The purring tiger mums

LONDON EYE

The purring tiger mums



By Teresa Lim

THERE'S an awful lot of curiosity here about Chinese tiger mothers, when in fact English tiger mums exist too. They are simply a different species.

American law professor Amy Chua's Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother, published last year, aroused considerable interest in Britain. It was timely: a study carried out between 2005 and 2007 had released its finding that Chinese children in Britain, whatever their social class, did better in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examination than any other ethnic group.

But publicity of Chua's book played up the threats and demands she had made on her daughters and put off many English women. They preferred, somewhat self-deludingly, to think of themselves as pussycats to Chua's tigress.

Now the BBC has stirred up the debate again with a documentary last week, called Meet Britain's Chinese Tiger Mums, which focuses on three mothers whose young children attend a north London Chinese-language school on Sundays.

The three women are Sally from Guangzhou, Kate from Taiwan, and Vivian whose family left Taiwan for Canada. All are offspring of parents whose lives had been bitterly difficult and who instilled in them the necessity for hard work. As Kate pointed out, her parents had no safety net of health care or pensions. They could rely only on themselves.

These women believe in filling every hour of their children's time with something useful. Sally's timetable for her son accounts for every minute after school, including his play time.

Besides study and extra study, there is music practice. Kate expresses the certainty, rather than hope, that her daughter would learn at least one musical instrument when she starts infant school.

Are these children being hothoused in a peculiarly Chinese way? Actually, it is not very different from the way middle-class English children are brought up.

English boarding schools, which take in the children of the upper middle classes, aim to fill virtually every waking hour of their charges with something academically, intellectually or physically active. It certainly makes sense to leave boys, especially, with little energy to misbehave.

It is not too different in the day schools, where lessons and activities occupy children from morning to mid-afternoon. The boys at my sons' preparatory (private primary) day school were overwhelmingly English. Virtually every child played an instrument. Several played two. The school had its own orchestra, jazz band, woodwind band and held regular solo concerts in its music hall by every pupil who could play something, however badly. (Building confidence was as important as actual achievement. I loved the school for that.)

Both top private boarding and day schools coax their children not only to excel in academic work, but also to read widely, behave responsibly, attend clubs and be enthusiastic at sport - in response to what their parents want.

When Vivian, whose son practises music for two hours a day, was asked by the interviewer why she could not relax her grip on her children, her answer was: What exactly would they do with extra free time? Watch more TV?

I would agree with her that that is poor use of leisure time. The middle-class English tiger mum has constructive ways with her children's 'down' time. One is to arrange tea sessions - the basic building blocks of social skills - with schoolmates.

A child is invited to tea during the week. He is brought home from school with her son. The boys play a little, then have tea. They eat politely, make conversation with prompts from the adult in charge, seek permission 'to get down' when they finish and play a bit more. Then the child is picked up by his mother or nanny and thanks the hostess 'for having me' when he leaves. The invitation is reciprocated and the process repeated on another day at the child's home.

English children build up the social IQ that smooths everyday life in whichever field they find themselves in the future. It is the emollient that the Cantonese Sally's husband, a quiet chartered accountant, regrets he never acquired.

If anything, the English tiger mum is even more demanding than the Chinese one. She wants her child not only to be good academically, but also to excel at sport, music and drama and be well-mannered, articulate and popular. But she tries to achieve this by purring encouragement rather than growling demands.

Perhaps the real difference between the British and Chinese is that there are Chinese tiger mums through the entire social spectrum whereas English tiger mums exist mainly from the middle class upwards.

Poor Chinese people believe education provides the way out of poverty, whereas poor English folk do not. The latter assumes social immobility, so there is no perceived advantage in making sure their children do well in school.

The GCSE statistics that were revealing about the Chinese in Britain were most revealing in this: Nearly all the poorest Chinese students, who qualified for free school meals, did as well as their wealthier counterparts. Among the English, on the other hand, the academic achievement gap between the rich and poor was wide.

The education authorities would love to transform socially deprived English parents from pussycats into tigers. Can they? That is a story for another day.

The writer is a Singaporean based in London.