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Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: review

By Helen Hayward - posted Monday, 18 April 2011


Could Amy Chua be right? Do we as Western mothers struggle to transmit deep values to our children because we're squeamishly reluctant to overide their 'preferences'? Perhaps, but it's not just this. It's also because we lack moral certainty, and with it the conviction - which Chua has in spades - that we know what's best for our children.

The other thing that we as Western mothers are hampered by is the amount of time we're able to give our children. And here it's not quality time that Chua is targeting, but something far more arduous. Given that children instinctively rebel against mastering anything difficult, what they need, if they're to overcome this resistance, is a mother (or father) with enough patience and energy to help them transcend it (homework at the kitchen table, and supervised music practice, that sort of thing). Amy Chua's memoir teams with descriptions of the hours she spent supervising her daughters, getting them to do things they didn't want to do, particularly things they didn't want to do, in order to equip them for 'life'.

Much of the tirade against 'that evil mother' which has swept across middle-class America in the last few months touches on Chua's tyrannical drive for perfection. What decent mother could possibly bin her children's birthday cards because they fell below the expected standard? Or refuse her daughter the bathroom until she has mastered a thorny piano piece? Amy Chua doesn't

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even try to conceal her heartlessness in these situations, describing them in gloriously frank, un-Western detail.

Instead she mounts a different kind of defence which gets at the heart of the difference between Chinese and Western parenting (or at least her versions of them). 'Chinese parenting', Chua writes, 'is one of the most difficult things I can think of. You have to be hated sometimes by someone you love and who hopefully loves you, and there's no letting up, no point at which it suddenly becomes easy'. The difference is this. Chinese mothers are willing to be hated in the process of transferring deep values and life skills to their children, whereas by and large Western mothers aren't.

Chua's memoir, a refreshing rant against wishy-washy Western parenting, dovetails in a key and disturbing idea. Far from indulging our children, a common fear in Western society, her claim is that we neglect them. And she's not talking about spoiling them with too much Lego or foreign travel. In her opinion we neglect them by failing to help them develop the self-discipline and confidence they need in order to realize their full potential.

What then is Chua's secret in bringing up her two very talented daughters? What does she do to instil in them enough self-discipline and confidence to master the challenges that the world - and she - throws at them? Does she resort to tactics verging on emotional abuse, as critics suggest, or are her means more benign and transferable?

A vital part of her parenting philosophy is that of the virtuous circle. The more she encourages - forces even - her daughters to meet challenges, the more rewarded they feel, and the more they're motivated to rise to the next challenge. This principle runs directly counter to easy-way-out wishy-washy Western parenting.

There is however a further problem that Chua doesn't address, more complex than laziness or neglect, which explains why so many of us tip into easy-way-out parenting. This is the problem of ambition and devotion, which family life brings to the fore. It's the conflict between meeting our personal demands for a worthwhile life, or just a financially viable one, versus the desire to devote ourselves to our children.

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Some of Amy Chua's strength, and she's clearly a formidable woman, comes from her willingness to be her daughters' taskmaster. She'd prefer that they took out their negativity on her than on their schoolwork or musical instrument. 'To be honest', she writes, 'I sometimes wonder if the question "Who are you really doing this for?" should be asked of Western parents too. Sometimes I wake up in the morning dreading what I have to do and thinking how easy it would be to say, "Sure Lulu, we can skip a day of violin practice." Unlike my Western friends, I can never say, "As much as it kills me, I just have to let my kids make their choices and follow their hearts. It's the hardest thing in the world, but I'm doing my best to hold back." Then they get to have a glass of wine and go to a yoga class, whereas I have to stay home and scream and have my kids hate me' (p148).

'What if', the unsettling thought goes, 'Amy Chua isn't nuts?' What if, even if she isn't right in some final sense, she's on to something important? What if what our children need from us most isn't praise, but something closer to supervision? What if the only way to counter a child's natural impulse to waste time is to have a mother (or father) who is willing not just to unplug technology, but to push him or her into picking up that musical instrument, or homework assignment, and to stay within earshot until they've finished?

There is however more to this memoir than parental self-help. As Amy Chua describes so well, she minds terribly when her younger daughter publicly turns on her - starting her memoir just days after this very cinematic outburst in Moscow's Red Square. But there's something else that complicates Chua's neat Western and Chinese parenting model, which is that Amy Chua lives in New York, not China, which makes her version of Chinese parenting closer to an ideal than a lived reality.

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About the Author

Helen Hayward is a former academic and writer with a PhD, currently living in Hobart with her husband John Armstrong and family. She blogs at Helen Hayward.

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