I don’t view being a “Tiger Parent” as a binary assessment with being a Tiger Parent as a bad thing. There are so many different components, some of which are not healthy when taken to an extreme. It is also a relative assessment. So some examples:
Competition Wanting your kid to be the “best” at whatever he/she chooses to pursue. I don’t think anyone would argue that encouraging excellence or being the best that you can be is a negative trait. But how do you measure whether or not someone has done their best? For certain things there may be objective standards, but for other (maybe most) things, it involves a comparison to others. When it gets toxic is when this becomes "you have to beat “Johnny and Sally” at all costs because that defines you as a winner vs a loser.
Setting Goals Again, a good thing to teach your kids, set defined goals for yourself. It only becomes toxic when the goals set are arbitrarily narrow and are used to define the kid as a winner or loser - “Ivy or bust”. This could further an unhealthy chasing of “credentials” vs actual achievement, leading to cheating and other unethical behaviors because the only thing that matters is getting the credential.
Carrot vs Stick As parents, we all uses different measures of carrots and sticks. This combination is driven by our personalities and what we think is effective motivation for our kids. Some kids need more stick than others. It becomes toxic when this is taken to an extreme of mental and/or physical abuse. Or, the situation where there is such a tight leash on the kid, the kid either burns out or goes on a “sex, drugs and rock and roll” rampage when they get out from under parental control. We have all seen this.
Of course all of this is relative. I don’t doubt that a lot of parents in our flyover city think my wife and I are tiger parents. Whose kids does their homework on bus rides on long away games? Whose kids aspire to go to college beyond the state flagship or other in state schools? Whose kids actually prepped for the SAT/ACT? On the other hand, if we lived in certain neighborhoods in the Bay Area, many parents would view us as rearing free range children.
Actually, I do often argue this. “Just do your best” can be a great thing to say to kids with typical levels of drive, but it can be toxic for kids with high levels of drive/perfectionism/self-control. “You should be the best that you can be” can feel like a crushing responsibility to kids like this. These are kids who need encouragement to intentionally practice doing their 2nd or 3rd best. They need to be told that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly.
That’s a huge over generalization. I agree that some kids who are perfectionists may also have mental health challenges that cause them to react badly to “do your best”. But others are perfectly fine, don’t feel any “crushing responsibility” and have the resiliency to deal with disappointment.
I think the bigger question is whether no kids should be allowed to push themselves hard (in academics, sports or whatever), based on concern about things like teen suicides. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could return to the olden days when everyone had a relaxing childhood and didn’t worry about where they would go to college? But that’s an idealized fantasy and the olden days were not better for large parts of the population who were poor, hungry or couldn’t afford to even contemplate college. Most of those people had to work a lot harder (even if not academically) just to survive, compared to our teenagers.
I would never say “do your 2nd or 3rd best” to my perfectionist kid (and I’d laugh if someone suggested it to me). He’s never got less than an A (not even a single A-) in 11 years of middle school, high school and college. He’s felt crushing disappointment when he’s competed for extraordinarily difficult prizes and not won (the Truman scholarship for example), but he did his best and is glad to have tried. He’s also had other amazing successes.
The important thing is that it’s his drive (and decision to compete) not mine. He knows we’d fully support him whether or not he wanted to take on these challenges.
I don’t know, maybe my tiger tendencies are showing. If there is something that my kids want to do and is worth doing, then I expect them to give it their best shot. They don’t need to be the best at it but how does a half hearted effort help them? If they don’t want to do it or is not worth the effort, then why do it unless it is some recreational activity where the point is being a participant and having fun. to clarify for @NiceUnparticularMan
Other than school itself, summer/part-time jobs, and maybe getting a driver’s license, aren’t most activities recreational for most children and teens? I’m having a hard time coming up with a list of non-recreational activities.
ETA: Maybe swimming. I know a lot of families that consider learning to swim to be primarily a safety activity and not a recreational one. CHORES! There we go! Not recreational and not school. I wish that I could convince my kids to try their best when doing chores around the house. I admit that I’ve settled for “do the chore well enough that I don’t have to redo it after you finished your half-hearted attempt…” On the other hand, I’m not the best role model in the domestic realm. My only real goal is to have a clean enough house that we aren’t too embarrassed if someone pops in for an unexpected visit.
So I think MIT can be an interestingly different sort of litmus test. Like personally, I think MIT is really only a good fit for a narrow slice of kids. And again I can see in our high school, it is a significantly less popular application choice than Harvard, and its most popular cross application is actually CMU. It also gets relatively high cross applications with the engineering powerhouse publics like Cal and UCLA (which are not normally so high at our non-California HS), Michigan, Georgia Tech, and Illinois, Case Western is also unusually high (like as in more than Stanford or Yale), Caltech is unusually high, RPI is unusually high, and so on.
So again, I have nothing against the right sort of kid wanting to apply to MIT, and then filling out a list with other colleges that make sense for that sort of kid.
But if MIT was more popular in a general UMC HS (meaning it was not itself a STEM-focus HS), that would be interesting. That could reflect differing norms about desirable careers and such, but that of course is not entirely separate from tiger parentish sorts of worldviews. Possibly the rest of the list would again help us detect some of what was going on.
I note I think the point of many activities is to have fun, spend time with friends, maybe in some cases learn something, maybe in some cases get some exercise, and so on. Competition may be involved but it can be more friendly than cutthroat. Like when I play a card or board game with friends, you are supposed to try, but you are also supposed to make it fun.
And I think we have all experienced encounters with the people who don’t seem to really get the concept of a friendly competition. These people may win more games (maybe), but may be missing out on a lot of the real point of these activities.
Anyway, to me it is a little odd to say the point of all that is to be a participant. I mean you are participating, but the participation per se is not the end goal. The end goal is the fun, the friends, the learning, the exercising, and so on.
Earlier in the thread (too lazy to search through the 467 prior posts), it felt like there was an emerging consensus that tiger parenting is a continuum. I might even extend that to more of a grid (i.e. multiple components of parenting, with each component having its own continuum, with certain parts of the continuum being characteristic of tiger parenting). Thus, having a discussion of tiger parenting as a binary thing at this point is kind of perplexing to me.
That said, a few remarks on some of the recent posts:
Competition/Try Your Best: I really like @NiceUnparticularMan’s suggestion of trying your reasonable best. Maybe if my kid stays up studying and working every night until 2AM, the kid’s work product/test results will improve, but I don’t consider that a reasonable (or healthy) expectation. For some people, particularly perfectionists, “try your best” can lead them towards unhealthy habits. For others, it can feel very overwhelming (i.e. they think of needing to do their best as needing to put 100% of everything they have). This is part of where it comes down to knowing your kid as to whether you need to modify the “try your best” language to moderate it a bit.
Setting Goals: Yes, setting goals is good. But setting goals should be based on the kid’s own performance. For instance, having a kid set a goal for a 5-minute mile might be reasonable if they’re already running it in 5:15. If they’re at a 12-minute mile, that would be a very unreasonable goal (or, at the very least, would need to be a very long-term goal with incremental goals in-between and a willingness to change the ultimate goal). Aiming for a 1500 SAT could be a reasonable goal for someone who scored a 1470 on their first try. If someone scored an 1100 on the first try, setting a goal of 1500 is unreasonable. Setting goals should always be individualized and should have nothing to do with how others perform (whether better or worse than the individual).
Carrot vs Stick: I think this is where parents really need to think about their long-term parenting goals for their kids. What are the family’s long-term goals for their kids, and will a carrot or stick be more useful in achieving those goals? And where do the goals mentioned in Competition/Try Your Best fit in with respect to the long-term goals? We shouldn’t lose sight of the forest while focusing in on the trees.
Here are a number of examples of longer-term goals, several of which were inspired by this source.
Being respectful
Being responsible and accountable
Being independent and self-reliant
Having problem-solving and conflict resolution skills
Setting boundaries
Being curious
Having a love of learning
Being resilient
Being self-confident with a strong sense of self
Having relationships built on trust, respect, and open communication
I could not agree more that ultimately this should not be about some formula where tiger = bad, not-tiger = good. And as always, each kid is an individual, and the exact same parenting approach is not going to be optimal for two different kids. Which can be very frustrating and challenging at times, but is also part of what makes parenting rewarding (in my view at least).
Speaking of challenging, in its own way that is an extremely daunting list! Like I lost count of all the ways in which I am personally still working on those things myself.
But that is also part of the point right? Early on we are a big influence on our kids, but gradually they take on more responsibility for how they are going to develop, and eventually it is virtually all on them. And hopefully they are not as good as they can be when we are exiting the picture, hopefully they are still going to keep making progress on all that!
So this is kinda meta, but I think not only is all that really important to think about as a parent, but then you have to try to get your kids on board with valuing all that too, and interested in continuing their own journey on those things for really the rest of their lives.
But I made that list extensive because different families will value different things, and I wanted to make sure that everyone (hopefully) had several things that resonated for their particular families. I think it also helps to put in perspective whether getting into MIT or winning competitions or whatever other data point a family might care about is more, equally, or less important than some of those goals/values listed above, and then make their own parenting decisions accordingly.
Your “real point” may not be the same as someone else’s. I get the concept of a friendly competition. I’m just not interested in playing games that way - I’d prefer friendly conversation or a shared non-competitive activity (e.g. go to the beach, go for a walk, eat dinner together). And never have, whether with friends, with my parents, or with my kids. When the kids beat me, that’s because they played well enough to do so. And so we picked games where the requirements (and balance of skill and luck) were age-appropriate, or activities that weren’t about people competing with one another (you can go swimming without having to race). That created plenty of opportunities for fun, learning, exercising and so on.
To return to where this tangent started, I wonder what playing games was like in Maia Weintraub’s house growing up? Aren’t some people/families just naturally competitive (that’s how I grew up, with parents and grandparents who played a lot of competitive sport and/or games)? And undoubtedly annoying in certain circumstances to those who aren’t…(which is why I rarely play pickleball). But there are plenty of games where the outcome is essentially random that can be “fun” to play.
I was thinking of activities like sports, music, art, literature, other types of EC’s … At one level and in most instances, they can certainly be for fun. At another level though, more effort and dedication is called for. If the kid wants to compete at an organized level, and especially if time and resources are required of the parents, to me it’s not much of an ask to expect the kid to take his or her (reasonably) best shot. The problem is when the driving force of the activity is the parent, who either or both wants to relive their glory days or wants to have brag rights.
That’s fine, but I assume you are aware other people really enjoy this sort of activity. And I was just noting they do have a purpose for what they are doing, even if it is not a purpose you choose to pursue in that way yourself.
Our general approach to this is to try to figure out a reasonable level of commitment for all concerned. Like, we are probably not going to pay a lot of expensive club team fees or do a lot of long-distance travel for a sport where our kid is not very committed themselves. But, say, our athletic club offers some fun kids sports programs for kids of all levels, which are not very costly and we go there a lot anyway.
So if our kids want to just show up and do those programs without really any additional commitment, that is fine. They make friends, get out of the house and get exercise, the games and tournaments are fun, and so on. And sometimes it leads to more–like a lot of the kids in those programs with my S24 ended up varsity athletes in HS. Sometimes the same sports, sometimes not, but I think this background in team sports starting at an early age helped them develop in that direction.
Even if not that, I have often mentioned to my kids it is kinda nice to end up the sort of person where if a friend says, “Hey, you want to go play X?,” you have the confidence and basic athleticism and coordination to say, “Sure, let’s do it!” And depending on what it is and your background in X, you may well suck–that time. But that does not stop you from having fun, and again who knows, you might develop that interest.
Oh, and speaking of school sports, I see that as a bit of a middle ground depending on the team and desired role.
Like at least at our HS, kids who were the top players, and perhaps recruitable at least at the D3 level, usually did a lot of year-round stuff, and that was definitely a big commitment for the parents as well.
But at least on many teams, you could be a valued contributor without that level of commitment. For sure you needed to go to practice, including preseasons as relevant, and do whatever the captains and coaches asked of you. But then if you had some natural talent and worked hard at it during the season, eventually you could carve out a role.
From the parents, this did not necessarily require a lot since it was a school program. But we tried to attend games whenever feasible, volunteered time and money for the team, obviously bought some personal equipment, and so on. So, not entirely casual or costless, but way less of a use of family resources than the year-round kids.
It is when your child is doing something not because it makes them happy or brings them joy but, because it makes you (the parent happy) is the point you need to reassess your parenting style.
My kids participated in youth sports and, also, at the high school level. While there were many positive aspects, the negatives were significant - much of it centered around parental behavior and expectations. Parents sideline coaching, parents berating officials, parents hounding the coach about playing time and, worst of all, parents screaming at their kids from the sidelines. I’d like to say it was only a few bad apples . . . but it was far more than a few. So if kids want to engage in sports recreationally - for fun - I’m all for it.
I’d say “it depends”. I had an enthusiastic and passionate debater; I had a “I like hanging with my friends and sometimes the competitions are fun” debater-- and guess what? Both of them LOVED debate. The former was clearly bringing the A game, well prepared, asked for feedback by the faculty coach after every debate, was obviously giving 120%. The latter? Had a blast. Hung out with friends in a safe environment doing something with some intellectual content (not everything has to be intellectual, but how many smoothies can you drink in an afternoon if the activity is “hanging out at the mall”?)
I can’t imagine denying a kid the pleasure of this type of HS experience just because we weren’t seeing the same intensity and level of commitment (i.e. “best shot”) as another sibling. Some friendships turn toxic in HS, so I was not going to be the parent to discourage relationships with a bunch of VERY nice and kind kids just because my kid wasn’t totally, committed, “giving best shot” type of debater.
Sometimes being around nice and kind friends is valuable in and of itself… even if time and resources are required by the parents.
For us (both kids recruited athletes), the insane parents were the worst in the 9 to 14 age groups when expectations greatly exceeded reality. By HS, reality for the most part had set in.
I have expressed on other threads how much of a racket I think youth sports have become – sucking time and resources/money that could be better applied elsewhere. On the other hand, we found competitive sports to be an overall plus. Unless you are a physical freak, to succeed at a high level requires hard work, dedication, and the ability to take direction. You learn the value of teamwork and leadership and how to win and lose graciously. You can derive all of these life lessons from other activities, but sports are as good of an avenue as any.