Many Asian Americans know the reality of growing up with piano lessons on Saturday, language school on Sunday — and trying to push back on it all whenever possible in-between.
Jennifer Chan was raised with similarly harsh expectations, but now the Clearwater, Florida, mom is trying to reverse that dynamic as a parent.
“I’m letting my kid be quite feral,” Chan, 34, said with a laugh about her oldest daughter, who’s almost 3 years old. “She just runs free.”
Chan is among a number of Generation X and older millennial Asian Americans who have been rejecting the stricter “tiger parenting” style for a looser approach — one with less emphasis on achievements and more focus on just allowing feelings to be felt and kids to be kids.
Experts and parents say it’s a shift that has been happening over the past 20 years, and they point to a number of factors: grappling with their own rigid upbringings, more awareness about mental health, having privileges their immigrant parents and earlier generations didn’t have, and a move away from collectivism and seeing parents as all-knowing elders.
Undoing the ‘tiger parent’ stereotype
Asian parenting practices have long been associated with harsh discipline, high academic demands and little sensitivity, largely rooted in Confucian family dynamics that firmly established parents as authority figures over their children — all amplified by the class and financial anxieties of these immigrant generations, experts say.
But then it was all given a name. The term “Tiger mother” was popularized in mainstream culture in 2011 by author Amy Chua, who published a memoir about the often extreme parenting practices she used to raise her two daughters. Her parenting style, which her book describes as the Chinese approach, focused on discipline, demanding that her daughters devote all of their time to homework and extracurriculars and forbidding them from sleepovers or other types of normal childhood fun to achieve the…
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