Moms Talk: Are You a Tiger Mom?

Moms Talk is a new feature on Acworth Patch that is part of a new initiative to reach out to moms and families. Acworth Patch invites you and your circle of friends to help build a community of support for mothers and their families right here in Acworth.

Each week in Moms Talk, our Moms Council will take your questions, give advice and share solutions. Moms, dads, grandparents and the diverse families who make up our community will have a new resource for questions about local schools, pedestrian safety, nutrition, work-life balance and the thousands of other issues that arise while raising children.  

Moms Talk will also be the place to drop in for a talk about the latest parenting hot topic. So grab a cup of coffee and settle in as we start the conversation today.

Here's our discussion topic:

Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and a Yale Law School professor, contends that most American moms are too soft on their children, acting as unwavering cheerleaders even when they don't perform at the level that parents expect. She also says her parenting methods are modeled in the approach her first-generation Chinese-American parents used with her, which she says has made her successful.

Does Chua have a point? Do American moms, but more especially suburban moms, coddle their kids too much? Or is 'tiger parenting' setting kids up for trouble handling failure and a good chance they'll harbor serious animosity toward mom and dad later on in life? Could this be more than a cultural issue; is it also generational? Did our parents coddle us the way we may coddle our children?

Please take a moment to weigh in on this debate in the comments below.

Patch columnists and members of the Acworth Patch Moms Council, Kelly Kimbro and Tiffany Hughes, share their views on this topic:

Many children have no concept of discipline. Parents give in to every whim and there are few boundaries. Many parents are able to financially say yes to every gadget and there is no concept of waiting or earning it. Money is a babysitter. Kids are given $40 and sent to the mall, given a laptop and iphone and left to “entertain” themselves.

On the flipside, many parents are too strict. They expect their children to have perfect manners and act like miniature adults. They use rules to box their children in so they don’t have to “parent”. True parenting is the activity of raising the child. Raising the child is more than driving, buying and feeding. It is doling out consequences, defining the “gray areas”, filling in the gaps and spending TIME with the child. It is a balance of protection and freedom. Tiger or rabbit, neither is human.

I’ve seen several interviews with Chua and I agree totally with her that American moms coddle their kids too much. This isn’t true of all American moms nor is it location specific. But the fact remains that if children are raised with no expectations set before them, what kind of adults are they going to be when they grow up?

I was raised in a generation where parents worried more about raising responsible adults with good decision-making abilities than whether or not the kids were going to hate them for disciplining them. It is sad that so many of today’s children will become adults who cannot function in society because their parents did not teach them to accept the consequences of their actions. Children should be taught to set goals and figure out how to reach them, rather than going through life with a sense of entitlement.