'Tiger Mom' is Back ... Because She's Selling Her Paperback

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I really didn’t want to leap onto the Tiger Mom bandwagon again, now that the Yale University Law Professor’s controversial book – The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – is now out in paperback. But Amy Chua’s latest Wall Street Journal essay and her appearance on news programs -- where she says  that, despite all the time she’s had to reflect and all the negative reactions her book sparked, she wouldn’t change anything and that her methods are superior to the "soft" American style of child-rearing-- has pulled me back into this quagmire again. (The return of Chua’s somewhat tamer version of her Tiger Mother persona is the subject of my latest Pop Culture and Politics post.)

In her Journal essay, Chua tries to persuade readers that because her eldest daughter is now a college student (attending Harvard no less), she is “hands-off” and thinks of herself as pretty much done with child-rearing.

“When our kids go off to college, we want them to have the confidence, judgment and strength to take care of themselves,” Chua wrote in the Journal. “Even critics of my approach to parenting would probably concede that, after years of drilling and discipline, tiger cubs are good at focusing and getting their work done. If instilled early, these skills also help them to avoid the college-prep freak-out that traumatizes so many families.”

This is from the woman who wrote that when one of her daughters was 7, she made the child sit at the piano, with no breaks for food or the bathroom, for hours, until the kid mastered a piece. She was also the one who said that her kids weren’t allowed to “attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play . . . watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A . . . play any instrument other than the piano or violin."

I, for one, don’t see a parent who had as much invested in her kids doing well and succeeding as Chua does, just turning that switch off if, for example, her daughter wanted to drop out of college, join the Peace Corps or start a rock band, and play the drums.

The Fall-Out from ‘Tiger Mother’ Continues as Folks Seek the ‘Right’ Way to Parent

The new controversial book about “Chinese mothering” that I mentioned last week – Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua – which was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal under the title, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” continues to generate controversy. And responses. Loads of responses. Some of them are angry. (Chua has received death threats.) Some of them are defensive. Several are funny.

Here are a few of the responses:

Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine entitled “No More Mrs. Nice Mom” in which she placed Chua’s piece into context, as yet another reaction by parents who are sick of being told how to parent but are constantly searching for a new way to exert control and influence over their children:

“Despite the obvious limits of Chua’s appeal, her publisher is clearly banking on her message finding wide resonance among American moms worn out from trying to do everything right for kids who mimic Disney Channel-style disrespect for parents, spend hours a day on Facebook, pick at their lovingly prepared food and generally won’t get with the program. The gimmick of selling a program of Chinese parenting is a great one for a time when all the talk is of Chinese ascendancy and American decline. . . And there is true universality behind the message [Chua is] honest enough to own: that she is terrified of ‘family decline,’ that she fears that raising a ‘soft, entitled child’ will let ‘my family fail.’ Her deepest hope is that by insisting upon perfection from her children in all things, like violin playing, she will be able to achieve, in her words, control: ‘Over generational decline. Over birth order. Over one’s destiny. Over one’s children.’”