ABAW: The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

Still catching up. 

The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, Penguin Press, 2011 (library copy)

When the Washington Post published an excerpt of this memoir in January, a mommy-war firestorm erupted. I read the excerpt, and some of the responses, mainly out of curiosity. Chua tells the story of raising her two daughters in what she calls a Chinese parenting style, like a Tiger Mother, limiting sterotypical Western childhood freedoms and demanding a lot from them, even as very young children. The most controversial bits are Chua’s admissions of hyperbolic parenting rage (calling her daughter garbage once, rejecting their homemade birthday cards, threatening to burn their stuffed animals.)

Now that I’ve read the book, I think the controversy is blown way out of proportion. Chua’s writing style is dry, and very funny. Her biggest target in the book is herself, and she presents her story of parental adaptation honestly. The take-home message from Chua is that like all other parents, she thought she was doing the right thing. Some things her children have done vindicated Chua’s choices, some things castigated them. Whether she was too strict or too demanding, she expected as much or more from herself as from her daughters, and the loving response of Sophia tells us more about the metatruth of Chua’s parenting than anything else. Sophia’s letter to her Tiger Mom.