Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

This book got a lot of press--excerpts from it were widely published and rebutted from many non-tiger moms. My sister-in-law, who has 6 kids and wants more, lent this to me. She LOVES the book and has even read it out loud to her kids. They like it too. wow.

The little blurb on the cover of this book says "This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it's about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a 13-year-old."

I don't believe the part about the author being humbled :), but it sure feels like a story about how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. I had to talk myself down from feeling defensive about my Western parenting more than once while I was reading.

As I read this book I found myself asking: how do I measure success in my family? What are my dreams for my children? Most parents wish their children to have it better, easier, safer, more. And how do we measure our success as parents? By what we can buy for our kids? Where we can take them? What experiences we can buy for them? What sports or instruments they play? Their grades? Their talents? Their performance? These are clearly the measurements Ms. Chua uses. She experiences some resistance from her younger (Westernized) daughter and struggles to re-frame (a little bit) her measurements of success. I wonder: can we say, as Westerners, that we don't use these measurements? I believe that in at least some part of our consciousness, most of us use these yardsticks to measure our success as parents. Many, if not most, of us pursue these ends for our children with our money and our efforts and the encouragement that we direct towards our kids.

The big question this book raised for me is: is it worth it? What IS success? I hope I don't measure it by all those things I listed at the beginning of that paragraph up there. Seems like there are more lasting things I'd like for my kids: good character, a strong spiritual foundation, loyalty, family solidarity, habits of charity, kindness. I tend to think competition has nothing to do with God, nothing to do with truly loving others. Hm. The tricky part of (theoretically) rejecting Amy Chua's measurements of success, though, is that success CAN build confidence and self-esteem. The ability to work hard (and those kids have got to work hard to earn those good grades, to become experts at their sport or their instrument, etc) is a gift we'd all like to give to our kids, if such a thing can be given. So the potential results of the push for successful kids are really good. But the potential pitfalls can rip a family apart and permanently damage the spirit of a kid also. So how far to push? What is success? Well, they're good questions, worth figuring out answers to.

It was a good book. Well worth reading, especially for parents.