If Books Could Kill - Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

A memoir about parenting very badly and then getting weirdly defensive when anyone asks you about it.Where to find us: Peter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:Effects of Authoritative Parental Control on Child Behavior, Child DevelopmentTypes of Parenting Styles and Effects On ChildrenDoes “Tiger Parenting” Exist? Parenting Profiles of Chinese Americans and Adolescent Developmental OutcomesAssociations of parenting dimensions and styles with externalizing problems of children and adolescents: An updated meta-analysisDo the associations of parenting styles with behavior problems and academic achievement vary by culture? Results from a meta-analysisParenting Styles: A Closer Look at a Well-Known ConceptImpact of Behavioral Inhibition and Parenting Style on Internalizing and Externalizing Problems from Early Childhood through AdolescenceThe One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump SupporterInvestigating Correlates of Self-Regulation in Early Childhood with a Representative Sample of English-Speaking American FamiliesAmy Chua thinks identity politics on both sides are to blame.How the 'Tiger Mom' Convinced the Author of Hillbilly Elegy to Write His Story Thanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

The acoustics at your new place are different. They're like tinier. Well, I... Tinier. I'm in the, uh... I'm in a little booth. Oh, you're in like a little Superman phone booth? I'm in a little thing, yeah. Okay.

I'm talking into one at least. Yeah, you're missing the dulcet tones of your previous place. We're not gonna get those emails anymore asking about your status. No, that's on... that's on you. You gotta... you have to... It's up to me to make one person on this podcast sound sexy. Look, I... I don't tell you what to do It's up to me to make one person on this podcast sound sexy. Look, I don't tell you what to do with your own voice,

but you gotta make mine hot. All right, Michael. Peter. What do you know about the battle hymn of the tiger mother? We already learned from Malcolm Gladwell that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something, but this was the book that taught Americans

you can also become an expert by someone else yelling at you for 10,000 hours. ["The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," by Amy Chua plays.] All right, the book, Michael, is the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua. Yes. She was a Yale law professor and an author who had written a couple of relatively popular international affairs books. But this was her first brush with like mainstream success and notoriety. The book is styled as sort of a memoir where she is recalling raising her two daughters

under a strict parenting regime that she calls tiger parenting or alternately Chinese parenting. The book came out in 2011 and it caused a pretty big stir. I will say as a basic methodological principle, I feel like if you're going to write a book about how being mean to your kids works, I do want to hear from the kids. I will say one thing in defense of Amy. Her kids seem to be supportive. Oh, yeah. They both seem to have turned out okay. Well, then she's correct.

Who would have thought that two children raised by Yale law professors would end up becoming American elites? A little content warning for our listeners up top. There aren't any descriptions of physical abuse, but there are definitely some things that veer into or near abusive territory. The thing is, I am triggered by this because I didn't have a strict upbringing and I turned out hella shitty.

So it's actually, it's hard for me to listen to people, people who got it right the first time. I can't decide whether you are obviously successful, and that's tongue-in-cheek, or whether we are both podcasters and, in fact, could have used some pretty aggressive discipline. The latter, 100%. Yeah, that's probably right. Something has gone wrong. So to give you a sense of the arc of this book, it covers Amy Chua raising her two daughters,

Sophia and Louisa, who she calls Lulu, under her strict parenting regime, which she nicknames tiger parenting. And then Lulu becomes a teenager and increasingly resists the strict parenting dynamic. So it's the clash between her and Lulu that inspires her to chronicle the whole ordeal in a book. I want to go over some of what we see in the book, and then we can talk about what the research says about this type of parenting.

And then we will have a vote on which race we think is the best at parenting. It's about time we got into the ranking the races exercise. That's something we both been on Twitter long enough, and that's basically 80% of what it is now. So it makes sense that we would engage in this exercise. Yeah, and I know you've told me privately that you think that white people do it better, but let's talk about the data before we draw any conclusions. That was based on the data, Peter.

You know me well enough to know. To give you a sense of what the book is like, I am going to send you the very first paragraph. She says, I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do. Attend a sleepover, have a play date, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A,

not be the number one student in every subject except gym and drama, play any instrument other than the piano or violin, not play the piano or violin. Oh, harsh stuff on drama here. It's a real victim of this. The theater kid is collateral damage throughout this book. Amy Chua thinks you are a fucking loser. Obviously, this is a lot. It's meant to jar you, and I think I need to provide a bit of a caveat as we go on throughout the book

She maintains a certain level of self-awareness. She knows that this is over-the-top. It's not meant entirely literally Yeah, I think that publicly she has taken advantage of that haziness to sort of alternately Embrace or distance herself from tiger parenting, depending on the situation. This is the Ann Coulter thing, where sort of officially she's joking, but also she's kind of not. Uh-huh. This is over the top. It's like you're not allowed

to not be the number one student. Right. Like that's obviously psychotic, so it's slightly tongue in cheek, but then to what extent is this actually useful advice if you can't determine whether she's joking or not, right? And and that's I mean, it's a rhetorical strategy often used by conservatives To sort of like maintain that like oh, it's it's not entirely serious sort of posture

But like then when people are like no, I like this. Yeah, then they're like, yeah. Thanks. I They're not they're not like no it was a joke you shouldn't like this yeah, then they're like yeah, thanks. I right right right They're not they're not like no it was a joke. You shouldn't like this This is like when I asked straight dudes have you ever fooled around with a guy have you ever had bisexual thoughts? How is it like that? I'm just doing this to troll you at this point. I Just want to make you as uncomfortable as possible right off the bat God it's working remarkable that you can always draw a parallel between something and you sexually harassing straight men.

So, a big part of the controversy surrounding this book stems from a single piece of PR by Chua's publisher. In January 2011, the Wall Street Journal ran excerpts from the book with the headline, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior. Oh, okay. So I'm going to send you a few long excerpts here. I'm ready to accuse her of anti-white racism. It's time for us to finally get there.

So this is her description of the three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mindsets. The white mind. The white mind. The white mind. She says, First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly

try to reassure their children about how good they are, notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result, they behave very differently. For example, if a child comes home with an A- on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on a test, some Western parents will still praise the

child. Other Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child stupid, worthless, or a disgrace. Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in a subject, or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and probably the whole school. You can see several big thematic elements here. One, she believes that this sort of like coddling is counterproductive.

Two, this is pretty consistent. She will often sort of suggest that Western parents are secretly doubting their parenting style, right? Yeah. So she's not just saying there are these cultural differences. She's making this sort of affirmative case that one is worse, at least in some regards, right? Yeah, it's very similar to the previous airport bestseller, white people dial a phone like

this. It's basically what she's doing. I'm about to send you the second big difference between Chinese and Western parents. She says, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches pulling in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating, and spying on their kids.

Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud. By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. Jed actually has the opposite view. Children don't choose their parents, he once said to me. They don't even choose to be born. It's their parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility

to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids. This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent. Who's Jed? That is her husband. Oh, okay. Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld.

Wikipedia, scroll down to controversies. We'll talk about it later. But this is, I mean, friends of mine who are like second generation immigrants, this does actually sound fairly familiar to me from like their upbringing. Yeah, I think that they're, I think that she's touching on something that has a truth to it. Yeah. And now I'm going to send you the third difference between Western and Chinese parents.

Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, I got a part in the school play. I'm villager number six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal

every day from three to seven and I'll also need a ride on weekends. God help any Chinese kid who tried that one. Oh, she's really coming for the theater kids. She hates them. Every time she's looking for an example of some dumb bullshit that students do, she thinks of theater. It's very funny when you contrast it

with her love of classical music. She makes one child play piano and one play violin. To me, I'm gonna be honest, as someone who just didn't do extracurriculars, these are the same thing. It's just nerd stuff you do after school. It's also indicative of how much advice like this. It's not virtue signaling,

but it's something like elite signaling. The reason you want your kids to play piano or violin is because those are coded as something the upper castes do. That's not really about the creative expression of your kids or like sort of self-actualization or that your kids enjoy it. It's showing to other elites, like, look, my kid is one of you. Like, violin and piano require just as much talent as singing or dancing or performing or speedrunning.

I threw in so you wouldn't notice. So, a lot of critics and readers were concerned that all of this veered into abuse or at the very least was misguided parenting. Of all people, David Brooks wrote a fairly withering review titled Amy Chua's A Wimp. Okay. Where he basically made this tongue-in-cheek argument that tiger parenting makes kids weak, not strong, because it doesn't prepare them to navigate like social dynamics right that feels like he's responding the fact that like this is an

asian lady saying that she's better than whites i feel like if a conservative christian made exactly these arguments he'd be cool with it his well his original title was in defense of whites that's every column could actually be retitled out. I love the idea of David Brooks submitting his column and every single week the title is in defense of whites and the editor just changes it to something more on topic. So Chua defends herself across various platforms. She took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to say like, look, this is a memoir, not a how-to guide. In the same breath, in that Wall Street Journal defense, she pivots to advocating for and defending tiger parenting. The journal piece is like her answering reader questions. She says that

tiger parenting can quote, absolutely lead to children leading happy lives as adults, as long as high expectations are coupled with love, understanding, and parental involvement. This is a gift my parents gave to me and what I hope I'm giving my daughters. She also gives some advice to someone who wants to apply her strategies to toddlers, one of the most unhinged things I've ever read in my life.

Are you lazing around in your crib right now? Get to the piano. Sippy cups are for closers. So again, sort of unclear what exactly is being endorsed by her here, right? Yeah. It seems like when she receives criticism, she says that her work is being misunderstood, but when people like what she's saying, she never corrects them, she just runs with it. Have you had bisexual thoughts? The more you would know, the more I'm going to do it. A couple of years ago, she was a guest on Barry Weiss's podcast. Oh my God.

Did you listen to it, Peter? I am one of the greatest journalists of all time. And so I did this. This is basically reporting from the war zone for me. Yeah, yeah. I would have rather been in Baghdad in oh three Listening to this fucking podcast I'm gonna spare your algorithm and I like I did a screen recording of the relevant elements here

Oh, you're gonna send me a fucking clip right now. I'm gonna send you a clip. Oh fuck Barry and Amy I Think I Barry and Amy. I think I was just a catalyst. I think that at that moment, a lot of Western parents maybe subconsciously... You know when a pendulum swings too far? I think a lot of people were starting to worry, like, wait, have we gone too far?

Everybody's getting a trophy. Right, too indulgent. Right. Oh, Barry Weiss is like, wow, tell me more about this. The kids are coddled. Interesting. Wow. Something I've never heard before. Totally new stuff.

Right. Let's dive in. I'm searching in my vast mind space for a metaphor. Are you familiar with pendulums? This is her talking about why she thinks her book hit a nerve. And this is something you hear from advocates of stricter parenting all the time, that permissive parenting is too common and has gone too far, right? I have not found, and this might just be my inability to do this research, but I asked

a bunch of people, I dug around, I have not found any real solid indication that permissive parenting has gotten drastically more popular. It is true that certain harsh forms of discipline, like corporal punishment, have drastically declined. That is true. But that's not exactly the same thing. Polls show that permissive parenting is less popular than harsh parenting.

So this sort of just comes off like fear-mongering to me. I'm not sure that there's any real basis in fact. It feels like it's based around anecdotes about certain types of overprotective parents or something. She's essentially making an empirical argument, but pretending that it's just like you can throw it out there and using her own experience as the only evidence of it. I'm going to send you another clip. Oh, God.

You think I was going to listen to the whole thing and not make you listen as I was listening? Fuck. After about two months, everyone said, this is when it dies down. And it just didn't. It went on for like six months. and I've really changed a lot. I mean I remember being in England and everywhere I went I was defensive and it's a memoir. I didn't really mean it and at one point somebody said, you know, I think you should just own this and I remember thinking, oh my god, that's going to make things so much easier, you know.

And I just learned, I just stopped trying to say it was all a misunderstanding, which it actually was. But I just thought, you know what, there are aspects of this way that I parented that I made some mistakes, but I am proud of it. I stand by it. I do think that self-esteem is not something that you could just gift your children. So yeah, it's been interesting. Such Barry Bate too, to be like, I was cancelled by the left. Barry loves it. And Barry's like, wow, tell me more. So even here, it's hard to gauge where exactly she stands on any of this, right?

Like she's saying it was a misunderstanding, but that she stands by it. On top of that, a lot of people who embrace strict discipline start praising her when the book comes out, right? Charles Murray writes a blog post titled Amy Chua Bludgeon's entire generation of sensitive parents bless her He brushes aside the cruelty of tiger parenting and then he immediately gets into the role of genetics You know how we do. Shocking twists. That's that Charles Murray special. You want that Murray sauce on top.

What if the kids are just baked wrong? Then you have conservative publications praising her. The Daily Telegraph writes favorable reviews because they endorse the harsh parenting style in the book. So intent aside, people are generally reading it as if it is an endorsement of harsh parenting style in the book, right? So intent aside, people are generally reading it as if it is an endorsement of the parenting style and the way that it's sort of digested into our culture is as an endorsement. Yeah, people are reading it correctly.

I think so too, I think so too. I think that generally speaking, it appears to endorse large chunks of the parenting style that it describes. She does sort of hit a wall with Lulu and then like alter up her style toward the end of the book where she gives Lulu a little more free rein to decide what her interests will be.

She lets her pursue tennis instead of violin. But I want to be clear, I was aware of the arc, the narrative arc of the book before I read it, and I was expecting that the final third of the book would be about what I think about parenting now. Instead, she just sort of vaguely changes the parenting style a little bit toward the end, and then the book ends immediately.

There's no lessons to be drawn. It's not a good ending to the end and then the book ends immediately. There's no like lessons to be drawn. It's not a good ending to the book like objectively, like it doesn't really tie anything together narratively, but it also just, it's also written to like maximize your confusion about where she actually stands on all this. Right, because it's a refutation of her thesis. The whole point of the book is that tiger parenting is better and then at the end she's like oh well some of this western stuff is fine too. It's like the Mars and Venus guy saying oh yeah I guess men and women are the same. They're the rules, ladies being like yeah act like a normal person.

So alright let's talk data. Can this type of parenting be defined, can it be measured, what are the results of this type of parenting? On a spectrum, how tiger is your parenting? So a lot of the modern research about parenting styles stems from the work of Diana Baumrind who published multiple articles about this in the 60s and 70s. She identified three general styles of parenting, authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. In very simple terms, authoritarian parents try to control and direct their children's

behavior and their children's attitude in accordance with a set of rigid, absolute standards. They use coercion rather than reasoning. They prioritize obedience, and they punish disobedience harshly. Research from Baumbrindt and others shows that these children tend to be good at following instructions, but also have lower self-esteem, are less socially adept, are worse at making independent decisions, and have higher levels of aggression and depression. Then you have permissive parents on the other end of the spectrum. These parents make few demands of their children. They allow them to regulate their own behavior. They

implement very little structure. These children have better self-esteem, better social skills, but they struggle with self-regulation and bad habits. They perform worse academically. They're more impulsive. They're often more demanding. It's on me. And then you have authoritative parents, which are sort of in between. These parents establish clear guidelines, but they will generally explain to their children the reasons behind those guidelines. Disciplinary measures exist, but they tend to be less punitive.

The children have more autonomy to establish their own goals. There's more dialogue with the child. Research has shown very consistently that these children have the best results in almost every category. They tend to be responsible, have better self-regulation, higher self-esteem, better social outcomes, and better academic outcomes than any type of parenting. Right, but there's also a big correlation causation thing here, too. Maybe those kids are kind of more high-functioning,

which makes it easier to be that kind of parent, like a little bit more collaborative. Whereas if you have a kid that's like fiercely independent, you might kind of be forced to take a permissive stance, or your kid might be like acting out a ton and that kind of pushes you in the more authoritarian direction. Like I think so much of this stuff

is just really hard to measure. It is, there's a ton of noise here. I think it's much harder to like point out where you were as a child or as a parent on the spectrum than you'd think, right? It's also very hard to gauge, you know? It's hard to remember exactly what your day-to-day was as a child decades later. It's hard to know what an appropriate amount of discipline was.

I, you know, I was a misbehaving kid, right? So like, if you're a kid who's misbehaving all the time, wouldn't you expect to see a little more discipline, right? Right, right. It's very hard to do anecdotal analysis of these things. I think my parents were permissive with me and authoritarian with my brother because we just needed different styles. And I was straight A student, I would just sit in class and read Stephen King books.

I was like, I just didn't need very much watering. Yeah, if you see your young child reading Stephen King while everyone else is socializing, just just leave it be. No correction needed, folks. Well, I turned out well. With one early intervention, you are working in marketing. That's true. If my parents had grounded me a single time, I would be married to Pete Buttigieg.

I could get I could get to the top because of my general vacuousness. My... Your lack of interest and deep knowledge of things, it's your best asset, Peter. When Bruce Lee said, be like water, what he meant was do whatever your boss thinks is good. So we will talk in a minute about where tiger parenting fits into this parenting style framework. But I want to pause because even at a glance, you can see that some of these findings undercut Chua's central principles.

One very prominent element of the book, something that she has stood by over time, something that she talked about in that clip with Barry Weiss, is that you cannot gift your child self-esteem. They have to earn it. And so the point of forcing your kid to practice an instrument for hours on end every day, which she did, is that after they do it, they will be great at that instrument and being great will give them self-esteem. There is a story where she is attempting to force a seven-year-old Lulu to learn a certain piece

titled The Little White Donkey and Lulu is resisting aggressively. I'm gonna send you that. She says, Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed, and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I donated to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have the little white donkey perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here? I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it.

I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent, and pathetic. Okay, now we get into the borderline abuse stuff. Yeah. Like, no food? This is fucked. So this ultimately leads to Lulu getting it right. And then Shua says, quote, Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem

is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't. She goes on to say that, quote, Western parents try to respect their children's individuality. By contrast, the Chinese parent believes

the best way to protect their children is individuality. By contrast, the Chinese parent believes the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future. So this is a big theme throughout the book. You can't just praise your child and expect them to have self-esteem as a result. They need to root their self-esteem in their objective successes. That seems true as like in a vacuum principle, sure.

Like yeah, they should achieve stuff. But the way that she's going about it is deranged you're just like parenting by fears like Stalinistic parenting yeah I actually thought that this was like as a principle compelling intuitively but the research pretty plainly shows that authoritarian parenting tends to produce lower self-esteem oh yeah not higher and that's true even compared to permissive parenting. In fact, some studies have shown that children in permissive households have the highest self-esteem out of the parenting styles.

Not every study shows that, but some do, which really throws cold water on the idea that you build your self-esteem by setting objective standards and then pressing the child to meet those standards. And also on the idea that our culture of participation trophies is undermining self-esteem or whatever the fuck she believes. Right? This is why we read stuff for the show, Peter, because sometimes we learn things. I spoke with Iris Chen, who wrote a book a few years ago called Untigering, about her journey away from tiger parenting.

I asked her about this because this was sort of an interesting topic to me like where does self-esteem come from and her explanation was essentially if you set up these strict objectives for your children they will only feel good about themselves if they are able to meet those objectives right if you are teaching your children that they are worthy if they achieve X, Y, and Z rather than teaching them to have independent, freestanding self-worth, that can backfire very easily. And so it could be that some of these kids end up with high self-esteem because they

are like hitting the metrics that their parents set out for them, right? But that's a dangerous game to play with your child. Not every child will hit them, and eventually your child will fail to meet some goal or another, and then what, right? Then where does their self-esteem come from? I have friends who are like, basically professional sports people, partly because of like encouragement, slash cajoling from their parents, and they've kind of come to resent it It's hard to derive self-esteem from that because it feels like their parents achievement more than their own

I've never been good at anything and I have no self-esteem. So I'm speaking experience here A lot of these folks seem to believe that like childhood doesn't count that the only utility That childhood has is preparing you for adulthood. And so if you are yelling and shaming your child and there's five hour a day mandatory practice schedules, as long as that leads to better academic performance or something, you're good, right? Because it doesn't count. I just feel like that's not the case. Like, childhood counts.

Your enjoyment of your life as a child still counts and parents should think about trying to maximize that a little bit. It should at least be a factor in what's driving you. I can hear Amy at you are responding, but what if they want to be in theater, Peter? Have you thought about that from your ivory podcasting booth? The other thing that we should talk about is punishment.

Harsh punishments and aggressive confrontation of your children don't really seem to work. The anecdote that you just read is pretty illustrative here, right? Amy Chua very frequently describes screaming matches with her kids over various things and 95% of the time it's just like, but then she finally caved and practiced her violin and it was great. There's this like idea that she seems to subscribe to that a lot of authoritarian parents seem to subscribe to is like yeah this is unsavory but it gets results. That's just not really backed up by the research. Not only are these children not performing at the same level academically as children with more supportive parents,

but it also leads to all sorts of bad behaviors. You see this over and over again in the literature. The children of authoritarian parents have more problems with aggression and bullying, for example. They struggle with self-regulation. They are twice as likely as the children of authoritative parents to be heavy drinkers.

Permissive parents, by the way, tend to produce the heaviest drinkers. So it does get even worse. If you've ever heard a parent who's like, well, I just like to, I let my kid drink in my home because I like, you know, that way I'm keeping tabs on them. Does not work, folks. Don't be a cool mom. Don't be a cool mom. Don't be a cool mom.

There's also research about the neurobiology of children that supports this. Aggressive confrontation can trigger what's basically a fight or flight response in a child where they feel threatened and so their brain gets a sort of tunnel vision. They're just trying to address this immediate problem, the immediate threat posed by their parents. And a lot of psychologists argue that when their brain is in this mode, they are not really able to learn, right? Their ability to learn is inhibited,

so they're not absorbing lessons like they would if you were engaging with them more substantively. Yeah, I guess if you're afraid of not getting dinner, you might play the piece, but you're in a stress state while you're doing it. And the lesson that you are learning about why you are doing this thing is probably a little bit fucked, right? Like what you are becoming good at is avoiding discipline, right? That is what the child is sort of learning to do. That's the environment that they're adapting to.

I have not looked into the parenting research, but I have seen this in other places where this kind of scared, straight approach to getting people to stop drugs or stop hanging out with juvenile delinquents or whatever is the lowest and worst form of motivation. Those videos where they're like, you're going to go to jail and get raped forever. Those kids are motivated to sort of straighten up

for six hours, and then they forget about it and then they move on. It's just like this sort of habit via terror approach. It doesn't work in like other contexts either. It's very interesting to me how many people just intuitively assume that this stuff works. Right? A lot of these discussions happen where people are basically imagining that it works and they're saying, but is it bad for the children too? It's like whoa whoa it doesn't work at all. It's actually quite bad at doing the things that it claims to be good at doing. Well they have to defend it that way because there's no other defense of it. Right. Because any moral defense would fall

down like yeah I'm shitty to my kid. So before we get into tiger parenting specifically I want to provide a bit of a caveat which is that some research indicates that these parenting style frameworks do not show the same results across cultures. There is a study in 1994 by Ruth Chow that found that these parenting styles don't have the same predictive power for Chinese Americans, at least first generation immigrants. For example, authoritarian Chinese parents were producing better academic outcomes than you'd expect, even where Western parents were not. So there is this lingering question here of whether and how much this applies to Chinese

families. Like maybe Chua is on to something here, right? A couple of years after the book comes out, the Asian American Journal of Psychology published a special issue that addressed tiger parenting. One article by Sooyoung Kim, a psychologist at UT Austin, was titled, Does Tiger Parenting Exist? And the research surveyed hundreds

of Chinese American families in California, and they did in fact identify a group of people who seemed to fit the tiger parenting type. Higher on hostility and control and shaming and punishment, but also higher on the positive traits like warmth. What they found first of all, was that tiger parenting was not the most common parenting style in these communities. The most common style was just more supportive parenting. That was about 45% of the population.

And then you had about 28% doing tiger parenting. So the claim that this style of parenting is correlated with Chinese culture might have some merit, but it's not the dominant mode of Chinese parenting by first immigration immigrants in America, right? And then more importantly, tiger parenting did not result in the best outcomes. Supportive parenting, which was high in the positive traits but lower in the negative ones, was associated with higher GPAs, higher educational attainment, lower levels of academic pressure, lower levels of depressive symptoms, lower levels of parental alienation, and stronger feelings of family obligation.

So basically in every single category that tiger parenting claims to be targeting, it performs worse than just being more supportive and less harsh, including in the precise demographic that Amy Chua is talking about. I like that we've taken the longest imaginable way to the conclusion that being nice to your kids is good. You should be nice to your kids. We did these episodes by conferring an amount of good faith on the authors and also the people who believe this stuff.

And so when you're thinking about this, you often have to remember that some people don't really place much importance Yeah on Being nice to your kids they feel that the relationship should be a little more adversarial than that right and so I'm trying to talk In more research terms, but I do personally feel and I want to say it on a podcast that you should be nice to your kids You guys your kids. I also I have to say my parents compared to this were chill as hell. And I didn't quite get into Harvard and Yale, but I got close enough that Amy should be worried.

You know what I mean? Everybody has these broad universal rules about parenting based on their own experience. And so much of the way you turn out as an adult is just total coincidence and like serendipity. Well, it's my raw talent. I didn't need it. I didn't need to get bullied. You were a born podcaster. Did you get like grounded a lot as a kid? Did you get like a lot of like parental punishment? I almost never got punished. I would say I got an appropriate amount given my disposition.

Given your behavior? I was punished quite a bit at school. You can't put me in a school setting where there's an audience for my shenanigans and expect good things. That's where I was a real danger. When you put me in a room with 30 kids who were trying to learn, at all times I was like, what would be the funniest thing I could say right now? And now that's your job.

And now it's my job. The biggest trouble I ever got in in middle school was we had a teacher who wanted us to like silently journal for the first 10 minutes of class. And he said, like, I won't read them, but like, I think it's good to get in the habit of these diaries. And I was like, this fucker is going to read our fucking diaries. I don't trust this guy. Michael, we have the same story. OK, go on. Wait, really?

OK. So well, maybe yours had the same outcome as mine. So't trust this guy. Michael, we have the same story. Okay, go on. Wait, really? Okay. Yep. So, well, maybe yours had the same outcome as mine. So, to test this guy... Oh my god, Michael, we're the same person. I started writing extremely explicit pornography, like erotica. This is not the avenue I took, but we're in the same mind space here. And then I did this days and days and days in a row, and the following week, I was called into the principal's office. Oh my God. And I walk in there and there's the principal, my teacher, and my mom. Oh my God. And then they're immediately like, were really disturbed by the things that you've been writing. And I was like, I did this to fucking test you because I don't trust you not to read them.

And I was fucking right. And there's like this silence in the room. And my mom was like, why did you lie to my son? And she like completely took my side and I was like, yes! A full turn. Mom! How old were you there?

Six or seventh grade, so like I guess 11 or 12, I think. Oh Jesus, that's pretty young to be writing the explicit pornography, I have to say. But it was also, to be clear, I was like a 12 year old gay kid, so I think it was probably not particularly competent. I think it was like he p competent I think it was like he he poked her boobs so but you did the same thing almost so okay when I was a little bit older I I was in like 10th grade

maybe teacher and I hated each other and same thing she had this journaling practice and when she and she was like if you the page over, I won't read it. Come on. It was an open secret that she read them. Yeah, of course. Multiple students would write personal things about their families and what was happening, and then she would ask them about it later.

Oh my gosh. Knowing this, right toward the end of the school year, I just wrote a thing about how much I hated her. Okay. I thought that this was gonna sit in the air between us and I was gonna smirk at her and she was gonna scowl at me and that's how it was gonna go. Instead she called that bluff immediately

and I found myself in the assistant principal's office and she's like why would anyone write this to their teacher? And I was like oh my god, she has always said that it was private if you folded it over So I was I was venting yeah, and the entire demeanor of the meeting changes and all of a sudden it's about this gross violation of student privacy by the teacher, okay, and I'm like, you know now that I think about it. I've heard other students say this too

you know now that I think about it I've heard other students say this too. So she ended up getting in trouble instead of you? I'm sitting in like the waiting room of the principal's office after this and five minutes later she gets perp walked in front of me hell yeah to the office and we make eye contact and I she has like pure terror in her eyes because it's very clear based on my face that I'm not in trouble. Like, something has changed. This all ends with her being forced to apologize to me. And invite me back into the class. And it was like presented as a choice to me. And I was like, yes, I will.

I will join. I was also hoping you would take the same tack as me so that we could have a bonus episode where we do dramatic readings of our 12-year-old erotica. I can't believe you have this same basic story. I love that we were just talking about how different we were as children, and then you find this, like, synthesis. We probably both had, like, a libertarian phase.

I was like, this is, like, government surveillance. That was, like, my angle. Nope, delete this from the episode. I never had a libertarian phase, listeners. Was I an asshole in various ways? Yes, but it never manifested in libertarianism. Let's move on to the meta phase of this episode because I think the research is pretty devastating for the advocacy of tiger parenting, right? It's very clear that this type of parenting is

Correlated with bad outcomes. So her book is just straightforwardly wrong. This advice is bad There's another level to why this is disconcerting to me and it's about political science in 2016 a bunch of political scientists looked at the population of people who supported Donald Trump. And they found that the best predictor of Trump support wasn't race or gender or income or anything like that. It was the person's level of authoritarianism. How favorably they viewed authoritarian behavior. Do you know how political scientists measure authoritarianism? They do it by measuring views of authoritarian parenting. Matthew McWilliams, a political scientist, asked people four binary questions, and these are the standard questions in a lot of these studies.

Would you rather have a child who is independent or respectful, self-reliant or obedient, considerate or well-behaved,ious or well-mannered? For each one of those that you answer on the more authoritarian side, you're about 7% more likely to support Donald Trump. By political science standards, that is extremely impressive predictive power. It's important to understand that when you hear people talk about how like, parents are too soft these days days or how children need discipline, that's not just about parenting per se.

This is also something we've come across on the show so many times that these advice books aren't really advice. They're the expression of a worldview. Yeah. We're back to one book, Peter. We are back to one book. We're fucking back. Parenting stuff often gets expressed as like a cultural grievance about us growing weak, right? That's not rooted in data or anything.

It's about their normative belief that society should be harsher. They tell themselves that it's because people need that harshness to like improve themselves. But we basically just know that's not true, at least in the case of parenting, right? What they really want is a world where, yeah, children don't get to choose what exactly their life is like,

that that gets dictated to them, but also a world where adults don't really choose what their life is like, where they're just dictated to them by authoritarian figures. It's one thing that like this lady believes this. But I think part of what caused this to be such a firestorm is that it taps into this debate, right? It's not just parenting.

It's about like how society should be structured, right? What's your view of hierarchy? How does power justify itself? Is obedience something that has merit in and of itself, right? These are all things that weigh on the type of government we want, as much as they weigh on how we raise our kids. And also, you can see it in the Barry Weiss interview, where she mentions, like, oh, these kids have participation trophies now,

which is a very widespread conservative urban legend, essentially. And it's like, that's not really about your individual parenting style, that's analysis of the kind of society we are. And she's basically resorting to this kind of kids these days are too coddled stuff, which is an extremely conservative and extremely pervasive myth. You can see that she's not just like, I want my children to be the best that they can be, right? It's this broad complaint about like parenting these days. And that in and of itself is like, feels like a broad complaint about how people are.

We've grown to coddle our children, but we ourselves are too coddled. We are too weak. People complain too much. You know, we've too weak, people complain too much, we've sort of lost our edge. Those are all opinions that lead to dangerous places. Yeah, they also lead to Barry Weiss's podcast. The worst result. So, you know, knowing that, knowing that there's this like authoritarian personality type,

and it's something that stretches beyond parenting, you can sort of glean something about Amy Chua herself and her disciples Her public statements about politics place her very much in that reactionary centrist camp Yeah, a few years ago. She wrote a book about how tribalism on both sides is the problem in America scorching stuff Yeah, scorching that's the opinion that people who don't have the energy to come up with a real opinion have. They're just like, everything's just so heated. Yeah. Everyone believes all this stuff.

Now since the battle hymn of the Tiger Mother came out, she has made headlines for three main reasons, which I will go through in roughly chronological order. First, when Brett Kavanaugh was up for the Supreme Court, she wrote an op-ed in support of his nomination titled, Brett Kavanaugh is a mentor to women. Then these sexual assault allegations came out. Amy refuses to retract her piece despite a lot of pressure, despite a lot of people who wrote out in support of him initially retracting their pieces. Is he anything else to women, Amy? Has he ever been anything else to women?

Are there nouns? She talked to Barry Weiss about this and the justification she provided was, quote, I stand by my friends. Oh, what? Okay. What? I guess the loyalty paid off because Sofia, her oldest, was hired by Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court clerk about a year later.

So congrats. Wow, happy ending to all of this. I'm not going to Google any further, but things have gone great since then. At about the same time, various complaints and allegations start to swirl around Chua and her husband, again Yale law professor, Jed Rubenfeld. First, there were reports that Chua advised female students to dress like models when applying for clerkships with Brett Kavanaugh. He's going to want to see your hip bones. He's going to want to see those. Get the pelvis

out. She denies this. Then Rubenfeld ends up suspended from Yale for two years following an investigation into alleged sexual harassment of students. Canceled, I believe you mean canceled. He was canceled from Yale. And then there is what is colloquially referred to as dinner party gate.

Yeah. This one I kind of know about. Yeah, this made a shocking amount of headlines and it obviously would have made none if she wasn't a public figure of some kind, but whatever. Basically, there was an investigation by Yale into Chua and her socialization with students. It turns out that due to allegations of inappropriate or excessive fraternizing, perhaps heavy drinking, Chua had agreed in 2019 not to host any students at her home.

This gets out when the Yale Daily News writes about it, and rumors are swirling that Chua was hosting soirees that included federal judges during like early COVID. There's basically no good evidence for this. Oh really? Really. I didn't know that, okay. But Chua does admit to hosting at least a couple of students at her home in what she described as like a mentorship

capacity. She also says that they brought wine. Okay. She did not ask for wine. She says that she drank Fresca. It appears that this happened more than once. The Dean and Chua tell very different stories about how their private conversations about this went. This has all resulted in a lot of conflict between her and administration, a lot of public

criticism. It has sort of pushed her into the favor of the fake centrist grifting types like Barry Weiss, right? I've seen her on the sort of canceled people's list. That's how I know about this, yeah. So I will send you one more clip from the Barry Weiss podcast where they are discussing this. Here we go. You were involved in a controversy this past year during COVID that honestly I couldn't

even totally follow. It seemed like you were getting accused of hosting two students at your home. And to be honest, reading it from afar, here's how I read it. Amy has a target on her back and has since 2018, but really maybe for the past decade, because she is unorthodox, because she doesn't fall in line, because she refuses to ascribe to every aspect of this new ideology.

And because of that, her enemies are looking to bring her down in any possible way they can, including by accusing her of like having chicken pox parties for COVID. That's how I read it. Is that pretty accurate? It's pretty accurate. It's actually even more Kafkaesque than that, because it involves secret recordings.

So the original accusation was that I was having drunken dinner parties with tons of secret students and federal judges. That was actually the original accusation that the dean herself made and said this to the entire faculty. And so the only reason I fought back was because my daughter Lulu, my rebel daughter said, Mom, in this day and age, like we get our truth from social media. Like if it's not true, you have to fight back. So I did something I have never done. This is what a younger generation would do.

I told the truth. I wrote a letter to my entire faculty and I tweeted it. And I never believed that it would end up being covered by the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker. But I fought back. It was so unpleasant. Like 80% of the faculty stopped talking to me. But I feel vindicated that in the end, the version that you're getting now is what finally came out. Okay, there were no gender parties. There were no drunken things. There were no federal judges, two students came over and left after an hour and a half and Amy Chuo had a fresca.

That's what happened. I love that Barry is like, okay, so what I think happened is like, you're the victim of a witch hunt. Is that true? You're actually in trouble. And tell me if I'm getting this right, because you're so brave. Here's the thing, Chuo gets a ton of mileage on this out of the fact that the early rumors about her hosting federal judges and like big parties were false which

allows her to paint the whole thing as sort of bullshit but what actually happened was that she had agreed with administration not to host students. Right. And then she hosted students. Right. Extremely cut and dry. She admits to hosting two students. From what I've seen, it seems more likely that she consistently hosted two or three students at different times.

She calls it mentorship sort of thing. Whatever. She's like, the students brought wine themselves. I was like, I don't know. I feel like if I was going over to a professor's House to get mentored about the law. I'm probably not bringing a bottle of wine, right? Who knows right? Yeah, I don't I don't know how it's Kafka esque It's also it seems like the actual scandal is whatever the fuck she did to have her privileges of hosting students taken away

So that's the thing is there again there were allegations of having, basically partying with, hosting a lot of students, partying a little too much with them, to the point where administration felt like they should step in. Yeah. And they did, and that's why Chua agreed not to host students, right? That all predates this.

And then she violates the agreement, and then because it gets mischaracterized by either the dean or the press or or both, Chua gets to latch on to that and be like, they're slandering me. It's like, okay, but you still basically did the thing. What the fuck? And also she's like, I never thought some minor scandal at an elite school would end up in the New York Times. Like, have you read the New York Times lately? That's like 40% of the front page is some low-stakes bullshit at Oberlin. Yeah, you know, I don't want to read too much into this sort of shit, but you can see perhaps

how a somewhat narcissistic philosophy regarding power and control can bleed into other aspects of your life, right? Someone who views herself perhaps as a power broker at Yale Law and lets that get a little bit out of control when it comes to like partying with the students, right? Aaron Ross Powell I blame her parents. I think her parents were too permissive. Aaron Ross Powell Unfortunately, she's been allowed to run wild. Aaron Ross Powell She wasn't tiger-momed enough. Aaron Ross Powell Again, I don't want wanna overstep in my analysis here, but it's hard not to see a little bit of narrative flow,

shall we say, from the way she talks about her parenting and then the way she sort of conducts herself when she's in a position of authority at a law school. Very little concern with whether or not she might have done something wrong, very willing to just do something and then justify it after the fact. And I will say, I don't know that I care that much

about the fact that she had two students over or that she broke an administrative rule. Truly, who gives a shit? Yeah, I guess it's just indicative of somebody who is not telling their own story with a lot of accuracy. Now, the last major piece of Amy news popped up recently, but it's actually a story from 2017.

I'm going to share a headline with you. It says, How the Tiger Mom Convinced the Author of Hillbilly Elegy to Write His Story. And then sub-headline, When JD Vance was in law school, his mentor, Amy Chua, gave him the confidence to take a different path.

I forgot she made a cameo in our Hillbilly Elegy episode. That's right. That's right she did. It is truly one book. And I mean a couple things about this. Yeah, you think it's not so bad that she had two students over to provide them with mentorship? What if I told you that some of those students end up being JD Vance? Now how do you feel about it? Look, he did drink the blood of three virgin tradwives, but I had a fresca. So Amy Chua mentored JD Vance and convinced him to write Hillbilly Allergy in order to launch his career as a public figure and then ultimately a senator and possibly vice president. So Amy Chua, again, politically, she talks with empathy

for the viewpoints that come from the left very frequently. She will often say the left has gotten out of control, but she'll be like, they have a point about this, this and this. She's very willing to give credit to leftist activists on campus, for example. She's like, I disagree with their tactics, but they are fundamentally making these know these accurate observations, etc

Publicly she is trying to cultivate a persona where she is very reasonable liberal fair-minded Someone who is sort of above the fray and yet every time she engages with the political world You get a Brett Kavanaugh and a JD Vance. Yeah, the question isn't whether she was a good mom. The question is whether she tiger-mommed a fascist into the White House. Who have you tiger-mommed into power? So when I think about who she is politically, I think it's probably a little more valuable

to look at who she's actually materially connected to, rather than the bullshit she says on podcasts or whatever. I would be fine with this entire book if she had treated JD Vance as badly as she treated her kids. Revoke his dinner, call him a piece of shit. I will read an entire book about someone screaming at JD Vance to play the piano.