Probably more so the culture of skilled worker and PhD student immigrants who eventually became permanent residents and citizens in the US. Many came from elite educational backgrounds in their countries of origin, and has to pass through highly competitive admission gates there. India and China are not that culturally similar, but many immigrants from there had similar educational paths involving highly competitive admission experiences to elite universities there. Because of numbers and people’s tendency to look at race/ethnicity first, this phenomenon gets seen as an “Asian” thing rather than as a something that is an effect of “merit based immigration”.
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Although, if I recall the book correctly, Amy Chua framed it as an “Asian thing” (although more specifically a Chinese thing) and since many people (myself included) first became acquainted with the term through her book, that framing stuck. It may of course be inaccurate. But I think for many this is how it became part of the popular consciousness and, through her framing, also indelibly linked to Chinese culture as its point of origin.
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Maybe it’s just me, but being a ‘Tiger Parent’ sounds seriously expensive. It’s probably my frugality that prevents me from approaching tiger parent territory. `
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It also sounds exhausting. I don’t have the energy for all that.
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As an Asian, I can definitely say it’s an Asian thing. I think it is just that we value education and achievement very, very highly because it truly is a way out of poverty in a lot of cases. Without an degree in my country, you are pretty much doomed to a life of poverty. It is not so much the case in the US. That mentality is super hard to get rid of even after living here in the US for so long. So I think we are always in the “optimize opportunity” mode whether that be violin lessons, fencing, or “insert whatever stereotypical activity Asians do”.
I fortunately found myself in an area wherein those opportunities were not available so I did not have to join the rat race so to speak. But even so, there were standards set for my kids as far as their best efforts went. Not necessarily gunning for the A but if they get an F on an assignment because they did not submit it, then we have something to discuss. Unfortunately the public school system here is pretty dismal in that the priority is just graduating students so my S24 was pretty much able to graduate top of his class despite being in a lazy stupor for 4 years. So being a tiger parent in this case would have been… a complete waste of time. Had we been in the bay area, I probably would have been a tiger parent through and through.
College is going to be quite an adjustment for him. However just a couple of months back he told me, “thank you for having high standards for us” so I am hoping that that will get him through the rude awakening of now playing with the big kids from the prep schools.
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Not sure what definition you are using for wealth - it seems you are assuming that 20% of people are wealthy based on just taking the cutoff ie. 20% are poor, 20% are lower middle class, 20% are middle class, 20% are upper middle class so the last tier must be wealthy but that doesn’t take into account the large disparity in wealth between the top 1% vs the top 20%, most of whom are solidly upper middle class. Wealthy is more akin to an anomaly so I think most would mean the 1 person in 50 or possibly the 1 in 100 among the population - certainly not the 1 in 5 that would be defined by the top 20% bracket as wealthy. I don’t think the latter would be a commonly held point of view on what is defined as “wealthy”. I think most would consider wealthy somewhat akin to the definition of genius which similarly would not be just the top 20% in the IQ spectrum.
Note that less than 20% of people earn 100k and less than 3% of people earn 250k. About 0.7% earn 500k and less than 0.3% of people make a million per year.
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I’ve never heard the expression lawnmower parent before, but I am imagining it is something like snowplow parent, which I have heard. Why does pop culture spend so much time putting down parents and coming up with clever but disparaging nicknames for them? I think many of us are just trying our best to get through.
Anyway, I understand the distinction, but in my experience, the line between tiger parents and lawnmower/snowplow parents is often blurry because both “types” seem quite focused on external measures of success --that is having their child acknowledged as the best in comparison to other children. Winning the athletic or artistic competition, getting the A+, attaining the highest rank, admission to the most prestigious college. Even activities that do not need to be ranked become quantified and earn bragging rights --earning the most community service hours in the grade or raising the most funds for a charity or heck, how early a kid starts reading.
The trap (which I certainly fall into at times) is the need to evaluate how good of a parent we are by certain visible outcomes and markers. Those outcomes become the parental prize for driving a child’s work ethic (tiger) or the proof that the parent has successfully removed obstacles/created opportunities for their child (lawnmower).
Though I do find myself in this trap often, I also think that I am being silly because that sort of focus can overlook other goals that I value. So I try to consider the invisible outcomes that can also = success. I want them to be empathic and kind human beings most of all. I want them to genuinely enjoy school and their activities because actually learning new things and stretching yourself can be fun. I want them to feel free to play the guitar (or piano or any other instrument) badly and sing along loudly without fear of being judged just because they enjoy it. To jump into a pick up game because they like to exercise or join a community theater or dance group or take an adult education class in something like stained glass or Kafka just becuase they are curious.
I want them to find meaningful careers that they enjoy and hopefully make a positive contribution in their fields (or at least do no harm). I want them to stand up for others when they witness injustices or bullying. I want them to be assertive self-advocates and find fulfilling friendships and relationships --ones based on mutual respect. I don’t want them to feel as if they are part of a rat race and they can’t get off the treadmill of achieving in order to prove their worth/credentials to others. I want them to make enough money to support themselves and their future families but not so much to become entitled or ungrateful/unaware of their good fortune. Finally, I want them to find and achieve their own goals for themselves and not feel obligated to follow the ones that I direct or snowplow for them (except if I am being honest with myself, I often feel disappointed and a little bitter when they ignore my advice).
Is there a parenting manual for all of that?
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Agree that the common theme is driving for an outcome that distinguishes their kid from others, and behind that is some element of parental bragging/badges that prove their parental worth. No doubt there is also overlap, but to me the distinction is the emphasis on the student’s efforts/work ethic for tiger parents whereas a lawnmower parent is focused purely on the outcome and how to make that path easier for their kid. A tiger parent will try to get their kid into the best class sections, hire tutors and coaches if they can afford it, and may well help their kids with their homework or projects and this is where the major overlap occurs. The mentality of a lawnmower parent though is to make things easier for their kid as a first priority. It’s not just tutors or parental help, but the willingness to substitute the work of others for their kids’ and the use of wealth or position to alter outcomes divorced from their kid’s actual achievement.
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This is my experience too. The lawnmower/snow plow parents were the ones that called their kid in sick if the homework wasn’t done or if they were unprepared for a big test, they built their kid’s sci oly projects because junior was “too stress” or had “too much other work”, and nothing ever was the fault or responsibility of the child. Bad grade = bad teacher. Didn’t get the lead in the school play = system rigged. Low test score = test not fair.
Tiger parents were all about work ethic/studying/practicing.
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Yeah, I associate Tiger Parenting with the logic chain:
More Sacrifice by My Kid => Superiority to Other Kids => Life Success (for Whole Family)
To me the mower/plow sort of parents may want their kids to end the same sort of places, but that first step is very much not where they think it should start.
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The distinction doesn’t matter once these kids are in the workforce. You explain how to access the benefits dashboard to choose your health care plan…there are navigators you can call for personalized help to choose a plan based on your needs. Who do they call? Dad. You explain the exceedingly simple process for your expense checks…it’s all online, upload the receipts, it generates a check…who do they call? Mom.
These are smart and capable young people who have never handled anything remotely administrative in their lives… making dentist appointments? Checking the flight schedule? I imagine they’ve never made a bed since it took time away from their cancer research in HS.
People…help your kids transition to independent adulthood! They don’t need your tax professional to file their taxes from their summer job… really they don’t. They don’t need a full-time administrative assistant at home… because they will be sharing one with 9 other people once they are in the workforce. Your kids future employer will thank you.
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Hmm, is it a tiger move or a lawnmower move to send your kid to private primary and secondary schools or select to live where the public schools are wealthy?
I feel like I could argue either. But if I had to pick one, I’d say lawnmower. The choice of an elite education is about removing obstacles and putting your kid n an environment where they are mostly likely to succeed. More resources on general, usually smaller class sizes, better facilities and equipment, opportunities for individualized attention for the most gifted students and weakest ones, more extracurricular enrichment activities provided by the school, teachers and administrators who are attuned and responsive to parental demands (and their power). Maybe your kid deals with some adversity as a growth experience but it is likely to be manageable challenges —struggle can also be carefully curated by the parents and teachers.
To be clear, my kids have attended sich schools from day 1. I think they are great. I am definitely not mocking them even if I sound dismissive. Those types of schools are filled with both tiger and lawnmower parents. But I have also witnessed a blurry line in the behavior of both types of parents in that the only acceptable outcome is one in which their child collects some sort of trophy as proof of their success.
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LOL–“struggle can also be carefully curated by the parents and teachers.” Definitely not the case at my daughter’s public school, where some kids had to take the city bus to get there!
That’s my friend, the IB analyst. He’s forty-years old and agonizes over every imaginable decision, big or small, mainly because his mom left no room for him to decide anything for himself when he was younger and living at home.
This is so important because the other thing that I occasionally see slipping into our conversations is a bit of self-congratulation on my friend’s part. And it often presents as a kind of narcissism, (e.g., “That person’s a nice guy - but doesn’t make a lot of money”, or “I spent (fill in the 3-figure dollar amount) for dinner last night - pretty cool.”) He clearly feels as though there are winners and losers in society, and I think he is merely reflecting what his mother taught him.
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That’s an interesting question!
The way I see it, the main point of these highly-resourced schools (which we have also chosen) is to give kids lots and lots of opportunities to do and experience things that will help them develop in different ways. This also helps for college admissions because colleges like to see kids who have developed in those ways! But that’s not the primary reason we did it, we just wanted them to have the experiences.
What we have not done is demand our kids make use of any specific set of opportunities available to them, indeed our plan was always to give our kids more and more independence when it comes to such choices. To the point we let our S24 actually choose his high school (we use a K-8, which we in fact did choose for them).
We also have never asked our kids to sacrifice physical, social, emotional, or so on development in order to beat out the other kids at school for grades, awards, college admissions, or so on. So, I want to say we have not been very Tigerish.
But is this mowing/plowing? I guess my inclination is to go more with a concept introduced above, namely being a tail wind parent. I think paying for these schools definitely helps our kids do important things, experience important things, develop in important ways, and so we are definitely doing something. But we are not trying to remove all challenges, protect our kids from any possibility of failure, or so on. Indeed all that is part of developing.
My last observation would be if you listen to some kids and sometimes parents talk about being a kid in a highly-resourced HS full of smart and ambitious kids, they sometimes make it sound like that is not at all laying out an easy path for the kid! They make it sound like it is going to require that kid to work harder, sacrifice more, all just to be able to claw as high as possible up the rankings of such a competitive school, do the best activities, get the best leadership positions, and so on.
And then of course other people who look at such high schools from the outside think all those kids don’t know how good they have it, when it is such a struggle to do anything at all competitive for “top” colleges if you go to an under-resourced high school.
And frankly, I think the second group have it much closer to correct. But still, there is SOME truth to the first thing, meaning peer competition certainly can be stressful and challenging and sometimes overwhelming for kids in highly-resourced high schools.
So what we do to address that is try to make it clear to our kids they don’t have to be the best at everything, they don’t have to be envious of successful peers they can celebrate them, and so on. But we haven’t removed the possibility of them actually being on the wrong end of a peer competition, and certainly that happens quite a bit at highly-resourced high schools to the vast majority of kids.
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I don’t think sending your kid to the best available school is necessarily tigerish or plowish by itself. I like the tail wind label that @NiceUnparticularMan puts to parents who try to give their kids the best opportunities possible. They may also be tigerish or plowish on top of that.
For our kids, we chose to live in the “better” public school district, even though we could afford to send them to private school. We also did not place them in the magnet IB program available in our city. Our thinking was exposure to classmates/families of all types and backgrounds was an important part of life lessons in their formative years. Some of the “soft skill” attributes you listed are best learned in a diverse environment as well as an appreciation for the privileges that they have.
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Agree—while private school can be seen as a boost, some elements of a highly selective private high school (or public magnet: both are test-based entry where we are) are akin to throwing your kid in the deep end with a ton of other big fish! In fact , we picked the private route because based on the curriculum all the way through, there was a path to much higher math levels& the english courses were structured like college courses: they offered a better education than public. We both remember vividly the feeling of graduating at or near the top of our above -average suburban public high schools only to feel decidedly unprepared for Duke when we arrived (humanities, foreign language, stem, all of it was a gigantic step up: below average on almost every single assessment at the beginning despite the same or higher test scores than private school kids there). We wanted our kids to “step up” and be pushed in middle and high school and have only a small step up in college. And that has been the result: both have done extremely well and have much higher gpas/beat the means on curves much easier than we did. They work hard, as almost everyone does at their schools, but they were not outclassed by peers in the beginning like we were(until we figured it out).
So does that make me a tiger mom? No I do not think so, especially given the fact that we required them to be entirely responsible for homework, studying etc from 5/6th grade and purposely did NOT allow them to have after school activities more than 2 days a week until middle to prioritize family and a healthy bedtime.
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Yeah, if wanting your kid to be as prepared as possible for a smooth transition to rigorous college classes is plowing/mowing, so be it, because that was definitely a large part of what we valued as well. Indeed, our K-8 promised to prepare our kids well for starting at a competitive HS in 9th grade, and that worked. Knock on wood it will happen again for S24 this fall.
But that still feels more tailwindy to me than plowy/mowy. Like, I don’t want S24 not to be challenged in college! I just wanted to help prepare him as well as reasonably possible for that challenge.
And yet if someone bluntly suggested we were trying to buy him an advantage in that transition phase? I mean it might be impolite to put it that way, but sure, of course we were. Not for that reason alone, but that is definitely part of it.
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I think families choose private schools for a wide variety of reason, and I am sure some choose them for “tiger” reasons, or even for “snowplow” reasons (or religious reasons, social reasons, extracurricular reasons . . . really any number of reasons). For our family, there were lots of things we loved about our kids’ private school experiences, but the two main ones were small classes (I really believe both of my kids learn best in small, discussion based classes and in project based classes) and because both of my kids did really well as “big fish” in small ponds. My daughter, in particular, was painfully reserved in middle school and lacked confidence. Going to a small, private high school allowed her to develop relationships with teachers who could see her potential and encourage her to try activities where she ultimate found herself and ended up really shining and growing into leadership roles. My son had a similar experience at his (different) private high school. Did they both end up with “tiger” coveted leadership roles and awards? Yes, but not in ways I would have imagined. And, I didn’t have to be a tiger parent to get them there because they were in an environment that helped bring out the best in them.
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That has been a big part of my goals as well with the education that I chose for my kids. Note, I don’t think that more resources necessarily make wealthier schools less academically rigorous or easier. But they do make those schools a more comfortable (and often) more pleasant place to learn. The facilities are nicer, the teachers are focusing on fewer kids and likely have to differentiate less, and the non-academic obstacles have often been smoothed over for kids. At the simplest example, at most private and wealthy public schools in my area, students are expected to annotate their texts and taught to do so, which makes it easier retain info. At less resourced schools, the books are passed on the next year so they cannot be marked up. Can a kid accomplish the same sort of annotation with a notebook? Absolutely, it is an unimportant example, but it is still one of dozens of things that parents are buying at certain schools to make the learning process easier.
And yet if someone bluntly suggested we were trying to buy him an advantage in that transition phase? I mean it might be impolite to put it that way, but sure, of course we were. Not for that reason alone, but that is definitely part of it.
I agree, it is impolite to say it so bluntly, but I have no beef or problem with this goal. I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that there is anything wrong with that goal OR that only tiger or snowplow parents choose elite schools. There are other reasons those schools get chosen, and there are other types of parents who seek a private or wealthy public education… At the same time, I know a lot of parents at both types of schools by which I mean schools that I see referenced here often. And for quite a few of those parents, their motivations seem tigerish/lawnmower like to me. Roughly, their reasoning is often in one of three categories:
- the school is rigorous and it will push my children to learn more and perform to the best of their ability. Part of the appeal is they will be competing with the very strongest students in the country (kind of tiger-y motivation). If they can make it through X prep school then they are ready for any challenge.
- the school will provide a more pleasant learning space and one that is responsive to my children’s needs. With my purchase, I am expecting a level of service and attentiveness for my family that is absent in typical public schools (kind of lawn-mowery motivation).
- This school (because of its reputation for rigor, preparation, or moneyed student body) offers my kids the best chance of admission at a selective college (both tiger-y and lawnmower-y).
There is also a solid chunk of parents whom I’ve encountered that choose private schools in order to opt-out of a competitive public but wealthy environment in certain suburban communities of the Bay Area or DC or Boston. Or they don’t want a city exam school for their kids (urban schools that are more socioeconomically diverse than suburban schools but even more competitive/stressful). These are the more free-range, progressive parents who enroll their kids in unstructured, democratic or play-based/innovative schools. I know kids who have attended private primary & middle schools where in the earlier years, it seems like the children are mostly let loose in the woods to learn from sticks, stones and experiential self-direction (exaggerating a bit for humor’s sake). These parents seem a bit different from either the tiger or lawnmower above. But even amongst this group, there is a solid minority who are doing something they think is rigorous on the side. CTY or private foreign language tutors, or Math Circle/Russian Math or high level music conservatories. It seems like a hedging of parental bets. All that running around in the woods and play based learning is great, but I’ll make sure that my kid is still attaining more traditional credentials.
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