Tiger Mom strikes!

Amy Chua

Yale law professor Amy Chua created a firestorm of controversy with the publication of her new memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Well, I think it was less for the book than it was for the exerpted portion printed in the Wall Street Journal recently under the title, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior."

If Chua was looking for publicity, she got it. The provocative WSJ article has led to op/eds and blog posts all over the country, as people have weighed in on the traditional Chinese parenting techniques Chua describes using on her two daughters. Many Westerners would regard the "Tiger Mom" approach as extreme, as Chua well knows. (Making her girls practice violin and piano for 4 hours per day, banning play dates and sleepovers, and threatening to burn stuffed animals are among the most eye-opening.)

Commentators have predictably acted horrified, while Chua for her part says she's been misunderstood: Her memoir is just that - a memoir - written in a subtly self-deprecating manner and not intended to be taken as a parenting guide.

I look at the Chua Effect in my new United Methodist Reporter column. I'm less interested in how much Western parents should be shocked by Chua's parenting style, and more so in how much parenting insecurity she has uncovered in our culture.

When Amy Chua describes "Western parenting," she's doing so with broad brushstrokes. But she also points to a lot that I think is fairly accurate: The obsessive desire to protect kids from a sense of failure while constantly trying to boost individual self-esteem; the reluctance to expect too much of children and desire for them to "just be happy"; and the rapid decline of any use of parental discipline over children, which often results in parents giving in to repeated demands by their kids and failing to correct them in an effective way when they misbehave in a significant way.

These are, in fact, significant facets of the "Western parenting" that I see around me everyday. And if Chua's readers are getting defensive by some of the implicit criticism she's lodging against this parenting approach, I think it is only because Western parents are pretty insecure about whether the common approach of today actually does a good job helping children develop in the right way over time. As a new parent myself, I think about this kind of thing a lot.

Christians should think about their parenting as Christians, of course. Our faith should cause us to see every aspect of our lives through it, child rearing included. And the Christian faith teaches us that we are not likely to do well on our own, absent intensive guidance in a particular kind of virtue. We need God's grace to be healed of the sin resident within us, and our calling as parents is to participate in the redeeming work God is doing by forming our children's lives in such a way that they will be prepared to continue receiving that grace throughout their lives as disciples of Jesus Christ. We simply don't take that as seriously as we should in our hands-on parenting, probably for any number of reasons: impatience in an ever-busy world and uncertainty that we really know what we're doing, probably chief among them. But the fact that we don't think nearly enough about parenting as Christians looms over the whole.

It's good that Chua is provoking us to think about parenting approaches, and I hope that we Christian parents will use the opportunity to think about how we really should be raising our kids. As I state in my column, the right parenting doesn't require a tiger for a mother -- but it does call for something more than the Western approach currently on offer.