Is tiger parenting the norm among upper middle class parents?

Parents Forum
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I hereby agree to disagree with you about the “lost sight of their mission to educate” part, though I can’t bring myself to feel very triggered today.

The more interesting question to me is the relation between a student’s love of a subject and the demand for a lucrative career (any lucrative career). Has this relation changed over the past several decades? Is so-called genuine passion for particular academic subjects simply on the wane? Or have career considerations simply made academic passions irrelevant? What role have parents (tiger or not) played in such shifts, if any?

Many pre-med students nowadays still genuinely love the idea of becoming doctors, I’m sure, along with the idea that medicine is a nice career. And many Econ majors find the field fascinating. But it goes without saying that Studio Art or Literature majors do it out of love.

Of course in many cases, “mercenary” (in the kindest sense) motives and genuine passion fit together seamlessly.

I have met finance majors to whom Henry Fielding’s description of his character Peter Pounce perfectly applies: he “loved a pretty girl better than anything besides his own money or the money of other people” (—something I learned while being indoctrinated in an English literature class.)

I think the general question of love vs. money is pertinent to the whole tiger-parenting phenomenon.

Maybe in some cutthroat suburb this summer there is a tiger parent haranguing their kid: “you mean you haven’t finished that Baudelaire yet? You really think the Yale French department will care about your silly love of calc? Les Fleurs du Mal isn’t going to translate itself!”

But I doubt it.

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My thoughts differ in that “tiger-parenting” is really about wanting a better life for one’s children through things such as opportunities, priorities, and work ethic over which we have a high degree of control.

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Career considerations are probably more important now than a generation ago. Previously,

  • a BA/BS in anything was more distinctive in the labor market.
  • jobs did not require as much specialized knowledge and skills, because some of that specialized knowledge was not known at all then.
  • employers were more willing to do on the job training, rather than expect applicants to have the needed knowledge and skills before applying.
  • post secondary education was less expensive.
  • high school graduate jobs paid enough for someone to self-support (not living with parents).
  • cost of housing and medical care was much lower.
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Also, the greatly increased cost of higher education demands that students be able to secure employment upon graduation.

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I agree. Tiger parenting may be misguided but a lot of it comes from a place of fear.

In generations past wealthy kids were who mostly attended college and they had the freedom to study American Lit or Art History without worrying whether they would find a job. I started my career in publishing with loads of these people, making a pittance but still living in a doorman building on the upper west side and sharing houses in the Hamptons during the summers.

But today college is different, more kids from different backgrounds attend but that degree in Medieval Studies isn’t a career starter for low income kids. So mom and dad go crazy trying to get their kids into what they see as the best schools to study the most marketable degrees. It makes sense.

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My two cents is kids from working class families looking for serious upward mobility out of a college degree have always had a relatively big focus on the major/careers where that is a relative secure proposition. Which makes perfect sense.

When it comes to the kids from professional class families, I think if you take serious dives into household income and wealth trends, a lot of the “fear” of today’s college-educated professional class kids doing “worse” than their parents is rather overblown. Individually, downward mobility is always a possibility, but not particularly more so now than before.

But these days, some kids from those backgrounds in certain career paths are systematically doing BETTER than their parents, some WAY WAY BETTER.

In that sense I think the pull among even professional class families toward certain majors/careers is more carrot than stick.

That said, if you are the sort of parent who is very big into peer status competitions involving your children, then in a way this carrot/stick distinction breaks down. Because if your kid doesn’t have the biggest carrot, and some other parent’s kid does have the biggest carrot, you might feel like your kid, and by extension you, are losers, failures even. And fear of THAT may be the stick for you, even if objectively your kid is on track to having a comfortable and rewarding life on their own terms.

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However, wouldn’t downward mobility include falling from top 4% or so (full pay at expensive private colleges) to top 10-20% or so? Seems like there could be fear of that kind of downward mobility, even if the absolute level of the endpoint is still doing very well.

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Some of the downward mobility fears are just examples of moving the goalposts. How many of us shared a bedroom growing up? Had a family of 5 or 6 sharing a bathroom? There was no word for “staycation” because EVERY school break was a staycation… public library storytime, public playground, an occasional sleepover.

Parents now are fearful of… exactly the life I just described. Vacations mean hotels and flights or you are a loser. Every kid needs a bedroom AND designated space in a “family room” for homework and arts and crafts.

We have ratcheted up the hallmarks of a pleasant middle class life and then are terrified that our kid who is a HS Spanish teacher married to a social worker ( both with great job security and benefits) won’t achieve the designer everything/sushi for lunch lifestyle that we didn’t even know existed?

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So that depends entirely on whether you define this in relative or absolute terms.

If you look at, say, this chart of real household incomes (just an illustrative example that was convenient):

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Between 1965 and 1985 or so, the 90th Percentile got to about where the 95th Percentile had been at the start of that period. Then it all happened again between the late 1980s and late 1990s, with the 90th Percentile again getting to around where the 95th Percentile had been around 1985.

OK, so if hypothetically in a certain family there was a shift between generations in this period from top 5% to top 10%, then that is what it is in relative terms. But in absolute terms, they may have been around the same in terms of real income.

Which is definitely not an argument that no one will care about that change in relative position! We know lots of people very much care about relative positioning in all sorts of ways.

And that was my point. The math is the math, but how you feel about the facts the math represents can vary a lot between different sorts of people. And indeed, if you broke that top 5% down even further, you would see a similar effect where even as the top 5% were converging on where higher percentiles had been in the past in absolute terms, those higher percentiles were further stretching out above even more so at the same time.

And that I think does explain how top 10%, or top 5%, or even top 1%, or so on families can feel like they are not keeping up with the Joneses. They sometime are not, even if in absolute terms they are doing as well or better than ever.

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And speaking of social science research, health and happiness measures have not in fact notably improved as a result of all this. It turns out the evidence is there is a pretty sharp diminishing marginal utility to more material consumption beyond that pleasant middle class life level. So an upper middle class family putting even more distance between themselves and that level is unlikely to do much if anything for their actual health and happiness. And in fact losing some distance is unlikely to harm it–in the long run.

But some people nonetheless expect it will in fact feel good to increase the distance, and feel bad to decrease the distance. And there can sometimes be a temporary effect like that.

But then most people adjust, and most happy people end up about as happy, and unhappy people about as unhappy, as long as they don’t actually go all the way below that comfortable middle class level.

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And in many cases ratcheted up the expectations that our kids will live in an expensive coastal city (SF/LA/NY/DC) after college, rather than in a “flyover” state where housing is cheap and a teacher plus social worker’s salaries will go much further. We definitely get different reactions about our kid who is in DC compared to his sister in a major city in Appalachia that most of the people we know have never visited and would never in a million years think of moving to.

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I think there is a lot of truth to what you have said. I also wonder if it is a bit of a chicken and egg thing. Amongst my children’s social circles, there were many kids who were scheduled every afternoon and pushed quite hard to succeed in a variety of extracurricular activities (in my opinion). The typical areas of extracurricular pursuit were sports, music, math, & coding or robotics. I think some of this was driven by the parental preference and some by student interests. But some was driven by what was actually available to do after school.

Particularly when my kids were younger, it was easy to find relatively inexpensive enrichment activities and speciality camps that emphasized the above fields. Of course it all got much more expensive as they aged/progressed, but in elementary and middle school, the prices were more doable. And many of those activities had offered trophies, medals, ribbons, competitions, auditions (orchestra seating), performances, and so forth --that is tangible rewards that give parents the sense that their money was being well spent and that demonstrated their kids’ success.

However for a kid who wanted to learn a new language, or loved reading, or the visual arts or just wanted to nerd out on history, I don’t think there were nearly as many available opportunities or clearcut paths to progress in their skills as there were in sports, music, and STEM. Now, I also doubt that there is any need to provide structured activities for kids who are interested in learning Italian or crafting or cooking or reading about Medieval England. So who really cares, right? At the same time, I think robotics clubs are pretty common. Clubs aimed at reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, not so much :slight_smile: or at least parents need to search harder to find nerd activities in the humanities.

At the same time most children of working parents still need to be doing something from 3pm-6pm and during summers while their parents are at work. Besides, if everyone in a particular social circle is enrolling their kids in specialized activities and sports, I think it can be easy to fall into keeping up with the Joneses traps, not because the parents are worried about future careers necessarily. Instead, it is just the observation that all the other families seem to be enrolling their kids in more exciting activities than regular aftercare (=sitting around the school cafeteria doing homework and playing cards for 2-3 hours). Or in the case of kids with a SAHP or babysitter, they can come home after school but there are no other neighborhood kids available for casual play because everyone else is busy with their travel teams and Russian math.

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I think the relation between love of a subject and demand for a career has changed fundamentally over the past few decades. My wife’s entire undergraduate education at an in-state R1 university cost less than her first year salary. Think of it as a nice car. Today, it is common to see total college costs over $70K per year, or $280K. Think of that as a starter home or condo in a second tier city. Very few students have the luxury of spending that much on a degree that doesn’t result in a well paying job.

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I think that is a large motivation for Tiger parents. I also think a lot of it is status seeking, “My kid was accepted at Harvard!”

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I certainly see a lot of prestige chasing from international applicants from India wanting to pursue master’s degrees in the US. Ivy League schools have a certain cachet in India making them the desired destination, whether or not they’re actually the best option (frequently not) or make financial sense (they often don’t, I’m looking at you Columbia). Many of these students are driven by their families’ desires for bragging rights.

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The vast majority of “tiger parenting” is from parents in the upper middle class and lower levels of upper class families, and comes from wanting one’s kid to attend a “prestigious” college.

A kid from a family with this income will remain in the same income bracket if they attend wide range of universities. A kid who is from family in the top 20% will remain in the top 20% by income and/or wealth if the kid attends Rutgers or UC Davis. So parents in the top 10% from the NYC area or the LA area who are pushing their kids relentlessly so that their kid gets into Yale or Stanford is not doing so so that their kid will have a “better life”.

The activities and achievements in which the Tiger parents are pressuring their kids to engage are not even affordable for the SES which requires that their kid attend a Very Prestigious College so that the kid can have a good life.

Alsot, the article that @ucbalumnus cited in the OP was very clear that they have seen Tiger Parenting as an upper income phenomenon.

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It’s all fun and games until the kid wants something different than what their parents want, or, heaven forbid, does not excel in the sport or field that the parents have assigned to them. For every Maia Weintraub, there are thousands of kids who are raised the same and, as a result, will never feel adequate, will never know how to receive or give compliments, and will have difficulty ever being able to relax and enjoy life.

Maia was super lucky than she had the talent to be that good. Imagine what would have happened if she had loved fencing but was not able to get to Olympic quality fencing no matter how much she tried? What would have happened had her parents’ money and connections and pushing, along with her own talent, not been enough to get Maia into Princeton? What would have happened had she been #12 in NCAA, or #22? Would her mother have told her “never mind, we love you”, or would her mother have told her that, had she Just Worked Harder she would have been #1 and been on the Olympic team?

People are so focussed on that miniscule percent of these kids who were successful enough to satisfy all but the worst if the worst of Tiger Parents. However, there are literally tens of thousands of kids with Tiger Parents who are not making it to the top 0.1% in their music/sport/academics, and most of these tens of thousands of kids are growing up with deep feelings of inadequacy, hating themselves and/or their parents.

Focusing in the few like Maia Weintraub is why there are so many highly talented kids who have miserable lives, instead of the great lives that they could have had, based on their talents. That is not even talking about the kids who destroy their bodies trying to be top ballerinas, or boys and girls who destroy their bodies trying to be better at various sports. So not only there are kids with broken spirits, there are also kids with broken bodies, all sacrificed on the altar of “Our Kid Will Be #1”

But it’s OK, because the parents may find momentary self affirmation from their kids’ achievements.

Worse, the kids buy into it, and drive themselves, because they have now invested their entire self-esteem into being The Best, and, like Tiger Parents, have bought into the dangerous (and frankly evil) fallacy that everybody who is’t #1 is A Failure, that #4 is a Miserable Failure, and #31 may as well hang a giants sign around their neck saying “The World’s Biggest Loser”.

So Maia Weintraub is great, but glorifying her parent’s idea of raising a child will result in an unbelievable amount of harm. I also think that we have yet to see the harm that her parents have caused her. Let’s see what her life and mental health are like in 20 years.

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Wow, so wanting to be “The Best” and believing you are better than your competitors is for all intents and purposes “frankly evil”???

There’s surely a middle ground here…where parents encourage their kids to be as successful as possible, while not threatening to imprison them in the basement or cut them off if they aren’t “#1”…

Some kids are motivated, tiger parents or not, and do “drive themselves” and invest “their entire self-esteem” into being “The Best”. And they may succeed or fail, but without that we don’t get Steph Curry, or Lebron James, or indeed Maia Weintraub. Would we be better off without them?

And on a personal note, I was in many ways one of those kids, told repeatedly from the age of 3 or 4 that I was “the best”, at least in my parents very limited experience (since they never even went to college). It continued all through elementary and high school (my mother told me that she laughed out loud at a teacher who didn’t remember me at parents’ evening and suggested I was a “solid B” student) and so I was pretty “invested” in that belief. It turned out later on that I wasn’t, at least in math (sadly no Fields Medal here), but I certainly don’t regret for a minute either that self-belief or the drive that was associated with it. I just grew up…

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I’m not quite sure that is what they are saying here…

I think just like you, they are advocating for a middle ground wherein not being #1 does not necessarily mean you have doomed yourself to failure.

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