I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.' They then 'work right through dinner' without letting her daughter 'get up, not for water, not even for bathroom breaks'. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. When Lulu said, 'I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?' I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. Particularly controversial was the 'Little White Donkey' anecdote, where Chua described how she got her unwilling younger daughter to learn a very difficult piano song: 'I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have ' The Little White Donkey' perfect by the next day. In one extreme example, Chua mentioned that she had called one of her children 'garbage', a translation of a term her own father called her on occasion in her family's native Hokkien dialect. Ĭhua employs the term ' Tiger Mother' to describe a mother who is a strict disciplinarian. : 4Ĭhua also reported that in one study of 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, the vast majority 'said that they believe their children can be 'the best' students, the notion that 'academic achievement reflects successful parenting', and that if children did not excel in school, then there was 'a problem' in the household and the parents 'were not doing their job'.' Chua contrasts them with the view she labels 'Western' – that a child's self-esteem is paramount. She defines 'Chinese mother' loosely to include parents of other ethnic backgrounds who practice traditional, strict child-rearing while also acknowledging that 'Western parents come in all varieties' and that not all ethnically Chinese parents necessarily practice strict child-rearing techniques. In response, Chua has stated that the book was not a 'how-to' manual, but rather a self-mocking memoir. Many readers believed that Chua was advocating the 'superiority' of a particular, very strict, ethnically defined approach to parenting. But instead, it's about a bitter clash of cultures and a fleeting taste of glory.' Īn article published under the headline 'Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior' in The Wall Street Journal on January 8, 2011, contained excerpts from her book in which Chua recounts her efforts to give her children what she describes as a traditional, strict 'Chinese' Confucian-style upbringing.

This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. The complete blurb of the book reads: 'This is a story about a mother and two daughters.

It quickly popularized the concept and term ' tiger mother'. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is a book by American author and law professor Amy Chua that was published in 2011.

Tiger mother book