The Meek Squawk of the Chicken Mother

Much has been written about The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the book by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua.  If you are not a parent, or are not Asian, perhaps you have not heard of it, except possibly from your friends with kids.  They probably either hate the book and wish ill to its author or who grudgingly acknowledge that American kids could use some of her tough parenting style.

I don’t wish ill to Amy Chua.  I wish her anti anxiety drugs.  And I wish that she had waited to publish this book until her children were adults.

There are no Tiger Mom stories from my childhood.  My father was Chinese, and my mother was Caucasian.  In fact, my mother was (and is) exactly what Amy Chua would picture when she describes the soft-hearted, conflict-avoiding Western parent who avoids setting standards too high and praises “mediocrity” when it comes to her children.

My mother did all sorts of ineffectual things that Amy Chua would cite as evidence of the decline in achievements in second-generation Asian children.  She told my brother and me that “we could be anything” and that we were beautiful and brilliant.  She was riding the tide of pre-ERA Amendment feminism.  In every loving, starry-eyed pep talk were vapors of Helen Reddy lyrics mixed with Mr. Rogers-style parenting.

In fact, we were decent-looking, surly, and of modest talents compared to many of our peers.  It sometimes felt nurturing to have a mother who was affectionate and believed in us.  Both of us have earned graduate degrees and work in skilled jobs.  But I sometimes suspect that part of the reason we have become professionals is that we finally believed the hype about Asian kids being inherently smarter, and we regressed to the mean of our model minority-hood by graduating from respected colleges.  (I’m mostly kidding.)

My father, an immigrant from China via Taiwan, was in the tiger parent mold.  He was a civil engineer and attended one of the top universities in Taiwan.  But since my parents were divorced and he lived in another state, he could only drill us in math, science, and swimming one Sunday a month.  Although he was paranoid schizophrenic, I am convinced that most of his academic fervor and frustration with his children had more to do with our utter foreignness (the shrugs, the adolescent hostility, the lack of single-minded focus on achievement) – than with his mental illness.

Since The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was published, some of my friends have asked me whether I’m a “tiger mother.”  My answer has sometimes been yes, but more often no.

When I’ve said yes, it’s been a day when I feel keenly aware that, like so many parents my own age I feel like I’ve got to be parenting “correctly,” which, now that they’re not babies anymore, slides easily into “preparing them for the future.”  My kids are learning Mandarin, piano, Hebrew, and each play a sport.

On a day when I deny being a “tiger mother,” I comfort myself with the fact that Mandarin is taught by a young woman far kinder and more patient than I am.  My daughter has school homework, and our family has decided that sleep and homework come before any extras.  My kids’ other activities are close to home.  Their sports – one day a week of barely competitive soccer for my son, three days of swim practice for my daughter – are because I just can’t bear to take them to the park anymore for their exercise.

It’s the curse/blessing of my public health education that I’m obsessed with preventative medicine through healthy eating and exercise.  And I’d like to think that I’m giving them something that they need, or at least that they will appreciate later.  My social son loves mixing it up with the other kids while he runs drills and plays short soccer games.  My cerebral daughter loves the mastery of swimming on a competitive team and needs a structured physical activity to get her out of her own head.

But there’s no way I can be a tiger mom.  For one thing, I was born in the year of the chicken.  And I’m only “hapa,” with the added disadvantage of a relaxed, White mother.  I lack the hunger to succeed and the anxiety about failure that plague the striving model minority parent.  Sometimes I call myself the Stoner Tiger Mother.  Most of all I strive to strike a balance between full-frontal parenting (Tiger Mom style) and allowing my kids to turn out to be the individuals they were born to be (hippy-dippy style).  Does that sound wishy-washy?   It is.  But it feels more honest and true to my agnostic nature than firebrand fanaticism than any parenting advice (or “self-effacing memoir”) I’ve read.