Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is a book by Amy Chua published in 2011. The complete subtitle of the book is: “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 thirteen-year-old.”

 

Summary

Wall Street Journal preview

An 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 describes her efforts to give her children what she describes as a traditional, strict “Chinese” upbringing. This piece was controversial. Many readers missed the irony and self-deprecating humor in the title and the piece itself and instead believed that Chua was advocating the “superiority” of a particular, very strict, ethnically defined approach to parenting. In fact Chua has stated that the book was not a "how-to" manual but a self-mocking memoir. In any case, Chua defines “Chinese mother” loosely to include parents of other ethnicities who practice traditional, strict child-rearing, while also acknowledging that “Western parents come in all varieties,” and not all ethnically Chinese parents practice strict child-rearing. 

 

Chua 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, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job."' Chua contrasts them with the view she labels “Western” – that a child’s self-esteem is paramount.

 

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. Particularly controversial was the ‘Little White Donkey’ anecdote, where Chua described how she got her unwilling younger daughter to learn a very difficult piano piece. In Chua’s words, “… 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. 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. 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. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.” They then “work[ed] right through dinner” without letting her daughter “get up, not for water, not even for bathroom breaks.” The anecdote concludes by describing how her daughter was “beaming” after she finally mastered the piece and “wanted to play [it] over and over.”

 

Chua uses the term "Tiger Mother" to mean a mother who is a strict disciplinarian. This use of the term appears to be fairly recent. In his novel South Wind published in 1917, Norman Douglas uses the phrase to mean a mother who will do anything – including committing murder – to protect her child.

 

Cultural references

The term and behaviour of the "Tiger Mother" has been satirized in the online anthropomorphic animal comic strip series Kevin and Kell  with the recurring characters Mei-Li Lee and her raising methods with her daughter Lin as well as in attitude, although it's been noted that Mei-Li is not actually a tiger but a tabby cat passing for one