Battle hymn of the tiger mother (book)

Despite her effort to make fun of herself, I or most of the readers heard only loud bragging from this book. After the blood puddling piano and violin lessons, her older one had a piano recital at Carnegie hall and the little one achieved superb reputation from world famous violin teacher.


Moreover many of the readers of course including myself are disgusted by the way she bosses and insults her own children, threatened them to burn their stuffed animals for not playing instruments well or took down the birthday card they wrote for herself saying she deserved better.



I was wondering why the book sold so well so far. This could be accused for the child abuse (verbally, saying "garbage" to the child can't be said in usual circumstances) or the author would be considered as having anger control disorder.


I happened to see the article about it on magazine "New Yorker", it says "secretly American parents wanted to have a permission to be tough on their children, tired to say good-job to their children for mediocre thing, annoyed to be afraid of hurting their feelings. It was said.



Every reader should be smart enough not to adopt her entire way of course, meanwhile we should be a parents who can say big no to our children. That's how we age 30-40's parents generation got to be raised. That may have been caused some problems such as deppression or low self estimeem, but not for everybody. Most of us survaived over the hard no-is-no parenting.


In addition I found immigrant mentarity in there. For the successful life in the U.S, the first generation doubtlessly toil super hard. They learned of course the education was the key for next generation to get up on the same stage with Americans. The most certain way for them was to have their children get the professional skills like doctors, lawers, accountant or musisian.


Time magazine shows the statistic 50% of Asian-American over 25 years old has bachelor degree or more in US. Isn't that amazing? Most of them are Chinese or Korean immigrant. While their parents barely speak English, what an accomplishment!

I myself am a mother of daughters and I'm one of those minority person in U.S. I can tell she was only a mother just wanting her girls success because that is her success. But let me tell her something. "Stop pushing so hard on yourself. You are doing great job. Be happy!" I bet she'll tell me "Don't worry, loser!". Oh, well...