Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (original 2011; edition 2011)

In her memoir, Amy Chua sets out to demonstrate how the Chinese style of parenting is superior to the method that indulgent Westerners use in raising their children. Her 2 daughters had strict rules they had to follow. They never went on play dates, never slept over a friend's house and had to practice their musical instruments at least 2 hours a day. The result? Her oldest daughter, Sophia, performed at Carnegie Hall at the young age of 14. Her younger daughter was a whole different story (you'll have to read the book to see what happens). In her book, Amy Chua describes with humor and honesty her family's struggle with her extreme parenting styles in a Western world. This book was a perfect selection for me to enjoy this past week while my son was studying for finals. As I read her book, I found myself waffling - should I push harder? Am I being too tough and extreme? As Chua discovers, we all want our children to be happy and successful in life. The dilemma is how do we help them achieve this. Excellent book! ( )

I found this book to be a great read. Although some Chua’s statements were a bit overboard, selfish, and a bit thoughtless, she had some great insight into the way of Asian parenting, albeit an extreme example.
In this memoir, Chua describes her experiences parenting her children. She has extremely strict rules, including: no sleepovers, no playdates, no watching TV or playing computer games. She has exceedingly high expectations for her children’s futures. Using her experience, she attempts to explain why Chinese parenting produces more successful children than more lax Western parenting. Personally, I feel this book would not be so offensive if she didn’t tie in so many stereotypical insults to Americans and Western parenting, one such being, “I think it’s more important, Sophia, for you to ask yourself what it would be like if you moved to China. How perfect do you think your accent would be? I don’t want you to be a provincial American. Do you know how fat Americans are? And now after 3000 years of being skinny, the Chinese in China are suddenly getting fat too, and it’s because they’re eating Kentucky Friend Chicken.” I mean, honestly, what is this? Amy Chua is giving Chinese parents everywhere a bad reputation.
Even with all these kinks in the system, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is a great read. There is much satirical humor scattered throughout the text and anecdotes that will make you laugh out loud. Overall, this book was a good insight as to why many Asian parents can produce successful children. ( )

A lively choice for our bookclub full of young mothers. ( )

If you can imagine a 7-hour plane ride in which you're seated next to a shrill, drunk woman with an inflated ego and a full-blown case of Munchhausen's disease, then you have some idea of what this book is like.

The book is an almost, but not quite, comedic farce. It's not just the author's outrageous claims, (her three-year-old was reading Sartre and understanding the deeper concepts, too, no doubt) but also her complete lack of self-awareness. She verbally abused her daughters, 'inspiring' them to be number one in *everything*, yet admitted to giving up tennis as an adult because, "the pressure of competition was too great". Then there were her bizarre reasoning (she forced them to take piano and harp lessons because playing the drums leads to drugs. Everyone knows that, duh.) Even though Chua never learned how to play the violin, she studied books and watched the music tutors like a hawk so that she could stand over her children while they practiced and instruct them on how to do it right. Finally, there is the constant complaining about American culture: Americans are too fat, too stupid, too lazy, and too provincial (and yet she never moved back to China...why?)

The biggest laugh came when Chua realizes that the family dog, a Samoyed, was not ranked as the smartest breed in the world. Determined to prove that *her* dog was better than all the other dogs, she drills the poor creature over and over again to make it behave perfectly (did I mention she was an expert dog trainer even though she'd only owned one dog in her entire life?)

Chinese, British, Canadian, American...I've seen this kind of mom many times before. I'm sure her kids *are* highly accomplished musicians (they should be - they were forced to practice at least three hours every day), but the reason they were successful was because their mother bullied everyone in her path. No doubt those teachers and tutors gave Chua everything she wanted just to make her *shut up and go away already*!

The saddest part of the book, to me, was when Chua's daughters make her birthday cards and Chua 'rejects' the cards, insults her daughters for not creating better cards, and rips up the cards they made for her. I kept thinking that those pathetic cards were, in reality, true expressions of how those girls felt about her. They didn't love her, so they made her crappy cards.

I almost gave the book one star, but there was a glimmer of hope for the author by the end of the book. I doubt she changed her beliefs (why would she? After all, she's an expert on everything), but at least she changed her behavior. A little bit. ( )

For me, this book was a self indulgent rant about a Chinese mother who was looking for justification for her way of raising her kids. What did it accomplish in the end - who learned the lessons? Are the girls better off or not? Are they all living happily ever after? Way too harsh for my liking. ( )