Is tiger parenting the norm among upper middle class parents?

Parents Forum
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I live in a solidly middle class (not upper middle class) town and see almost no Tiger parenting. In fact, I’d say the only thing I see pushed on kids is sports and it’s a “reliving a childhood thing” or “I could have played in college (if I only went)” thing rather than a push for admission purposes. The recent immigrants to town are too busy trying to make ends meet and build a life to be Tiger parenting.

I work in a very wealthy town that people move to because of its school district. And while going to college is a presumption and elementary school kids come to school in T50 sweatshirts like other kids come to school in athletic jerseys, I really don’t see much Tiger parenting. I see parents spending a lot of money to make their kids happy or have a perfect Instagram life, but not Tiger parenting. The only Tiger parenting I see at the elementary level comes from recent immigrants/H1B, L or O visa holders. They tend to be high management in tech companies, scientists or teachers at some of the “best” colleges. Some are willing to commute 2 hours to have their kids in the district. At the high school , the pressure to get into a limited range of top-ranked colleges (and only those colleges will do) seems to be much more internal rather than parent driven.

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But note that from the starting point of the upper middle class parent, there is little space for upward economic mobility, but plenty of space for downward economic mobility, for the kids relative to their parents. The same goes for educational attainment if the parents already have graduate or professional degrees (particularly “elite” ones like MD, top 14 JD, top __ in subject PhD, …) or occupational prestige if the parents are already in a highly regarded occupation.

If the parent explicitly or implicitly tells the kid that the expectation is to do better than the parent in any of these dimensions, wouldn’t that be a reach goal that is very stressful on the kid, even with the advantages of growing up in an upper middle class environment? Even if a parent does say that any outcome for the kid that results in being self supporting in an honest manner is fine, wouldn’t an upper middle class environment have considerable peer prestige pressures regarding post-high-school and career goals? Also, would a kid growing up in an upper middle class environment have a distorted sense of what level of income is “enough” to live on after they finish school and go to work?

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Absolutely, and the NiceUnparticularParents have tried to be clear with the NiceUnparticularKids that we really did not do notably “better” than their NiceUnparticularGrandparents. The fact that professional class kids have all sort of advantages in becoming professional class adults is plenty as far as I am concerned, we don’t have to try to build to some sort of upper-class family dynasty.

Yes, the possible influence of peers and peer competition has always been a concern to us. We have tried to be clear that plenty of families have less material wealth than us and are just as happy and fulfilled, and fewer but still many families have more and are not as happy and fulfilled, all of which confirms what a gazillion studies have found, namely that past a certain relatively modest point, more material wealth does very little if anything to actually make families happier.

But are peers and observations of peers reinforcing that message, or undermining it? That’s not totally under our control, but hopefully we have done a good enough job helping our kids see behind the superficial things to assess what really seems to lead to happiness and fulfillment.

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High performing students are in classes with other high performing students and compare themselves to their peers. At our school, the same 30-40 kids have 80-90% of classes together - BC calc, lang, apush, chem. They literally spend 7 hours a day together in small rooms doing the exact same assignments. It’s the kids who are pushing the other kids. Many parents don’t know what’s going on at the school.

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I will say this. These kids know so much. Today, we were making fruit salad and my 15 year old tells me strawberries are not berries and bananas are berries.

I dont remember learning that in high school (or maybe I fell asleep during class when that was taught - which is entirely possible).

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Is tiger parenting the norm among upper middle class parents? No.

Is it the norm amongst most of the kids who post on CC? It definitely appears so.

Is it the norm for most parents who post on CC? Unsure.

I think that the majority of parents who have stayed long past their kid’s high school graduations are less likely to be the tiger parents. I don’t know whether that’s because they trust the process and that once their kids made it into college that they trust their kid can get themselves to grad school or a job, or wherever, but I don’t see the parents who are not in the thick of college admissions (or prepping for them) as having much of the tiger energy.

I suspect that tiger parents use the forum for support and information to help place their kids in “appropriate” institutions. Once that happens, they no longer feel the need to be on CC. I don’t know whether they’re moving on to other pursuits to support their kids to the next step or if they’re going off to live their own lives, or whatever, but I think the majority of tiger parents step away from the forum.

I do think there are non-tiger parents who are parenting high schoolers who post here on the board. I just think that they’re the minority, or at least in the minority of the postings.

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I would like, once again, to point out that people from the top 20% by income are NOT “upper middle class”, they are “wealthy”.

I would also like to point out that people should look beyond “parents of the high achievers in high school” and see how they raise their kids.

No, not only is “tiger parenting” not the norm on the upper middle class, it is a rare phenomenon. Even among the top 20% by income is is limited to the parents who have the time and energy, and usually involves having a parent who isn’t working full time.

Consider the fact that usually only 25% or so of the students who attend most high schools for the affluent communities are engaged in academic and extracurriculars at the levels one sees in kids who have a tiger parent. That can also be seen in the fact that only 25% or so of these students in the top 20% by income end up attending a college with an acceptance rate of lower than 30%, and of those a substantial proportion are getting in because of wealth and influence, rather than because they have a parent driving them.

So I would guess that “tiger parenting” involves maybe 20% of the top 20% by income, and a far smaller percent of the upper middle class.

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Why is Yale giving wealthy students (top 20% $130k-$150k income) need based aid?

https://admissions.yale.edu/affordability-details

  • All of Yale’s undergraduate financial aid is awarded on the basis of financial need.

Who qualifies for financial aid?

The table below shows median financial aid awards for families of students enrolled in the 2022-23 academic year who applied for aid.

Financial Aid Snapshot 2022-2023

Annual Income Range Median Net Cost Median Scholarship Percentage Who Qualified for Aid
Less than $65,000 $0 $84,200 100%
$65,000-$100,000 $1,500 $79,000 99%
$100,000-$150,000 $14,800 $65,800 97%
$150,000-$200,000 $30,500 $50,200 94%
$200,000-$250,000 $46,500 $40,300 83%
Greater than $250,000* $49,400 $28,700 47%
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In the Bay Area and call it what you want tiger parenting, crazy parenting. It’s happening all the time. Multiple friends are paying college counselors although none of us are sure what they provide beyond telling the kids to have a “story”, take AP classes and work on essay writing.

S26 seems to have a good handle on things, like most teens we work on time management but it slow and painful. He does lament that many of his friends in AP classes are not interested in having a social life, going to the mall or hanging out.

Another friend who is more involved in his highschool scholarship program told me stories about kids having breakdowns because of anxiety over grades. We both agree we are lucky we are in CA. In both of our schools about 60% of kids get into a UC, our kids will be fine and don’t need more stress.

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Because Yale is expensive enough that even many people with lots of money need a discount to be able to afford to send their kids there.

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How many schools in the US cost over $80k all in?

Yale isnt even in the Top 20.

According to this, there are 14 schools in Mass alone that cost over $80k. Im not sure Yale is unique in its cost

I think colleges’ definition of “wealthy” may not be $130k/year. $130k/income year is probably not going to “influence” any school to let someone’s kid in because of their “wealth”.

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Overall I agree with your points, but I would say ‘high income’, not wealthy. A lot of people with high incomes live paycheck to paycheck and build negligible wealth.

To answer a question that came up as to why schools like Yale give financial aid to families in the top 20% of incomes if that is high income - Yale is obscenely wealthy…Croesus-like, one could say. They are interested in getting the class they want and don’t want money to be the limiting factor (nor do they need money to be the limiting factor with how much they have).

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If Yale doesnt want money to be a limiting factor, how does “wealthy” people making $130k influence their decision to accept someone?

My point is the majority of kids who get into T20 schools are really smart and they work their butts off and it’s insulting to think a family income of $130k, $200k or $250k would be a primary reason a school would accept a student or that type of income would have any influence.

There are about 15 million families who make over $200k per year. 99% of their kids are not getting into T20 schools.

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Here’s what our kids college counselors provided : a resource that wasn’t me. Someone to help them devise a game plan for the extensive admissions work that they were doing applying to 10-12 school and chasing prestige. The college counselor set up deadlines well before the actual deadlines so there was room for problems to be worked out. She gave feedback on their different essay topics. She provided statistics on odds of admission and answered questions about things like when amd how to seek teacher recommendations. She discussed what kind of college experience they wanted and really pressed them to think about what was important to them. Like city vs college town, ratio of men to women, number of other Jews, class size. Both my kids were crazily busy junior and senior year with an incredibly demanding schedules. And this hired administrative help was wonderful. I could have done it, . But not without strain on our relationship

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Not sure why you are asking me about “wealthy” when my point was high income doesn’t equal wealthy?

High income doesn’t mean a family has the money to be full pay. Yale has enough money to make that a non-issue for most families - their endowment is enormous.

Your point and my point don’t really have anything to do with each another as I wasn’t talking about who is highly qualified for admission or how money does or doesn’t intersect with that.

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It’s the same in San Diego. This is not what I call Tiger parenting: I call this fear of missing out. People throwing money away because everyone else is doing it. I had several friends, family and co-workers tell me for S24 how I need a consultant. But at a cost of $150/hr to over $12k, I said no thanks.

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I did talk to a wealthy friend who mentioned you could hire a team for six figures. One person to work on essays, one to work on extracurricular activities, find non-profit work, internships at labs in ivy colleges etc. Sounded insane to me but then again I don’t have 7-8 figures in wealth.

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I am a first generation (my parents immigrated from Europe and met here through their parents, a great story).

Anyway … I remember my mother always saying “you could have gotten a 96” when I told her I got a 95 on a test. The only time she had nothing to say is when I came home and told her I was HS valedictorian. In retrospect, I understand she was trying to encourage me and my siblings but it was really soul-crushing, and my sister and I would still talk about it as adults.

That was the ONE thing I promised myself I would never do as a parent, and I never did. My question was “did you do your best” if they came home with a questionable grade. Sometimes we would talk about what could be done differently, or if they could seek out help from the teacher to understand what they got wrong (they usually did, and were often the only ones staying after school). Maybe that was a form of gentle tiger parenting?

FWIW, they are both adoptees from China. My oldest had a friend whose parents were from Korea, and she was under immense pressure to be perfect. She’s now in law school, my oldest is an oncology nurse. My youngest is at a great internship (in Plano of all places - she loves being in the land of barbecue AND sushi LOL). It all worked out.

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I wasn’t going to read this thread at first. As a Yale Law graduate, I have deep concerns about Amy Chua’s various philosophies and hold her responsible for JD Vance. But the points you and @ucbalumnus touch on are things that have always worried me. My kids are not like me and that is fine and makes life much more interesting. My husband is an economist and it’s a family joke that I am Adam Smith’s “rational man”, so that fact that we ended up with an athlete and an artist was a lovely surprise. They do share our stubbornness and attempting to push them in any sort of tiger parent fashion would surely have backfired, so we never tried. However, as a result, it is highly unlikely that they will end up anywhere near the same income bracket in which they have grown up. We have always tried to keep things at what felt like a reasonable level to me (I’m a first gen and had a very normal blue-collar upbringing that gives me a baseline), but I have friends who have built much “larger” lifestyles and it has always struck me that, in doing so, they end up putting their kids in a position where they almost have to become investment bankers (or something equally lucrative) or else remain dependent on their families to avoid a dramatic change of situation. It’s not anybody’s fault, and I think it naturally gets harder over several generations of higher income, but I want my kids to be able to follow their own dreams and be satisfied with their own accomplishments.

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I don’t think there is much consensus on terms like the upper middle class as applied to US society, but as I understand the usual academic definition, it means something like highly-educated, highly-compensated salaried professionals with a lot of work autonomy (like you have projects, cases, patients, students, etc., but are not constantly being directed in the details of your work by someone else).

The only group typically “above” this class in terms of annual income are the true upper class, people with very high incomes supported by the returns on various forms of invested capital (financial assets, real property ownership, business ownership, and so on). Some of these people “work” in the sense of managing such assets and properties and businesses and such (and so some CEOs and such may be in this group as well), but they are not doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, professors, or so on.

With that definition, I think the upper middle class (in the sense of professional class) is usually estimated to make up roughly 15% or so of US households, with the true upper class being under 1%. So top 16% by household income is the range where you are going to see a lot of people in the upper middle class. However, defined like this it is not purely an income measure, so some upper middle class households may not be quite top 16% by income, and some households in the top 16% by income may get there without the definitional education and work characteristics.

All this is kinda beside the point, though, because I agree with the observation that not all of the US upper middle class, however you define it, has gone to like an Ivy+, nor is demanding that from their children. Because of course the math can’t work out–15% of US households cannot send their kids to way less than 15% of US college slots, even adjusting for the fact not every US kid goes to college.

So if that defines the short-list college ambitions of a typical “tiger” parent, the upper middle class parents can’t all be tiger parents.

And of course that is the lived experience of many of us in the upper middle class. I do think it is very much the norm that most kids will go to a “good” college, because we all understand that as the likely next step after HS, and before some sort of professional career (usually although not always with some sort of postgraduate degree too). But having been through all this ourselves, we usually understand that plenty of colleges are “good enough” for this purpose.

So, like, Ivy+ are fine of course, but so are all sorts of other private universities. Obviously all sorts of LACs, which appear to sometimes be off the radar of “tiger” types but of course have been popular with many upper middle and indeed true upper class families for a long time. I also sometimes single out Wake Forest as a litmus test. I could use any number of others, but Wake Forest is among the sorts of universities plenty of upper middle class families have graduated from and then sent their kids, and if it is completely off the radar of a certain ambitious family that is an interesting observation to me.

And then there are many publics as well, flagships and also a variety of tech publics and so on. Again, lots of upper middle class parents went to such colleges, and they happily send their kids to such colleges, understanding that if you do well at such a college you can then go on to a successful professional career.

And finally I would mention the service academies, which I gather are definitely not discussed much in “tiger” circles but are certainly another well-worn pathway to ultimate professional class success among various US families.

All right, so of course when you add that all up, now you have plenty of room for the college-bound kids of the US upper middle class. And I guess it is theoretically possible that all those upper middle class parents sending their kids to all those other colleges besides the Ivy+ are absolutely miserable with their failed kids–but in practice, nah. They are mostly happy with that, again because they know it means their kids are still on track for some sort of professional success.

So to me, that again is one of the litmus tests of tiger versus not-tiger upper middle class norms. If you implicitly expect your kids to go to a “good” college but that potentially includes Wake Forest, Ohio State, Mt Holyoke, and so on, then that doesn’t sound very tigerish to me. But if you think your kids will be failures if they end up at Wake Forest or Ohio State or Mt Holyoke instead of an Ivy, that is what I think of as the “tiger” mentality towards US colleges.

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