How Tiger Parenting Styles Influence Children

How Tiger Parenting Styles Influence Children

Attending reading club, taking a piano lesson and learning golf, children barely have their own spare time at weekends because everything have been planned by their parents and extracurricular activities occupy all their times. To make children superior, parents push them to learn as more as possible and this is becoming a more common phenomenon, first in Asian countries like China, gradually in the US as well. This is a typical trait of tiger parenting style. As a matter of fact, even though some aspects of tiger parenting are worth learning, to have an optimal educational outcome on children, tiger parenting is not the best choice for parents because it has a lot of potential disadvantages as well.

 After the publication of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, the tiger parenting style in the book brought out great controversy among the society. The most typical trait of tiger parenting is parents that set a lot of strict discipline and highly control their children. In Western Asian countries, due to the large population base and rapid spread of education, competition between students is extremely intense. The strict educational selection system results in utilitarian social atmosphere, and that’s the reason why tiger parenting becomes main trend. Heavy extracurricular activity is only one part of tiger parenting. Inspired by the great achievement in academic and music of two daughters of Amy Chua, more families including western parents are following this parenting style.

Some people claim that parents should push their children to the limit to get the best educational outcome and that is how tiger parenting works. Many parents do believe that the more extracurricular activities children take part in, the more they will learn. It can’t be denied that appropriate amount of extracurricular activities usually help children to do better at school and have more gifts. Also, there is a high ratio of children that take part in extracurricular activities according to Census Bureau Report, Nearly 6 Out of 10 Children Participate in Extracurricular Activities. However, tiger mothers overestimate some children’s learning capacity and blindly let children have too many extracurricular activities, which doesn’t lead to ideal outcome obviously. In addition, I believe the heavy pressure itself on children in their early age is unnecessary and unreasonable. According to “Extracurricular Activities When is Enough”, written by Nicole, Pierotti, “If kids have too many activities on the go then they run the risk of stretching themselves too thin and not being able to really focus and master the skills of one activity”( qtd. in Pierotti).

It is another frustrating fact that to find out whether a child is well-educated, GPA comes to most people’s mind, especially for Asian parents. Most extracurricular activities are designed to improve children’s grade. According to "What Is “tiger” Parenting? How Does It Affect Children?", written by Su Yeong Kim,“Asian Americans are more likely to endorse the idea that academic success is due to effort instead of innate ability, and that they are more likely to believe that putting effort into school work will result in better academic outcomes.”(qtd. In Kim 30) Parenting style influences various aspects of daily life of a child such as academic performance, social performance and emotional health. Among those factors, GPA should be the one that is most frequently overemphasized because it is measured in direct and simple number. Tiger parenting is exaactly the representative that focuses on academic performance, and this is an essential reason why more families are following tiger parenting. However, It shouldn’t be the only index to access a child is doing well in his or her childhood. To predict his or her future is successful or not with only GPA is even more ridiculous. When Asian tiger mothers are overstressing academic performance, their children usually are losing in social skill. At the same time, tiger mother’s overprotection not only fails to help children develop their independence from parents, but also affects children’s mental health and make them more fragile than normal children.