Amy Chua
When the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from Yale law professor Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in January, the editors titled the article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” and readers lost their collective minds. But it wasn’t just the headline that offended; it was everything that Chua went on to recount about how she, as a Chinese mother, parented her two daughters Sophia and Lulu. She did everything in her power, including insulting, threatening and screaming until she lost her voice, to make sure that her daughters were straight-A students who were first in their class and had mastered either the piano or violin. The girls were kept on a strict schedule and not allowed to have sleepovers or watch television. According to Chua, Chinese parents believe “it is crucial to override [children’s] preferences” no matter what because pandering to a child’s wants and desires gets them nowhere. Critics argued that Chua was generalizing when she said that non-Chinese parents are too permissive when in fact many are already too focused on academics. TIME’s Nancy Gibbs wrote that the piece elicited such a harsh reaction because it made parents question their own skills. But Gibbs also reminded all the non-Tiger moms out there that parenting is not so much a “puzzle to be solved, [so much as] it’s a picture to be painted … no way [of knowing] what it will look like until it’s done.” Nonetheless, Chua probably felt a bit superior when news broke in April that her older daughter was accepted to both Harvard and Yale. (She enrolled at Harvard this fall.)