'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.’”

Three for Thursday: Controversy Over 'Chinese Mothering,' Teens on TV & 'The Middle's' Little Brick

Image credit: Wall Street Journal

Item #1: Controversy Over ‘Chinese Mothering’

Amy Chua wrote a book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It’s about how she started off her life as a mother of two girls as a very strict, “traditional Chinese” mother, like her parents before her. By the end of the book – in which Chua says she gets her “comeuppance” – Chua says she realized she wanted to “retreat . . . from the strict immigrant model” of raising her daughters, according to an interview she gave to the Wall Street Journal.

However the Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt of the first part of Chua’s book, when Chua was describing being fully bought into the strict, no messin’ around style of parenting that believes that children are strong and need to be pushed, not coddled or allowed to choose the direction of their lives. Outside of the context of the whole book -- and without knowing that Chua says she’s “not exactly the same person at the end of the book” -- Chua seems extremely domineering. Combine that excerpt with the headline (which Chua didn’t chose) “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” and you'll see why folks went nuts on the internet, calling Chua every variation on "Mommy Dearest" which they could come up with. Here are some excerpts which’ll give you a sense of why people were outraged by what ran in the Journal:

“Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.”

Then there was the anecdote about Chua's then-7-year-old who was having trouble with a piano piece and, after the girl and her mom worked on it “nonstop for a week” and the daughter wanted to give up, Chua ordered her back to the piano:

“Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have ‘The Little White Donkey’ perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, ‘I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?’ I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn’t do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.”