I wanted to write about some fantastic Chinese documentaries I’ve seen over the past year, but instead I’m going to have to write about the debate raging over Amy Chua, of Tiger Mother infamy.
I’ve received enough emails from people wondering if her approach is really typical of “Chinese” parenting or my own upbringing (God forbid!) that I want to reply once and for all here, and then I’ll refer everyone to this blog entry.
First, Chua’s super-controlling style of parenting is not “traditional Chinese” for many reasons, most obviously the fact that most Chinese have had no opportunity to parent the way Chua does. She takes one grain of truth–that Chinese traditionally have emphasized the importance of education–and then manages to conflate that with her own hyperbole to promote her book. Controversy sells. But let’s get a few facts clear. Chua is American. Her parents were ethnic Chinese from the Philippines. (I guess the title “Battle-hymn of the Imelda Marcos Mother” just didn’t have the same ka-ching to it.) However, Chua is exploiting current fears of a rising China, stereotypes about Chinese (and “Westerners”), the “model minority” stereotype, and almost every mother’s own conflicted feelings about her parenting in order to sell books.
Secondly, there’s been a lot written already about the harmful effects Chua’s abusive language and control-freak style may actually have on children. I will refer everyone to several of the myriad articles about this subject, including this CNN report showing that Asian American females, ages 15-24, have the highest suicide rate of anyone in the U.S. in that age group. This beautiful essay, \”My Life as the Child of a Tiger Mother\”,by memoirist Lac Su, explains how he would give up all his current success if he only he could erase the psychic scars caused by his parents’ abusive behavior, which in some ways dovetails with Chua’s name calling. This article written by Betty Ming Liu, Parents like Amy Chua Are the Reason Why Asian Americans Like Me Are in Therapy, describes her critique humorously while this Quora post by Christine Lu explores how her older sister’s efforts to fulfill the pressure to be “perfect” and “successful” resulted in her sister’s suicide. (Meanwhile, a good round-up of bloggers critiques as well as thoughtful analysis is provided by Cynthia Liu.)
Finally, I’d like to address the fundamental problem with Chua’s thesis: she oversimplifies a complex issue with a simple binary of Western indulgent v. Chinese strict.
In fact, this issue is about class not ethnicity. How many people can afford the nannies, tutors, special camps, private schools, etc. that Chua and her husband have paid for? Yet Chua’s book and PR do not emphasize this class privilege or all the people who have contributed to her children’s academic successes. No one woman could do everything, or seriously spend as much time as Chua claims that she did micromanaging her children’s every rehearsal and lives, as Janet Maslin points out in her review in the New York Times.
Chua’s parents were from very wealthy families. (See Chua’s first book, World on Fire, for anecdotes about her relative’s stash of solid gold bars.) Chua is also extremely wealthy. (For example, her daughters attend the private Hopkins School, which charges $30,000+ per year for tuition for grades 7-12.)
Money buys many wonderful opportunities. For example, want your kids to have a recital at Carnegie Hall, too? Anyone can pay to rent one of Carnegie Hall’s many venues. Current cost for a recital at the smallest of the halls (capacity 268, Weill Recital Hall) is about $4,500 for a weekend evening or Sunday afternoon. How do I know? I emailed Carnegie Hall\’s \”Hall Rental\” page on its website and asked.
So what’s wrong with spending a ton of money to raise your kids to have a great education and a lot of special opportunities? Nothing, in and of itself…if you’ve got the money. But it’s alarming that the issue of money and privilege is being obscured in this debate, and the focus in the media is solely on the efforts of one person–the mother–as though it doesn’t take a village (or an incredibly wealthy community) to raise a child.
This refusal to acknowledge privilege and the greater role of community in helping to raise successful children reminds me of The Atlantic‘s cover story, The Rise of the New Global Elite, about the new wealthy who relate to each other around the world but feel little to no obligations to the societies in which they grew up. (See especially pp. 6-7.) According to the article, the new elite believe that solely through their own hard work and merit did they rise to the top. They don’t recognize the privileges of growing up in a largely middle-class society without crime to worry about, with good schools, and with access to jobs. They do not acknowledge the role of luck in their own success or being in the right place at the right time in history. For example, most of the American elites featured grew up in an era that did not have a universal draft, which would otherwise have required them to serve in America’s two ongoing wars, rather than continue their educations uninterrupted and to travel freely to make money for themselves and their companies. The fact that others–generally poorer and less educated– make these sacrifices of going to war for the nation, and thus for them, does not apparently translate to gratitude.
We used to recognize in America that having a strong middle class made us a strong nation. But according to The Atlantic article, we are creating an entitled class (yes, they are smart, they go to good schools, they work hard, but they also have the opportunity to do so) and an underclass, who cannot get ahead no matter how hard they work because they simply do not have access to the best education, connections, and opportunities that the elite enjoy. This divide is dangerous.
We as a nation need to look for real solutions that will help ALL OF US as a society, not just a few of us. We need to stop blaming “indulgent Western parents” or unions or teachers or such-and-such ethnic group, and look at the lack of opportunity that a society increasingly segregated by class leads to as well as the declining state of our public school systems, for example. If you can put your kids in a $30,000/year private school, then of course the kids can get a good education and meet many children of influential people who will help them later in life.
But most parents who are working two full-time jobs just to get by do not have the time, which Chua claims somehow that she has, to self-tutor their children. Nor do most families have hundreds of thousands of dollars to use just to put their kid through a private junior high and high school.
Some parents are truly neglectful of their children, of course, but the problems we see in our education system and economy are not simply issues of bad parenting…or “lax Western parenting” to borrow the publicity’s inflammatory rhetoric.
But notice how the debate raging in our media now is solely about parenting styles and not about the class issues or real solutions to the greater gap in educational opportunities in America for poorer or middle-class people.
Perhaps the elite who are able to take advantage of their opportunities and make the most of them feel that’s enough. Perhaps they feel no obligations to the greater good of their societies. Perhaps it’s enough to grab a bigger piece of the pie for themselves. And maybe they truly can convince themselves that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans deserve to have more collective net worth than the bottom 90 percent (Kristof, 1-1-2011). But if they’re wrong, and we really do need a thriving middle class to prevent most of America from sliding into a permanent underclass, if we need a thriving middle class to keep our country stable, to help lift the poor, to nurture people who will think outside the box rather than think merely how to preserve their own privilege, to innovate for the greater good, then we are all in trouble.
I wish the American media would recognize that we need real solutions and a real examination of our growing societal inequity, not stereotypes.
Standing OVATION. Great post.
Chua’s only marginally mentioned the Mandarin-speaking nanny (also housekeeper? cook?) who has helped raised her kids. I’d be curious to know more about this person.
To me, skimming over the nanny is much like presenting the the vision of Martha Stewart’s “hand-made” crafts…sure, gorgeous hand-crafted objects for the home are possible–when you have a staff of twenty that preps, helps fabricate, and cleans up after you.
I’m sure Chua puts a lot of effort into her kids. But the amount of time doesn’t seem to square with the fact that she’s also a writer and teacher at Yale Law, and presumably someone has to shop, cook, and clean at Chez Chua-Rubenfeld.
And talking up the time-intensive, laborious way of parenting that Chua started out endorsing *without* mentioning that it’s out of reach unless you have a nanny/housekeeper/cook seems rather disingenuous to me.
Excellent points!
Thank you so much for this post! I found this by chance when a friend shared it on Facebook. Love your blog and will visit again! I am one of those allegedly indulgent western parents. The real truth is my husband and I both work full time to raise our 3 children. I fully agree with everything you have noted in your post. I have read the Tiger Mother article and while there are some things that I think I could use most of it I would disregard, even if I could afford all the additional assistance of nanny, housekeeper etc. I would never limit my children by giving them only 2 instruments they could play, not allowing drama or art into their lives etc.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts as a parent. I know there are so many opportunities and experiences I wish I could provide my nieces and nephew as well. And personally, I think the world would be a sadder place (for me at least) if I couldn’t hear a flute or guitar or drums or pi pa or qin!
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Oregonian Omamas and simonfirth, Jeremy Adam Smith. Jeremy Adam Smith said: May-Lee Chai brilliantly reframes the Tiger Mama debate as being mainly about class, not culture: http://bit.ly/dQn8ca […]
Bravo!!! GREAT post. This needs to be said.
I’m not against Chua or her book or even her method of raising kids (she backed down a bit from what you see in the Wall Street Journal article)– I think she was fairly honest about herself, and really does make things more transparent. Yes, this is what most American kids are up against.
I hope her book and your post start a conversation about what is expected from kids with ambition in this country, and about how few kids really can achieve those things on their own in our more and more class-ridden and partisan society.
I talk about class issues on my blog, snoburbia. [ http://www.blog.snoburbia.com ] If I skewer the overclass in a humorous way, it is more palatable to people. I find it interesting that people always move away from class as the core issue, even if I overtly point it out. People are just not comfortable talking about class in this country. We speak of overachievers as having more merit, of working harder, rather than of the luxury of having a stay-at-home mother who can drive them to lessons or the expensive music camps the parents can afford. It’s easier to talk about Chua’s behavior than her privilege.
Here are the two posts (filed under my Preachy category, as I rarely get serious) I did that touched upon some of the issues you discuss: http://blog.snoburbia.com/the_snoburbs/2009/06/cue-the-helicopters.html and http://blog.snoburbia.com/the_snoburbs/2010/10/snoburbia-and-race.html
Thank you for expanding the conversation to include class.
Brilliant. Thank you for this powerful explication of the issues so many are missing.
Very interesting. I especially love the last paragraph……the middle class might have a better chance of “thriving” if they lived within their means. I see so many middle classers maxing out on cars, houses, etc and having to work 2 full time jobs to support their spending habits. The end result is them not having enough time to teach their children…..hardly the fault of the upper class!
I can’t say that the entire “middle class” is wasting its money. For example, see the link to the Wall Street Journal article about declining wages for people in the middle who’ve had to take enormous cuts to their wages. Rather than “blaming” either middle class or upper class people, I’d rather look for solutions. Even if one family spent less, is it enough to provide a world-class competitive education for their children? Can a public education compete with a private one? If not, what can we do about it? Parents can tutor their kids in elementary school but their knowledge may not be enough for skills their kids should be learning in high school, especially in science, math and extracurricular activities–this is where people with more money can hire tutors, coaches and highly qualified teachers for their children and people without that money and access cannot. That’s not the “fault” of people with high incomes, of course, but it is a problem that our society as a whole (meaning all the people) will need to address or I fear we will see growing instability. Creating a culture where there are more opportunities for children to receive quality tutoring in most communities, instead of just the most affluent communities, might be a useful solution. But we need to talk about that need and recognize it exists before solutions will become a reality.
Oh, I see this one all the time. “Middle class” people like my husband and me who make rather less than the median wage each (white-collar doesn’t mean good pay, at least in Australia, and double if you’re self-employed) don’t have the equivalent of a pricey school fee left over every year, even though we *don’t* take expensive holidays, have multiple cars, etc. If I sold my old station wagon I might get $800 if I was lucky. That wouldn’t even buy one term at a lower-end private school. And as for 2 fulltime jobs, the corollary of this is always that one partner should give up their job. And we all know which partner they mean by that, don’t we!
Um, really? The less socio-economically privileged Chinese parents I know are, if anything, dramatically more “tiger” like in their approach.
Class might affect tiger parenting tactics (Carnegie Hall Recital vs Crazy English Classes), but the debate here is about strategy (autonomy vs conformity), and that has very little to do with class, and a lot more to do with culture.
I feel we need to change the debate. My point is that Chua is Western. She *is* American as is her husband. The excellent private school her children attend is American, not Chinese. I don’t think it’s just a question of ethnic approaches to parenting.
I agree with you there. I think it’s awfully simplistic to make this a “Chinese” thing. If anything, I think Chua has struck such a chord because the underlying approach to parenting she describes resonates with some barely remembered approach to parenting that was once very American. I think my grandmother’s scotch-irish parents would have seen themselves as tiger parents.
In some ways, perhaps the overwhelming response to Chua is part of America learning to manage in a world of diminishing resources. One could argue that the tiger parent mentality is borne (at least partially) out of a need to survive in very lean social circumstances, where the consequences of coming in second are material and impact an entire family. There is a sense in the American middle-class that we are moving back into such a world. Whether that is because of a growing wealth divide (as you suggest) or because of structural shifts in the global economy (as I would argue), is less important than the implications for our approach to social life.
How do we protect our deepest values (autonomy, self-expression, the wonder of childhood) in a world where the consequences of individual failure are increasingly dramatic, and extend across our families and communities?
Great question (and exactly what I hope we all start asking across the country):
“How do we protect our deepest values (autonomy, self-expression, the wonder of childhood) in a world where the consequences of individual failure are increasingly dramatic, and extend across our families and communities?”
I was wondering when someone would point out the amount of opportunities and resources Chua had at her disposal. I remember being envious of all my other Asian American friends whose parents could afford to give them the violin lessons and keep up with all the rehearsals and concerts. My parents were just too exhausted to do no more than just transport me to wherever I needed to be.
Thank you for this awesome post!
Thank you for your insight! It was a very good read.
[…] May-Lee Chai’s thoughtful post argues that the debate has played upon racism and is fundamentally about classism. […]
Yay! Finally! Like many other commenters, I was wondering when someone was going to bring this up, and you’ve done so with a lot of elegance.
An excellent post.
(Here from BlueMilk.)
[…] real commentary on cultural differences (see: this post by May-Lee Chai, which I found via Blue Milk who is my favoritist […]
[…] 11D, I’m tired of being manipulated. And, May-Lee Chai points out (via Blue Milk), there is a “fundamental problem with [Amy] Chua’s thesis: she oversimplifies a complex issue with a simple binary of Western indulgent v. Chinese […]
Wonderful post!
[…] Street Journal, not the tWashington Post, as I stated earlier! Lilian also emailed me a link to this wonderful post, about how Chua's parenting style is more related to her class, than her […]
Great post. As soon as I heard she and her husband were both professors at Yale, I knew race was not the main issue here. I just wish people in the media talking about the controversy took a second to think how wealthy and privileged the family are.
[…] On her blog, May-Lee Chai argues that the debate isn’t really about ethnicity but about class. "Chua’s super-controlling style of parenting is not ‘traditional Chinese’ for many reasons, most obviously the fact that most Chinese have had no opportunity to parent the way Chua does", she writes. What nobody seems to be talking about is how much Chua’s wealthy background has shaped the lives of her two daughters. Chai continues: […]
Excellent post! You make good points here.
However, I would still argue that while Amy Chua’s money allows her access to many resources for her children that others don’t have, it is her culture that prompts her to do what she does with that money. Other parents may have the same socio-economic status, but their children will not be raised with two languages and sent to an expensive school because they have a different parenting philosophy. And even parents who do not have such privileges can force their children to practice an instrument for hours on end or keep them from participating in school plays. In short, this is not a question of class but a question of philosophy.
This is why the debate raging in our media is about parenting styles and not class issues. Class issues still exist and need to be dealt with, but they are a separate problem. Ethnicity has little to do with it, either; it is true that some parenting styles exist in patterns in different ethnicities, but I still wish Amy Chua hadn’t named the different parenting philosophies after stereotypes. She did, however, provide a disclaimer at the beginning of her book about the ethnicity issue.
At the heart of the matter is the mindset of the parent. Some parents are competitive perfectionists who need their children to be number one, and raise them with high standards. Other parents just want their kids to be themselves and be happy, and they are okay if their kids are not academic geniuses so long as their happiness is secure. You don’t need lots of money or have to be Asian to require that your child have the best grades in their class, or, similarly, to encourage their social lives and relaxation and fun. While class and ethnicity can be strong factors, they are not the main point of this debate.
You bring up many good points. I agree that Chua’s parenting “philosophy” is definitely not an ethnic marker, which is the unfortunate stereotype she has chosen. But I still feel that the specific and very narrow definitions of success that she writes about are class based. And her methods–hiring very expensive tutors, paying for very expensive rewards, for example–are also class based. I would, of course, have preferred a more nuanced examination of how to improve educational opportunities for children, especially for all of us who aren’t wealthy!
Thank you for your great post!
It can be a matter of class. But my parents are not that wealthy and they actually invested a lot. They were Tiger Parents during all my childhood. Amy Chua just gives a wrong image of Asian parenting, some people struggle to educate their children without being Tigers and are blamed because of they’re not following the so called “Asian” Method.
Amy Chua is university teacher, this is why she’s listened. I think if she were a random housewife, the social service would have ranged at her door 3 days after the book was released, and she would not have created such a debate… Her children are just an extension of herself… and as perfect that she thinks she is, she wants them to be the same.
Thank you again, and greetings from Switzerland 😀
Anna
http://chronicekid.wordpress.com
Thanks for your comments, Anna. I too think her book is definitely distorting the image of “Asian'” parenting, as you point out. It’s distressing that many in the media took her to be an “expert” and decided to make this into a geopolitical issue…Alas!
[…] noted, came from those privileged families, without questioning how the constraints and filters of social class impacts parenting […]
[…] was the year of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring. It was also the year of the Tiger Mother and hype about discrimination against Asian Americans at the most selective universities in the […]