Notes on The Tiger Mom

I just finished “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” by Amy Chua, in which the author mercilessly criticizes Western parenting style for producing soft, spoiled children who stink at most things they do.

Chua’s unique brand of “Chinese parenting” included isolating her children from playdates and sleepovers so that they could practice their music. Her mothering tactics included relentlessly insulting her children and comparing them to one another in order to motivate them to produce excellent work. And produce they definitely did.

To her limited credit, Chua admits that she has little capacity for joy, and the path she chose as a parent was lonely and extremely difficult.  One of her two daughters (who started at Harvard this year) publically supported her mother’s methods, while the other, who was quite rebellious throughout the book, is rather silent on the subject.

Coincidentally, a good friend of mine sent me this link to a performance of “Swan Lake” by a Chinese circus-ballet troupe: http://www.nzwide.com/swanlake.htm . It is stunning, filled with jaw-dropping, oh-my-god moments and feats of super-human strength and flexibility.  It made me strangely sad to watch it in light of this book. How many of these performers had “Chinese mothers” and were made to train to exhaustion, pushing their bodies through injury and pain? How many developed eating disorders or attempted suicide because they never felt good enough? And for what? So that I can be entertained? So that I can be awestruck? There’s something unnatural and macabre about this that I’m having difficulty reconciling with my values.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about values lately. Values-based living is a key component of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and appears to be integral to emotional well-being. I can appreciate that different cultures have different value systems with respect to child-rearing, and it behoves us to remain nonjudgmental.  I think that’s what I found so discomforting about Ms. Chua’s memoir: her smug assertion that her values are superior to others’. Ms. Chua and her children may be academically brilliant and impressively accomplished, but as far as I can tell, they don’t exhibit much in terms of compassion, spontaneity, or equanimity. Fortunately for humanity, there are others who do.

That's a values-based judgment I can live with.

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