Is tiger parenting the norm among upper middle class parents?

Parents Forum
321

Re: Blossom’s astute point about kids being able to adult when they need to (without parental assistance), this is definitely a more recent phenomenon that I see across this generation but particularly among the kids who are excelling (with parental encouragement/consent/pushing) across a variety of tigerish disciplines. The kids who are doing chess/tennis/debate/violin/robotics + entering every science fair + acing their tests and getting straight As in weighted classes (often w/ the help of tutors) don’t have a lot of time for things like household chores, summer jobs at frozen yogurt shops, etc. This is a parental choice, to be clear, but not always a conscious choice. It’s “my kid got into Stanford Math Camp and this chamber music workshop, so I guess they won’t have a job this summer.” It’s “my kid stayed up until 2 AM studying for three tests last night so I guess I’ll make their lunch and clear away the breakfast dishes.” These little default patterns can snowball into a mindset of both parents and children that the parents live in service to the children and the children’s extracurricular and academic pursuits are their sole concern.

And it does cause problems once kids hit college (before careers even) because they can’t handle administrative stuff a lot of the time. My friend who is a dean at Vanderbilt said that kids these days were frighteningly good at doing academics (compared to us and our peers) but dismayingly bad at handling life’s inevitable bumps in the road – like formula one race cars trying to drive in the back country.

I think this was less frequently the case in my generation (Gen X) because even those of us who aspired to Ivies etc. had comparatively few demands on our time. It feels like the arms race of piling on ever more activities at ever higher grades of execution has just gone nuts. And of course in my era, the kid who did two or three things really well + aced their classes and their tests would have probably had their pick of Ivies and selective liberal arts colleges. Now it feels like a crapshoot for just about everyone. (Fun fact: Northwestern University accepted something like 1/3 of applicants 20 years ago. Now their acceptance rate is ~7%.)

12 Likes
322

Oh, that is interesting. My experience going from high school to college was the reason I felt it wasn’t important to send my kids to a private school. I felt that we strong students from a suburban public measured up very nicely to the prep school kids academically. And we were at some schools with strong academic reputations: UChicago, Stanford, Carleton, Northwesterm, Grinnell, Duke, an Ivy. (We did have a strong high school class, however. And I know that some students from rural publics did struggle.)

6 Likes
323

Until middle…school?

324

Coming from a relatively strong suburban HS in the Triangle Area of North Carolina (one that sent a handful of kids to Ivies every year and a lot more to Duke/UNC), I will cop to feeling underprepared at Princeton relative to my classmates who’d gone to places like Trinity/Milton/Andover and even those who’d gone to public high schools in places like Westchester County/Long Island/the posh CT and Philly suburbs. The biggest gap was in writing ability, and I’m sure this varies wildly according to which public high schools happened to have extremely dedicated and focused English teachers. (I actually think that if my mom had taught the AP English courses at my high school, I and my classmates would have been much better prepared as writers. And when her friend was teaching AP US History, she was known to be tough/rigorous/send well-prepared kids out into the world.) My best guess is that at that time anyway (and probably still), those Ivy feeder-type private schools had more consistently high standards for teaching different kinds of writing, as did public schools in areas where the overwhelming majority of students came from highly educated, upper-class families.

Today I could imagine the distinction being even more stark. My son is not (by my standards) a strong writer. But he’s gotten 5s on three AP exams featuring writing (APUSH, AP World, and AP Lang.) I think this is because the teachers have figured out a paint-by-numbers approach to teaching writing for these specific tests. And they don’t spend much if any time teaching anything else. S25 has never written a research paper, for example.

5 Likes
325

For sure I don’t think any one format of HS has a monopoly on great college prep. I went to a well-regarded public HS and there was a legendary English teacher there who kicked our butts, truly loved teaching, and eventually made sure we were all good writers. I could not be more grateful.

But I do think my S24 more consistently had such experiences than I did. Not always, but more often.

And I am a sample of one, but I finished in my fancy college stronger than I started, which in part was me sort of learning the system better. I did that in HS too, so at one point I assumed it was just my thing. But then in law school I finally went in arguably more prepared than most, and started off strong.

So in retrospect . . . I don’t know, maybe I could have been better prepared for that fancy college. And maybe others were. Impossible to prove but eventually I ended up suspecting that.

2 Likes
326

Not sure your question, but in our k-12 as well as other schools, most kids do different activities 4 days a week plus weekends too, starting as early as 1st gr: soccer one day, music the next, kumon tutoring for some, dance or a second sport, on and on. Overscheduling is a common practice here.
Edit to add: the school has after school sports mon-friday in 7th/8th instead of PE, and sports 2 of the 3 seasons are required in HS so it is very common and expected to ramp up the after school activities by 7th at the latest. Many families do the elementary school sports (field hockey, soccer, tennis) to give their kids a leg up so they make the top team in 7th grade. Not a joke. Ours did not do that level of competitive sports and it seemed silly to have them be that intense so young. There is a sports-tiger-parent culture here and many places, per friends with kids across the US. That is a different kind of tiger parent than the book I think .

3 Likes
327

Reading all this is very interesting/stimulating, yet in my head I keep circling back to a saying that always makes me laugh and also rings very true: “On the freeway, everybody going slower than you is an idiot and everyone going faster than you is a jerk”. (someone upstream had similar sentiments).

I think we all do some form of it to some level, but each of us also has personal criteria as to whether something is too much or not. I’ve always wanted my kids to not only understand the joys of doing things “well”, but also the fact that the “things” could cover a huge range. My friend’s favorite story on this topic was at a japanese temple, where a monk was sweeping the walkways and an open gravel area, but doing it with a large branch and in a fashion that produced pretty patterns on the trail. He obviously knew what he was doing. Encouraging such thought and gaining rewarding experiences related to a task seems like a good tool with which to face life, and many many things are rewarding in this fashion if pursued in depth.

I asked my kids to be involved in sports, music, academic pursuits, and other ECs, but I did give them the choice to continue or stop after a point (some earlier than others as they clearly did not resonate with the activity). At times I felt “tigery”, but the spirit really was to help prep them for the road ahead and get them to find that joy of doing things (and not just the thing they like) as well as they could. I tried to match each child with the academic environment that seemed appropriate which led to private school for some and not others.

I’ve been accused of being well-adjusted with this style, and I’ve been accused of being tigery. Ultimately, I’ve decided to reply in the affirmative for both. I hope and pray that most parents really don’t regard their kids’ outcomes as a grade. I hope they stay focused on the vision of their kids as well-prepared adults facing a tough but promising world. Most tigery parents around me seem like this… but most people still look on and consider them idiots or jerks.

8 Likes
328

Like homework?

1 Like
329

By the way, I mean to mention this was a term another poster introduced to the discussion, which I believe in turn came from a spouse. I have just taken it up because it seems so appropriate for what a lot of us here are doing (or at least trying to do without straying too far into the other metaphorical categories).

3 Likes
330

Yeah, I think a LOT of humility about how we perceive our relative positioning in the world of actively-engaged parents is wise counsel, since surely others often see us differently.

But I do think that holding aside sweeping judgmental categories, the substantive issues involve exactly what is really necessary in terms of self-sacrifice, anxiety, peer competition, and so on in an overall good childhood, or really a good whole life. And as parents we inevitably play some role (although not the only role) in determining how much of that will happen while our kids are in our care, and possibly beyond to the extent we are still involved or just have been role models.

And I think a lot of us agree all that stuff can’t be entirely eliminated from a good childhood/life, but there can also be too much, maybe way too much.

And I guess that just reinforces your point that anyone who stresses their kids too much is a jerk, and anyone who protects their kids too much from stress is an idiot, and of course we are surely doing it just about right . . . .

1 Like
331

Our kids’ high school is like a Tale of Two Cities, depending on how the student is tracked. We are in a Detroit suburb in the #5 HS in state which is one of the top feeder schools into UofM. In addition to a strong AP course catalog, he school is known for a Desgn and Technology curriculum with classes like Engineering Design 1-4, Archtecture 1-4, Computer Modeling and Robotics 1-2. Families in the district are middle to upper middle class, with many parents working as engineers, Big Three execs, business owners, and licensed professionals. Just from seeing students at the school I would guess around 20-25% of the students are Asian (I only bring up race because it was the focus of the article).

Our older son was a total STEM kid and was on the advanced track in HS, taking all the STEM APs, plus electives like Engineering Design and Genetics/Microbiology. He also was on the schools Robotics team, where I was also a coach. Over half the students (maybe 60%) of the students on the Robotics team were Asian. Many of the coaches were Asian parents with engineering or IT backgrounds. My son reported that Asians were wildly over represented in his AP STEM classes. At the school’s honors assembly probably 70% of the students who graduated with High Honors were Asian.

While driving three Asian students back from a Robotics competition, my son got a window into the “Tiger Mom” world. The girls, who were all friends, started complaining about their parents. Girl 1, “My mom threw a book at my head because I wasn’t practicing piano hard enough.” Girl 2, “My dad will be really pissed at me if I didn’t get a 1600 on the SAT.” Girl 3, “My parent will consider me a failure if I don’t get into an Ivy League.” My son and I were silent at first, but his eyes were bugging out of his head. When I mentioned to Girl 3, that she might get an objectively better education (smaller classes, better access to professors, etc.) at a small LAC like Williams or Amherst than at Harvard, her response was, “You don’t understand Mr. H; we’re Chinese, and it is all about the prestige.” An Indian Robotics mom chastized me for allowing my son to attend CWRU when he was accepted at CMU.

So far, our second son has been on the normal track, but he is scheduled to take AP classes next year as a Junior. It is almost as though he attends a different HS. He knows students who skip two days a week of school, are failing most of their classes, enjoy their recreational pharmacuticals, or are just not engaged at school. When he tells us these stories, my wife and I wonder out loud, “Where the hell are the parents?”. Thankfully, our son is not easily influenced by peers and is himself disgusted by these kids who have gone off the rails. Yes, almost all these troubled students are white. My wife and I look forward, frankly, to Thing #2 being in AP classes surrounded by more serious and engaged students.

There are two takaways from our experience. First, no, not all upper middle class parents are “Tiger Moms”. Most of the parents of these troubled kids are educated and have healthy financial resources, but they are simply not engaged. Second, yes, there is something to the Asian “Tiger Mom” stereotype. I think this a function of culture and values and not race, but I’ll save that for another thread.

8 Likes
332

I note I have been taking this as a given, since I really doubt there are genes for throwing books at a kid’s head if piano practice is going poorly, or insisting Brown >>> Williams.

I do think, though, there is a natural component to parents wanting good things for their kids, which is broadly shared across our species. How that motive gets channeled into specific modern behaviors, though, is surely “nurture”/culture.

1 Like
333

The culture and values in question are not ethnicity based, but immigration based, since the parents are likely those who initially came to the US as PhD students or skilled workers after having attended elite universities in their countries of origin.

4 Likes
334

I’d agree (although the high educational achievement in the previous country is not a requirement in my experience. It has an additive effect I’d agree). The countries of origin do tend to be those where differentiation is more important and where struggling for resources may be more of a norm.

2 Likes
335

I don’t think it is necessarily limited to skilled/highly educated immigrants. I think immigrants in general tend to have a belief that the US represents an opportunity to earn a better life for their family (why they immigrated in the first place) and education is an/the avenue to get ahead. While we often think of the Asian engineers and scientists in Silicon Valley, don’t forget that the special schools in NYC are highly over represented by Asians who qualify for free/subsidized lunch. But I agree that immigrants with those characteristics will more likely value and push education. But the same could also be said for highly educated non-immigrant families.

2 Likes
336

Doesn’t NYC give every student free lunch now? Before that, something close to three quarters of NYC students qualified for free or reduced price lunch, although it was lower at schools like Stuyvesant (something like half).

337

But by and large, the kids from the NYC special schools are not the ones walking around in ashes and sack cloth because they didn’t get into HYP and MIT. An ABET approved engineering degree from just about any university in the country would make their parents very, very proud - as would a professional degree via any one of the three or four New York State flagship universities. These kids are flying by the seat of their own pants when it comes to the college application process just like a lot of other First Gens.

3 Likes
338

Homework comprises a wide range of experiences. 50 algebra problems a night is one thing, writing an essay on current events might be another. But here’s my pitch:

  • if the work is busywork and trying to develop muscle memory (akin to practicing layups or give and go’s) it could be useful if they figure out personal heuristics to get through the work faster.
  • if the work is content absorption, it’s good to develop methods to get that as effective as possible. My HS English teacher told (but didn’t require) us to read our books twice, once for absorption and another for a thoughtful/analytical reading… eventually the good readers would learn to do it in the first pass.
  • some projects and essays assigned as homework are quite valuable experiences so I doubt people have any issues with those (extending the basketball analogy, it would be like practicing a matchup zone to different offensive sets and movement… eventually leading to an understanding of how offenses attack a defense and how a defense responds)

So finding the joy in homework can be tough, but I do think it is less so if there’s a chance to do it “well”. Watch basketball stars warm up and practice and see if they work on their dribbling, passing, layups, and free throws and explore if they are having “fun” out there. Understanding that the work helps them reach their goal more easily seems to make the experience more fun (or at least palatable) for these stars.

1 Like
339

I often wondered what other families thought of us when our kids were in high school, and whether we were the idiots or the jerks?

There is a lot of talk about tiger parents, but are we the only ones that had a “tiger child”? Our son was the national champion in one of his activities in middle school, and then decided by himself he would try to repeat that in two other activities. And it didn’t matter how much we discouraged that, he was going to try. And when he didn’t succeed, it led to anxiety and self-doubt. Much of our parenting effort in high school was teaching that it wasn’t necessary to the best at everything. Those lessons finally kicked in by senior year, and he entered college with full confidence. He was still going to give it his all, but he was ok when there were others that were stronger.

In contrast, our daughter was a bit of a slacker in high school. We pushed her a bit, and she has told us she was grateful for us doing so.

3 Likes
340

Looking further back in history, the majority of the immigrants from China and Japan, beginning shortly after the Gold Rush to 1960’s were mostly uneducated laborers who worked as railroad builders, laundrymen , cooks, farmhands etc. Yet these laborers understood the importance of education, as a route to advance to non-laborer jobs, just as much as their educated compatriots here in the states (not many of them prior to the 1960s), as they encouraged (pushed) their children to do well in school.

2 Likes