Academic

Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother is a brave and provocative work--inspirational and disturbing in roughly equal measure.

To be a mother is to be judged. Strangers in public places offer advice about whether your baby is dressed appropriately for the climate; family members, friends, and mere acquaintances feel at liberty to share their often strong opinions about how you feed or discipline your children. Amy Chua is therefore brave to offer up her parenting for minute public scrutiny in this book that is part memoir and part spirited defense of parenting methods that many of her readers are likely to brand extreme, including calling children names ("fat", "lazy") and making invidious comparisons between one child and another. 

As a mother of three sons (ages 12, 9, 6), I found Chua's honesty about the difficulties (battles, really) of parenting to be remarkably inspirational. One of Chua's themes is the difficulty of attempting to inculcate one's children with values that do not seem to be shared by the wider culture. Like Chua, I sometimes feel as if cultural forces are aligned against my attempts to produce respectful, disciplined, and hard-working children, and it is inspirational to hear of another parent's struggle against these same forces. Like Chua's children, my own sometimes make me feel like an ogre when I am standing over them demanding (often quite loudly) that they re-do a project or assignment until it represents their best efforts.  Many times I feel like throwing up my hands when I am dealing with an obstinate and argumentative child who simply doesn't want to do the work required to realize his full potential as a student, especially since these battles are always waged after a long day at work, when I'd like to relax and read a novel. Chua's book truly inspired me to redouble my efforts with my sons and not to cut myself slack when I am feeling overworked and exhausted.  In fact, Chua's book was so inspirational that the "Tiger Mother" moniker has become a running joke in our house. When my sons are obstinate about doing their work, I'll say to them, "Don't make me go all Tiger Mother on you." It is, I hope, a joking reminder that I'm willing to do whatever is necessary to make them the best students they can be. 

Chua's book is billed, in part, as a memoir, and as the book unfolds, Chua begins to question, albeit mildly, whether her "Chinese mother" model can and should be applied by every parent to every child. Chua's older daughter responds well to her parenting methods, which involve a highly regimented and demanding schedule of study and piano practice under the constant, intense, and highly critical gaze of Chua herself. Her youngest daughter, however, eventually rebels, but not before she has become a highly accomplished violinist, and even her rebellion involves merely quitting violin and being unpleasant to her mother; she remains, evidently, an extraordinary student and is talented both musically and athletically. Despite this, Chua tell her daughters at the end of the book that she would do nothing differently if she had it do all over again.  She insists that she made "great choices" in parenting, and she defends her extreme methods "even though all those people worried that you [i.e., her daughters] would be permanently damaged psychologically." (227). Throughout, she rails against lazy Western parents who place insufficient demands on their offspring and allow them to choose mediocrity.

The point, though, is that Chua's daughters are still too young for her to make a fully informed judgment about the virtues of her parenting style as applied.  Herodotus wrote, "Call no man happy until he is dead." By the same token, no parenting can be judged successful when the children have not even become adults. And even if Chua's parenting produces accomplished adults, are accomplishments the ends of successful parenting, or are they only means?

In judging her own parenting, Chua falls prey to what a friend of mine calls the "reflection doctrine." Chua judges her parenting successful because her daughters have accomplishments, such as playing at Carnegie Hall, that reflect well on Chua herself. Chua's daughters accuse her of only valuing them to they extent that they are extensions of herself.  In what is probably the climactic scene of the book, Chua's younger daughter shouts at her "You don't love me. You think you do, but you don't. You just make me feel bad about myself every second. . . . You're a terrible mother. You're selfish. You don't care about anyone but yourself . . . .Everything you say you do for me is actually for yourself." (205). No one should be judged by what her teen daughter shouts at her in a fit of anger, but after reading the book, it is easy to see how Chua's daughters could come to feel as if they were only valuable for their accomplishments. Even her more compliant older daughter complains, in essence, that no matter what she does to please Chua, it is not good enough.

For me, but not for Chua herself, the central tension in this memoir is between being a parent with high expectations versus being a parent who can never be pleased. On Chua's account, her own mother and father could never be pleased, and she seems to attribute her extraordinary success in life to the perfectionism that her parents' attitudes inspired. Yet perfectionism has costs. Chua admits that she started off as a math major in college to try to please her parents but dropped it when her father "told me I was in over my head, saving me." (31). She wrote her senior thesis on a subject she found boring, again because it "seemed vaguely sciencelike." (31). She went to law school, "mainly because I didn't want to go to medical school." She attributes her success in law school to "working psychotically hard" rather than to being brilliant. (31). Meanwhile, she worried that law wasn't her "calling": "I didn't care about the rights of criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me. I also wasn't naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it."  After law school, she went to Wall Street as "the path of least resistance." Though she was good at the job, she felt like an impostor. (31). Even once she entered academia, she often suffered from writer's block, despite her obvious talents and abilities and, yes, accomplishments.  

Despite her own experiences, Chua never asks herself if the costs of being a parent who cannot be pleased are ultimately worth it. Chua attributes her success but not her difficulty in finding her way in life to her parents' methods. She freely admits, however, that her husband was equally successful even though his parents took a much more relaxed approach. Unlike Chua, her husband "loved the law," "loved writing briefs and litigating," loved prosecuting, wrote "for fun" a "100-page article on the right of privacy--it just poured right out of him." The article was published by the Harvard Law Review, and her husband got a job at Yale Law School without applying "even though [Chua] was the one who always wanted to become an academic." (32). Could there be a lesson here? If there is, Chua doesn't see it.