Does "Tiger Parenting" Exist? Parenting Profiles Of Chinese Americans And Adolescent Developmental Outcomes

Does “Tiger Parenting” Exist? Parenting Profiles of Chinese Americans and Adolescent Developmental Outcomes

Su Yeong Kim, Yijie Wang, Diana Orozco-Lapray, Yishan Shen, and Mohammed Murtuza

1. What’s the main idea of the article?

The main idea of the article is to reveal or disproof the general perception about a specific parenting profile among the Chinese American families called “Tiger Parenting”. This profile has its own characteristics (high control and high academic expectations) and due to the cultural differences it’s pointed as a different profile from the ones usually defined as American parenting profiles. Its importance lies in the possible effect in the young development, both academic and social. The study reveals that such profile exists, it also reveals that it’s not the best option, but also that is not as common as it’s usually believed.

2. Summarize the article succinctly yet thoroughly. Be sure to use your own words, and when necessary provide examples.

In America there has been this perception about Chinese families, of a traditional or highly used parenting method, that is similar but with some specific characteristics to the authoritarian profile among the traditional parenting profile classification. Due to cultural differences it’s impossible to use the same system to evaluate the relationship between sons and parents, and because of this is that this study is so important, to understand and define the typical or general parenting profiles among the Chinese American families.

To evaluate the existence and how it ranks in relation to other parenting profiles, the tiger parenting was first define based on the positive or negative spectrum of four different dimensions, although this 8 possible characteristics are not mutually exclusive. According to the study this characteristics are “parental warmth, inductive reasoning, parental monitoring, democratic parenting, parental hostility, psychological control, shaming, and punitive parenting.”

The research was conducted through a longitudinal study, asking the adolescents, mothers and fathers (from an original group of 444 families) to evaluate their family’s parenting methods, the researchers gathered the data every 4 years in three different moments. The questions were made to evaluate in a scale from less to most, the different 8 dimensions previously listed. The other part of the research was the recollection of information related to the adolescents’ academic development, (GPA, academic pressure, and some others).

Based on the information obtained, the researchers did an exhaustive process to group all the different results to find patterns or tendencies among the Chinese American parents’ methods and their corresponding sons’ academic results. And the results were similar to the widely accepted parenting profiles theory, ranking the supportive authoritative parents as the most effective ones, followed by the permissive or easygoing parents, then against the popular beliefs were the tiger parents, the ones that expect the most of their kids but as the research shows, not the ones who help their kids to actually obtain those results, and finally the harsh or authoritarian parents.

The conclusions of this research show that in many Chinese American families the parenting methods or profiles changes from time to time, adjusting to the young development, and sometimes changing form the mother to the father depending on their sons’ growth stage. Although is important to take in consideration what the researches state at the end of their study, many of the results may be affected by the region were the study was develop, the high Asian population that lived on it, and the discrepancies between the adolescents opinion and their parents opinion. And of course they show that the tiger parenting profile exists, it’s similar to the authoritarian profile but it’s more orientated to conserve the family image and to expect more from the kids, it expects high results and academic success, and also like the authoritarian profile, it doesn’t get good results.

3. How does the information from the reading overlap with ideas/theories you’ve learned in this class and other courses you’ve taken? Be explicit.

The most obvious relation between the article and the content studied in class is the one referring

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