Posts made in December, 2011
Balancing the Tiger Mom and Dragon Mom Within
In an achingly beautiful essay in The New York Times, “Notes from a Dragon Mom,” Emily Rapp describes dragon parents: “fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.” She says that Amy Chua’s Tiger Mom in “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is “animated by the idea that good, careful investments in your children will pay off in the form of happy endings, rich futures.” Rapp writes that she will never be a tiger mom; she is a dragon mom because her child has a terminal...
Read MoreWas My Japanese Mother a “Tiger Mom?”
Like so many other people, I was incited by the “Tiger Mom” sensation that Amy Chua created with her provocative book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and inflammatory article in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” I was outraged by the ferocious control she relentlessly imposed on her poor children and felt relieved that I had not been raised by such a monster parent who was sure to ruin her children. How lucky I was, I told myself, that my Japanese mother was nothing like Amy, not at all a stereotypical Asian mom. To reassure myself even more that I was the healthy product of an enlightened parenting style, I called my older sister...
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