I’m a terrible tiger mum, but that makes me a good enough parent

There are three things in my life I thought I’d be absolutely brilliant at, but I turned out to be terrible. The first was surfing. The second was Theatresports. The third one was being a Tiger Mother. It’s this last that really sticks in my craw.

I read Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother back when it came out in 2011. My first child was 18 months, and I was pregnant with my second. Like Chua, I was an Ivy League professor and a perfectionist. Like her, I believed there was only one grade: an A. Like her, I knew that I would never back down. My sister and I are living proof that tiger-parenting works. We have redrafted thank-you letters, rewashed the car in the dark, done music practice on our birthdays. We have got many As and won many prizes.

But it turns out I am bad at being a Tiger Mother. The early years went fine. Sleep training, bedtime, bike riding, ballet, swimming, tennis lessons with those balls that don’t bounce, contaminant-free food, no media. Then things started going south. There was the mid-year recital when the kid who started cello at the same time as my 6-year-old son played the Lully Gavotte and my son played Two Grenadiers. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re not a tiger parent.)

There was the day my daughter indifferently mentioned that A, R, and L had all been in “extension maths”, and she had not. Then there was the time when she stopped running at a running carnival to help her friend who hurt her ankle.

These are bitter pills for a Tiger Mother to swallow. The Tiger Mother is a parent who does not fear their child’s resistance, incapacity, complaint, or hostility. She believes in her children’s ability to succeed and knows that only a parent will push them to achieve true excellence in the face of failure and self-doubt. She knows that discomfort, often acute discomfort, is crucial to success.

Though Chua has been in and out of hot water ever since her book was published, tiger parenting itself has been largely redeemed in the media. King Richard showed that Venus and Serena Williams would not be global figures of hope for racial justice had their father not been a super aggressive Tiger Dad. They probably wouldn’t even have been that good at tennis. Taylor Swift chalks much of her success up to having a hyper-involved mum. Amy Chua’s children are on the record as being tiger-positive.

My track-record is patchy at best. I get mad, I rant about excellence, but eventually, my kids’ total lack of compliance with the regime gets the better of me. When my son was eight, we realised that his writing and spelling were well below average. We bought Learning Without Tears and worked consistently until he got to the exercise: “Describe a person place or thing in three sentences.” He toiled away before tearily handing me back the worksheet: “Mumy is growche and mean. She is sometimes nice. But not very often.”

A Tiger Mother would have made him correct it. I put it on Instagram with the caption, “I feel seen”.