Tiger Mother Research Articles

Among the Periodicals: The Tiger Mom Phenomenon

Until the 2011 publication of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, the term “tiger mom” was not commonly known. Since the book's publication, many commentaries have been written, both pro a...

Tiger Cub Strikes Back: Memoirs of an Ex-Child Prodigy About Legal Education and Parenting

I am a Chinese American who at 14 enrolled at Princeton and at 17 began my applied mathematics Ph.D. at Harvard. I was a first-year law student at the University of Chicago before transferring to Stanford, preferring the latter’s pedagogical culture. This Article offers a complementary account to Amy Chua’s parenting memoir. The Article discusses how mainstream legal education and tiger parenting are similar and how they can be improved by fostering life-long learning about character strengths, emotions, and ethics.

The real tiger mother: From the clinical geneticist's perspective

The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua raises questions about motherhood and what is admirable. Chua promotes strict, Old World, uncompromising values stressing academic performance above all, insisting on drilling and practice, and instilling respect for authority. As clinical geneticists, we meet an entirely different type of mother than Chua, the clinical genetics mother who fights illnesses, schools, hospital policies, and insurance companies. She battles not against her child but for her child. With brilliance and resilience, she creates a child-centered world. The stories of four clinical genetics mothers rally us to reject extreme parenting and appreciate the simple joys of childhood.

Lions, Tigers, and Bear Moms—Oh, My!

Pushy parenting is a central theme in Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but Chinese mothers aren't the only caregivers well-schooled in the business of concerted cultivation.

The Social Value of Self-Esteem

This essay reflects upon the current cultural skirmishes over the parenting practices of Americans, which have pitted “Helicopter Parents” against “Free-Range Kids”; “Tiger Mothers” against “Panda Dads;” and at-risk communities “Waiting for Superman” against privileged students in the “Race to Nowhere.” Despite the exaggerated claims of difference in these and other popular representations of the parenting wars, a common theme of building children’s self-esteem is evident as a cornerstone of contemporary American parenting practices. Through different means, the relatively privileged parents who write child-rearing memoirs (or confessionals) pursue a similar end: to build and enhance their children’s self-concept and emotional competence. In particular, professional-class parents who are anxious about their own prospects for continued success in a risky economy turn toward emotional capital as a necessary supplement to educational and extra-curricular success to ensure inter-generational transmission of advantage. The goals of emotional competence and self-esteem replicate the mechanisms of control to which elite parents are subjected in professional careers and therefore represent an important form of cultural capital in the reproduction of class advantages.

Can a tiger mother raise a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist?

Can a tiger mother raise a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist?

In ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,’ Amy Chua describes a parenting style that includes calling her daughters names. Yet, one of her daughters played at Carnegie Hall at the age of 14. Can harsh parenting push some people to excel as children – and as adults?

In ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,’ Amy Chua describes a parenting style that includes calling her daughters names. Yet, one of her daughters played at Carnegie Hall at the age of 14. Can harsh parenting push some people to excel as children – and as adults?

Ching Chongs and Tiger Moms: The “Asian Invasion” in U.S. Higher Education

Personal memoirs by people who are not household names rarely set off fiery debate and conversations the way that Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ignited them in January 2011.1 Yet Tiger Mom's chronicle of her experiences as a second-generation Asian American woman raising mixed-race, third-generation daughters has clearly struck a national nerve. The book has been discussed in major print and broadcast media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, NPR, and the New York Times, just to name a few; Chua has even made an appearance on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. The hype generated around the book can be explained by two key concepts. First, Battle Hymn converges with the master narrative framing Asians in America as invading foreigners who maintain their peculiar un-American cultures in the U.S. Second, it concomitantly connects to cultural fears of a non-white population challenging white supremacy vis-a-vis educational attainment, particularly in elite college admiss...

The Year of the Tiger Mom

If the primary goals of an author with a new book are to garner attention, generate conversation, and sell copies, then Amy Chua could not be considered anything but successful: After an excerpt of her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother appeared in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” in early January 2011, the term “Tiger Mom” has entered the cultural lexicon and has been the subject of heated debate in the public square, virtual or otherwise. As the fodder for discussion on popular television programs like the Today Show, Good Morning America, and The Colbert Report, not to mention the back-and-forth it has stirred up on the blogosphere—the initial Wall Street Journal teaser itself spawned over 8,800 comments—Chua's book has thrust longstanding stereotypes of Asians in America as model minorities and perpetual foreigners into the spotlight yet again.

Anti-Oxidants, Omega-3 Fatty Acids, and Cognitive Decline with Aging

A nti - oxidants , O mega -3 F atty A cids , and C ognitive D ecline with A ging Tanu Ashok Patel B S J Mental capabilities have become an increasingly valuable commodity, especially in recent years with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the general economic downturn, and the advent of competition for jobs with rising countries such as China and India. The focus on increasing and retaining cognitive abilities such as memory and executive functions has risen over the past couple of years. In the year 2006 the release and popularity Figure 1. A list of the most common anti-oxidant ruch foods. Graphic by Tanu Ashok Patel of the book, IQ and Global Inequality by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen captured precisely this fascination with cognitive abilities. For some, this interest has meant adopting the “tiger mom” tactics of Yale law professor Amy Chua (Chua, 2011), while for others, this has meant turning to less rigorous tactics, such as the consumption of herbal concoctions involving fish oils and anti-oxidants simply because they’ve heard of the benefits these foods have on cognition, an idea that has become urban lore of late. The popularity of supposedly mind-sharpening anti-oxidants and fish oils has only increased over the years, and the foods containing these ingredients continue to fly off the shelves of small herbal shops and big corporate stores alike. Children in homes across the US are encouraged to eat foods rich in these compounds. But is there a real correlation between these foods and mental capabilities? As we shall see, research has shown both sides of the coin. While the consumption of anti- oxidants has been commonly shown to increase cognitive abilities, there has also been research illustrating that consumption of anti-oxidants has a minimal effect on the aged brain. Similarly polar findings can easily be found for the prevention of cognitive decline and Omega-3 Fatty Acids. Studies showing a positive correlation between cognitive impairment and oxidative stress have been replicated many times over and the correlation between the two is relatively trusted. The human brain is placed under as much oxidative stress as the rest of the body, but has been found to be more sensitive to damage from the free radicals that result from oxidative stress. (Butterfield et al., 2005) The body incurs oxidative stress simply by carrying out normal functions like breathing. Oxidation has the harmful effect of producing free radicals, which are highly reactive molecules that react readily with lipids, proteins, and DNA causing them to become radicals, and altering their natural 1 • B erkeley S cientific J ournal • S cience of F ood • V olume 16 • I ssue 1

Advice on How Not to Misread the Tiger Mother

On the book tour circuit, Amy Chua's strategy has been to disavow just about everything her infamous Wall Street Journal article seemed to say. “I do not believe that Chinese mothers are superior,” she declared to Stephen Colbert. To PBS's Need to Know, she described the book's arc as revealing her “eventual transformation as a mother,” while, to Good Morning America, she insisted that she believes “people get to great places so many different ways: lenient parents, strict parents. . .”

On Tiger Mothers and Music Moms

The almost instantaneous uproar elicited by Amy Chua's Wall Street Journal op-ed “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” and her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was, in many ways, unsurprising. With her brash and unapologetic claims about the reasons for Chinese success, Chua touched upon several interlocking anxieties: waning U.S. hegemony, growing Chinese dominance, and proper forms of parenting in an era of global competition. As the symbolic embodiment of these fears, Chua evoked a tiger on the loose—the threat of danger and difference run amok without proper management, domestication, and punishment. Parenting blogs reviled her mothering style as child abuse, pathologized the (narrowly defined) success achieved by Asian American kids as the product of excessive discipline and rote practice, and extolled the virtue of balance, sleepovers, and play. In the thousands of comments generated in response to Chua's op-ed, a panoply of responses emerged: critiques of the author's reliance on tired cultural ...

"We Don't Sleep around like White Girls Do": Family, Culture, and Gender in Filipina American Lives

Au Etats-Unis, les immigres Philippins resistent a differentes formes de discrimination a travers l'affirmation de certaines specificites culturelles. Par exemple, la chastete des femmes avant le mariage est presentee comme une resistance au modele de la societe dominante blanche americaine, mais ceci se fait au prix de l'autonomie des femmes et renforce le pouvoir patriarcal dans ces communautes

A tiger mouse and relatives. Variants caused by an activated transposable element?

In a laboratory-bred population of wild Peruvian house mice, one male had an excessive rate of non-pairing of the X and Y chromosomes. After crossing him with laboratory stock mice, a mouse of very unusual phenotype appeared from a yellow (AyA) mother. He was yellow with black dorsal stripes; hence Tiger. He was mated to many females, and inbred F2 and F3 generations were raised. There were no more tiger phenotypes, but his F1 contained an excess of black-and-tans over yellows, showing him to be a gonosomic mosaic Ayat/atat; the homozygous cell line probably arose from the heterozygous one. The mitotic karyotype was normal. Some of Tiger's mates were of known allozyme types and their progeny were scored. The allozyme segregations were normal, except at the Es-3 locus (esterase-3), for which Tiger was typed as homozygous. Several unusual events among Tiger's close relatives included a mutation to an unstable pattern mutant, three probable translocations, and several cases of somatic defect. All unusual mice derived from Tiger's yellow mother, whose genome was one-quarter Peruvian. Yellow is associated with an ecotropic murine leukemia virus. The Peru genome is characterized by a high occurrence of mutation and aberrant karyotypes. It is suggested that something from the Peru genome in Tiger's mother caused instability of the DNA sequence associated with yellow, with related disturbance at different locations thereafter. The nature of this instability, and of the Peru genome, is discussed.