Ten years on from the Tiger Mother, did Amy Chua have a point?

It is arguably the most reviled parenting memoir ever written.

To say that people just about lost their minds when Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother was published 10 years ago isn’t hyperbole. Chua, a Yale law professor who promised to reveal the secrets to raising “stereotypically successful kids” – think “math whizzes and music prodigies” – received death threats for her efforts. People called for her arrest on child abuse charges. She was labelled the cruellest mother in the world and a “fascist pig”. Adults who’d been raised by highly controlling parents like her said her memoir gave them “the PTSD of flashbacks” and drove them to seek therapy.

Amy Chua, pictured with her daughter, Lulu Chua-Rubenfeld, forced her children to practise up to six hours every day.

And, yet, on its 10th anniversary, Chua’s book – and the fate of the family at the centre of it – have prompted a surprising reckoning, with parents and experts now looking anew at her style of parenting.

Did Chua have a point and a parenting style that others should consider aping, for the benefit of their children? And what happens to children who are raised this way? It’s especially relevant now given that, according to one expert, the impact of the pandemic could well lead to an increase in Tiger parents.

Let’s back it up for a moment to what Chua actually wrote. In a nutshell, the mother of two extolled the virtues of driving children relentlessly to achieve academic excellence bar none with the goal of creating people in her image, namely those who are “powerful, authoritative, and magnetic” and inspire “fear and respect”.

Amy Chua’s memoir tapped into universal anxieties around how parents should raise children who will cope with modern pressures.

Chua’s daughters Sophia and Lulu, aged 14 and 17 when the book came out, were expected to be the “number one” student in every class (except for drama and gym). They were to perform at Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall. Chua’s rules to achieve this famously included: no sleepovers, no play dates, no television, no grades lower than an A, no choosing their own extracurricular activities, and no playing any instrument other than the piano or violin, which they were expected to play for up to six hours a day.

Then there were her emotional tactics, which seemed to push Lulu, in particular, to breaking point.

At four, Chua gave Lulu back the birthday card she had made for her mother – “I reject this,” she wrote on the back of the card, accompanied by a scrawled unhappy face – because Chua wanted “a better one – one that you’ve put some thought and effort into”. Chua threatened to deny Lulu lunch, dinner and birthday parties for “two, three, four years” when she couldn’t play a piece called The Little White Donkey. (She was seven.) At 13, Lulu seemed to have had enough. “I hate the violin,” she screamed in a cafe on a family trip to Russia. “I hate my life. I hate you, and I hate this family!”

Sophia – once called “garbage” by her mother for disrespecting her – didn’t get off lightly, either. Her father, Jed Rubenfeld, a fellow Yale law professor and novelist, once found her teeth marks in the piano.

But as one Sydney mother I know puts it: “Maybe we’re [relaxed parents] missing a trick. Are we equipping our kids in a really competitive global world?”

This mother is the “opposite” of a Tiger mother to her two daughters in primary school, letting them choose their own extracurricular activities and prioritising their emotional wellbeing. But her anxiety was spiked after seeing British teenager Emma Raducanu at Wimbledon in July. Raducanu, who went on to win the US Open, has attributed her success to her “very hard-to-please parents” who expected her to “be the best” in everything. “I have this fear that my daughters will one day turn around and say, ‘Why didn’t you push me a bit more?’ ‘Why didn’t you help me be my best me?’” says the Sydney mum.

But UNSW lecturer and clinical psychologist Dr Georgette Fleming says that if emotional neglect results from “authoritarian” parenting styles like Chua’s – defined as being very high on control and limit setting, and really low on nurturing and warmth – it comes with the risk of enormous damage.

“[That] has profound impacts on the physical and psychological health and development of children,” says Fleming, who specialises in helping children with disruptive behaviour. Of children who have experienced emotional neglect, she says: “They struggle to develop and maintain relationships with people as they get older… Or if they do form a relationship, they struggle to regulate their emotions in [them].”

Emotional neglect is also a risk factor for anxiety, depression, and other mood difficulties, says Fleming.

Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother spawned countless memes.

As for calling your child names, like, saying that they’re “garbage”? Chua learned the tactic from her father, a scientist who worked until 3am every morning, and who once called Chua “garbage” for behaving disrespectfully towards her mother. “It worked really well,” wrote Chua. “I felt terrible and deeply ashamed for what I had done.”

Fleming is not a fan. “If you’re saying to a child, ‘You’re garbage’, you’re saying, ‘This is something [broadly] about you’, that’s not necessarily changeable, is it?” she says, noting that this can lead to damaged self-esteem and possibly depression. In contrast, criticising a child’s behaviour is something they have agency over and can control.

Authoritarian parenting like Chua’s also often breeds perfectionists who fear disapproval, which can morph into social anxiety, says RMIT clinical psychologist Dr James Collett.

“They feel, ‘Well, OK, my self-worth is really contingent on how others value me’,” says Collett. “And if I’m not doing well, others won’t [want] me. This particular client [I had], they were really, really anxious about driving. Especially if they had other people in the car because it’s like, ‘What if they think I’m a weird driver, or a bad driver’. It can be such a limiting thing.”

The number of perfectionists among his students has increased in the 13 years that he’s been teaching.

Amy Chua and husband Jed Rubenfeld, pictured in happier times with their daughters at the Time 100 gala in 2011. Both parents are now facing professional censure.

“I’ve had students crying because they got one mark under a high distinction,” says Collett, who has researched the dangers of perfectionism. “You might argue that socio-culturally, our society or the spirit of the times is Tiger parenting us,” he adds, noting that he has to coach numerous students into seeing that making mistakes drives learning.

He has also found himself having to teach clients that wellbeing is a form of currency just as they understand social validation and driving a fancy car to be. They’re often shocked. “Oh wow,” they say. “Yeah, I’ve never really thought about it.”

Which is why parents, perhaps more than ever, need to ask themselves what sort of person they want to nurture while their children are young, says Dr Lyndall Strazdins, a clinical psychology professor at the Australian National University.

“Is someone whose focus is on getting marks and being the best and being top, is that the human being the world needs?” says, Strazdins, a family and wellbeing expert who has worked on the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. “Or is it actually someone who can grow into an adult who can actually value other people and understand and nurture their communities, learn and understand that the world is a process of learning and discovering and therefore making mistakes as well as improving. You can’t really do one without the other. And being able to support themselves and others to do that.

“The view of a kind of ‘climb to the top to beat everyone else at any cost including your own personal cost in a very competitive society’, it is a recipe potentially for making lots of money, and you know, climbing the corporate ladder, but is that the human being the world needs? Because that’s what you’re telling your children they should be.” (Also, she adds, “The evidence for success in the world is not whether you get A grades. It’s also whether you’re emotionally intelligent. It’s people who can do both who can absolutely outperform others.“)

It’s particularly relevant now, as we might soon see a spike in Tiger parents, says University of Technology Sydney’s Christina Ho, who has, for the last 10 years, been researching Tiger parents who have migrated to Australia from Asia.

“Tiger parenting comes from anxiety,” she says, referring to the common feeling by these parents who often don’t speak English well or understand the local school system, and fear that if they don’t drive their children hard, they won’t succeed in an unfamiliar land. And the pandemic has created a rise in discrimination against Asian people globally, including in Australia.

“If migrants are feeling more anxious about their place in this society, so then that will be reflected in their parenting,” she says, adding that she hopes people might now be able to look at Chua’s book and Tiger parents in general with greater understanding and compassion, given the fears that often lead them to their parenting choices.

Herself the child of a Tiger Mother, Ho is currently questioning whether she was too relaxed with her two children, now 9 and 13, when they were young. At the time, she did a “one-eighty” from Tiger parenting, wanting to give them “absolute freedom”. Now she questions her choice. “When you have a child in high school, it’s crunch time, and certain kind of habits I think need to be instilled, which don’t necessarily come naturally to most kids,” says Ho.

Just how we balance parental anxiety to raise children who are happy and also thrive in a competitive world is particularly relevant given what’s happened in Amy Chua’s family.

In one sense, Chua, the child of Tiger parents herself, got what she wanted.

Sophia, now 28, and a Yale law school graduate, is a captain in the legal arm of the United States Army. Lulu, now 25, is a teaching fellow of American constitutional law at Harvard University.

But earlier this year, Chua was deemed unfit to teach a “small group” of 15 first year law students at Yale and removed from that course after she allegedly hosted boozy dinner parties for students in lockdown. (She denies the charges, and a New York Times report found them unfounded, too.)

Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld did make it to Carnegie Hall, as her mother demanded. But not without gnawing on her piano at home during forced five-hour-long practices.

Her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, 62, has been called a “pariah”, after he was issued a two-year suspension from Yale University last year, after he was accused of sexually grooming female students. (He denies all charges.)

Since then, Chua’s focus for what she wants out of life seems to have changed.

What really matters, she said in June this year, is “to be happy and close as a family. I see young parents stressed about their children’s exams or tennis matches and find myself saying – and I can’t believe this is coming out of my mouth – it’s not as important as you think.”

Perhaps she might, if asked now, praise instead an “authoritative” parenting style, which psychologists define as being equal parts demanding of certain behaviours and also emotional warmth. “You’re at a lower risk of things like anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, delinquency and aggressive behaviours and poor academic outcomes,” says Fleming. “You have better friendships and peer relationships.”

But Chua has, it seems, already set the wheels in motion for her future grandchildren.

“I will definitely be a Tiger mom,” Lulu said three years ago, noting that she had gained a new appreciation of her mother’s brutal parenting style. Unlike some of her Harvard peers, she never suffered from imposter syndrome, as she knew she “earned” her spot there. “It’s not a blanketly bad thing to push,” she said of Tiger parenting. “Sometimes it just means you really believe in your child.“

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