My TakeWhy tiger mum Amy Chua may have it wrong about how to raise successful children
Her theories have been debunked by psychologists, who conclude: ‘What is new is not correct, and what is correct is not new’
I have a soft spot for alpha tiger mum Amy Chua. A day after The Wall Street Journal published, in 2011, ‘Why Chinese mothers are superior’ – the article that came before her mega-bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – which triggered the whole parenting debate, I wrote a front-page story in the Post about the furious readers’ response to Chua’s op-ed.
I could reasonably claim to be the first Hong Kong reporter to write about what would become a global educational debate well before it did become one. But I digress.
Two years ago, Chua followed up, with her husband and fellow Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld, with The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.
The book offers an unorthodox theory of professional success. This time, it sparked a comparably angry response from social scientists. How dare two law professors invade their research territory!
The book argues that a combination of racial superiority, a personal sense of inferiority/insecurity and strong impulse control explains why some ethnic minorities like Jews, Indians and Chinese produce many successful people in America.
A new study by two psychologists, Christopher Chabris and Joshua Hart of Union College in the US, claims to have disproved the thesis. Call it the revenge of social scientists. “Does a ‘Triple Package’ of traits predict success?” – published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences – finds no correlation between the combination of the three traits with success.