Academic

I think the hardest part about reading Chua's book for me is that it is like catching myself in a mirror -- and I don't look that great.  I am a junior Tiger Mom, with Tiger Mom aspirations.  Like Chua, we have rules that are not universally accepted around us (limited electronics use, fairly censored TV watching, computer only in common areas, etc.)  And, like Chua, I am a yeller:  a warrior with words, and with sarcasm.  (Last week, when my daughter was lamenting having to write a long essay, I countered with "Well, if you don't like to write more than a few sentences, I have a list of mediocre colleges you may want to think about.  And a list of occupations, most of which end in "repair.")  Reading some of Chua's and Lulu's verbal jousting was a little too close for comfort.  I also felt the heartbreak of thirteen-year-old Lulu's detaching from Chua, which felt all-too-familiar to me.  I kept thinking of the song "Slipping Through My Fingers," from the musical Mamma Mia.  I wanted to pound on my Kindle screen and tell Chua to wake up and get her daughter back.

But because I walk a similar path, I understand Chua's motivations.  We are all products of our childhood, and we all vicariously use our children as avatars to mimic or correct our childhood.  Chua seems to be doing both -- she wants to use her strict parenting to ensure that her children have similarly successful outcomes as well as acquire hard-earned insights and skills on the arduous journey, but she also (like Western Parents) wants her kids to have what she didn't.  Luxurious foreign travel.  Dresses from Barney's.  Musical instruments that cost as much as automobiles.  Tastefully simple celebrations with lots of guests that reek sophistication.  Chua is trying to give her kids the best of both worlds:  the work ethic of the recent immigrant and the sophistication and pedigree of a Mayflower descendant.  And she has seen many reaffirming payoffs, though we see that her strategy is high-risk and high-reward.

I also understand her basic quandary:  how to "make" a child do anything.  My first child was my "Lulu," so I figured out at about two months that I couldn't make a child do anything they didn't want to do.  Unless you are willing to resort to some sort of physical coercion, which I'm not, then the second-best strategy is to try to make the child want to do what you want the child to do.  this can be achieved, if at all, through reasoning or incentives (otherwise known as bribery and threats).  And sometimes, nothing works and you find yourself with a child who still says "no," even after you've taken away every physical possession known to man and grounded them for their natural life span.  Then you realize they are on to you.  Like the ants in A Bug's Life, children can sometimes catch on to the fact that parental control is fairly illusory and depends completely on the voluntary compliance of the child.  If I could have warned Chua of anything, it is that the child will have this epiphany earlier rather than later if you do not choose your battles.  If Chua's main goal is to have her children emerge successful and having reached their full academic/musical potential, then she should only try to use control as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.  So I winced when I read that she went into "bet the family" fighting mode over Lulu playing at her own Bat Mitzvah and over Lulu trying caviar.  Getting her way in those episodes was an end in itself, proving that children must obey their parents, not a means to the greater end of self actualization.  And of course we know what happened next, if you have read the book.

In the end, the parenting memoir as genre doesn't have much to offer as advice.  Chua has an "n" of two, with mixed results, which aren't complete yet.  All of us have small n's, with way too many confounding variables.  If we don't like Chua's methods, it is hard to combat her anecdote with our anecdotes.  Many commentators and reviewers have questioned whether her children are really hapy/will be really happy in the future/etc.  There's really no way to know, and no way to know if their happiness/unhappiness is linked to the fact that their parents heaped both huge amounts of love and expectations on them.  I think the best way to read Battle Hymn for the Tiger Mother is as an account of one woman's decision to parent in a particular way and the transformation that occurs in her because of that choice.  As I said in an earlier post, I'm not sure that enough time has passed between the events in the memoir and the writing of the memoir for the author to have truly processed the transformation of Tiger Mother.  Unfortunately, she has said "no sequel," so we may just have to catch up with her at a conference in a few years to get the rest of the story!