Tiger Mother Research Articles

Analisis Tiger Parenting bagi Perkembangan Emosional Anak

Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui dampak penerapan gaya pengasuhan tiger parenting untuk perkembangan emosional anak-anak. Penelitian ini adalah jenis penelitian kepustakaan yang sumber utamanya berasal dari penelitian yang berkaitan dengan penelitian ini, baik dari karya ilmiah, hasil penelitian, buku, dan sumber data tambahan yang berasal dari pengamatan. Gaya pengasuhan yang dianalisis adalah gaya pengasuhan tiger parenting. Dari gaya pengasuhan yang dianalisis, hasilnya menunjukkan bahwa perkembangan emosional secara khusus memiliki lebih banyak efek negatif daripada efek positif seperti anak-anak yang tidak bahagia, jarang bersenang-senang, sedih karena mereka terus-menerus ditekan, merasa kurang memiliki wewenang dalam hidup mereka sendiri karena semuanya terus diarahkan oleh orang tua, sampai yang terburuk adalah gejala depresi.

Is It Too Late? Exploring Self-Actualisation of a Self-Proclaimed Artist in a Restrictive Chinese-Indonesian Family

Self-actualisation is an interesting topic to be talked about in Indonesia, as Indonesian families still uphold filial piety very highly. Thus, the concept of putting forwards one’s dreams and wishes for one’s own future and brushing aside one’s parents’ wants and plans is mostly unheard of. I made this creative work, in form of a novel, to highlight this highly-relevant phenomena and initiate the talk between parents and their descendants. This story is written from the perspective of the son of a family who wants to be an artist, but faces hurdles in the form of his chasing tiger mother and how that affected him and his decision-making in relation of becoming the best version of himself.Keywords: Artistry, Chinese-Indonesian, Filial piety, Poetry, Realistic fiction, Self-actualisation.

Do tiger moms raise superior kids? The impact of parenting style on adolescent human capital formation in China

How parenting style influences human capital accumulation is an important yet under-researched topic in the economics literature. Based on the two-wave longitudinal dataset of Chinese Education Panel Survey (CEPS), this study explores the impact of parenting style on adolescents' human capital formation, including cognitive and non-cognitive skills in China. Following the mainstream approach in development psychology, the measurement of parenting style is constructed from two dimensions – demandingness and responsiveness, and further classified into four types: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful. We find that both demandingness and responsiveness of parents have positive effects on children's academic performance, while parents' responsiveness play a substantial role in the formation of children's cognitive skills (measured by the standardized cognitive skill tests) as well as socio-emotional skills (measured by mental health, self-confidence, motivation and extraversion). Putting together, the authoritative parenting style characterized by high demandingness and high responsiveness is associated with the best outcome measures among the four parenting types in cultivating children's human capital formation. Moreover, we find that student time-allocation, extracurricular activities and parent-teacher interactions may serve as important channels of the parenting influences, and that there exist moderate interactive effects between fathers' and mothers' influences and between the demandingness and responsiveness of parenting styles.

Shadow education in the service of tiger parenting: Strategies used by middle‐class families in China

AbstractParents in many cultures invest significant proportions of household incomes in the so‐called shadow education system of private supplementary tutoring. Parts of the literature attribute intensive tutoring to East Asian cultural traditions and to so‐called tiger parenting. Based on a mixed‐methods study in Shanghai, this article examines tiger parenting through a socio‐economic lens to show the roles of shadow education in achieving parental goals. The study shows that tiger parenting is most evident in middle‐class families. In order to transmit or increase social advantages inter‐generationally, such parents use private tutoring to prepare their children for successful academic trajectories in mainstream education. The strategy is driven by anxieties related to social status in the rapidly changing risk economy. Shadow education has provided parents with new means to increase family cultural capital which not only facilitates school performance but also reinforces class dispositions. The study highlights the importance of understanding tiger parenting in the culture of class, in addition to other cultural factors. It challenges the simplistic attribution of tiger parenting to Confucianism by revealing dimensions that run counter to the Confucian conception and tradition of parenting. It also extends the conceptualization of family cultural capital by unpacking the processes of tutoring as externalized parenting in the era of global expansion of shadow education.

Ethnicity differentials in academic achievements: the role of time investments

In most English-speaking countries, the children of Asian immigrants have better academic outcomes than other children, yet the underlying causes of their advantages are unclear. Using decade-long time use diaries on two cohorts of children, we present new evidence that children of Asian immigrants spend more time than their peers on educational activities beginning at school entry and that the ethnicity gap in the time allocated to educational activities increases as children age. We can attribute the academic advantage of children of Asian immigrants mainly to their allocating more time to educational activities or their favorable initial cognitive abilities, not to socio-demographics or so-called “tiger parenting” styles. Furthermore, our results show substantial heterogeneity in the contributions of initial cognitive abilities and time allocations by test subjects, children’s ages, and points of the test score distribution.

Tiger mother and her cubs on a stage:

Ever since the publication of Amy Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother, in 2011, Asian or Asian-heritage parenting has received more time under the limelight both in and out of the United States. More attention is given to the effects of that particular parenting style on the children’s academic achievement and wellbeing. Listen to Me (LTM), a play by Bernadeth Febyola Linando (2018) published as one of Petra Little Theatre’s New Play Development Series, indicates that the issue also hits a nerve among young contemporary Indonesian playwrights. This paper is interested in finding out how LTM portrays Tiger Mother parenting style and its impact on the children. Upon analyzing the play using the conceptual framework of parenting styles and their impacts, this paper argues that LTM displays a typical Tiger Mother parenting similar to Chua’s with a slight difference, and it shows mainly negative results of such parenting on the main character, and, on the side, some positive results on two other supporting characters.

Tiger Moms or Cat Dads: Parental Role in Bilingualism Among Asian and Latino Americans

ObjectiveThis study examines the differing roles of parents in producing bilingualism among second‐generation Asian and Latino Americans, the fastest growing immigrant groups in the United States.MethodsWe employ the probit model to estimate the likelihood of language maintenance for both ethnic groups using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) USA of 2005–2014.ResultsThe estimation results show that mothers play a more significant role than fathers, especially for Latino Americans, and that heritage‐language retention increases with the parents’ age at arrival. We also find an increase in the rates of language maintenance across generations, presumably resulting from heightened awareness of the need to preserve cultural heritage among younger immigrants in recent decades.ConclusionThese findings highlight the cultural and structural differences in gendered parenting between the two immigrant groups and suggest potential areas of gains through intervention programs for immigrant parents to promote parental investment in their children's development, including bilingualism.

Getting rural migrant children into school in South China: migrant agency and parenting

ABSTRACTScholarship has examined how immigrant parents in North America and Europe acculturate their children to the education system in their receiving societies, with a focus on overcoming language barriers and coping with cultural differences in education between home and host societies. However, relatively less attention has been paid to the efforts of migrant parents in circumventing structural obstacles to the education access of their migrant children. To address that gap, this study draws on the qualitative data obtained from 23 rural-urban migrants in South China to investigate how these parents help their migrant children access urban education resources in a social context where structural obstacles outweigh cultural/racial differences. This study defines migrant parents as active agents who use strategies and actions to adapt to, manoeuvre within or circumvent the structural constraints to augment urban education resources for their migrant children. The migrant parents’ agency includes persistent efforts in obtaining urban hukou for their children; applying strategies to increase their children’s qualification for public schools that use a point system; exploring guanxi and using tiger parenting to get their children into public schools; exchanging economic resources for education opportunities in elite private schools; purchasing extracurricular education services; and actively maintaining parent-teacher partnerships to support their children’s schooling. While valuing the migrants’ agency, this study also indicates that the efficacy of their actions and strategies is affected by disparities in their socioeconomic resources.

Lessons from Shakespeare’s tiger mothers: parental and political authority in Coriolanus and Merchant of Venice

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Narratives of mothers in diaspora: Motherhood reconstruction in Chinese transnational families

This paper attempts to map the way that gender inequalities have shaped experiences of contemporary Chinese mothers and their role-negotiation in transnational families. Narrative inquiry is used not only as methodology but also as phenomenon experienced by the mothers and the author. The narratives of three mothers both confirm and counter the master cultural narrative of motherhood of contemporary China as well as the stereotypical notion of a Chinese “Tiger Mom” in the United States; their narratives and diasporic experiences shaped by the transnational social field are far more complex than either of these two narratives taken on their own. It is imperative to rethink the complex intersection of education, gender and migration in the contemporary Chinese diaspora in the United States. In so doing, we are able to deconstruct the unitary concept of motherhood and womanhood, and reconceptualize their meanings in a more sociohistorical locale as well as a global and transnational context.

The Effect of Parenting Styles on Private Educational Expenditure and Academic Performance of Children: Focusing on Mediation Effect of Private Educational Expenditure

Using a sample of third grade middle school students from the forth wave of Children and Youth Panel Survey in 2012, the mediation effects of private educational expenditure between parenting styles and children’s academic performance were investigated by applying factor, cluster, tobit, and two stage regression analysis. The major results were as follows. First, four types of parenting style were identified. The most frequent parenting style was ambivalent parenting (tiger parenting) which was followed by authoritative parenting. Second, compared to permissive parenting style, ambivalent, authoritative, and authoritarian parenting styles were significantly associated with more private educational expenditures. Third, more private educational expenditures were significantly associated with higher academic performance of children. I found both a full mediation effect of private educational expenditure for ambivalent and authoritarian parenting styles, and a partial mediation effect for authoritative parents. Authoritative parenting style has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between household income and private educational expenditure, along with a positive direct effect on the academic performance of children. The results suggested that an authoritative parenting style was related with higher academic performance of children with less private educational expenditures compared to other parenting styles. The results also implied that the public policies to enhance authoritative parenting style among parents would be effective to reduce household’s private educational expenditures.

The moderating effects of positive psychological strengths on the relationship between tiger parenting and child anxiety

The children of tiger parents have an elevated risk for anxiety disorders. This study aimed to expand upon the current literature, in a first such attempt, by uncovering the protective factors against the negative influence of tiger parenting on children. A Chinese sample of 439 Hong Kong children was successfully selected to assess whether tiger parenting increases the risk of child anxiety, and whether children's positive psychological traits can moderate the relationship between tiger parenting and child anxiety. The results showed that tiger parenting was positively associated with child anxiety, while the relationship of four positive moderators (namely, optimism, life satisfaction, hope, and gratitude) with child anxiety was negative. The children's optimism and gratitude also moderated the parental effect on child anxiety. To cultivate children with healthy psychological development, considerable efforts should be made on the parents and children to promote the benefits of positive parenting and positive psychology.

Does tiger parenting work in contemporary China? Exploring the relationships between parenting profiles and preschoolers’ school readiness in a Chinese context

ABSTRACTThis study explored the relationships between parenting profiles and young children’s school readiness in urban China. Eighty-six pairs of Chinese parents completed the Chinese Parenting Style Questionnaire (CPSQ), and their children were administered the Bracken School Readiness Composite (BSRC; Bracken, B. A. (1998). Bracken basic concept scale: Revised. San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.) and Preschool and Primary Chinese Literacy Scale (PPCLS; Li, H. (1999). Development and validation of the Preschool and Primary Chinese Literacy Scale. Psychological Development and Education, 15, 18–24.). A set of statistical analyses was conducted to explore the relationship between the three types of parenting profiles (supportive, tiger and easygoing) and children’s scores in BSRC and PPCLS, and four typical couples were invited to attend semi structured interviews. The results indicated that: (1) Inter-parental consistency in supportive parenting were associated with better children’s school readiness, but not for consistency in easygoing or tiger parenting; (2) Tiger mothers were not associated with better outcomes in either boys or girls; (3) Significant interaction effect was found between child gender and parenting profile. The findings have implications for the theoretical development of parental education and related programmes. Understanding the differentiated parenting styles and practices with boys and girls will help parents and educators to improve their educational practices.

Child and Family Factors Associated With Child Maltreatment in Vietnam.

This study aims to explore possible risk factors for child maltreatment in Vietnam by investigating the association of child and family factors with different types of child maltreatment (i.e., sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, witnessing parental conflict, and neglect) and the occurrence of multiple types of child maltreatment. Cross-sectional data of 1,851 secondary and high school students aged 12 to 17 years (47.3% boys) in four provinces of Northern Vietnam were obtained using self-report questionnaires. Results indicated that the likelihood of emotional abuse, witnessing parental conflict, and experiencing multiple types of child maltreatment during lifetime increased with age. Boys had a higher risk than girls on lifetime sexual abuse, and past year and lifetime physical abuse. Living in a single parent family was the risk factor related to most types of child maltreatment including lifetime sexual abuse, neglect, and multiple types of child maltreatment, and both past year and lifetime witnessing parental conflict. Interestingly, low socioeconomic status (SES) and parental unemployment were associated with a decreased risk on experiencing emotional abuse in the past year and during lifetime, respectively. “Tiger parenting,” a parenting style observed frequently in East Asian parents, may be more common in families with high SES and might explain this finding. This study highlights the importance of prioritizing single parent families in parenting programs and implementing child maltreatment interventions early because of the risk on child maltreatment increased with age. More research on emotional abuse and “Tiger parenting” in Vietnam could clarify the association of emotional abuse with high SES and parental employment. Finally, the underlying mechanisms of the risk factors in Vietnam should be studied more to inform interventions.

Despite Your Tiger Mother, or Your Other Racial Half Will Not Save You from What the World Thinks of Your Blackness

Abstract In this personal essay, the author analyzes what it means to be black and Asian American in a nation where racial capital determines social value and non-black immigrants are encouraged to uphold and abide by anti-black systems, policies, and practices. Narrating her experience as a black Chinese American woman, the author reflects on having received anti-black messages throughout her childhood and how her need for healing has paralleled her work which challenges existing racial logic that casts Asian Americans as a model minority in competition and conflict with black people who are cast as social failures. Recognizing this racial/racist logic as one that allows white America to absolve itself from its central role in maintaining structural oppression, the author argues for the continued calling out of anti-blackness in all spaces—public and intimate, white and non-white—while carving out a path to empowerment, creativity, and freedom for herself and her daughter.

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Angry Anglos and aspirational Asians: everyday multiculturalism in the selective school system in Sydney

ABSTRACT‘Asian whiz kids’ perfect test scores.’ ‘Selective schools and tiger parents.’ These types of headlines highlight the increased visibility of academically successful students from Asian migrant backgrounds, in Australia and other Western countries. They also point to anxiety about the perceived aggressive ‘tiger’ parenting often associated with Asian academic success. This paper focuses on the forms of everyday multiculturalism found in and around high-performing selective schools and classes in Sydney, Australia, almost all of which are dominated by Asian-Australian students. Drawing on interviews with parents and students from Anglo- and Asian-Australian backgrounds, it documents the different positionalities adopted by participants within these culturally diverse settings, including anger, aspiration and cosmopolitanism. This potentially volatile combination of approaches to diversity reveals some of the social consequences of neoliberal migration and education policies.

ManChyna’s Queer Tiger Mom

In this article, I introduce Queer Tiger Mom, a conceptual project by performance artist ManChyna that disrupts Asian desire for assimilation into white futurity. The Queer Tiger Mom project responds to two controversial texts that inform North American Asian racialization and its assimilatory relationship with whiteness—the Maclean’s Magazine article “‘Too Asian’?” and the American publication of Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Disassimilation is my neologism, applying José Muñoz’s concept of disidentification to the narrative of assimilation into liberal multiculturalism. Disassimilation describes Queer Tiger Mom’s assimilation-focused form of Muñoz’s analytic category, neither rejecting nor fully adopting the desire for racial incorporation. ManChyna’s Queer Tiger Mom takes multiple forms as a cultural text—a party, performance and song (“Tiger Mom,” 2012). i With all its elements taken together, Queer Tiger Mom mobilizes the racialized, gendered and sexual pathologies projected onto North American Asians, which Chua and Maclean’s reproduce. Channeling these pathologies through Man-Chyna’s queer Asian masculinity, Queer Tiger Mom re-circuits the sexual and racial puerility that David Eng (2001) argues is projected onto Asian masculinity. ManChyna’s Queer Tiger Mom crosses this psychosexual-racial pathology with a gender-inappropriate motherhood, evading these tropes by exaggerating them in a physically impossible and antisocial sexual union—dom top mother and power bottom son in one versatile body. Queer Tiger Mom depravedly embraces sexual and racial pathology, animating and terminating the heterosexual futurism of Battle Hymn by mobilizing Chua’s servile assimilation with the deathly potential of queer Asian masculinity. By queerly exaggerating the pathologies manifest in Chua’s Battle Hymn and ManChyna’s embodiment, Queer Tiger Mom emulates, but ultimately denaturalizes, their presumed connections.

Asian migration and education cultures in the Anglo-sphere

ABSTRACTAsian migration is transforming education cultures in the Anglo-sphere. This is epitomised in the mounting debates about ‘tiger mothers’ and ‘dragon children’, and competition and segregation in schools. Anxiety and aspiration within these spaces are increasingly ethnicised, with children of Asian migrants both admired and resented for their educational success. This paper presents some frameworks for understanding how Asian migration both shapes and impacts upon education outcomes, systems and cultures, focusing on Australia, the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. It challenges the cultural essentialism that prevails in academic and popular discussion of ‘Asian success’, arguing that educational behaviour cannot be reduced to ethnic categories, whether these are ethnic ‘learning styles’ (e.g. the ‘Chinese learner’) or ‘cultural’ family practices (e.g. ‘Confucian parenting’). In also presenting an overview of papers in this special issue, this introduction showcases the explanatory models offered by our authors, which locate Asian migrants within broader social, historical and geo-political contexts. This includes global markets and national policies around migration and education, classed trajectories and articulations, local formations of ‘ethnic capital’, and transnational assemblages that produce education and mobility as means for social advancement. These are the broader contexts within which education cultures are produced.

‘Tutored within an inch of their life’: morality and ‘old’ and ‘new’ middle class identities in Australian schools

ABSTRACTThis paper documents the self-positioning of a segment of middle class parents, whom we call ‘community-minded’, as they distinguish themselves from pedagogies and parenting practices for education often associated with ‘tiger parenting’ and ‘Asian’ practices in Australia. Increased public interest has scrutinised the growth of high achieving Asian-Australian students and commonly depicts ‘Asian success’ as being about ethnicity and/or race. As academics argue, such essentialism validates existing capitals among middle-class parents and feeds into a politics of racial hostility. Building on this literature, we focus on this site of tension as one of a struggle between ‘old’ and ‘new’ middle classes. Drawing on a small study in Sydney NSW, we deal with a fraction of the middle classes for whom particular educational strategies are disavowed as part of their self-positioning as moral, ‘community-minded’ citizens. This is analysed as a response to broader changes across education, the economy and migration trajectories which have emerged alongside what Watkins and Noble call the ‘ethnicisation’ of academic achievement. These tensions provide insight into how ‘old’ and ‘new’ middle classes are attempting to co-exist in Australian schools, as global political and economic transformations are negotiated within the micropolitics of parenting and cultural constructions of childhood.