Mother concept earlier this year when the book came out (or, to put it another way, a furore), but I preferred to wait til it was available in the library. I knew it wouldn't be a keeper.

I don't want to get into whether Tiger Mothering is typically Chinese, as Chua argues but I would like to make one comment on her parenting philosophy which she summarises thus:

'Unlike your typical Western overscheduling soccer mom, the Chinese mother believes that (1) schoolwork always comes first; (2) an A-minus is a bad grade; (3) your children must be two years ahead of their classmates in math; (4) you must never compliment your children in public; (5) if your child ever disagrees with a teacher or coach, you must always take the side of the teacher or coach; (6) the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal; and (7) that medal must be gold.'

I have not thought to articulate my parenting philosophy but off the top of my head it would probably be along the lines of (1) the best thing you can give your children is a happy childhood; (2) you can't spoil a child by giving her love and attention; (3) children are all different so each should be given what they need; (4) but what they all need is love and affection.

So, it's pretty hard for me to comment on her book in any meaningful way since I just, literally, kept feeling ill as she described fight after fight with her daughters as she forced them to practice their musical instruments for hour after hour. The scene where she locked the three year old on the porch, in the snow, because she refused to practice was pretty harrowing.

Comments

[mizchalmers.livejournal.com]

Yes. This.

I've started to get an anxious tic whenever this book is mentioned in an approving way.

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

I thought about it more over night. I guess my aim in parenting is for my kids to be happy when they are adult. Hers is for her kids to be successful, and, if she is lucky, that will also mean they are happy in their success.

[pyraxis]

I haven't read the book, but I found out about Amy Chua's ideas from her article Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.

I'm curious about different parenting practices in different cultures. One of the first things in the article is the qualifier that she's using "Chinese mother" and "Western parents" loosely. I thought the "overachieving Asian kid" stereotype was one of the harmful ways prejudice gets perpetuated, but it's still interesting to hear how it works in at least one Chinese family.

Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld's article defending her mother points out that a lot of people misunderstood her mother's sense of humour and I wonder how much of that is a cultural thing. She wrote it when she was only eighteen, which might be too soon for her to be able to judge whether she was harmed, but it's still another side to the story.

I don't know. I'm not out to be an apologist. What I do know is that reading Amy Chua's stuff for me is equal parts horror and jealousy. I was raised to be competitive, but not that competitive, and it answers why even when I tried my hardest, I often lost. I'm envious of the way she stayed with her daughters even through really difficult practice, teaching them by example how to work hard, and the way they celebrated together afterwards when one of the girls finally accomplished something she'd been struggling with.

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

there's another review of this book up with links to various asian american blogger critiques and some media analysis.

[pyraxis]

Cool. *heads for the archives*

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

for some reason, it's not coming up under the author tag. i remember sanguinity compiled it a few months back.

[chomiji]

Is this the review that you had in mind?

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

yea, thanks.

[pyraxis]

Found it. Thanks. That was a really awesome discussion.

[chomiji]

There's certainly a lot of being offended. Also, white U.S. mothers (like most mothers in the modern connected world, I would imagine) are always worrying whether they're doing it wrong (no matter how big we talk about whatever theory we've been following). Back in the day, you learned how to raise your kids from how you yourself were raised: now parents can find books and Websites galore flacking contradictory approaches, and all the info makes it very tough to find the one true way that most human beings seem to crave. Babbling uncontrollably is an all-too-typical reaction to feeling uncomfortable.

For that matter, white cultures aren't a monolith either, and there are some elements of what Chua did with her daughters in the usual (stereotypical) U.S. Jewish child-rearing practices, and probably in other groups as well. I think her frankness and eloquence (most reviewers have emphasized how well they think the book was written) have made her a lightning rod. People are whispering to themselves Oh God, I did that too while exclaiming "Oh how horrible she is!" aloud.

[pyraxis]

What do you think the response would have been if she were white?

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

i think it's important to consider audience (Wall Street Journal) and why this in particular caught on like wildfire in the mainstream media, in terms of racial/national context.

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

I think there would have been a massive meltdown as the response to any person writing a child rearing book that took an extreme stance. Attachment parenting, not breastfeeding, breastfeeding til the child is a preschooler, home schooling, sending the kid to boarding school, strict discipline, no discipline - any of these is bound to enrage some other parent because all parents are basically massively insecure.

[chomiji]

>>The dominant sentiment slants more toward guilt and squirming about their own parenting<<

Very true.

>>They sure love to refer to everyone else in broad generalized strokes<<

Sadly, also true.

Oddly enough (in terms of timeing), today someone on my f-list linked to this article - "How to land your kid in therapy," about typical U.S. liberal child-rearing - which cites Tiger Mom in more measured terms than most of the original reviews: "Chua’s book resonated so powerfully because she isn’t so different from her critics ... When the Tiger Mom looked unsparingly at her parental contradictions, perhaps she made the rest of us squirm because we were forced to examine our own."

That's not to say there wasn't a lot of ugly conflation with prejudices and blanket assumptions about Asian cultures as well.

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

i got asked to do this radio bit on it, and the people who were calling in were either anxious white american mum types or cantankerous white men going on about how discipline needs to be reintroduced in the home bc of how "the chinese" are getting ahead/"china rising" stuff. so this stuff catches on like wildfire bc the possibilities are endless for white anxieties/smugness.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I am *really* unhappy about the erasure of hyphenate voices from your framing of the Chua response.

Quite a lot of Asian Americans in the blogosphere banded together to decry their own version of being raised by abusive Tiger parenting. It results in a lot of very real trauma even as it allegedly makes possible the Model Minority myth.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Intent is nice, but it's better when not covered over by expressions of erasure.

Thanks for the acknowledgement, at least.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I appreciate your revisiting that!

Yes, the weird white filter over the story, and the reaction to *that*...

*sigh*

My friends list wasn't like that, but I've been pruning like mad for years. So I've seen vague MSM mentions of the white reaction, a bunch of hyphenate reaction (which I also went off-list to go look for), and a bunch of sourceland-identified Asians reacting against the white MSM stuff and utterly eliding the hyphenates.

So my sample set had me a little itchy to start with. (And I'm seeing Asian parents justifying their parenting style based on the WSJ excerpts now...for toddler kids. It's triggering to watch a small child being told, "Oh, that's good, Don't Be An Artist! That's no good, be a surgeon! Art is stupid, and for stupid people!" (rough quote of actual incident I witnessed).

*shudder*

[trinker.livejournal.com]

We're cool. Thank you.

I liked Amy Chua's earlier work (World on Fire) and I'm just really disheartened by this book, and all the complicated, and....*flail*.

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

I could see she was exaggerating for humour at times *but did not find it funny*.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I am not convinced that she was. I've seen similar stuff IRL that's at her level, or worse.

[pyraxis]

I agree about the overinflated sense of self-worth and entitlement. Seems like Amy Chua's just being forthright about it instead of pretending to hide behind humility. Poking a hole in the bubble of "there there, we like you and you're a good person no matter what you actually do". People don't like having their laziness put in the spotlight any more than their precious parenting ideas.

I'd be curious to hear from the other daughter too.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

According to Jeff Yang at SF Gate, the WSJ article really doesn't give an accurate portrayal of the book. Yang has a very interesting article, including some interview bits with Chua, over here. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/13/apop011311.DTL)

[pyraxis]

Holy cow. That says it really well.

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

Yes, that great review was the one that inspired me to read it. I ordered it at the library - it just took this long for the book to be free at the library. Clearly a lot of people wanted it.

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

this.

[books2thesky.livejournal.com]

One thing that I haven't seen discussed anywhere (understandably enough, since it's a pretty minor thing, but still) is that the style of parenting described is a fundamentally...unsustainable style of parenting? In the sense that it only works if there are only a few "tiger mothers" around. If all mothers were "tiger mothers" then the kids being two years ahead of their classmates wouldn't work because all the kids would be two years ahead. If all mothers were "tiger mothers" then their kids wouldn't be able to win medals because all of the kids would be practicing like crazy. This style is only effective if you're one of a very small number of people who use it.

I don't know, it bothers me somehow that it's such a fundamentally competitive mindset oriented towards outdoing other people. And it bothers me that being a "tiger mother" absolutely cannot be a categorical imperative because it would just not work.

Then again, the categorical imperative is a Western concept, so maybe that's the problem here?
Aaaaand I'm stopping now because wow, so totally not a philosophy major; I've probably put my foot far enough in my mouth already by attempting to use the term at all. >_<

[books2thesky.livejournal.com]

Okay, coming back to rephrase something: "it bothers me somehow that it's such a fundamentally competitive mindset oriented towards outdoing other people" is not QUITE right. I mean, it does bother me, but that's not the relevant point.

Better phrasing would be "it bothers me somehow that it's such a fundamentally competitive mindset that its entire existence depends on there being other, not-as-successful people to outdo."