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The History of Tiger Parenting In Chinese American Families
Twenty five years ago, my mother moved halfway across the world from Hong Kong to start a new life in the United States. She was not only looking for more economic and vocational opportunities but also a better environment in which to raise a family. For the last century, Chinese parents like her followed this path, traveling the world in search of environments with more economic freedom and a more transparent government. Most importantly, these parents focused on education for their children as the drive to leave their homeland, believing education is the foundation for a child’s development and a predictor of his or her success in society. However, Chinese parents’ methods for raising academically successful children often differ from typical Western standards of raising kids. Onlookers might sometimes see Chinese tiger parents, parents who play a direct and active role in every segment of a child’s education, as overbearing or, in some cases, abusive to their child as they plan out their kids’ schedules in minute detail and enroll said kids in an unreasonable number of extracurricular classes.
However, Chinese parents see their work as a sacrifice that is necessary to ensure the success of a child that would not otherwise be granted in their previous environment of China. More specifically, rather than using their incomes to purchase nice cars or fancy dinners, Chinese parents believe that the financial sacrifice of paying for their children’s tutorial programs and enrichment activities will pay off and make their children valued members of the American workforce. In their eyes, this seeming coldness and intense concentration on and manipulation of their children’s academic experiences is the greatest gift a child can receive, keeping them from the economic stagnation so common in China throughout the 20th century. This research paper will explore the history of tiger parenting, its historical roots, and how it became a way for Chinese immigrants to climb the ladder of American social structure. It will also explore tiger parenting’s slow, recent decline and argue that socio-economic turmoil and the slew of negative historical conditions in China, like the Chinese Civil War and Cultural Revolution, shaped the Chinese-American immigrant family identity into one that is, or at least was, hyper focused on academics and obtaining economic security.
Why Only Talk About Chinese Families?
First, it's a good idea to get out of the way why this paper will focus on Chinese parenting instead of Asian American parenting in general. Although Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans get unfairly classified into the same category as other East Asian groups, this plays into a quasi-racist cultural stereotype as the cultures are as different as the British are from the Russians, the Italians are from the Greeks, or the Afghans are from the Egyptians. In other words, although Japanese and Chinese people may look similar in appearance, their cultures are fairly unique from each other. This paper is focused specifically on the history of Chinese American immigrants as the experience and the conditions in China that drove Chinese immigrants to the U.S. differed from the conditions in Japan and Korea in the 20th century in that the causes for migrating were different and happened at different periods. In fact, “tiger parenting” applies specifically to Chinese parents in America, and the paper will now go into further detail about the socio-economic and cultural conditions that make Chinese parents the “tigers” who are so obsessive about their children’s education.
Figure 1: Ancient Chinese scholars taking the Civil Service Exam (400 BCE - 500 BCE) (Public Domain)
The Importance of Education in Ancient China
To begin, the phenomenon of Chinese parents obsessively focusing on their child’s education is something that can be explained historically and also by modern data analysis. Even the famous ancient Chinese speaker Confucius, “viewed education as a means of transformation, the discovery of human nature, and the cultivation of character” (1). Since notable Chinese philosophers began promoting education back in 470 BCE, education has been something that was not only used to obtain socioeconomic status, but was also thought to be something that could help one gain happiness and a better understanding of the world they live in, an idea that was later forgotten as Chinese history was being eradicated by Mao’s totalitarian regime. However, once the country opened its doors to capitalism and the socio economic climate began recovering as people made money, the historical focus on education immediately came back. Furthermore, throughout the many dynasties of ancient imperial China, there were extremely difficult civil service exams, as “government officials were selected through an annual national written test” (2). With the majority of the population being farmers and merchants during ancient China, becoming a scholar by passing this difficult national exam would not only allow the family to become wealthy, but would also bring prestige, honor, and respect to the family name. Therefore, young men from all social classes, especially the nobility, would study for years to try to become government officials, which was one of the most prestigious careers during that period of time, and this tradition of forcing education onto family members as a key if not the key family priority still persists today.
How War and Politics Shaped the Chinese View on Education
Furthermore, extreme resource deprivation and political instability in China during the 20th century led to parents feeling a subconscious urgency and desperation to do what it takes to ensure their children’s economic success. It is arguable that no other major world culture has had as difficult a 20th century as the Chinese. From the 1920s to the 1930s, China was in the midst of a bloody civil war between the communists led by Mao Zedong and the nationalists led by Sun Yat Sen. This was punctuated by a terrible period of Japanese occupation, and millions more Chinese were subjugated and murdered by the Japanese. According to modern estimates, around “14 million Chinese died and up to 100 million became refugees during the eight years of the conflict with Japan from 1937 to 1945,” making it nearly impossible for anyone in the country to reach any level of financial prosperity (3). Again, any sort of social mobility and academic and economic security were completely eliminated from society. Unfortunately as soon as the Japanese occupation was over and the Americans soundly defeated them, the civil war started right back up and more intensely than ever, leaving another several million dead. Then, during the Cultural Revolution in 1966, led by Mao Ze Dong, the already competitive and class-divided education system transformed into a “hierarchical system, based on rigorous competitive examinations at every level. It offered two distinct educational tracks: an elite academic track for high-achieving students and a broad-based vocational track for ordinary students” (4), with “ordinary students,” the peasants, making up the vast majority of the country. With kids being divided into “elite academics” and “vocationals” at a young age, many parents struggled desperately to get their kids into educational programs to prevent them from losing any kind of livelihood on the farm and from toiling in the fields under the grueling sun. This historical event arguably played the most drastic role in shaping modern tiger parenting, as being an academic essentially meant a one way ticket to food security, and thus survival, at a time where approximately 30-50 million Chinese starved to death due to poor crop yield and government mismanagement. Furthermore, the fact that the Cultural Revolution happened around 1966 means that many of the survivors of this event are still alive and continue to instill values of education and survivalism in their children and grandchildren in America.
Figure 2: A group of students preparing to take the reinstated college entrance exam (1977) (Public Domain)
Figure 3: Farmers during the Cultural Revolution (1950) (Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)
Figure 4: The graph shows the causes of death from 1900-1987 (1991) (University of Hawaii)
Figure 5: President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) (Smithsonian)
Figure 6: Percentage of Asian ethnicities that are enrolled in higher education (2016) (National Center for Educational Statistics)
Development of Tiger Parenting In Chinese American Families
Moving on to 1965, with the establishment of the new Immigration and Naturalization Act in the U.S. Chinese immigrants were no longer discriminated against as much legally, as the law banned ethnicity based admissions. Consequently, this new law gave rise to “far more skilled workers and family members to enter the country than ever before,” and the “Chinese American population in the U.S. almost doubled within ten years” (5), with millions attempting to escape the aforementioned Cultural Revolution and its consequences in communist China. These immigrants did not come to the United States with money, but were instead fleeing starvation and therefore did not have the resources to put their children through the best education, like modern tiger parents. However, once China opened its economy to capitalism in the 1990s and a portion of the citizens started acquiring private capital, they left and came to the United States in search for more social, educational, and vocational opportunities for themselves and their loved ones. Thus, a more wealthy, educated class of Chinese immigrants began to come to the United States. This new class of Chinese Americans became the first tiger parents, as they believed in the foremost importance of education and saw it as a way for them and their children to achieve the American dream and had the newly acquired financial resources to afford enrichment programs for their kids, and from the 1990s until 2011, tiger parenting in Chinese families who could afford it reached its height in the U.S.
Thirty years later, the results have spoken for themselves, as today, according to research done by the New American Economy organization in 2016, “the average college enrollment rates for Chinese [Americans] were 78 percent” (6). The continuation of tiger parenting throughout the 2000s in some Chinese families is also due to the fact that over half of all Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans who come to the U.S. have a college degree by the 21st century, meaning that it is more likely for many modern Chinese immigrants to find high paying jobs, allowing them the ability to afford high-priced tutors for their children, similar to how other upper class American families do. Furthermore, because many of these Chinese immigrant parents are already educated, they understand the importance of schooling for their children and therefore put an extra focus on this area of parenting compared to those parents who did not attend college. However, the idea that the majority of Chinese American parents use tiger parenting might simply be a misconception.
The Divisiveness of Tiger Parenting in Modern America
The state of modern "tiger parenting" is explained and promoted by Amy Chua, a Yale law professor who published a book about “tiger parenting,” the reaction to which revealed the contemporary thoughts regarding strict, traditional, Chinese parenting prominent since the waves of Chinese immigration since the 1990s. In her divisive book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, published in 2011, Chua directly criticizes aspects of Western parenting, stating “Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem.” She then argues that “one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't” (7). Though Chua argues how modern helicopter parenting is beneficial in that it forces kids to become good at a skill, which later provides them with satisfaction and happiness, her promotion of a more authoritarian style of parenting has brought her a fair amount of criticism from even Chinese Americans. In a 2011 interview on ABC News, Chua explains how she even “received death threats” regarding the statements in her book, with many many Chinese parents even stating how she is giving them a bad name. This essentially shows how divisive the issue is and how some otherwise passive Americans are willing to go to extreme lengths to defend a more lax, carefree parenting style, and see Chua’s “tiger parenting” as a harmful form of traumatizing children.
Moreover, a study done in 2013 at the University of Austin and later reported by the American Psychological Association showed that in "Comparing child and parent reports, [Dr. Kim] found parents fit four parenting styles: supportive (45 percent), tiger (28 percent), easygoing (20 percent) or harsh (7 percent)" (8). As shown in the data, the majority of parenting styles that modern Chinese American families use lean towards "easy going" and "supportive," representing the reduction in popularity of strict, tiger parenting within Chinese families. This historical shift may be caused by the assimilation of Chinese immigrants into American society throughout the 2010s, in which parenting practices began to shift towards a greater emphasis on individualism and self-expression. This shift was also influenced by broader cultural trends in the United States towards more child-centered and permissive parenting styles. Furthermore, another important factor was the aforementioned growing diversity within the Chinese American community. As more Chinese immigrants arrive in the United States from different regions and with different cultural backgrounds (Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan), parenting practices have become more varied and influenced by a range of traditions and values.
Figure 7: Amy Chua interviewed on ABC News following the backlash from her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011) (ABC News)
Figure 8: The cover of the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother promoting tiger parenting (2011) (Amy Chua)
Tiger Parenting in American Pop Culture
Figure 9: Notable Chinese American comedian Ronny Chieng mocks the stereotype of strict tiger parents (2021) (Youtube: Netflix)
The stereotypical Chinese-American tiger parenting style has recently also found its place in American popular culture and has essentially become a part of the Chinese-American identity. In most cases, it is Chinese or Asian comedians who make jokes about their own childhood experiences. For instance, in one of Ronny Chieng’s stand up shows, the comedian states how “when Asian parents want their kids to be doctors, helping people is always on the bottom of the list” (9). This line exaggerates the stereotype of how Chinese/Asian parents value money to the point that they simply want their child to find the highest paying job, regardless of the child’s interests and the job’s impact on humanity. This offers a playful yet many argue realistic insight into the way some Chinese parents think, mocked by Chieng for how immoral it sounds. However, most of this stereotype of greed and strict adherence to academic success stems from the aforementioned events in China in the 20th century, where there were very few opportunities to gain wealth, and so wealth accumulation is a high priority for many Chinese who come to America chasing the “American dream.” By openly mocking tiger parenting and other cultural traditions, these comedians challenge the traditional Chinese belief that children should always respect and defer to their elders’ wishes for them. The comedians also provide a platform for younger Chinese Americans to express their opinions and push back against cultural expectations that may not align with their own values and beliefs. Overall, the rise of Chinese American stand-up comedy that mocks tiger parenting represents a shift towards more individualistic and Western parenting styles, as well as a growing awareness of the importance of emotional connection and open communication in parent-child relationships.
Also, one of the most prominent shows poking fun at the modern Chinese-American family is Fresh off the Boat, a show that portrays two perspectives: one of the experience of parents who are first-generation immigrants attempting to adapt to American culture but in many ways failing to do so, the other, children who go to American schools, absorb American culture, but who are expected to learn Chinese, get A’s in every class, and participate in multiple extracurricular activities a day. In essence, the show is a satire of the modern Chinese-American family, implying that even though the family appears to be cold and academically focused, every member of it still loves each other at the end of the day. There is even a scene in the show when Evan asks his mom for “white people food” and throws away his mom’s traditional Chinese lunch every morning (Figure 10). Stereotypes presented in the show, written and produced by Asian Americans, may not be harmful as they simply offer insights into a different style of life that many modern Asians in America experience, while others argue that stereotypes in any form are bad and should not be propagated, even if done playfully by one’s own race. In addition, the show also portrays the clash of traditional Chinese parenting styles with American parenting norms. Jessica Huang, the mother, is portrayed as a strict and demanding parent, while her husband Louis is more lenient and relaxed. This reflects the changing dynamics of Chinese-American parenting, as many immigrant parents adapt to the more relaxed parenting style prevalent in American culture.
Figure 10: A scene from Fresh off the Boat depicting Evan's need to assimilate into American culture by eating "lunchables" (2018) (Youtube: Comedy Central UK)
In conclusion, the prevalence of helicopter parenting within Chinese-American households is a phenomenon that was created by multiple factors. From the principles of notable Chinese philosopher Confucious to post Cold War immigrants trying to start new lives in America, many philosophies and historical events have sociologically contributed to the prevalence of tiger parenting in Chinese families throughout America. Whether helicopter parenting is overall positive or a drawback to students is probably pretty subjective and largely depends on a parent’s desired outcome when raising a child. If one wants their kids to be loose and charismatic, outwardly confident and funny, a strict form of tiger parenting is likely not going to create this type of child. However, if a parent wants their child to get high grades, secure a well-paying position in the future, and be overall less likely to be involved in drugs and crime, then tiger parenting might ultimately be a good decision. In the end, there are definitely tradeoffs, as it may be very hard to raise a child to simultaneously get perfect grades and be the funny, charming guy that everyone wants at their dinner party. One thing's for certain: its supporters would say that credit should be given where it's due, since many kids who experience this form of parenting perform well academically. However, as the recent community of Chinese immigrants “Americanizes” within a decade or two, tiger parenting within their households will likely gradually decrease even further, and the prevalence of overbearing parents will drop to levels similar to other American households, many of whom promote a balance between sociability and academic prowess.
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Hello, my name is Jonathan Yung. Growing up, my mom always told me about how painful the process of giving birth to me was, complaining about the constant kicking and moving that she felt a month or two before my birth. Furthermore, she described me as a child who always cried and needed the most attention, which is one of the reasons why she quit her full-time job to look after me. These conversations happened every year before my birthday, which slowly became a tradition in my family for my mom to tell us about these stories.
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