Amy Chua

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1. 01

   The book was read as a manual although it is an ironic memoir in which the author herself revises her method — and the data on intense parental control shows, consistently, high performance paid for with anxiety and distance.

   Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother · 2011

   It is not high standards that produce the cost but high standards without reciprocity.

   The book describes strict rules: no sleepovers, no grade below an A, daily hours of an instrument chosen by the parent. It caused a global scandal and is often cited in defence of harsh parenting. Two qualifications change the reading. The first is that the text is written ironically and ends with the author's defeat at the hands of her younger daughter, which is to say with the acknowledgement of the method's limits. The second is what the research shows, which is more interesting than the polemic. Ruth Chao's studies introduced the distinction between Western authoritarian control and the Chinese concept guan, which means to govern and to love at the same time; when control is read by the child as involvement, the costs fall. But longitudinal studies of Asian-American families, among them those led by Su Yeong Kim, described a group called tiger parenting and found in their children lower grades, more depression and more alienation than among those with parents described as supportive. That is the exact inverse of what the stereotype assumes. And at system level, the East Asian countries with the most intense school pressure also report some of the highest rates of stress and suicide among adolescents.

   “Nothing is fun until you are good at it.”

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