Last week, the New York Times ran an article titled “Where Should You Raise Your Children?” The answers, taken from a recent study by the personal-finance company WalletHub, were not particularly surprising, but they were notable in their near-uniformity. Fremont, California, a city of two hundred and thirty thousand people that sits between Oakland and San Jose, posted the highest score. More than sixty per cent of its population is Asian. Irvine, California, whose population is more than forty per cent Asian, came in third place, followed by Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas that is famous for its large population of highly educated immigrants from East and South Asia. One should be careful about drawing too many conclusions from provocatively titled studies, especially those that measure vague criteria, such as “family fun.” Still, the WalletHub study confirmed a bit of conventional wisdom that has taken shape during the past twenty or so years. If you want to move somewhere in America that is within commuting distance of a major city, and you prioritize good schools and public safety, there’s a decent chance you’re going to end up somewhere with a lot of Asians.
A somewhat tongue-in-cheek but not necessarily inaccurate conclusion can be derived from this. If many young, upwardly mobile families want to move to cities like Fremont, Plano, and Irvine—or other academically competitive enclaves, including Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, northern New Jersey, or Chicago’s north suburbs, all of which also have significant Asian populations—then it might be fair to say that the upper middle class has, as a group, adopted the stereotypical Asian parenting ethos. If we accept the information provided by the Times article, and we believe that a healthy Asian population correlates directly with desirability, then perhaps a whole lot of people, regardless of their ethnic background, want to become “tiger parents”—or, at the very least, they want to live near one.
Before we decide whether this is a good thing, we should take a moment to consider who the tiger parents in these desirable places are, and how they shape the culture of the upper middle class. I should confess here that I am a conflicted tiger parent. And although Berkeley, where I live, did not make the WalletHub top-cities list, it is widely considered one of the most attractive places to live in the country. My seven-year-old daughter does not play the piano or violin, nor does she attend any after-school tutoring programs, but I did make sure she knew how to read before she entered kindergarten, a frequently thankless task that required nightly struggle sessions with Siegfried Engelmann’s “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.” Once that was complete, my wife and I required her to write at least a page every night, an expectation that continues to this day. The topic or form doesn’t matter, but the rule—one that, admittedly, gets broken far more often than I would like—is that she cannot turn on a screen until some number of words have been committed to a page. This is a chore that I also had to perform every night as a child, and, though I did not enjoy it, I do think it taught me how to fill an empty page without too much pain or consternation. This is the main skill that is required to be a weekly columnist, and so I am thankful to my mother now, even if I wasn’t always then.
Conflicted tiger parents are quite common. In “Raising Raffi,” my New Yorker colleague Keith Gessen meditates on Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” the book that popularized the term. “I was surprised when I finally read the book not long ago,” Gessen writes. “It was much funnier and more self-aware than I’d expected.” Gessen, the son of Russian immigrants, seems taken with Chua’s theory of generational decline, in which the first generation works hard to survive; the second, taking the spoils of the first, charges into professional fields, such as medicine, engineering, and finance; and the soft third generation turns listless and privileged. Gessen wonders if he should be the Russian version of the tiger mom, and mentions this to his wife, the writer Emily Gould. She suggests a name: “bear dad.”
Around the time that Gessen’s book came out, I was talking to a friend, Konstantin, who grew up as the son of Russian immigrants in the same desirable Boston suburb as Gessen. He and his wife, whose parents live in Hong Kong, were about to move to New York, for work, with their two kids. They were choosing among wealthy suburbs in Westchester, where his half-Russian, half-Chinese children would attend school. One suburb, Bronxville, was overwhelmingly white; the other, Scarsdale, had a good number of Asians. His father-in-law warned him to stay away from the more Asian suburb because he thought the kids there would be too academically driven.“You cannot outcompete the Asians,” Konstantin recalls his father-in-law telling his wife. “They are too much for you.” Konstantin and I laughed about this, because what his father in-law didn’t understand—but what we, the members of the second generation, knew—was that the Asian kids in Scarsdale weren’t the Asian kids you had to worry about. They would mostly be members of Chua’s third generation, soft and spoiled with no need to fight their way into the upper middle class; they were already there.
What Chua was describing, of course, was a process of assimilation. But, interestingly, in these desirable cities, assimilation can go both ways. In the book “Race at the Top,” the sociologist Natasha Warikoo examines communities where there is intense academic competition between a newer Asian-immigrant cohort and more established white families. (I wrote about the book back in 2022.) In these places, Warikoo finds, white families feel a degree of resentment toward their Asian neighbors, and will sometimes try to change how students are assessed, in ways that end up benefitting their own kids—reducing homework loads, for instance, in the name of emotional well-being. But those parents will not advocate for lessening the inordinate amount of hours required for high-pressure youth sports. The parenting culture in these supposedly desirable cities is largely set by the race for college admissions; most likely, these parents are simply responding to what the Ivy Leagues and exclusive colleges say they want from their applicants. After the arrival of Asian families in these towns, white parents, wary of their stereotypically academically driven new neighbors, may adopt a more intense approach to their own children’s schoolwork. And as Ivy League schools turn to supposedly holistic standards for admission, Asian parents have started putting squash racquets in their children’s hands and encouraging them to start nonprofits while still in high school.
So should people actually want to raise their kids in these tiger-parent cities? Or does the compression of privilege, ambition, and competition create a toxic atmosphere that strips away the good parts of childhood? In an effort to think through my answers to these questions, I called Amy Chua. “I think there is something to more and more people becoming tiger parents, but they do it in completely different ways now,” Chua told me. A lot of these parents wouldn’t admit to their tiger side, she added, but the time and thought they put into their children’s various competitions gave them away.
Chua has taught at Yale Law School for years, and, in that time, her students have changed, she told me. (She also said that a remarkable number of them now come from Plano.) Before, one might have called them grinds, but now they all had a variety of interests—standup comedy, leftist politics, what have you. Chua believed that this new breadth of enthusiasms could be traced to a diversification of tiger-parenting methods.
Chua felt like the “lone crazy one” back when she was writing her book. And people seemed shocked when the book came out. “But now I’m seeing that this is becoming much more common,” she said. “Parents are adjusting. They realize that tennis and the violin don’t really work now, and they decide to do art or environmental stuff. And so you have tiger parents who are now very creative on how to get their children to excel in these very specialized niches. So maybe it’s not standing over the child and making them practice the piano over and over. But this résumé-building is just the new incarnation.”
The parenting style that Chua championed more than a decade ago has seemingly achieved broad cultural acceptance, even if in slightly modified ways. Most parents who, like Chua, want to send their children to prestigious colleges understand that they are more tiger parent than not. “I guess you could see it as a confirmation of what I was writing about,” Chua said. But she didn’t seem to feel great about that. Her tiger parenting had been driven by her obsession with getting her two daughters into an Ivy League school. “Now, fifteen years later, when I see other parents of any background really wanting their kids to go to Brown or Harvard,” she said, “my heart sinks, because the odds are just so low now, and it’s going to require so much anxiety to get them there.”
Still, she continues to think that tiger parenting is mostly beneficial. She distinguished it from snowplow parenting, in which the parent removes all obstacles from their child’s way, and helicopter parenting, in which the parents hover over every decision their children make. Admission to prestigious colleges is more competitive than ever, and there is a fear among some white and Asian upper-middle-class parents that their children are at a disadvantage when compared with the children of underrepresented minorities—not to mention legacies, and the offspring of billionaire donors. This has fostered an extremely unhealthy culture, Chua said. She saw the downsides of this culture in her students, some of whom seemed more burned out than those she had in the past. “Something needs to be radically changed, because all this pressure is on a road to nowhere,” she said.
I think I’m supposed to dismiss all this competition as bad and destructive to young minds. I see the unhealthiness that Chua describes. And I could cite the rising anxiety and mental-health problems that afflict today’s youth, and say that, although screens and phones may be partially at fault, we also need to take a hard look at how much our children compete with one another, whether in sports, academics, or even in the world of social justice. And yet, like the bear-dad Gessen, I can’t quite shake the feeling that a guileless and seemingly brain-dead style of permissive parenting, which emphasizes “play” and essentially places children in talk therapy right after they get out of diapers, is worse. Kids should understand that mastering anything worthwhile requires years of unpleasant training and endless practice. The most unhappy adults I meet were told from young ages to “pursue their dreams.” Some of them can express their ambitions in grand language, but lack the basic ability to meet deadlines. They seem to lack the understanding that all work is dignified as long as you respect it.
Can strict parenting that focusses on building robust work habits and what is sometimes called grit be extricated from the monetized and predatory world of endless child competition for admission to exclusive colleges? In an earlier column, I wrote about privileged parents who make their child compete at things without really knowing why. My defense of tiger parenting stems from a desire to impart the dignity of work to my children alongside a belief that satisfaction does not lie in any result. I suppose there might be other ways to accomplish this; I could send her to a retreat where she would learn the lessons of the Bhagavad Gita about working without concern for the results, or I could have her listen to Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb,” which has roughly the same message. But I learned that lesson through my mother’s own dabblings in tiger parenting. I am fine now. I don’t really know another way.♦
