In 2011, Amy Chua sparked a nationwide debate when she championed her tough-love parenting style in the book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” Critics said the iron-fist child-rearing approach of the Chinese-American mom was too intense, stigmatizing or even damaging to the child.
New research and a just-published memoir suggest the critics may be right.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, followed more than 250 Chinese-American immigrant families with first- to second-grade children in the San Francisco Bay Area for over two years.
“We found that children whose parents use more authoritarian-type parenting strategies tend to develop more aggression, depression, anxiety, and social problems and have poorer social skills,” said Qing Zhou, an assistant professor of psychology who led the research.
Zhou, who heads the university’s Culture and Family Laboratory, said the findings were based on interviews, parent-child interaction activities, and cognitive and academic assessments of the child. Her team measured how frequently parents use authoritarian-type of disciplinary strategies - like verbally criticizing the child and demanding the child do things without explanation.
Kim Wong Keltner, a Chinese-American writer from San Francisco, said she’s not surprised by the new research. Keltner, who was raised by two “tiger parents,” said the child-rearing style can be so demanding and confining that many Asian-American children live in a kind of “emotional jail.”
“What I’ve been seeing is a huge burden and unspoken depression about expectations that people are feeling,” Keltner said.
Releasing that burden is one reason Keltner wrote