How Tiger Mother’s cubs grew up
David Cameron is a fan. Now Amy Chua’s daughters tell Tanith Carey what it was like being raised by the world’s strictest mum
‘My mom feels she has done her job, so she doesn’t hover over me as some parents do’
For any fresher, the first term at university is an important time to find friends and forge an identity away from home and parents. So what must it be like to turn up and find the psychology course includes lectures on your childhood and the lessons that can be learned from it?
Such was the plight of Lulu Chua Rubenfeld when she fulfilled the destiny her mother Amy had mapped out for her and took up her place at Harvard 18 months ago. Now in her second year studying art history, Lulu, 19, says: “I was in the library when my friend called me over to her computer to show me that her upcoming lecture was on the subject of my childhood. They were holding an entire seminar on how my personality had responded to my mother’s parenting style – and the professor had never even met me!”
But that is what happens when your mother is Amy Chua, a Yale law professor whose book on her philosophy of child-rearing, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, became a global best-seller. It’s a philosophy that can be summarised as no grade below an A, no play dates and no life outside school except violin and piano practice. When the book was published in 2011, Chua’s approach was met with a firestorm. Overnight she became a household name, and despite their background of incredible privilege, Lulu and her older sister Sophia, 23, became known as two of the world’s most ‘abused’ children.
Yet four years on, it seems the opposition has died down to such an extent that Chua’s philosophies have won a fan in no less than David Cameron.
“Character – persistence – is core to success,” said the Prime Minister in his rallying cry for improving Britain last week. “No matter how clever you are, if you do not believe in continued hard work and concentration, and if you do not believe that you can return from failure, you will not fulfil your potential. It is what the tiger mothers’ battle hymn is all about.” Considering Sophia has also recently graduated from Harvard to start a postgraduate law degree at Yale, you can see why Cameron might like to see more UK parents put toddlers out in sub-zero temperatures when they refuse to do as they are told, as Chua famously did.
Both her daughters are so polite, modest and thoughtful, it seems Amy has had the last laugh at the critics who predicted they would grow up into mentally ill, friendless robots. However, before parents start ripping up their offsprings’ underwhelming birthday cards, it’s probably safe to say Mr Cameron is unlikely to have read the book. Although touted in his speech as a childcare manual, Battle
Hymn of the Tiger Mother never has been a how-to guide on getting your children into elite institutions. Instead, it is a complex account of how children can become rebellious and alienated when one-size-fits-all education philosophies are applied.
So with more parents being encouraged to adopt hard-line methods, who better than Sophia and Lulu to say whether it will work here? The sisters may have sought-after Ivy League places, but even they have reservations. As students, they have met plenty of casualties of pressure parenting – and are the first to say not everyone survives unscathed.
“I have come across Harvard students who tell me, ‘My grade wasn’t good enough. I can’t go home for Thanksgiving,’” says Sophia, noting that her parents cut her more slack.
In fact, far from the bootcamp described in the book, both sisters paint a far rosier picture of their upbringing and say the strict regimentation was always balanced with plenty of support.
“We are a close family,” says Lulu. “Even when there was a lot of screaming, that was work. When it was over, that was family time and we’d watch movies together.”
For Sophia, the main lesson of her childhood is that hard work pays off. She may have come home at breaktimes to practise the piano, but when she did, it was she who was pleased when her concert recitals went better.
“Everyone talks about my mother threatening to throw my toys on the fire, but the funny thing is that was not a major memory. I remember my childhood as happy,” she says. “I am not scared of my mom and never have been. It was my dad [law professor Jed Rubenfeld, who makes only a shadowy appearance in the book] who I was much more afraid of disappointing. It was always unequivocally clear in my mind that my parents were on my side, no matter what. They did have high expectations of me, but because they had the confidence that I could do amazing things.”
Lulu, who kicked back against her mother’s child-rearing methods, has a more circumspect response.
“I think I had a tough childhood, but a happy one,” she says after a long pause. “I was playing up to six hours of violin a day and it was too much. However, when I rebelled, my mom could easily have given up on me. If I did poorly in a test, she did not let me lie in bed and wallow. She’d tell me I needed to get up and study to get a better mark so I would feel better. She pushed me when I needed it.”
Perhaps the ultimate test has to be whether they would raise their own children the same way. Both girls say yes, albeit with tweaks to make allowances for a child’s individuality. Rather than just stick to the usual array of extracurriculars prized by Asian parents, Sophia would want to guide them towards activities “they are naturally drawn to”.
Amy, ironically, is now one of the most hands-off mothers they know. “My mom feels she has done her job, so she does not hover over my life in the way some of my friends’ parents do,” says Lulu. In her most recent book, The Triple
Package, it is Amy herself who points out that hot-housed Asian-American children often feel like miserable instruments of their parents’ ambition.
So is such an approach really going to help the UK, where children are already the most tested on earth?
“No, assuming every kid can do this is dangerous,” says Lulu. “I know too many kids who have cracked.”
For her sister, it is a question of degree. “I don’t think we should take from tiger parenting that every kid needs to become a violin prodigy or get into Harvard,” she says. “But when it comes to smaller issues like, ‘You won’t get every toy you want until your grades improve,’ then I believe tiger parenting does have its place.”