Tiger Parents

Tiger parents demand that children follow a gruelling schedule of intensive studying and extra-curricular activities, particularly in high-earning, in-demand occupations such as law and medicine, then measure their children’s success by these achievements. Chua (pictured, below, with her family) is a successful Chinese-American writer, lawyer and academic and a self-claimed ‘tiger mom’, who was raised this way by her Chinese immigrant parents.

Tiger parenting is not confined to China, however. Parental hothousing and control is found worldwide from the kyōiku mama, a Japanese version of the tiger mother, to the American ‘stage mom’. Neither is it new; Leopold, father of the 18th century composer Mozart, was a tiger parent who relentlessly pressed his son to achieve great things musically.