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Time of India
25-05-2025
- General
- Time of India
THIS parenting style is doing more harm than good. Here's why
W hen it comes to parenting, there is no one size fits all. Parents all across the world might have different styles, but at the end of the day, all of them want the best for their child. Whether it is gentle parenting, helicopter parenting, or strict parenting, all parents try to achieve the best results - making their kids smarter, and successful in life. But is THIS parenting style doing more harm than good? Let's know all about Tiger Parenting... What Is Tiger Parenting? Tiger parenting is an extremely strict style, where parents set very high standards for their children, often focusing mainly on academic success and discipline. These parents expect their kids to spend long hours studying or practicing skills like music, without any leeway for playing, chilling with friends etc. They often do not allow children to choose their own interests and may penalise them if they go astray. This parenting style became widely known after Amy Chua's book 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,' which described strict rules like no sleepovers, no TV, and always being the best in school (no second best) Emotional toll on children Studies have found that children raised by tiger parents often suffer from anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. When parents use shame or guilt to punish their children for not meeting "their" expectations, it can damage the child's confidence and lead to feelings of worthlessness. For example, telling a child that he/she is useless after an average score in a test can damage the child's emotional quotient. A 2018 study in Singapore showed that children with very critical parents who held them to high standards were more likely to develop depression and anxiety than children with less intrusive parenting styles. These children may also develop perfectionism that harms their emotional health, making them petrified of failure instead of seeing it as a chance to learn. Curbs creativity Such parents often keep academic achievement above all else, leaving little room for creativity or socialization. Children may miss out on hobbies, friendships, and playtime because their schedules are packed with study and practice. This can lead to a lack of creativity and poor social skills since these areas are not encouraged or given time. Moreover, because tiger parents tightly control their children's activities, kids have fewer chances to make their own choices. This can hurt their decision-making skills and reduce their intrinsic motivation—meaning they do things mainly to please their parents, not because they want to. Why such parenting style Many tiger parents come from backgrounds where failure meant serious consequences, such as poverty or discrimination. For them, pushing children to succeed is a way to protect them from hardship. This parenting style can be a response to trauma or fear, where parents believe that only the best achievements will secure their child's future. While this approach makes sense from a survival perspective, it can create emotional distance between parents and children. Kids may feel that love and approval depend on their success, making them anxious and disconnected from their true selves. Finding a balance Although tiger parenting can teach discipline and a strong work ethic, experts suggest that parents should balance high expectations with warmth and understanding. Children need to feel loved unconditionally, not just when they meet goals. Allowing kids to explore their interests, make mistakes, and develop social skills is important for their overall growth. Therapists recommend that parents listen to their children's feelings and support them in setting their own goals. This helps build self-esteem and motivation from within, rather than relying on external pressure. Healing from the effects of strict parenting can also involve therapy to address anxiety, depression, or anger caused by high-pressure upbringing. One step to a healthier you—join Times Health+ Yoga and feel the change
South China Morning Post
27-04-2025
- General
- South China Morning Post
Are Hong Kong's tiger parents harming their children's futures by pushing them too hard?
Maths on Monday, taekwondo on Tuesday, piano lessons on Wednesday, creative writing on Thursday and swimming on Saturday. No, this isn't a schedule of activities offered at your local community centre, but a typical week of extracurriculars for a student in Hong Kong on top of their regular academic curriculum, usually planned by a so-called 'tiger parent' or 'helicopter parent'. Advertisement Used to describe parents who are too strict, protective and intensely involved in their children's lives – with an extreme focus on academic performance and high-status extracurricular activities (ECAs) – tiger parents are especially prevalent in Hong Kong and the rest of Asia, where huge value is placed on academic achievement. 'When I first moved here 13 years ago, tiger parenting was more ubiquitous, thanks in part to Amy Chua's book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,' says Dr Melissa Ortega Giglio, clinical psychiatrist at Central Health's child development team. 'However, new parenting styles have emerged and become more attractive and mainstream.' Tiger parents are still very common in Hong Kong, according to educators. Photo: Dickson Lee For Brenda (whose name has been changed for privacy reasons), a mother of three and international school educator in Hong Kong, 'Tiger parenting is still very common. Parents send their children to all sorts of classes from a young age, even when they're just one or two years old. I'd say that 80 per cent of our students are involved in some kind of ECA.' Despite its negative connotations though, Brenda also points out that tiger parenting usually comes from a good place. 'Parents genuinely care and want their kids to have a head start in life,' she explains. 'Some are more relaxed than others and send their kids to ECAs because they want them to spend their time more productively than just playing video games at home. Others are a lot stricter and have high expectations – wanting them to get into exclusive programmes like a school's gifted programme, for instance.' Tiger parenting can be gruelling for children, who are often put through many hours of private tutoring, which are crammed into after-school hours and weekends, not only for academic subjects but for sports, music, languages and the arts as well. Those who perform well could consider themselves lucky to receive praise, given the stereotypical cultural reluctance of Asian parents to heap compliments on their children, while those who fall short of their parents' exceptionally high standards might be scolded, or even worse, shamed. Invictus' Fiona Chan says parental pressure has long-term effects on children. Photo: Handout 'Hong Kong students face a lot of pressure to meet society's expectations – whether it's the school's, their teachers' or their parents' – and I feel for them,' says Brenda, who has seen these scoldings first-hand. 'It breaks my heart, and we try as much as possible to encourage parents to be supportive and positive instead of judgmental and overly critical.'
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
The dogma of ‘Britain's Strictest Headmistress' is a con as old as time - gentle parenting produces happier kids
You've heard the terrible news, I'm sure. Our children are pampered. We raise the coddled brats not as stern parents but simpering friends. We flatter their whims and let them bury their heads in screens. We fetishise what they feel, care not for what they learn, and neglect what they need: that good old-fashioned commonsense discipline that raised the great generations of times past. Inarguably the greatest peddler of this diagnosis is Katharine Birbalsingh, Britain's Strictest Headmistress™ and co-founder of the Michaela Community School in Wembley, which boasts fastidious adherence to uniforms, timed loo breaks and silent corridors. In an interview with the Times last week, she yet again bemoaned the 'gentle parenting' that is leaving her students ill-equipped for modern life. Her approach is hardly new in modern times. Amy Chua's 2011 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, preached stern, academically focused parenting, in which withholding compliments, denying playdates and banning sleepovers were the order of the day. It was a sensation at the time (and, in fact, so influential to this cohort that Michaela would release a book entitled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers two years later). In the time since, these age-old woes have been joined by constant panics over smartphones, tablets and screen time, perhaps best represented by Jonathan Haidt's 2024 tome The Anxious Generation, which posits that allowing our children to avail themselves of the technology that powers our lives has spawned an epidemic of mental illness that we must do all we can to forestall. At this juncture, I'll admit I'm not convinced. In the case of Birbalsingh, I find her pronouncements to be boilerplate conservatism rebadged as revolutionary pedagogy, complete with consistent, and tired, jeremiads against 'woke culture' and 'Marxist' education ministers. Michaela's academic results are indeed excellent, but so are those of many other schools that do not subscribe to its philosophy, and the web of factors that inform how schools perform is complex. As for how their students are parented at home – the most common crux of Birbalsingh's pronouncements – we, quite rightly, have no idea, despite her constant endeavours to sow the airwaves with charming anecdotes about how feckless and stupid they often are. In the case of Chua, the available research counters her claims quite starkly. A 2013 paper by Su Yeong Kim at the University of Texas at Austin found that children of tiger parents were 'more likely than those with supportive or easygoing parents to feel more alienated from their parents, report greater depressive symptoms, and, in contrast to the stereotype of high achievement, report lower GPAs [grade point averages]'. Haidt's thesis that smartphones and social media use are turning our children into depressive zombies sounds convincing until one considers the correlative fallacy in connecting increased smartphone use to rising diagnoses of mental ill health. When I recall the entirely unaddressed mental wellbeing of classmates during my own pre-smartphone schooling, I can freely imagine that diagnosis and treatment had a lot of catching up to do. Consider, also, the consistent refrain that British kids are falling behind in coding, and that touchy feely subjects like arts and languages should make way for computing classes for every child in Britain. How, precisely, we achieve this without screens is left for brighter minds than ours to figure out. If I sound glib about all these Cassandras, perhaps it's because I'm sick of the tired grift that rewards them for passing off alarmist hectoring as common sense. My own generation of parents – the timid, indulgent, millennials they so despise – are, ourselves, the 'terror tots' of the 80s and 90s, raised on a diet of ultraviolent computer games and video nasties; the very same tykes the press insisted would grow up to be remorseless, vacant serial killers. Were I to sit with those currently stigmatising parental indulgence and yearning for the return of cold, hard discipline, I'd have little problem discerning which generation had trended toward psychopathy in the intervening years. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion Just about the only thing we can say with any certainty is that strictures of discipline, education and access to technology, affect different children in different ways. A greater awareness of their individual needs is warranted, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach aimed at scaring parents and flattering the culture war zealots who consider every new thing strange and every kindness wicked. Children are, it turns out, frustratingly individual. In this sense, one might almost compare them to human beings. Anyone still doing the 'kids these days' routine in 2025 is engaged in a con as old as time. You've possibly encountered an old quote that often does the rounds. 'We have fallen upon evil times. The world has waxed very old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their parents.' It's often attributed to King Naram, who ruled the Akkadian empire from approximately 2255–2218 BC, with the humorous implication that people have been saying these kinds of things for millennia. In actual fact, no useful source for it stretches back further than 1913. As such, we don't know if a Mesopotamian king wrote those words more than four millennia ago, but we do know that we've been mocking our peers for echoing these scaremongering, solipsistic sentiments for a century at least. Call me old-fashioned, but this is a tradition I reckon we should uphold.
