A Working Mom Questions the Tiger Mom

Work Wednesday

This weekend, I enticed my seven-year-old daughter into practicing an extra ten minutes of piano by bribing her with ten gourmet multi-colored jelly beans. Only later did I realize I could have avoided the sugar-fueled consequences of my poor parenting choice by threatening to haul her dollhouse down to the car and drive it to the Salvation Army, burn all her stuffed animals, and withhold lunch, dinner, holiday presents, birthday parties, sleepovers, and bathroom breaks, for the foreseeable future. 

I didn't though. I guess I'm not a "Tiger Mother." In case you've managed to miss the Chua commotion, the techniques above (excepting the jelly beans) are just a few of the parenting moments recounted by Yale Law professor Amy Chua in a now-notorious Wall Street Journal excerpt from her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.  In the article, Chua presents her hard-core, "Chinese-style" parenting approach for producing "stereotypically successful" children. Insults, shame, and absolute parental control are among the principal tools in her box.

Like many of the thousands and thousands of journalists, bloggers, commenters and others who have weighed in on Battle Hymn, I haven't read the book. And I'm fairly sure I won't.

But I've read the original Journal piece, reviewed her many interviews, and scoured the "softer" pieces that have popped up in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere this week in response to intense criticism. Apparently, Chua now claims, the Journal strung together the most inflammatory, controversial parts of her book, and failed to reflect both the ironic wit and the "full arc" of her story, which ends with her (sort of) recognizing the limitations of her parenting model. (I'm not sure I buy it.)

So, I do have an opinion. Or make that opinions. Many.

But this blog is not my judgment on Chua's child-rearing methods. (For true insight, read this post by my CurrentMom colleague, Katherine Reynolds Lewis, who was raised by a Chinese mother and now is one.)  Instead, it's a riff on a question or two I'd like to ask Chua if I were to have the chance. From the working mom's perspective, of course. So, in no particular order:

1) How did you do this?

Not just write the book, which Chua apparently did in eight weeks, but how did she manage to spend hours and hours supervising her daughters' every school assignment and scale? For me, and for most working moms I know, there aren't enough hours in the day just to do the essential stuff like eating, showering, and sleeping.

Of course, there's more to it than that. Most of us working moms are involved in our kids' lives and many have high expectations for them. While we sometimes coddle our kids, other times we can be a little pushy. (Kind of a hybrid pushy/cushy style.) I've been known to quiz my first-grader daughter on her inventive spelling when I think she's just being lazy. And I always insist that she complete the "optional" homework questions. (It's first grade, after all. How hard can they be?) But the idea of engaging in all-consuming, concentrated, and coercive (Chua's word) "Tiger Mother" parenting seems unfeasible and unreasonable (not to mention damaging). And not just for the kids, but for the moms, too.

Other working moms agree. As Vivia Chen, from the law blog, The Careerist, puts it: "Really, do working parents -- especially the moms -- need any more pressure on the homefront? Isn't it enough to make sure your kids are clothed, fed, and nurtured while holding on to an outside job, without having to whip them into mini-geniuses?" Wendy Sachs, author I Don't Know How She Does It: Secrets to Stay-At-Work Moms, underscores Chen's point:

[T]he Western moms I know, particularly working mothers, have neither the desire nor time to run such an extreme household. After a day at the office, the last thing a working mom wants to do is come home and turn into the drill sergeant. Getting kids to do their homework is challenging enough, but tacking on extra hours of mom-generated exercises? Not happening.

But how does Chua make it happen? Chua says she's definitely a Type A personality, always rushing around, trying to do too much, not good at just lying on the beach. But I still can't figure out how Chua manages to conduct her kids' three-to-four hour music sessions, intensive academic drills, and Chinese conversation practice and get any of her own work, or the routine stuff of family life, done. After all, she presumably needs to prepare for classes, teach, grade papers, mentor students, write articles and books, speak at colloquia and symposia (fancy law school lingo for "conference"), serve on faculty committees, and do all the other stuff most legal academics do.

Maybe she's a great time manager. Or a champion multi-tasker. Or maybe the John M. Duff, Jr. Professorship of Law is an easier gig than most legal jobs.  Maybe. Despite my curiosity, it's clearly not something I'm going to do. So, on to my next question . . .

2) Why did you do this?

It's clear from Chua's comments that she's raising her kids the way she (but not her fellow Yale Law prof husband) was raised. In the introduction to one of her academic books, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance-- And Why They Fall, she writes about her father calling her a "disgrace" when she took "only" second place in a high school history contest. This provides some context for her conduct. (But not for her husband's complicity.) But it still begs the question: why did she wrote this book?

Chua, by all accounts, is a high-achieving legal academic, with a tenured position at prestigious Yale Law School. She's written two well-regarded books on, in rough terms, the relationship between globalization, market democracy, and ethnicity, a slew of law review and other academic articles, and added what reviewers have called a "fundamentally new perspective" on democracy and development. I wonder why a scholar with stellar academic credentials, intellectual heft, and a successful career would seek to make her mark by writing a book about her extreme parenting techniques. Even if it's a memoir.

Although I certainly believe that a professional woman shouldn't have to hide her parenting role, it almost seems as if Chua's sabotaging her well-constructed career for a different kind of renown. She will forever (at least on the Internet) be thought of as the "Tiger Mother," not as Professor Chua. As one writer put it in the Yale Herald:

Ms. Chua, whose most controversial stand until last week was including the Dutch Empire on her shortlist of world Hyperpowers in her most recent book, is poised to achieve the kind of celebrity rarely conferred on academics . . . . Chua’s public transformation from respected legal scholar to self-promotional internet meme makes for a fascinating study of the murky, often lurid realm at the intersection of the intellectual world and pop-culture.

Chua is now poised to make a small fortune in book sales, but there will clearly be long-term costs - to her academic reputation, to her daughters, and to her husband. Once the immediate firestorm dies down, it will be interesting to find out how Chua's family and career fare.

Image by Larry D. Moore, via Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License.

 

 

 

Comments

[Lyn]

Pushy/cushy. I like it. Let's go with that! Pushy/Cushy Mothers for the win!

[Miriam]

I guess the question I keep asking--in addition to your questions--is "Why?" Are there really people out there who think that being number one in the class at the expense of all else is a value. It distresses me that so few have asked that question.

[Karen]

This afternoon, at my youngest son's request, we are hosting a small celebration party for his GeoBowl team ... which came in second place out of three. In fact, they lost on a question that was supposedly his to have studied. And yet, he is excited to host his friends. He has set out the games he wants to play (Twister, Jenga and Scrambled States) all over our living room in preparation, and thinks it would be great fun to test the grownup on GeoBowl questions.

I thought it was ironic that this happened this week. To everything in my parenting life, I've been thinking, "What would Tiger Mother do?" My response - she would do nothing the way I do it. I don't care if they came in first, second or third, so long as they had fun and learned some geography (it was an extracurricular activity.) I don't care that we forgot to write up his science expo question until the morning it was due (we chose the experiment two weeks ago.) I don't care if he hasn't mastered enough piano for his teacher to take him to the next level, or that he was sick for his saxophone concert in December.

My son is happy, and incredibly social (hence, the party) and marvelously athletic and a team leader. He makes friends wherever he goes, with both children and adults. He has emotional intelligence out the wazoo, and snuggles with me every night before he goes to bed, kissing my nose and tickling me.

I often think that I have been a neglectful parent, especially with my third child. There aren't enough hours in a working mom's life to be anything but. But when I look at my kids through the Tiger Mother prism, I think they're coming out in just a good a place, if not better.

[Jamie]

I had not read the article until I read your piece (although even I, in my little boys and work bubble had heard about it) and wonder how much this is truly a discussion of different cultures. A friend of mine who lived in Asia (Tokyo and Hong Kong) for many years and I were talking about how you impart your values on your children. He and I agreed that our values were the Judeo Christian values (do good, or try to do no harm, help the less fortunate, etc.), which he assured me were not identical to Asian values. I found the piece very interesting, and possible a BIG exaggeration. If a Chinese mom has twins, both can't be number 1. And if we all parented like Chinese moms, how would that work? 99 out of 100 children would be "failures"?
I do think there is something to be said about encouraging your kids to strive for excellence. But I think it should come from the kid, not the parent. I don't want to torture my kids to play the piano if they're not interested. I want them to have their own passions, and sincerely hope they move beyond "Buzz and Woody" and superheroes, which are today's passions. But if they don't, that's okay.
Maybe she wrote the book because she truly believes that Westerners are ruining their children. But I think I buy the more likely view - it's the Palin factor. Say something outrageous enough and perhaps people will give you your 5 minutes of fame.
I want my kids to do well, but I want to have a nice life too. Nothing about Tiger Mom's life appeals to me. Guess I'll just have to face up the fact that I'm a slacker mom who's raising slacker kids but having fun doing it!