The way of the 'Tiger Mother' - interview with Amy Chua

[theempathogen]

The award for controversial book of the year so far for concerned parents has to be Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

The author is a Chinese American academic at Yale, Amy Chua, and the book plots her "tough mothering" style of parenting.

Ms Chua explains her thinking.

The sound file is here. (4:36 in length

Comments

[theempathogen]

You got really lucky. My mom is from Vietnam, and their culture is a severe one, I suspect even by Asian standards in general. Her parenting methods were actually toned down in comparison to her parents. Corporal punishment was literally the answer to everything in her parents' generation, to the point where her and her siblings would get whipped if they didn't come home with good grades. Once one of my aunts came home late and my grandma was waiting for her in front of the house with a pair of shears. She then proceeded to cut all my aunt's hair off.

Case in point: my mom's toned down even from a lot of modern ultra-Vietnamese parents, like say, fathers who think it's acceptable to kick down or smack their grown children hard across the face. (Yes, even in 2011, not just the 1960s.) She states this is why she was determined never to marry a Vietnamese man.

And let's not even get into the kind of things my mom has called me. She only stopped when I stood up for myself and started making it very clear that I would not tolerate it and did not deserve it. And, being raised under the shadow of Asian Parent Syndrome, I didn't even know standing up for myself was an option until a totally white friend of mine wondered aloud why I let my mom talk to me that way.

This is the long way of saying I'm glad there are parents like you out there.

I'm avoiding having children, but if I did, I couldn't possibly demean them the way my mom did.