I wrote this on 8/23/2013 as a Toastmasters assignment.

Good Evening, Toastmasters and Honored Guests.

Two years ago, author Amy Chua published a book called – Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It created a big debate on whether or not tiger mom is good. A tiger mom is defined by Wiki as “A mother who raises stereotypically successful children by being strict parents.  By focusing exclusively on their children's academic perfection, these mothers hope to produce children who are able to achieve better performance in academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success”

I think that a tiger mom is bad.  There are a number of reasons people shared on the internet. The most popular ones are:

1) A tiger mom micromanages kids.
2) A tiger mom kills a kid's creativity.
3) A tiger mom raises a kid who has no social skill.

Tonight, I'll add three more reasons to say No to a tiger mom.

First, Amy's parenting style is not traditional Chinese style as she and her husband claimed.  The assumption of Chinese parenting style is the tiger mom style is wrong.  Let me tell a traditional Chinese mom story.

The story was first published around 300 AD and then used in a textbook ever since then.  It was story about a well-known scholar Meng Ke's mother - Ji

Ji lived with her three-years-old son – Ke near her husband's graveyard.  Young Ke watched people in the funeral and mimicked what he saw.  Ji thought it had a bad influence on him.  So she moved to a house next to a market.   Ke watched people trading goods and bargaining on the price. He pretended that he was one of them.   Ji thought that's not good either so she moved to a house near a school. Ke became interested in school activities and Ji enrolled him in the school.

The story shows a good mom who provides a better environment to guide children's interests because the environment affects a person greatly.  A tiger mom ignores the environment. Amy even asked her daughter to practice piano without getting a bathroom break. We express our feelings through music. What kind of feeling does she want her daughter to show when she cannot get her bathroom break?

I will add my own story as a testimony.  My older son was shy when he was little. To help him overcome it, we signed him up in team sports where he can easily communicate and interact with other players, coaches, and parents. He masters his people skill without any bad feeling that Amy gave to her daughter.

Secondly, we achieve more when we are self-motivated. A tiger mom does not care about the kid's motivation. She sets up strict rules on what kids can do and cannot do. I feel that kid is treated like a prisoner.  It's the reason that Amy had to battle with her daughters.

The last reason is that success does ot equal academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success. I think that a successful person is a person who contributes to the community, works well with others, copes with the problems, and adapts changes.  A tiger mom pushes the kids as hard as she can with all means. But she did not look back at herself in the mirror.  When Amy yelled and called names on the kids, the image of yelling, mean face created greater impact on her daughters than the musical lessons because the action is louder than a word.  Amy led her daughters by a bad example.

We all want to raise successful children, but the means to reach our goal is not the tiger mom's way. I think you will agree with me that children do not need a tiger to roar at them. They need a loving heart to guide them on the right path to become the best person he or she can be. So please say No to Tiger mom.