How does it feel to have “Tiger Mother” used as a synonym for “not normal”?
Someone recently showed me this New York Times op-ed piece on the Palo Alto suicides. It’s interesting to see that this discussion has made it to the New York Times. And also interesting to see that this author extensively quotes the opinion piece written by Palo Alto psychiatrist Adam Strassberg. This piece is one of the more popular posts in response to the situation here.
But my question is, does it really help to pathologize the social and cultural norms that have developed in this region of the world? Do we really reach people when we make them “not normal”? Does it actually inspire those who need most to find another way - their own way?
I’ve been in a series of very lively conversations on this hot-button topic. People seem to need to respond in some way to something as grave as teen suicide. It’s amazing to me how a series of suicides can serve as a catalyst for a community to come together in ways that other events do not. I am also struck by how suicide “statistics” are used to create sociopolitical movements centered around the problems of certain demographic groups.
We read what we want to read into a situation that defies explanation. We respond with the strategies most comfortable to us - whether that is pathologizing certain social behaviors, demanding more data and statistics, studying something more closely (while also remaining emotionally distant from the heart of the experience), forming committees and task forces, or having speculative one-on-one conversations with our neighbors and friends.
For me, I read my own experience into this situation. I recognize that at one time, I believed that Palo Alto was the epicenter of all that was cool about the Bay Area (and therefore, the Western world). There was an allure that spread far and wide, especially to the smaller Midwestern cities I had lived in after college - Ann Arbor, Minneapolis and Cleveland. I had a sense that I was missing out by not at least trying to live in the Bay Area for once in my life.
When I moved to California in 2004 to follow a dream of starting a violin school, I followed an intuitive sense, which was backed up by the research I did, that this area was ripe with parents who would invest heavily in educational enrichment opportunities for their children. The younger the better. I had something powerfully seductive to offer them, and I could get paid immediately.
What I offered was real. But I was also very aware of the game I was playing. I copied the processes that the best schools on the Peninsula used. I noted how Bing Nursery School at Stanford had a 5-year waiting list that prompted parents to fill out their children’s application forms from the delivery rooms after they gave birth. I noticed how preschools that were feeder systems for the best private schools in Menlo Park and Atherton had five-figure tuition rates, and impossibly long waiting lists also.
Did I have a lingering sense of the “wrongness” of all this, even as I played the game of being an educational entrepreneur? Yes, I did. And I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the implications of that game as time went on.
At that time, I only knew authoritarian models of leadership. Collaboration was a foreign and somewhat threatening concept to me. What I had experienced up until that point in my life was extreme expectations for perfection. And those standards of perfection were defined by whoever was standing in the front of the room. Yes. I had a Tiger Mother. Yes. Amy Chua’s book was essentially a scene-by-scene description of my childhood, right down to being locked out on my front porch when I was four years old. I cut out a chunk of my own hair too, but I wasn’t twelve, I was more like eight years old. I traveled internationally to perform and compete in both violin and piano. And there was always drama on those trips that we try not to speak about.
Yes, there was a monomaniacal focus on getting everything exactly right all the time. Or else. And I never dared test the concept of what “or else” actually meant.
So now that I am an adult, feeling deeply moved and touched by the pain that is being expressed through these kids in Palo Alto, how does it feel to read a psychiatrist write, “The ‘Koala Dad’ is the far better parent than the “Tiger Mom’”? How does it feel to read that as a stand-alone statement implying that it has meaning on its own?
I feel marginalized and insulted by it. And the best quote I can find in response to it is this, from Dr. Mario Martinez, clinical neuropsychologist and creator of a theory of mind-body-culture called biocognition:
Health gurus medicalize living conditions they fail to understand, and medicalizing is a form of hegemony. In anthropology, hegemony means domination of one cultural belief over another, with such insidious power that the dominated fail to see the dominator's impositions.
There is a larger context here - a cultural one - that is beyond the limits of reductionist science, school homework policies, getting the right number of hours of sleep, or “becoming a Koala Dad”.
I eagerly await the emergence of this larger conversation.
