Parents are struggling, it seems. We are obsessed with the job of “parenting”, trying to mould our children so that they are happy, garlanded with top grades and achievements, and ready to take on the future — even though that future is unknowable to us. Meanwhile, the frightening wider world lurks, chaotically, beyond our control. And to minimise our own fear and worry, we try to protect our young people so that a middle-class childhood now lasts until college, and often beyond.
There is an impossible mismatch between modern micromanagement inside the home and the unknowables outside. To assuage this crisis, parents (meaning, in my experience, anxiety-prone middle-class mothers) lap up advice from books telling us how to fix our family life so as to engineer more successful futures for our kids.The standout among these manuals in capturing the parenting zeitgeist was Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). This memoir by a Chinese-American mother of bringing up two high-achieving girls details how a traditional Asian regime can work wonders. Its key mantras include: be very strict, enforce music practice, don’t allow free expression through drama, sport — or sleepovers. Overnight, “tiger mother” became shorthand for a woman who turns parenting into a high-stakes management career.