Tiger Parenting, Asian-Heritage Families, and Child/Adolescent Well-Being

Asian American Journal of Psychology 2013, Vol. 4, No.
1, 1 6
2013 American Psychological Association 1948-1985/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0032136
INTRODUCTION
Deconstructing the Myth of the Tiger Mother: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Tiger Parenting, Asian-Heritage Families, and Child/Adolescent Well-Being
University of California at Santa Barbara
Linda P. Juang
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Michigan State University
Desiree Baolin Qin
University of Notre Dame

Amy Chuas memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011, New York, NY, Penguin Books) drew a tremendous amount of media attention that thrust Asian American parents into the limelight. In this special issue, leading scholars studying parenting in Asian-heritage families use Chuas notion of the tiger mother as a launching pad to examine aspects of parenting that may be unique to Asian-heritage (encompassing both Asian American and native Asian) families. The goals of this special issue are to examine the prevalence and impact of tiger parenting and to unpack the complexity of Asian-heritage parenting and its relation to child and adolescent well-being. Collectively, the articles in the special issue offer a more nuanced and accurate perspective on Asian-heritage parenting by taking readers beyond the myth of the tiger mother and dispelling some of the stereotypical, monolithic notions of parenting within Asian-heritage families. Keywords: Asian American parenting, tiger mother, child and adolescent well-being
Irene J. K. Park
Amy Chuas (2011) memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother describes in detail her endeavors to push her two daughters to succeed and, in the process, deny them a social life, sleepovers, and play dates. Chuas depictions and the ensuing media attention thrust Asian American parents into the limelight, their parenting debated and contested throughout the media and on social network sites. In these discussions, many are curious about the real-life experiences of Asian American children. In particular, do most Asian American children have tiger mothers like Chua? Is tiger parenting a unique practice in Chinese or Chinese American communities, or is tiger parenting common in other Asian ethnic groups as well? And, lastly, how does tiger parenting relate to childrens development? To date, there has not been a concerted effort by scholars of parenting in Asian American families to address the important questions raised by Chuas book and the heated debates on the existence and impact of tiger parenting. In guest editing this
Linda P. Juang, Psychological and Brain Sciences Department, University of California at Santa Barbara; Desiree Baolin Qin, Human Development and Family Studies, Michigan State University; Irene J. K. Park, Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Linda P. Juang, Psychological and Brain Sciences Department, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106. E-mail: juang@psych.ucsb.edu 1
special issue, we hope to contribute to the tiger mom debate by bringing together scholarly work addressing questions such as, What defines tiger parenting? How common is this type of parenting? What implications does tiger parenting have for child and adolescent development and well-being? Contributors were asked to use Chuas notion of tiger parenting as a launching pad to examine culture-specific aspects of parenting that may be unique to Asian-heritage (encompassing both Asian American and native Asian) families. The goals of this special issue, then, were (a) to examine the prevalence and impact of tiger parenting and (b) to unpack the complexity of Asian-heritage parenting through examining the rationale, practices, and influences of culturally-specific aspects of parenting on child development and well-being. The new Pew Research Center (2012) nationwide survey shows that Asians have surpassed Latinos as the main source of immigrants in the United States. The number of Asian American families has also increased substantially in recent years (Passel, 2011). In the field of psychology, attention to Asian American parenting has grown since Ruth Chaos (1994) groundbreaking publication in Child Development on Chinese American parenting. Amy Chuas book brought further public media and scholarly attention to Asian American parenting. We believe this special issue makes a significant and timely contribution to our understanding of parenting in Asian-heritage families by systematically examining gaps in existing literature; documenting the prevalence and influence of tiger parenting; and highlighting innovative areas, methods, and approaches to gain a more nuanced and culturally embedded understanding of Asian-heritage parenting.
JUANG, QIN, AND PARK
Tiger Parenting and Gaps in the Literature

According to Chua, tiger mothers are mothers of Chinese (or other ethnic) origin who are highly controlling and authoritarian, denying their children free time, play dates, and extracurricular activities in order to drive them to high levels of success at any cost, in sharp contrast to the softer and more forgiving Western parenting style. More specifically, tiger parents can order their kids to get As, are not concerned about their childrens self-esteem, assume strength not fragility (Chua, 2011, p. 52), believe that their kids owe them everything (Chua, 2011, p. 53), and believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their childrens own desires and preferences (Chua, 2011, p. 53). This stereotypical and caricature-like image seems to confirm the worst fears about Asian parentingthat it is excessively controlling, harsh, and demanding unquestioning obedience with little to no concern for the childs needs, wishes, or emotional well-being. Importantly, we note that this is Chuas definition of tiger parenting and that the authors of this special issue have operationally defined tiger parenting in somewhat different ways. Indeed, the precise definition and meaning of tiger parenting is debatable and seems to vary across contexts and reporters. This is in part due to the origin of the concept as depicted by Chuas book, which was based on one parents memoir instead of empirical research. In the scholarly literature, researchers have examined elements of tiger parenting in Asian-heritage families. The majority of studies have employed quantitative methods drawing on crosssectional data, used European American parents as a comparison group, and applied Baumrinds (1966) typology of authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and negligent parenting styles. Studies, for instance, have generally found that Asian-heritage parents tend to be more authoritarian when compared with European American parents (Chao, 2000; Park, Kim, Chiang, & Ju, 2010). They tend to endorse higher levels of psychological control and strictness (Chao & Aque, 2009); show less outward affection and verbal expressions of love (Wu & Chao, 2005); more strongly emphasize filial piety (i.e., honoring the family, respecting elders, being a top student; Chao, 2000), obedience, and deference to parents and elders (Supple & Small, 2006); and place less emphasis on autonomy (Supple, Ghazarian, Peterson, & Bush, 2009). In sum, it appears that Asian-heritage parents generally place differential value on control beliefs and engage in different parenting practices along a number of dimensions compared with European American parents. There are, however, a number of gaps in current research on parenting in Asian-heritage families. First, the majority of these studies have focused primarily on Chinese American families, with a handful on Korean American families. Few studies have examined Southeast Asian families or contemporary Asian families. Second, as with Asian American psychology literature in general, most studies employ quantitative methods and compare Asian American families with European American families. Far fewer studies have focused on within-group differences or use qualitative methods. Third, the image of the model minority has dominated scholarly and public discourse on Asian American children and adolescents. Subsequently, theory and empirical research on Asian American children has focused predominantly on their educational achievement. This emphasis, however, overlooks their psychological and
social well-being. As a result, the role parenting plays in Asian American childrens education has been well established in the literature. In contrast, much less research has focused on how different types of parenting may influence the psychosocial development of Asian American children and adolescents. In this special issue, the authors present data collected on Chinese American and Mainland Chinese, Korean American, and Hmong American families. Collectively, the authors employ both qualitative and quantitative methods, present findings on Asianheritage parenting (including tiger parenting), focus on withingroup differences, and examine how different types of parenting contribute to childrens educational outcomes and psychosocial well-being.
Six Empirical Studies in This Special Issue

In the first article, drawing on both parent and adolescent report data, Kim, Wang, Orozco-Lapray, Shen, and Murtuza (this issue, pp. 718) use latent profile analysis with a number of parenting dimensions to identity four parenting profiles among Chinese American parentstiger parenting, supportive parenting, easygoing parenting, and harsh parenting. Their longitudinal study provides empirical support for the existence of Chuas notion of the tiger parent. However, the results show that tiger parenting (measured as scoring high on both positive and negative parenting dimensions) is not common, challenging the stereotype that many Asian-heritage parents are tiger parents. The results also show that tiger parenting is prospectively linked to negative adolescent adjustment both academically and psychosocially, challenging the stereotype that tiger parenting is always successful in producing children with high academic achievement. In contrast, supportive parenting (scoring high on positive and low on negative parenting dimensions) is the most common parenting profile among Chinese American families and is linked to the best developmental outcomes, including academic achievement and psychosocial adjustment. In the second article on an emic-derived Korean American parenting socialization construct, ga-jung-kyo-yuk, Choi, Kim, Kim, and Park (this issue, pp. 19 29) show that ga-jung-kyo-yuk appears to be a blend of the authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles. Their findings on data from both fathers and mothers suggest that traditional notions of parenting styles based on Baumrinds typology may not wholly capture Korean American parenting. Their findings also suggest that acculturation to mainstream culture is positively associated with authoritative style, warmth, and good communication within the family. They also discuss unique Korean cultural disciplinary parenting practices. The third article by Cheah, Leung, and Zhou (this issue, pp. 30 40) focuses on Chinese American parenting beliefs in the context of acculturation. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 50 Chinese immigrant mothers with young children, the authors show how Chinese American immigrant mothers integrate both typical Chinese and American aspects of parenting. The mothers discussed the need to be more flexible across various areas to accommodate to the cultural values of the mainstream society. In doing so, they are challenged to balance the child-rearing goals of encouraging their childs autonomy with fostering a strong connection and sense of responsibility to the family. Importantly, this
DECONSTRUCTING THE MYTH OF THE TIGER MOTHER
study showcases how mothers parenting beliefs, values, and practices are deeply embedded within the acculturation process. The next two articles by Supple and Cavanaugh (this issue, pp. 41 49) and Lamborn, Nguyen, and Bocanegra (this issue, pp. 50 60) focus on Hmong American parents with their adolescent children, an understudied population in the Asian American parenting literature. Notably, both studies focus on normative Hmong American parenting rather than viewing Hmong American parenting from a risk and deficit perspective. Supple and Cavanaughs findings show that parental monitoring can offset the negative association between family conflict and adolescent adjustment. The authors argue that parental monitoring (an important aspect of tiger parenting) is a culturally appropriate and positive aspect of parenting, relaying concern and support to Hmong American adolescents. Their study also suggests that developmental implications for tiger parenting may differ for adolescent boys versus girls. Lamborn et al. (this issue) show that Hmong American adolescents view their parents in predominantly positive ways, describing their mothers as being supportive, loving, openly communicative, and showing warmth. Again, these views offer a contrast to the stereotype of Asian American parents as tiger parents. Lamborn et al. also consider social class and argue that the same parenting behaviors that they found with Hmong American mothers (such as training children using high expectations, close supervision to fulfill family obligations) may have different roots from what Chao (2000) and Chua (2011) have found with middle- and upper-middle socioeconomic status Chinese American families. In the Lamborn et al. study, many of the families were from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds. Under these circumstances, it is a necessity that children learn how to manage the household and be responsible for doing well in school. An important area for future research is to understand how differing motivations for similar parenting behaviors (e.g., the training model) may also have differing implications for child outcomes. The Lamborn et al. article demonstrates the importance of not only focusing on how cultural values shape parenting beliefs, practices, and related child outcomes, but also the salience of socioeconomic status and family resources. In the only international article in the special issue, Way et al. (this issue, pp. 6170) focus on parenting beliefs of mothers from Nanjing, China. In contrast to the tiger mother image, the mothers they interviewed had broader goals for their children beyond academic success, including being happy, self-sufficient, and socially and emotionally well adjusted. This article clearly shows how cultures are changing, and that using qualitative methodologies can provide a rich description of variations in Asian-heritage parenting. These researchers allowed patterns of parenting to emerge rather than pigeonholing Chinese parenting into previously defined categories. They also illustrate that traditional Chinese parenting is changing in the context of rapid social, economic, and cultural changes in China as a result of globalization.
tiger mother. Instead, the studies demonstrate clearly that the tiger mom is far from being representative of Asian-heritage parenting; it exists only in a restricted number of families. And more important, tiger parenting is far from the ideal way of parenting. Below, we turn to the questions that we started with in compiling this special issue and discuss how this collection of articles has addressed these questions and contributed to the field of Asian American parenting in their innovative foci and methodological approaches.
What Defines Asian-Heritage Parenting, Tiger Parenting, and How Common Is Tiger Parenting?
Is Asian-heritage parenting generally as harsh as what the tiger mother image suggests? In addressing this question, the research approach appears to be very consequential. As mentioned above, most studies have used cross-sectional data to compare Asianheritage (mostly of Chinese origin) parenting with European American parenting, using mean scores on Western measures of parental control and authoritarianism. This is the dominant approach by which Asian-heritage parenting has traditionally been defined. Results from these studies largely seem to support Chuas assertions of stricter and more demanding parents. One advantage of this approach is offering a clearer understanding of what may be unique and what may be universal across different ethnic groups. However, one important disadvantage of this comparative approach is that it does not capture the variations inherent in Asianheritage parenting or pay sufficient attention to culturally specific approaches to parenting. Cross-cultural psychologists have long recognized that parenting is grounded in the cultural context (Whiting & Whiting, 1975), and that the meaning and consequences of parenting are informed by culture (Harkness & Super, 1992). In this special issue, the authors address this disadvantage by adopting a range of methodologies, such as using emic-driven measures of culture-specific parenting (e.g., Choi et al., this issue), a person-centered approach (Kim et al., this issue), multiinformant surveys (e.g., Choi et al., this issue; Kim et al., this issue), and in-depth interviews (e.g., Cheah et al., this issue; Lamborn et al., this issue; Way et al., this issue), as well as a range of analytic methods to examine whether the phenomenon of tiger parenting captures essential aspects of Asian-heritage parenting. The authors in this special issue also adopted different operational definitions of tiger parenting depending on the focus and goals of their respective studies. For instance, Kim et al. (this issue) defined tiger parenting as scoring high on both positive and negative parenting dimensions, whereas Supple and Cavanaugh (this issue) implicated culture-based conflicts, shaming or disapproval, and parental monitoring as aspects of tiger parenting. Collectively, findings from this special issue suggest that Asian-heritage parenting is warmer, more emotionally supportive, and less authoritarian than previously depicted. The findings also suggest that tiger mothers are relatively rare among Asian-heritage parents. There are also important commonalities and tremendous variations in Asian-heritage parenting across cultural groups, time, and contexts. Based on Baumrinds original parenting style typologies, the parenting style of authoritarianism has been studied extensively among Asian-heritage families. One disadvantage of studying global parenting styles such as authoritarianism, however, is that it
Asian-Heritage Parenting: Typologies, Prevalence, and Links to Childrens Adjustment

Taken as a whole, the collection of articles in this special issue shows that in Asian-heritage families, parenting looks very different from what is depicted or implied by the caricature image of the
JUANG, QIN, AND PARK
underemphasizes the fact that parents tend to act and respond differently depending on the particular child, the situation, and the context (Turiel, 1998). Scholars have proposed a domain-specific approach that focuses on parenting behaviors rather than general styles to better understand the socialization process (Grusec & Davidov, 2010). This domain-specific approach may be particularly useful for understanding how parents of different cultures promote specific developmental goals as it can pinpoint specific parenting practices that can promote certain child outcomes in a specific context or culture. Almost all of the articles in this special issue aim to broaden the global parenting style approach through an examination of multiple aspects of parenting goals and practices in families. One further disadvantage of the dominant cross-sectional approach of capturing Asian-heritage parenting via one snapshot of parenting is the lack of attention to temporal change, both at the individual level and at the cultural level. From a developmental perspective, this is a clear limitation. In this special issue, a number of articles address this shortcoming by considering how parenting changes over time on an individual level (Cheah et al., this issue; Kim et al., this issue) and how cultures themselves change in response to fluid social and economic contexts (Way et al., this issue). In their study of Chinese American mothers, Cheah et al. (this issue) show how mothers adapted their parenting as they spent more time in the United States, highlighting the important role acculturation plays in parenting philosophy and practices. Kim et al. (this issue) show how, in a span of 8 years, both mothers and fathers practices changed from their childrens early adolescence to emerging adulthood. In addition to individual-level change, cultures themselves change. And because cultures are changing, parenting beliefs, itibas values, and practices are also changing (Kag i, 2007). Way et al. (this issue) describe how parenting in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China has changed over the past several decades resulting from dramatic social changes. Contemporary Chinese parenting, quite different from the traditional stern and highly controlling style, is increasingly including many Western elements; for instance, parents emphasize both autonomy and relatedness in their parenting (Lieber, Fung, & Leung, 2006). Furthermore, Chinese parents in the Way et al. study consider childrens happiness and social skills to be extremely important for children to thrive in a changing social context, quite different from the tiger mothers sole emphasis on academic achievement. The Way et al. study is important because it suggests that many (including Chua) may have an outdated view of Chinese parenting. Immigrants may be even more traditional than their nonimmigrant counterparts in the heritage countries, and in some ways, immigrants may continue to operate on a frozen and mummified notion of their heritage culture. Thus, in studying Asian-heritage families, it is important for researchers to be cautious of holding their own potentially outdated views of parenting in different cultural groups.
they include measures of adjustment beyond the academic arena. Their studies focus on social and emotional developmentareas that have traditionally been neglected in research with Asian American children and adolescents (Liu, 2011). Qin (2008) has also included a broader range of developmental outcomes to find that aspects of tiger parenting (overly high academic expectations and pressure to succeed, lack of open parent child communication, overly strict) may result in Chinese American adolescents who do well in school but who are not well adjusted socially and emotionally. Several studies in this special issue examine adjustment beyond the academic arena such as depressive symptoms, self-esteem, and feelings of alienation from parents (e.g., Kim et al., this issue; Supple & Cavanaugh this issue). Supple and Cavanaugh found that certain aspects of tiger parenting (such as high parental monitoring) may promote some areas of childrens adjustment (academic achievement and self-esteem) better than other aspects (parental disapproval for the child who is becoming more Americanized). Only when academic outcomes are studied in conjunction with socioemotional outcomes simultaneously can we begin to discern whether or not there are important trade-offs associated with certain parenting practices. For instance, as we see in this special issue, tiger parenting can contain costs in both the academic and psychological domains for Chinese American adolescents (Kim et al., this issue), whereas supportive parenting appears to benefit adolescent developmental outcomes. Thus, there is evidence that Asian-heritage parenting can evince positive outcomes in both the academic and psychosocial domains. And that to do so, Asian-heritage parents are employing parenting practices that emphasize nurturance and warmth as well as developing a bicultural parenting style that blends values from both their heritage culture and the mainstream American culture. It will be important to continue identifying other aspects of Asian-heritage parenting, beyond parental control and authoritarianism, that are salient for child development.
Where to Go From Here: Two Commentaries and Future Directions

We are fortunate to have several culture and parenting experts provide commentaries based on their review of the six empirical studies and chart directions for future research. In the first commentary, Lau and Fung (this issue, pp. 7175) highlight three controversial assertions by Chua and contrast these against the quantitative and qualitative data from the studies in the special issue: (a) that Chinese-heritage parents place a much stronger emphasis on their childrens academic development rather than social and emotional development, (b) the root of this emphasis is attributed to cultural values and beliefs (vs. other factors such as socioeconomic status), and (c) tiger parenting leads to highachieving and resilient children. Lau and Fungs commentary is notable for integrating findings from the six studies with popular media/public reactions to offer a critical and thoughtful analysis of the claims made by Chua. In the second commentary, DeaterDeckard (this issue, pp. 76 78) takes a birds eye view of the research landscape to identify three key issues relevant to the study of culture, parenting, and child development: (a) integrating universal and culture-specific as well as dimensional and categorical approaches to studying parenting; (b) building consensus around validation of the most relevant dimensions and categories; and (c)
Parenting and Links to Childrens Adjustment

As mentioned above, research on Asian-heritage parenting and child outcomes has been dominated by a focus on childrens academic achievement because of the continued acceptance of the model minority myth. Chen and colleagues studies (Chen, Dong, & Zhou, 1997; Chen, Rubin, Li, & Li, 1999) are important because
DECONSTRUCTING THE MYTH OF THE TIGER MOTHER
tackling within-family (sibling differentiation) as well as betweenfamilies variation in these dimensions and categories. Using the six studies as a launching point, Deater-Deckard offers a big picture view of the field, providing insights that lead to important directions for future research. We concur with the commentary authors that despite advances in understanding Asian-heritage parenting, there are still many questions left unanswered and important issues to consider. Although we know that socialization is a dynamic, reciprocal process (Grusec & Davidov, 2010), far more studies have primarily conceptualized socialization as flowing one wayfrom parent to child. In this special issue, none of the studies explicitly tested the dynamic bidirectional process of parenting and child adjustment. Further, there are still few longitudinal studies examining Asianheritage parenting and child/adolescent development. An important question to address is the stability and change in parenting throughout childrens developmental stages. Kim et al. (this issue) show that parenting changes from the childs early adolescence to emerging adulthood. The proportion of tiger mothers, for instance, tended to decrease over time, whereas the proportion of tiger fathers increased over time. And in her book, Chua realized that she needed to change the way she parented her younger daughter Lulu as Lulu became a teenager. At the end of the book, Chua realizes that her earlier ways of parenting were no longer appropriate for her teenage daughter. Future research should investigate reasons for such changes. Why do mothers become less tiger mom-like and why do fathers become more so? And, importantly, what role do children play in eliciting or challenging these changes in parenting over time? Another area for future research is to focus on secondgeneration Asian American parents and children. We know much more about first-generation immigrant parents. In this special issue, parents in almost all of the studies were first generation. Findings show that first-generation immigrant parents deal with the immigrant struggle, namely, learning to adapt to the new culture and, at the same time, figuring out how to maintain and transmit their heritage culture and values to their own children as their children grow up and are likely to pick up dominant culture values and beliefs. With the substantial wave of Asian immigrants to the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the children born in that time period are now parents themselves. We know very little, however, about the parenting goals, beliefs, and practices of these second-generation Asian-heritage parents. How do second-generation parents integrate different cultural values from their heritage and dominant cultures, and how does this integration relate to their parenting? Chua is not an immigrant herself, but a second-generation parent. Her story of parenting reflects a struggle to maintain aspects of parenting she views as important to her Chinese heritage culture. And yet, in the end, she also realizes the flaws in her tiger mother approach and that modifications are necessary in raising her children in a country that may have very different parenting ideas compared with her own notions of successful parenting in her heritage culture. Another direction for future research is the study of how parenting in Asian-heritage families reflects biracial or blended cultural values, practices, and socialization strategies. Although Chuas children grew up in a Chinese-Jewish blended family, she disclosed very little about how parenting decisions and negotiations were made to reconcile potential cultural differences. Ac-
cording to the U.S. Census, Chuas daughters represent an exploding segment of the Asian American population that identifies as Asian in combination with at least one other race (15%, 2.6 million people; Hoeffel, Roastogi, Kim, & Shahid, 2012). For this rapidly growing group, it is imperative that researchers address how biracial/multiracial/multiethnic families navigate parenting and socialization in culturally blended family contexts so that we can learn more about child development and well-being given these rapidly shifting racial, ethnic, and cultural parameters. Finally, it is important that future research examines the impact of Asian-heritage parenting (in all of its heterogeneity and complexity) on different kinds of child and adolescent outcomes within the same study. In this way, we can more clearly evaluate both the benefits and costs of various parenting practices on Asian-heritage childrens development. This is practical for several reasons, but we highlight two. On the one hand, identifying parenting practices that are associated with positive versus negative developmental and psychosocial outcomes is critical for translating this research into more targeted and effective prevention and intervention efforts for Asian-heritage families. On the other hand, delineating both sources of risk and resilience would help to move the literature away from stereotypes of the model minority to a more balanced and comprehensive empirical knowledge base that accurately captures the experiences of Asian-heritage parents and their children.
Conclusion
The articles in this special issue suggest several take-home messages. First, although tiger parenting (defined as harsh, demanding, and emotionally unsupportive) exists among Asianheritage families, it is not common. Second, tiger parenting is not linked to the best child outcomes both academically and socioemotionally. Third, the studies collectively show that there is much more variation in Asian-heritage parenting behaviors and practices beyond being strict, controlling, and demanding high academic achievement of their children. Using a range of samples and methodologies, the studies suggest that Asian-heritage parents are also warm, supportive, and loving toward their children, which has not been emphasized (and perhaps even de-emphasized) in the literature. We hope this special issue can dispel some of these stereotypical, monolithic notions of Asian-heritage parenting by offering a more nuanced and accurate perspective so that readers can see beyond the myth of the tiger mother.
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Received October 17, 2012 Revision received January 16, 2013 Accepted January 17, 2013
Asian American Journal of Psychology 2013, Vol. 4, No. 1, 718
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
University of Texas at Austin
Tiger parenting, as described by Chua (2011, Battle hymn of the tiger mother. New York, NY: Penguin Press), has put parenting in Asian American families in the spotlight. The current study identified parenting profiles in Chinese American families and explored their effects on adolescent adjustment. In a three-wave longitudinal design spanning 8 years, from early adolescence to emerging adulthood, adolescents (54% female), fathers, and mothers from 444 Chinese American families reported on eight parenting dimensions (e.g., warmth and shaming) and six developmental outcomes (e.g., GPA and academic pressure). Latent profile analyses on the eight parenting dimensions demonstrated four parenting profiles: supportive, tiger, easygoing, and harsh parenting. Over time, the percentage of parents classified as tiger parents decreased among mothers but increased among fathers. Path analyses showed that the supportive parenting profile, which was the most common, was associated with the best developmental outcomes, followed by easygoing parenting, tiger parenting, and harsh parenting. Compared with the supportive parenting profile, a tiger parenting profile was associated with lower GPA and educational attainment, as well as less of a sense of family obligation; it was also associated with more academic pressure, more depressive symptoms, and a greater sense of alienation. The current study suggests that, contrary to the common perception, tiger parenting is not the most typical parenting profile in Chinese American families, nor does it lead to optimal adjustment among Chinese American adolescents. Keywords: parenting profiles, Chinese, tiger parenting, adolescent adjustment
There is a common perception that Asian American parents are authoritarians when it comes to schoolwork and extracurricular activities, and exceedingly demanding of their children both academically and at home. Recently, these parents have been termed tiger parents (Chua, 2011) for the ferocity with which they discipline their children and for their emphasis on the importance of family obligation and academic achievement. They are also viewed as displaying relatively less warmth and affection toward their children, and as running households that do not exhibit democratic values. The spotlight on tiger parenting has caused the public to question whether the control these parents exert over their children is appropriate, and whether their parenting practices positively or negatively affect childrens development. Studies have yet to find empirical evidence to support or refute these concerns. The current study uses longitudinal data from Chinese American adolescents and their parents to examine the parenting profiles that may exist specifically within this group, and the
adolescent outcomes that may be associated with each emerging parenting profile.
Parenting in Asian Americans

All decent parents want to do whats best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that (Chua, 2011, p. 63). Chuas book, in which she presents a personal account of her own parenting practices, stirred parents and experts nationwide. She claims to be a tiger mother herself, and argues that the methods she used to raise her daughters are aligned with the Chinese cultural emphasis on academic achievement and family obligationtwo means by which adolescents bring honor to the family (Chao, 1994). This is in contrast to European American practices, which emphasize the importance of childrens selfesteem and personal growth (Chao & Tseng, 2002). These differences between the motivations of Asian and European American
This article was published Online First November 19, 2012. Su Yeong Kim, Yijie Wang, Diana Orozco-Lapray, Yishan Shen, and Mohammed Murtuza, Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Texas at Austin. Support for this research was provided through awards to Su Yeong Kim from (1) Eunice Kennedy Shriver NICHD 5R03HD051629-02; (2) Office of the Vice President for Research Grant/Special Research Grant from the University of Texas at Austin; (3) Jacobs Foundation Young Investigator Grant; (4) American Psychological Association Office of Ethnic Minority Affairs, Promoting Psychological Research and Training on Health Disparities Issues at Ethnic Minority Serving Institutions Grant; (5) American 7
Psychological Foundation/Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology, Ruth G. and Joseph D. Matarazzo Grant; (6) California Association of Family and Consumer Sciences, Extended Education Fund; (7) American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences, Massachusetts Avenue Building Assets Fund; and (8) Eunice Kennedy Shriver NICHD 5R24HD042849-10 grant awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Su Yeong Kim, Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, 108 E Dean Keeton St., Stop A2702, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712. E-mail: sykim@prc.utexas.edu
KIM, WANG, OROZCO-LAPRAY, SHEN, AND MURTUZA
parents may mean that Western-derived parenting profiles are not as applicable to Asian Americans.
Parenting Dimensions and Profiles

Research on parenting styles originated with Baumrinds research on parental control, which identified three parenting styles: authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive (Baumrind, 1966). Maccoby and Martin expanded on Baumrinds work by reassessing parenting profiles using two dimensions, responsiveness (warmth) and demandingness (control), which allowed them to identify an additional parenting profile: negligent (Maccoby & Martin, 1983). Authoritative parenting is viewed as supportive, with parents granting autonomy and encouraging communication (Darling & Steinberg, 1993). This style is correlated with positive academic outcomes and increased competence. Authoritarian parenting is viewed as harsh, with parents using fear to elicit behavioral compliance (Darling & Steinberg, 1993); parents may also use power and control to produce desired behaviors in their children (Baumrind, 1966). These methods are correlated with increased depressive symptoms and lower self-esteem (Nguyen, 2008). While both of these parenting profiles are characterized by the use of control, the type of control (power) differs. Authoritative parents employ confrontive power, which is open to negotiation and reasoning, while authoritarian parents use coercive power, which is aimed at maintaining the hierarchical structure of the parent child relationship (Baumrind, 2012). A negligent parenting profile characterizes parents who exert low levels of control and who are largely unresponsive to their children. In contrast, a permissive parenting profile characterizes parents who are more responsive, maintain low levels of control, are nonpunitive, and low in demandingness (Baumrind, 1966). While these parenting profiles have become widely accepted in the literature, they were initially identified using a population of toddlers and young children in well-functioning, European American families (Baumrind, 1966; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). Scholars are increasingly recognizing the need to assess parental profiles using expanded dimensions to accommodate ethnic populations and different developmental periods (Steinberg, Lamborn, Dornbusch, & Darling, 1992). Previous research on parenting practices in ethnic minority groups indicates that cultural values and practices may impact parenting styles such that the western-derived profiles established by Baumrind (1966) and expanded by Maccoby and Martin (1983) are not as applicable to these groups. Working from the hypothesis that ethnic minorities parenting practices may differ from those evinced in the classical profiles, Domenech Rodriguez, Donovick, and Crowley (2009) found the classic parenting styles did indeed have less relevance in the case of ethnic minority families. Studies conducted on ethnic minority parents have found that these parents exhibit lower levels of parental sensitivity, use culturally specific types of parental control, and exhibit higher levels of protectiveness (Chao, 1994; Mesman, van Ijzendoorn, & BakermansKranenburg, 2012; Domenech Rodriguez et al., 2009). Overall, these studies question whether the classic parenting styles accurately capture parenting practices in ethnic minorities such as Asian Americans. Previous studies on Asian parents have employed classic labels, but have added caveats such as, authoritative and psychologically
controlling (Chan, Bowes, & Wyver, 2009, p. 849) to the classic authoritarian label. Such parenting may be an example of tiger parenting, even though the term is relatively new. Recently, the term tiger parent was popularized, and is colloquially understood to refer to Asian American parents (Chua, 2011). The hypothesized tiger parenting profile may be characterized by high levels of both authoritativeness and authoritarianism among Asian parents, and may be viewed as the culturally salient merger of the classic authoritative and authoritarian parenting profiles (Chan et al., 2009; Xu et al., 2005). In addition to the tiger parenting profile, we expect to find additional parenting profiles in our sample. For example, a profile in which parents are supportive may be similar to the classic authoritative profile; a profile in which parents are characterized as harsh may be similar to the classic authoritarian profile; and a profile in which parents are easygoing may be similar to the classic negligent and/or permissive parenting profiles. Contemporary scholars are increasingly recognizing the importance of using multiple dimensions, both positive and negative, to define parenting profiles (Nelson, Padilla-Walker, Christensen, Evans, & Carroll, 2011). Accordingly, the current study conceptualizes its potential parenting profiles as reflecting varying levels of eight different parenting dimensions. The classic dimension of warmth is expanded to include both positive (parental warmth) and negative (parental hostility) dimensions in an effort to distinguish between the mere lack of warmth and the presence of actual hostility. The classic dimension of control is expanded to include the multiple facets of controlspecifically, positive control is measured by parental monitoring and democratic parenting; negative control is measured by psychological control and punitive parenting. Additionally, inductive reasoning, which is a measure of parents effective communication with their children, is included as part of the fourth dimension, along with shaming, which has been shown to play a significant role in the socialization of Chinese-origin children (Fung, 1999). Fung (1999) notes that Asian parents actively pressure their children to internalize feelings of shame for not conforming to norms or for failing to perform as parents expect. These expanded dimensions allow for a more comprehensive measurement of control and warmth than can be identified using the classical profiles. A possible supportive parenting profile emergent in this study would score high on positive measures (parental warmth, democratic parenting, parental monitoring, and inductive reasoning) and low on negative measures (parental hostility, psychological control, punitive parenting, and shaming). Another possible profile, one characterized as harsh, would score low on positive measures and high on negative measures. A profile characterized as easygoing may score low on both positive and negative measures. Finally, a profile characterized as tiger parenting may score high on both positive and negative measures.
A Variable-Centered Versus a Person-Centered Approach

In a variable-centered approach to studying parenting, each parenting dimension is examined in isolation. The disadvantage of this approach is that the effect of individual parenting dimensions may differ depending on the parenting styles compiled from multiple dimensions (Kerr, Stattin, & Ozdemir, 2012). For example,
TIGER PARENTING
high levels of control may be perceived differently when accompanied by high levels of warmth than when they are accompanied by low levels of warmth (Keijsers, Frijns, Branje, & Meeus, 2009). Although parenting is multifaceted, empirical studies that create profiles have relied on arbitrary cutoffs or a median split approach in order to create parenting styles using two dimensions. For example, Chao (2001) and Berge, Wall, Loth, and NeumarkSztainer (2010) identified the four traditional parenting profiles by placing subjects rated as high (above the median) or low (below the median) in two dimensions into a four-tier parenting classification system. One notable limitation in this type of analysis is the researcher may misclassify subjects by artificially placing an equal number of participants into each of the four profiles, which may not accurately depict the prevalence of each profile in the sample. In addition, by focusing on only two dimensions, this approach precludes the inclusion of other important dimensions used to define parenting profiles, such as autonomy granting/communication (Darling & Steinberg, 1993). The current study uses multiple parenting dimensions in a latent profile analysis to create the clusters that define parenting profiles in a sample of Chinese Americans. Nelson and colleagues (2011) also examined eight dimensions of parenting using a personcentered approach. The advantage of a person-centered approach, such as latent profile analysis, is that it allows the data to determine the optimal number of solutions (profiles) and can provide the probability of a participant belonging to one of the profiles. A person-centered approach eliminates any presumed bias toward a specified number of solutions, and is advantageous for its applicability to multidimensional models (Weaver & Kim, 2008).
responsible for childrens socialization in the home, up until their childrens transition into adolescence. Fathers, on the other hand, might take on the tiger parenting role as adolescents gain more autonomy and independence during emerging adulthood. In addition to parents reports on their own parenting styles, adolescents perspectives on their parents parenting is also important to assess. Parents and adolescents may not agree about which style of parenting is practiced in the home. Indeed, there is a high level of mismatch between the parenting practices Chinese American adolescents experience and those they deem to be examples of ideal parenting, suggesting a large discrepancy between parent and adolescent reports of parenting practices (Wu & Chao, 2011).
Parenting Profiles and Adolescent Outcomes

This study evaluates multiple domains of adolescent outcomes associated with each parenting profile that emerged in a Chinese American sample. Assessing multiple adolescent outcomes can provide a better understanding of how parenting profiles affect overall adjustment across the developmental periods of early adolescence, middle adolescence, and emerging adulthood. The outcomes include academic achievement, educational attainment, academic pressure, depressive symptoms, parent child alienation, and family obligation. Previous studies have evaluated the role of parenting profiles in relation to a single outcome, such as academic achievement or depressive symptoms. By examining these and other outcomes together, the current study may be able to address how parenting profiles relate to the achievement/adjustment paradox wherein Asian American students have high levels of academic achievement, but low levels of psychological adjustment (Qin, 2008). This paradox may be most evident among Asian American adolescents whose parents fit into the tiger parenting profile. Previous research has identified authoritative parenting as positively correlated and authoritarian parenting as negatively correlated with GPA (measure of academic achievement) (Steinberg et al., 1992). Chao and Tseng (2002) emphasize that Chinese parents measure success by their childrens performance in school and their childrens adherence to familial responsibilities, which means that children may feel a strong sense of academic pressure and family obligation. It is also important to assess adolescent adjustment by measuring outcomes such as parent child alienation and depressive symptoms. Research has found that unsupportive parenting behaviors decrease parent child bonding, leading adolescents to develop an increased sense of alienation from their parents (S. Y. Kim, Chen, Wang, Shen, & Orozco-Lapray, 2012). In addition, authoritarian-like parenting practices may also increase adolescents depressive symptoms (Nguyen, 2008). We expect that if tiger parenting does indeed emerge as a parenting profile, it may be the most likely of the profiles to relate to the achievement/adjustment paradox, given that tiger parentings emphasis on high academic achievement and strong sense of family obligation may go hand-in-hand with high academic pressure and heightened adolescent depressive symptoms. This study will also explore whether the achievement/adjustment paradox is evident in other profiles specific to Chinese American parenting that may emerge.
Parenting Profiles Across Adolescent Developmental Periods and Across Reporters

In the current study, parenting profiles are assessed during early, middle, and late adolescence. It may be possible for parenting profiles emergent at one developmental period to differ from those at another developmental period. Nelson et al. (2011) examined parenting during young adulthood and concluded that, while classical parenting styles were applicable to their sample, other parenting styles may be more relevant during emerging adulthood. The current study allows for an examination of parenting styles at developmental periods from early adolescence to emerging adulthood, and addresses whether the tiger parenting profile is evident throughout adolescence or only during specific developmental periods by a specific parent in the family. The common adage strict father, kind mother (Chao & Tseng, 2002) in Chinese families suggests that the mother may be responsible for daily upbringing and emotional guidance, while the father may be responsible for discipline and socialization outside the home. At this time, little research has yet examined whether mothers and fathers may take on the roles of disciplinarian and compassionate parent to varying degrees at different times during a childs development. If the tiger parenting profile does exist, it may be more evident during a particular time period, since parenting practices may be influenced by what mothers and fathers deem most appropriate for meeting the developmental needs of their children at any given time (Costigan & Dokis, 2006; Inman, Howard, Beaumont, & Walker, 2007). For example, mothers may be tiger parents during the earlier years, when they are more
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Current Study
Chuas book (2011) instigated a need to assess parenting profiles using an expanded model of parenting dimensions that may better reflect the parenting practices of a sample of Chinese Americans. First, this study aims to identify parenting profiles for Chinese American mothers and fathers separately, and to determine if a tiger parenting profile emerges, by using both parent self-reports and adolescent reports of parenting practices (warmth, parental monitoring, democratic parenting, inductive reasoning, hostility, psychological control, shaming, and punitive parenting). Second, this study will evaluate various adolescent outcomes (academic achievement, educational attainment, academic pressure, depressive symptoms, parent child alienation, and family obligation) associated with each parenting profile across three distinct developmental periods: early adolescence, middle adolescence, and emerging adulthood.
Method Participants
Participants were Chinese American families participating in a three-wave longitudinal study, with data gathered every 4 years. Adolescents were initially recruited from seven middle schools in Northern California. There were 444 families in Wave 1, 350 families in Wave 2 and 330 families in Wave 3. Slightly over half of the adolescent sample is female (n 246, 54%). The age of the adolescents in the initial wave ranges from 12 to 15 (M 13.03, SD 0.73) years old. Median family income is in the range of $30,001 to $45,000 across all three waves. Median parental education level is some high school education for both fathers and mothers. Most (75%) of the adolescents were born in U.S., whereas 91% of the mothers and 88% of the fathers were born outside the U.S. Most of the participants originally came from Hong Kong or southern provinces of China. Fewer than 10 families hailed from Taiwan. The occupational status of immigrant parents is wide-ranging, from those in professional occupations (e.g., banker or computer programmer) to unskilled laborers (e.g., construction worker or janitor). The majority speaks Cantonese; less than 10% of the families speak Mandarin as their home language.
lunch periods. Among the families who agreed to participate, 76% returned surveys. Four years after the initial wave, families were asked to participate in the second wave, and after another 4 years had passed, they were asked to participate in the third wave of data collection. Families who returned questionnaires were compensated a nominal amount of money ($30 at Wave 1, $50 at Wave 2, and $130 at Wave 3) for their participation. Questionnaires were prepared in English and Chinese. The questionnaires were first translated to Chinese and then backtranslated to English. Any inconsistencies with the original English version scale were resolved by bilingual/bicultural research assistants with careful consideration of culturally appropriate meanings of items. Around 71% parents used the Chinese language version of the questionnaire and the majority (85%) of adolescents used the English version. Attrition analyses were conducted at Waves 2 and 3 to compare families who participated with those who did not on the demographic variables measured at Wave 1 (i.e., parental education, family income, parent and child generational status, parent and child age). Only one significant difference emerged: boys were less likely than girls to have continued participating (2 (1) 7.20 to 10.41, p .01). Adolescent sex is included as a covariate for all analyses.
Measures
Parenting dimensions. Adolescents, mothers, and fathers all responded to questions about eight parenting dimensions: parental warmth, inductive reasoning, parental monitoring, democratic parenting, parental hostility, psychological control, shaming, and punitive parenting. The internal consistency for each parenting dimension was from acceptable to high across waves and informants ( .65 to .91), except for mother report of democratic parenting at Wave 1 ( .59). Parental warmth, inductive reasoning, parental monitoring, and parental hostility were assessed through measures adapted from the Iowa Youth and Families Project (Conger, Patterson, & Ge, 1995; Ge, Best, Conger, & Simons, 1996). Parental warmth was measured with eight items about an affective dimension of parenting on a 7-point scale. Some examples of the items are act loving, affectionate, and caring, listen carefully, and act supportive and understanding. Using a 5-point scale, participants also rated four items assessing inductive reasoning (e.g., give reasons for decisions; ask for the target childs opinion before making decisions; and discipline by reasoning, explaining or talking), as well as three items assessing parental monitoring (e.g., know whereabouts of the target child; know who the target child is with; know when the target child comes home). Parental hostility was assessed using seven items about parents hostile behavior toward their children on a 7-point scale. Some examples of the items are shout or yell, get angry, and insult or swear at the target child. Democratic parenting and punitive parenting were assessed through two subscales of the Parenting Practices Questionnaire (Robinson, Mandleco, Olson, & Hart, 1995) using a five-point scale. Democratic parenting was measured with five items about parents autonomy granting (e.g., encourage the target child to freely express himself/herself, allow the target child to give input into family rules, and take into account the target childs preferences). Punitive parenting was measured with four items about
Procedure
Participants were initially recruited from seven middle schools in major metropolitan areas of Northern California. With the aid of school administrators, Chinese American students were identified, and all eligible families were sent a letter describing the research project in both Chinese and English. The 47% of these families that returned parent consent and adolescent assent received a packet of questionnaires for the mother, father, and target adolescent in the household. Participants were instructed to complete the questionnaires alone and not to discuss answers with friends and/or family members. They were also instructed to seal their questionnaires in the provided envelopes immediately following the completion of their responses. Within approximately 23 weeks after sending the questionnaire packet, research assistants visited each school to collect the completed questionnaires during the students
TIGER PARENTING
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parents use of punitive discipline (e.g., punish the target child by taking privileges away with little or no explanation, discipline first and ask questions later, and use threat of punishment with little or no explanation). Psychological control was assessed through a measure of psychological control adapted by Barber (1996) from the Childs Report of Parental Behavior Inventory (Schaefer, 1965). Using a 3-point scale, all participants rated eight items about parents attempts to regulate childrens psychological experience (e.g., change the subject whenever the target child has something to say, avoid looking at the target child if disappointed, and become less friendly when the target child does not see things in the parents way). Shaming was assessed through an unpublished measure developed by Ruth K. Chao at the University of California, Riverside. Using a 3-point scale, participants rated five items about parents attempts to socialize their children by inducing feelings of shame. The five items are: Teach my child what not to do by using examples of bad behavior in other youths, Teach my child by pointing out other youths that I think are successful, Tell my child to consider my wishes or expectations in his or her actions or behaviors, Tell my child that his or her actions should bring respect and honor to the family, and, Tell my child that his or her actions should not bring shame to me. Adolescent adjustment. Adolescent adjustment was measured using six indicators: academic achievement, education attainment, academic pressure, depressive symptoms, parent child alienation, and family obligation. The internal consistency of each outcome was high across waves and informants ( .72 to .89). The internal consistency for academic achievement and educational attainment was not computed because they were measures with a single item. Academic achievement was measured at Waves 1 and 2 using unweighted Grade Point Average (GPA, without physical education courses) from school records. In Wave 3, adolescents reported their current education attainment using a scale ranging from (1) high school dropout to (5) currently in graduate school (medical, law, Masters Degree, etc.). Academic pressure was measured at Waves 1 and 2 using a scale developed by the first author. On a 5-point scale, adolescents rated three items about the pressure they felt to succeed in school. The three items are: Feel pressure from my parents to do well in school, Get annoyed when my parents remind me about the importance of getting good grades, and Stressed out about getting good grades. Adolescent depressive symptoms were assessed using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies of Depression Scale (CES-D) (Radloff, 1977). Using a 4-point scale, adolescents, fathers, and mothers each rated 20 items about adolescents depressed mood. Parent-child alienation was assessed through the alienation subscale of the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987). Using a 5-point scale, adolescents, fathers, and mothers each rated eight items on adolescents feeling of alienation from their parents (e.g., do not get much attention at home, have to rely on oneself when having a problem to solve, and get upset a lot more than parents know about). The measure of family obligation was adapted from a scale developed by Fuligni, Tseng, and Lam (1999). Using a 5-point scale, adolescents rated 13 items about family obligation (e.g., providing assistance to the family as a child, do well for the sake of the family, and make sacrifices for the family).
Demographic information. At all three waves, adolescents answered questions on their sex, age, and whether they were born in the U.S. At all three waves, fathers and mothers answered questions on their age, highest level of education attained, and whether they were born in the U.S. These variables were included as covariates when examining the differences in adolescent adjustment among the various parenting profiles.
Results Analysis Plan

All the analyses were conducted separately for adolescent report of maternal parenting, adolescent report of paternal parenting, mother report of own parenting, and father report of own parenting, and also separately for Waves 1, 2, and 3. Data analyses proceeded in two steps. First, parenting profiles indicated by the eight parenting dimensions were explored using Latent Profile Analyses (LPA). LPA assumes there are subpopulations in the sample, with distinct profiles comprised of multiple indicators, and attempts to identify these subpopulations. To determine the optimal number of profiles, a series of models were fitted to estimate between two to five parenting profiles sequentially. Each model was compared with its previous model (i.e., n class model compared to n-1 class model) on multiple fit indices to determine whether estimating one more class improved model fit. The best fitting model was chosen when there was no further improvement by adding more classes. Indices included Bayesian information criterion (BIC), the sample size adjusted BIC (ABIC), and a log-likelihood-based test (i.e., Lo-Mendel-Rubin (LMR) test) (Nylund, Asparouhov, & Muthn, 2007). Smaller BIC and ABIC values indicated better model fit, and a significant LMR test indicated that a given model significantly improved model fit compared to the previous model. Using a combination of multiple model fit indices strengthens the reliability of class enumeration (B. Muthn, 2003). The number of random starts was increased to ensure that the final model converged at a stable solution (Hipp & Bauer, 2006). Second, the effect of parenting profiles on adolescent adjustment was examined using path analyses. All the outcome variables were included as dependent variables in the same model, and dichotomous variables representing the parenting profiles were treated as the independent variables. In each model, when there were n parenting profiles, n-1 dichotomous variables were created, with the last parenting profile as the reference group. The coefficient estimation for each dichotomous variable indicated how each separate parenting profile was associated with adolescent adjustment relative to the reference parenting profile. The reference group was rotated to obtain all possible comparisons among parenting profiles. Demographic variables were controlled for, including adolescents sex, age, and birth place, as well as parents age, birth place, and highest education level attained. All the analyses were conducted in Mplus 6.12 (Muthn & Muthn, 1998 2011). Mplus handles missing data with fullinformation maximum likelihood (FIML) by default. FIML uses all the available information in its estimates and is therefore recommended among the current methods of handling missing data (Graham, 2009).
12 Parenting Profiles
Our first research question focused on whether there were different parenting profiles based on the eight parenting dimensions. For all the chosen optimal solutions derived from latent profile analyses, BIC and ABIC were the lowest, or the decline in BIC and ABIC between two adjacent models began to level off. In addition, the LMR test was significant, or marginally significant, between the optimal solution and its previous model, but not significant among any following models. The optimal solutions of parenting profiles are displayed in Table 1. In the discussion that follows, the number of parenting profiles in each optimal solution is described, then each parenting profile is labeled, and finally, the prevalence of each parenting profile in the current sample is examined. The optimal solutions were stable over time for adolescentreported maternal parenting (four profiles across three waves), most differentiated in middle adolescence for adolescent-reported paternal parenting (four profiles at Wave 2 compared to three profiles at Waves 1 and 3), less differentiated over time for mother-reported maternal parenting (four, three, and two profiles from Waves 1 to 3), and most differentiated in emerging adulthood for father-reported paternal parenting (three profiles at Wave 3 compared to two profiles at Waves 1 and 2). Solutions with the same number of profiles show a similar pattern of mean levels on the eight parenting dimensions. Examples of mean levels for the eight parenting dimensions in a four-profile, a three-profile, and a two-profile solution are displayed in Figures 1, 2 and 3, respectively. When the optimal solution was four profiles, each parenting profile was labeled according to its relative mean values compared to those of the other profiles on the four positive parenting dimensions (parental warmth, inductive reasoning, parental monitoring, and democratic parenting) and the four negative parenting dimensions (parental hostility, psychological control, shaming, and punitive parenting). Specifically, the parenting profile that scored relatively high on the positive parenting dimensions and low on the negative parenting dimensions was labeled as supportive parenting; the parenting profile that scored relatively high on both the positive and negative parenting dimensions was consistent with Table 1 Classification Estimation From Parenting Latent Profile Analyses
our operationalization of tiger parenting and was labeled accordingly; the parenting profile that scored relatively low on both the positive and negative parenting dimensions was labeled as easygoing parenting; and the parenting profile that scored relatively low on the positive parenting dimensions but high on the negative parenting dimensions was labeled as harsh parenting. The same labeling scheme was applied when the optimal solution was three or two profiles. Table 1 also shows the group size of each parenting profile. In general, supportive parenting was the largest group, followed by tiger parenting and/or easygoing parenting, and harsh parenting was the smallest group. Comparing adolescent and parent reports, the percentage of the sample classified as supportive tended to be smaller in the adolescent reports than in the parent reports. On the other hand, the percentage of the sample classified as tiger or harsh tended to be larger in the adolescent reports than in the parent reports. Regarding the changes in group size across waves, although there were no clear patterns for supportive, easygoing, or harsh parenting, a pattern did emerge for tiger parenting. Specifically, the percentage of the sample that fit the profile for tiger parenting decreased among mothers but increased among fathers according to both adolescent and parent reports.
Parenting Profiles and Adolescent Adjustment

Our second research question was how parenting profiles were associated with adolescent adjustment. The coefficient estimates from path analyses are displayed in Table 2, indicating each parenting profiles association with adolescent adjustment relative to the reference parenting profile. For each type of report, there were significant associations between parenting profiles and each developmental outcome in at least one of the three waves, with one exception: father-reported paternal parenting profiles were not significantly related to adolescent-reported academic pressure. In general, supportive parenting was associated with best developmental outcomes, followed, in order, by easygoing parenting, tiger parenting, and harsh parenting. This pattern was consistent for both adolescent and parent reports. Specifically, when being compared to the other three groups, supportive parenting profile, as reported by either adolescents or parents, was associated with
Classes 1 Supportive n (%) W1 W2 W3 W1 W2 W3 W1 W2 W3 W1 W2 W3 Maternal parenting (A) Maternal parenting (A) Maternal parenting (A) Paternal parenting (A) Paternal parenting (A) Paternal parenting (A) Maternal parenting (M) Maternal parenting (M) Maternal parenting (M) Paternal parenting (F) Paternal parenting (F) Paternal parenting (F) 199 (45.0%) 139 (40.3%) 136 (42.4%) 272 (63.4%) 131 (39.8%) 179 (58.3%) 142 (34.8%) 239 (77.3%) 210 (70.7%) 276 (72.4%) 208 (74.3%) 188 (69.6%) 2 Tiger n (%) 123 (27.8%) 66 (19.1%) 59 (18.4%) 80 (18.6%) 91 (27.7%) 85 (27.7%) 55 (13.5%) 52 (16.8%) 52 (19.3%) 3 Easygoing n (%) 86 (19.5%) 97 (28.1%) 109 (34.0%) 77 (17.9%) 77 (23.4%) 43 (14.0%) 182 (44.6%) 18 (5.8%) 87 (29.3%) 105 (27.6%) 72 (25.7%) 30 (11.1%) 4 Harsh n (%) 34 (7.7%) 43 (12.5%) 17 (5.3%) 30 (9.1%) 29 (7.1%) Total 442 345 321 429 329 307 408 309 297 381 280 270
Note. W wave; A adolescent report; M mother report; F father report; the sample sizes in Waves 1, 2, and 3 are 444, 350, and 330, respectively.
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Figure 1. Four parenting profiles estimated from adolescents report of maternal parenting practices at Wave 1.
higher GPA ( .13 to .28, p .007) and educational attainment ( .18 to .24, p .002); a lower level of academic pressure ( .33 to .16, p .003), depressive symptoms ( .40 to .13, p .006), and feelings of alienation from their parents ( .51 to .16, p .007); and a stronger sense of family obligation ( .14 to .41, p .008). In addition, compared to easygoing parenting, tiger parenting was associated with higher levels of academic pressure ( .17 to .26, p .005), depressive symptoms ( .17 to .24, p .008), and feelings of alienation from their parents ( .16 to .30, p .001). The only exception was that tiger parenting among mothers as reported by adolescents at Wave 1 was significantly related to higher family obligation compared to easygoing parenting ( .18, p .001). Lastly, compared to tiger parenting, harsh parenting was associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms ( .19, p .001), higher levels of alienation from their parents ( .20 to .27, p .001), and lower levels of family obligation ( .32 to .21, p .001).
Discussion
The current study identifies parenting profiles within a Chinese American sample using multiple dimensions of parenting practices. More importantly, the current study provides empirical support for the existence of Chuas (2011) concept of tiger parenting. Up to four parenting profiles are identified: supportive parenting, easygoing parenting, tiger parenting, and harsh parenting, with
supportive parenting making up the largest proportion, tiger parenting and easygoing parenting making up the second or third largest proportion, depending on the developmental period and the informant, and harsh parenting making up the smallest proportion. In most cases, of the various aspects of adolescents developmental outcomes investigated, supportive parenting is associated with the best outcomes, easygoing parenting is associated with similar or better outcomes than tiger parenting, and harsh parenting is associated with similar or worse outcomes than tiger parenting. As expected, tiger parenting is associated with high academic pressure. The current study takes a person-centered approach by conducting a latent profile analysis to identify parenting profiles within a sample of Chinese Americans. A person-centered approach is more advantageous than a variable-centered approach because the impact of parenting practices is examined in the context of parenting styles, which represent a combination of different levels of various parenting practices (Kerr et al., 2012). A classic personcentered approach to parenting studies is the median-split analysis, which has several shortcomings (Berge et al., 2010). First, the number of profiles is predetermined. Second, models with multiple dimensions can be extremely complicated. For example, with eight dimensions, the number in our study, a median-split approach would lead to 256 profiles. Third, all profiles are presumed to consist of equal number of participants, which is not realistic. Latent profile analysis, on the other hand, allows for the identifi-
Figure 2.
Three parenting profiles estimated from mothers report of maternal parenting practices at Wave 2.
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Figure 3.
Two parenting profiles estimated from fathers report of paternal parenting practices at Wave 1.
cation of different numbers of profilesthree to five in our studyand selects the optimal solution based on the model fit to the data. In addition, the group size varied among all the parenting profiles, which enabled us to compare the prevalence of each profile in the current sample. The profiles identified in the current study are similar to the classic parenting styles in that warmth and control are the general criteria for distinguishing profiles. For example, supportive parenting is akin to the classic authoritative parenting style, with high scores on both parental warmth and positive control, while harsh parenting is akin to the authoritarian parenting style, with low scores on parental warmth and high scores on negative control.
However, our parenting dimensions are more nuanced and comprehensive than the two classic parenting dimensions of warmth and control, which means that the parenting profiles that emerge in this study are distinct from the classic parenting styles. For example, in order to capture the multifaceted nature of parental control, the classic dimension has been parceled into multiple dimensions across both positive (parental monitoring and democratic parenting) and negative (psychological control and punitive control) constructs. The classic dimension of parental warmth has been expanded to include not only warmth, but also hostility. Considering warmth and hostility as separate dimensions, rather than as two extreme poles of a single dimension, allowed us to distinguish
Table 2 Coefficients Estimates From Path Analyses on the Relationship Between Parenting Profiles and Adolescent Adjustment
Adolescent report maternal parenting R_S Variable GPA Attainment Academic Pressure (A) Depressive Symptoms (A) Depressive Symptoms (P) Alienation (A) Alienation (P) Family Obligation (A) Wave w1 w2 w3 w1 w2 w1 w2 w3 w1 w2 w3 w1 w2 w3 w1 w2 w3 w1 w2 w3 E .06 .13 .15 .11 .16 .24 .12 .13 .13 .09 .11 .31 .30 .33 .03 .07 .22 .32 .24 .20 T .18 .25 .15 .30
Adolescent report paternal parenting R_T R_S E .05 .17 .11 .02 .13 .13 .20 .05 .07 .13 .08 .16 .26 .29 .11 .07 .11 .30 .26 .19 T .10 .28 .19 .27 .16 .28 .22 .27 .12 .08 .21 .46 .26 .45 .04 .14 .24 .27 .11 .20 H .06 T .05 .09 .05 .26 .03 .15 .00 .20 .04 .05 .11 .30 .01 .08 .07 .07 .10 .04 .16 .05 R_E H .05 R_T H .11
R_E H .04 .13 .24 .24 .26 .30 .40 .21 .13 .14 .24 .46 .51 .47 .08 .17 .19 .38 .41 .23 T .11 .13 .02 .17 .19 .03 .15 .24 .03 .04 .17 .08 .07 .10 .04 .09 .04 .18 .11 .03 H .00 .04 .17 .16 .14 .14 .31 .15 .04 .08 .19 .25 .29 .31 .06 .12 .09 .17 .23 .13
H .07 .08 .16 .06 .02 .12 .19 .01 .03 .04 .09 .20 .23 .26 .03 .04 .07 .28 .32 .15
.33 .30 .25 .35 .18 .12 .26 .43 .33 .37 .07 .16 .21 .18 .10 .13
.21 .25 .18 .43 .25 .28
.12 .11 .09 .26 .21 .11
.10 .11 .13 .27 .16 .21
Note. R_S supportive parenting as the reference group; R_E easygoing parenting as the reference group; R_T tiger parenting as the reference group; E easygoing; T tiger; H harsh; A adolescent report; P parent report; the significance level of group differences was adjusted using Bonferroni Correction in order to reduce Type I error from multiple comparisons among groups, p .0083; blank cells indicate the particular parenting profile did not emerge. p .0083. p .001.
TIGER PARENTING
15
tiger parenting (high warmth, high hostility) from easygoing parenting (low warmth, low hostility). Our profiles also included the dimension of inductive reasoning, because reasoning and explanation provide an avenue for better parent child communication, which is considered to be an important component of authoritative parenting (Darling & Steinberg, 1993). Inductive reasoning is also key for distinguishing between confrontive control of authoritative parenting from coercive control of authoritarian parenting (Baumrind, 2012). Finally, a culturally specific dimension of shaming has been included to create culturally meaningful parenting profiles. The results show that supportive parenting, which is most beneficial for adolescent adjustment, includes higher extent of shaming than easygoing parenting, although not as high as the level of shaming in tiger or harsh parenting. Our results suggest that the use of shaming is an important component of being a supportive and successful parent in Chinese culture, but the dimension of shaming is completely absent in the classic authoritative parenting style. Thus, the culturally specific parenting profiles that emerged in this study are not merely interchangeable with the classic parenting styles. Whereas most of the existing research on this topic uses either a cross-sectional or a short-term longitudinal design only, covering one or two specific developmental periods, the current study goes beyond these studies by using a longitudinal design that covers three developmental periods (early adolescence, middle adolescence, and emerging adulthood) and gathers data from multiple informants. This allows for an examination of whether or not
parenting styles remain consistent across different developmental periods, as parenting may vary according to childrens changing developmental needs (Nelson et al., 2011). Indeed, our results consistently show that the proportion of tiger mothers tends to decrease or disappear across waves, whereas the proportion of tiger fathers tends to increase or emerge, and this is so regardless of informant. Traditional Chinese parents are supposed to be, as the adage goes, strict father and kind mother, meaning that the father exerts restrictive control and the mother manifests warmth (Chao & Tseng, 2002). However, our results suggest that the roles of mothers and fathers change over time in a way that is tied to the development of their children. It appears that mothers gradually relinquish their role as the tiger parent to fathers over the period of time from early adolescence to emerging adulthood. The reason for this phenomenon is not known yet, but one possible explanation may have to do with the role Asian American parents play in the socialization of their children. In Asian American families, mothers are responsible for the socialization of young children at home (Inman et al., 2007), while fathers are responsible for the socialization of children outside of the home (Costigan & Dokis, 2006). Therefore, tiger parenting, as a culturally rooted parenting style, may be more likely to be used by mothers during earlier periods of adolescence, when adolescents social interactions are more likely to occur within the family. As children move into later periods of adolescence and emerging adulthood, and begin to interact more with the wider society, fathers may become more responsible for
Mother report maternal parenting R_S E .07 .03 .14 .08 .02 .13 .01 .08 .26 .14 .21 .09 .07 .16 .28 .23 .31 .10 .04 .01 T .15 .07
Father report paternal parenting R_E R_T H .04 .08 .09 .19 .13 .13 .09 H .04 .00 .03 .11 .05 .04 .01 .09 E .13 .06 .09 .03
R_S T
R_E T
H .08 .12 .16 .33 .18 .27 .14
T .10 .12 .11 .00 .09 .03 .11 .09 .12 .00 .16 .15 .00 .03
.16 .03 .18 .04 .29 .13 .18 .12 .35 .22 .07 .03
.18
.07
.13 .01 .00 .03 .24 .15 .08 .04 .05 .20 .29 .22 .23 .08 .16 .11
.19 .29 .14 .41 .05
.22 .18
.12 .08
16
disciplining the child, and thus may begin to take over the role of tiger parent. Unlike many previous studies, which have relied on adolescent self-reports about their parents practices, this study uses reports from both adolescents and their parents, for both maternal and paternal parenting practices. This allows for a comparison between adolescent reports and parents self-reports of parenting. The results suggest that, compared to their parents self-reports, adolescents are less likely to categorize their parents as supportive and more likely to categorize them as harsh or tiger parents. Previous research has shown that Chinese American adolescents are more likely than their European American counterparts to experience a salient mismatch between their ideals and perceptions of the parentadolescent relationship (Wu & Chao, 2011). Because of this mismatch, which may deepen the typical parent child generational gap, Chinese American adolescents are more likely than their parents to report negative parenting practices. The current study provides additional empirical evidence for a discrepancy in the perceptions of adolescents and parents within Chinese American families, and emphasizes the importance of comparing reports from target adolescents and their parents. The current study also compares the developmental outcomes associated with each emerging parenting profile for both mothers and fathers, and across different periods of adolescence. Despite the widely accepted notion of an achievement/adjustment paradox in Asian Americans, particularly in the children of tiger parents, the current study findings do not seem to support the existence of such a paradox. Regardless of the parenting profile, high academic achievement and high educational attainment are always accompanied by high levels of psychological adjustment, and low academic achievement and low educational attainment are accompanied by low levels of psychological adjustment. The widely agreed-upon paradox may be operative when comparing Asian American adolescents to their non-Asian peers, but within the current sample of Chinese American adolescents, levels of achievement and adjustment are found to go hand in hand. Tiger parenting, which owes its existence to the belief that academic achievement reflects successful parenting (Chua, 2011), ironically does not result in the best educational attainment or the best academic achievement; instead, it results in children experiencing a level of academic pressure that is as high as that associated with harsh parenting. It is actually supportive parenting, not tiger parenting, which is associated with the best developmental outcomes: low academic pressure, high GPA, high educational attainment, low depressive symptoms, low parent child alienation, and high family obligation. These results are to some extent consistent with the literature on the authoritative parenting style within European American samples (Steinberg, Elmen, & Mounts, 1989). Easygoing parenting is associated with similar or better developmental outcomes than tiger parenting, with the exception of Wave 1 family obligation for the adolescent-reported maternal parenting profiles. Harsh parenting is associated with similar or worse developmental outcomes than tiger parenting, which reflects findings in the literature on authoritarian parenting (Nguyen, 2008). These differences are consistent across parent and adolescent reports. There are some limitations of this study. First, the sample is selected from an area with a dense Chinese American population. Students in the initial sample were recruited from schools with a
sizable proportion (20%) of Asians in the student population, which is four times higher than the 5.6% that the Asian population represents in the United States (Hoeffel, Rastogi, Kim, & Shahid, 2010). Because families function in the context of the larger community, and because tiger parenting is a culturally specific construct, other studies may not be able to replicate our results. Tiger parenting may not emerge in other areas of the U.S. where the Chinese American population is smaller, or it may emerge but not be associated with the same developmental outcomes as in the current study. Second, the current study, as one of the first attempts to investigate Asian American parenting profiles, uses a sample of only Chinese American families, the largest ethnic group of Asian Americans in the U.S. (Hoeffel et al., 2010). It is not known whether the study findings are applicable to other Asian ethnic groups who share similar collectivistic values that may also emphasize childrens academic achievement as a way to bring honor to the family (B. S. Kim, Atkinson, & Yang, 1999). Third, due to the culturally specific measures used (e.g., shaming), the new parenting profiles created in the current study may not be applicable to non-Asian racial or ethnic groups, such as European Americans. This is because the mean values that represent the various parenting profiles within a Chinese American sample may not be similar to those of other groups, such as European Americans, who generally show higher mean values on parental warmth and lower mean values on parental control. In other words, it may be that the parents identified as supportive in the current study would no longer be identified as supportive if they were part of a sample that included European American families. There are at least two future research directions to consider. First, the effect of parenting practices may depend on the childs own characteristics. Chuas (2011) book shows that tiger parenting may not result in the same developmental outcomes in different children, even when they are siblings with the same tiger parent. Studies that compare the developmental outcomes of siblings can be conducted in the future to see how each childs specific characteristics can affect the way tiger parenting and other parenting profiles relate to adolescent outcomes. Second, results of the current study suggest that the parenting practices that comprise parenting profiles are not permanent, but vary over time. It may be that parenting practices fluctuate on a daily basis. Future studies could use a daily diary approach to investigate the changes in parenting practices and their relation to adolescents developmental outcomes in a short-term intensive longitudinal study. This study represents an initial effort at documenting and evaluating tiger parenting, which is oftentimes perceived by the public as distinctively Chinese or Asian American way of parenting. As controversial as tiger parenting has been, it is relatively understudied. The current study suggests that tiger parenting does exist in Chinese American families, but it is not the most common parenting profile, nor is it associated with optimal developmental outcomes in adolescents.
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Received May 12, 2012 Revision received August 31, 2012 Accepted August 31, 2012
Asian American Journal of Psychology 2013, Vol. 4, No. 1, 19 29
Is Asian American Parenting Controlling and Harsh? Empirical Testing of Relationships Between Korean American and Western Parenting Measures
University of Chicago
Yoonsun Choi
Clark Atlanta University
You Seung Kim Irene J. K. Park
University of Texas at Austin

Su Yeong Kim
University of Notre Dame
Asian American parenting is often portrayed as highly controlling and even harsh. This study empirically tested the associations between a set of recently developed Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk measures and several commonly used Western parenting measures to accurately describe Asian American family processes, specifically those of Korean Americans. The results show a much nuanced and detailed picture of Korean American parenting as a blend of Western authoritative and authoritarian styles with positive and although very limitednegative parenting. Certain aspects of ga-jung-kyo-yuk were positively associated with authoritative style or authoritarian style, or even with both of them simultaneously. They were positively associated with positive parenting (warmth, acceptance, and communication) but not with harsh parenting (rejection and negative discipline). Exceptions to this general pattern were Korean traditional disciplinary practices and the later age of separate sleeping of children. The article discusses implications of these findings and provides suggestions for future research. Keywords: Korean American parenting, Western parenting, family processes
Empirical research on Asian American families often paints a complex and paradoxical picture.1 For example, studies about family processes and youth outcomes among Asian Americans often do not align with conventional patterns (Chao & Tseng, 2002; Park, Kim, Chiang, & Ju, 2010). In general, authoritative parenting, a firm and warm style, is connected to intimate parent child relations and positive child outcomes. Authoritarian parenting, characterized by strict and restrictive parental control and lack of warmth, is associated with higher parent child conflict, negative youth behaviors, and poor mental health (Baumrind, 1991). Asian American parents usually endorse and practice strict control and are regarded to be less expressive in showing affection (Huntsinger, Jose, Rudden, Luo, & Krieg, 2001). However, their seemingly authoritarian parenting is not always related to negative youth outcomes as it is in European American families (Chao &
Tseng, 2002; Deater-Deckard, Dodge, & Sorbring, 2005). In fact, in Asian American families, strict control tends to predict improved outcomes such as higher school grades (Steinberg, Lamborn, Darling, Mounts, & Dornbusch, 1994). Therefore, the existing family process model (e.g., conceptualizing parenting style as authoritarian and authoritative), which is derived mainly from a Western culture and empirical evidence from non-Hispanic White families, seems inadequate in understanding Asian family processes (Choi, Harachi, Gillmore, & Catalano, 2005; Dornbusch, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts, & Fraleigh, 1987).
Culture and Parenting

The culture and social environments in which families reside help determine parental beliefs about child-rearing goals and parenting methods, which subsequently shape actual parenting behaviors and parent child relationships (Harkness & Super, 2002; Rubin & Chung, 2006). Thus, parenting goals, values, and practices and parent child interactions vary from culture to culture (Bornstein & Cote, 2006; Deater-Deckard et al., 2011). For example, in the dominant Western culture in the United States, the desired child-rearing goals are independence, individualism, social assertiveness, confidence, and competence (Rubin & Chung, 2006). Authoritative parenting style is regarded as the most ideal to promote these core values. Specifically, authoritative parenting establishes firm and clear rules but employs inductive reasoning
Yoonsun Choi, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago; You Seung Kim, School of Social Work, Clark Atlanta University; Su Yeong Kim, Human Development and Family Sciences, School of Human Ecology, University of Texas at Austin; Irene J. K. Park, Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame. This study was supported by a Research Scientist Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (Grant K01 MH069910), a Seed Grant from the Center for Health Administration Studies, and a Junior Faculty Research Fund from the School of Social Service Administration and the Office of Vice President of Research and Argonne Laboratory at the University of Chicago (to Yoonsun Choi). Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yoonsun Choi, School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago, 969 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. E-mail: yoonsun@uchicago.edu 19
1 The term Asian Americans refers to both U.S.-born Americans of Asian descent and Asian immigrants who were born in Asian countries and migrated to the United States and may or may not have been naturalized.
20
CHOI, KIM, KIM, AND PARK
and expressive warmth and allows autonomy, active exploration, and risk-taking, yielding positive youth outcomes (Rubin & Chung, 2006). It also helps to build close parent child relationships and reduce parent child conflict, and it has been shown to be the most beneficial in all domains of youth outcomes concerning academic performance, externalizing behaviors, and mental health (Park et al., 2010). Conversely, traditional Asian families tend to be culturally collectivistic, emphasizing interdependence, conformity, emotional self-control, and humility.2 This is in stark contrast to the core values of the Western culture (Kurasaki, Okazaki, & Sue, 2002).3 These Asian cultural values produce deeply ingrained family values, such as a strong sense of obligation and orientation to the family and respect for and obedience to parents and elders (Chao & Tseng, 2002; Fuligni, 2007). Despite the differences between Western and Asian family processes, the practice of using Western parenting theories to explain Asian parenting dominates the existing family and parenting research. Similarly, Asian American families, despite their cultural difference from the dominant Western culture in the United States, are often evaluated using the Western paradigm. It is likely that incorrectly fitting one culture into anothers framework and failing to capture the critical differences in core family values and practices have led to the complex and even paradoxical findings concerning Asian American families in parenting research.
Asian American Parenting Measures

Western theories of parenting tend to label Asian American parenting as more controlling than the idealized authoritative parenting (Kagitibasi, 2007; Vinden, 2001). However, a more nuanced conceptualization sees Asian American parenting, although more directive and restrictive than its Western counterpart, as a style that is practiced with reasoning as well as warmth (Chao & Tseng, 2002; Kagitibasi, 2007). In recent years, several measures have been created to assess family processes unique to Asian Americans. For example, the guan parenting and qin measures were created for Chinese Americans (Chao, 1994; Wu & Chao, 2011). Guan parenting (translated as to govern/train and love) involves directive control and close monitoring of child behaviors while building close parent child relationships. Qin (translated as childs feeling of closeness to parents or parental benevolence) captures Asian expressions of love for their children. The qin measures ask childrens perceptions of parental devotion, sacrifice, thoughtfulness, and guan. The rationale is that Asian American parents affection is conveyed through instrumental support, devotion, close monitoring, and support for education, rather than through physical, verbal, and emotional expressions such as hugging, kissing, and praising, which are typical indicators of Western parental warmth (Wu & Chao, 2011). The guan ideology and behaviors and the qin measures are excellent examples of Asian American family processes in which components of both authoritarian and authoritative styles emerge in an idealized Asian parenting practice. In a similar endeavor to develop indigenous parenting measures, several scales have been recently developed to capture family processes that are specific to Korean American families, called ga-jung-kyo-yuk ( ). Several scales that collectively assess ga-jung-kyo-yuk were generated using multiple methods, including
focus groups, an extensive literature review, and reviews by academic experts and community leaders. With survey data, they have been tested for psychometric properties and have been shown to be reliable and valid for Korean American parents (for more details, see Choi & Kim, 2010; Choi, Kim, Pekelnicky, & Kim, 2012). Ga-jung-kyo-yuk (translated as home [or family] education) is closest in concept to family socialization or family processes. Although family processes and/or socialization and ga-jung-kyoyuk similarly describe the process of socializing children to a set of core norms, beliefs, and values through parenting, main differences exist in the specifics of those norms, beliefs, and values. The core values of ga-jung-kyo-yuk include emphasis on parenting via role-modeling, the centrality of the family, family hierarchy, demonstration of respect for and the use of appropriate etiquette with parents and elders, age veneration, and family obligations and ties. For example, three new measuresKorean traditional parent virtues, enculturation of familial and cultural values, and important Korean traditional etiquetteare specific dimensions that exemplify core ga-jung-kyo-yuk values.4 Ga-jung-kyo-yuk also includes child-rearing practices. For example, more than 80% of Korean immigrant parents reported practicing a traditional sleeping arrangement, that is, cosleeping with their child until he or she was 6 years old, on average (Choi et al., 2012). The goal of cosleeping with an infant or young child in Asian cultures is to build a close parent child bond, reflecting a cultural emphasis on interdependence (Greenfield & Cocking, 1994) and is likely another example of a nonverbal expression of parental love. In addition, although similar practices that involve corporal punishment are found in other cultures, three physical disciplinary practices primarily used with young children (i.e., hitting their palms with a stick, hitting the calf of their leg with a stick, and having them raise their arms for a prolonged time) are identified as a traditional Korean parenting practice (e.g., Choi & Kim, 2010; E. Kim & Hong, 2007). These forms of discipline are practiced along with parental love in the cultural context that stern parenting is an ideal virtue in traditional ga-jung-kyo-yuk (K. Kim, 2006). Thus, similar to guan and qin among Chinese Americans, several aspects of both authoritative and authoritarian parenting style seem to coexist in ga-jung-kyo-yuk among Korean American families.
2 In contemporary Asian societies, however, things are changing drastically as children are growing up in an increasingly globalized world. In one of the articles for this special issue, Way and her colleagues (pp. 6170) found that in the contemporary Chinese society, parents place great emphasis on independence, autonomy, and extraversion in children as they try to socialize children and prepare them for a changing world. 3 The divergence of individualistic and collectivistic cultures might have emerged in response to the disparate needs of early societies: For example, agricultural Asian societies demanded more group-oriented values, whereas nomadic Western societies required more independent values (Greenfield, 1994). 4 Enculturation means learning the culture and assimilating its practices and values. The term is often used to indicate the degrees to which children of immigrants or cultural minorities maintain or learn their heritage and culture.
KOREAN AMERICAN AND WESTERN PARENTING MEASURES
21
Relationships Between Asian American and Western Parenting

Despite a significant stride made in research on Asian American parenting in recent years, there is a continued lack of empirical evidence on how Asian and Western family processes are different from or similar to one another. Subgroup-level understanding is lacking even more, with Chinese Americans being the exception. Filling in the knowledge gap are stereotypes, prejudices, and misperceptions. The controversy over tiger moms (Chua, 2011) showcases the lack of understanding of Asian American family processes and parenting styles. The premise that Asian American parents are utterly controlling, demanding, emotionally insensitive, and harsh, but that they effectively churn out math and music prodigies, is, quite simply, an exaggeration. For example, even if Asian American parents, more than European American parents on average, expect their child to conform to parental rules and expectations, does such a parenting style necessarily translate to a lack of parental warmth and acceptance and poor parent child communication, as well as high levels of parental rejection and harsh discipline? This study aimed to answer this question by empirically examining how culturally distinct Asian American parenting values and practices are related to Western parenting styles and behaviors. Specifically, this study investigated whether and how the Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk measures, both of parenting values and behaviors, are related to several widely used Western parenting measures, including parenting styles (authoritarian and authoritative), positive parenting practices (parental warmth, acceptance, monitoring, and parent child communication), and harsh parenting practices (negative discipline and parental rejection). Following the notion that ideal Asian American parenting is a unique combination of authoritarian and authoritative styles, we hypothesized that the ga-jung-kyo-yuk measures would be positively associated with both authoritarian and authoritative Western parenting styles. We further hypothesized that the ga-jung-kyo-yuk measures would be positively associated with several characteristics of authoritative parenting style (parental acceptance, warmth, and monitoring behaviors, as well as parent child communication), but negatively associated with the measures of harsh parenting such as negative discipline (e.g., getting angry, slapping or hitting with hand, fist, or object) and parental rejection (e.g., resenting or paying no attention to the child). Although certain aspects of Asian American parenting, such as a high level of parental control, may seem authoritarian, the ideal Asian American parental control is not coercive, punitive, or rejecting (Kagitibasi, 2007). In addition, although the cultural norms such as family hierarchy and age veneration may not be a subject of negotiation with children and thus likely require strict rules, the ultimate goals of establishing and building strong family ties and interdependence in the family are likely to discourage a harsh and rejecting parenting style. More complex associations are expected with traditional Korean disciplinary practices. Although corporal punishment, these disciplinary practices, at least in Korean culture, are differentiated from harsh parenting and parental rejection and widely accepted as legitimate methods of discipline because rules about these practices are set in advance and are used without parental impulsiveness (E. Kim & Hong, 2007). Thus, the use of these particular practices was expected to be positively related to both authoritar-
ian and authoritative styles and positively associated with several positive parenting measures. However, Korean immigrant families in the United States reside in a society in which corporal punishment is strongly discouraged with possible legal complications. In fact, these parents, although they may have used one of these methods at some point, did not use them frequently (Choi et al., 2012). Thus, the continued use of these physical disciplinary practices despite the social and possibly legal ramifications is likely to be positively associated with harsh parenting in an American context. As reflected in the low use of traditional disciplinary practices, immigrants and their offspring, even if reluctantly and slowly, alter their culture, including parenting values and behaviors, through the process of acculturation (Berry, 1997; Ward, 1996). In other words, parenting values and behaviors may change as immigrant parents adapt to the mainstream culture. For example, a higher level of acculturation may predict a higher use of Western parenting styles. Thus, this study examined whether the relationships between Korean American parenting measures and Western parenting measures would remain the same after taking parental acculturation into account. If the relationships remained unchanged after accounting for parental acculturation and enculturation, it would indicate that it is not parental acculturation that explains, for example, coexistence of authoritative and authoritarian parenting. In this study, we sought to further advance our understanding by examining these relationships among mothers and fathers. Fathers are rarely included in family surveys, so we know much less about paternal than maternal parenting. There are significant and meaningful differences in how fathers and mothers view parenting, how they interact with their children, and how acculturation influences their parenting choices. Children also perceive similar behaviors of mothers and fathers differently. For example, child rearing is usually regarded mainly as the mothers responsibility in Korean culture (E. Kim, 2005), paternal and maternal report of conflict has differential effects on youth depression (De Ross, Marrinan, Schattner, & Gullone, 1999), and only maternal acculturation moderates parenting (E. Kim, Cain, & McCubbin, 2006). In sum, we hypothesized that the Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk measures would be (1) positively associated both with authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles, (2) positively associated with positive Western parenting characteristics (e.g., parental warmth, parent child communication, and monitoring), and (3) negatively associated with harsh parenting (e.g., negative discipline and parental rejection). One exception for these hypotheses was with the Korean traditional disciplinary practices, which we believed would positively relate to both positive and harsh parenting. The maternal and paternal differences in the hypotheses of this study were exploratory. There is very limited information from which to generate a set of explicit hypotheses in regard to parent gender differences. One possible expectation would be that because Korean immigrant mothers are more involved in parenting and are more expressive in affection than are Korean immigrant fathers (Choi & Kim, 2010), the mothers use of Korean traditional disciplinary practices may not be positively associated with Western harsh parenting as much as that of the fathers.
22 Method Overview of the Project
Measures
Reliability coefficients (Cronbachs alphas) were examined across mothers, fathers, and the full sample of parents. In addition, unless noted, response options for each item were on a Likert scale from 1 (e.g., never or strongly disagree) to 5 (e.g., almost always or strongly agree). Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk constructs. Korean traditional parent virtues. Six items assessed Korean traditional parenting beliefs including parental virtues and filial piety. Example items include Parents should try to demonstrate proper attitude and behavior to their children and Parents should teach their children to respect elders by showing that they love and respect their parents (i.e., childrens grandparents). Reliability coefficients ranged from .86 to .90. Enculturation of familial and cultural values. Seven items asked parents about important traditional values that they want to transmit to their children. Items include supporting siblings or relatives in need of help, regarding family as a source of trust and dependence, doing things to please parents, taking care of parents when they get older, maintaining close contact with family no matter where they live, and seriously considering parents wishes and advice in career or marriage decisions. Reliability coefficients ranged from .73 to .79. Important Korean traditional etiquette. There are several rules in Korean traditional etiquette that reflect core Korean social traditions and norms. Six items asked parents how important it is for specific behavioral etiquette to be practiced by their child. Examples include My child properly greets adults (e.g., bowing to adults with proper greetings) and My child uses formal (respectful) speech to adults. Reliability coefficients ranged from .90 to .93. Cosleeping and age of separate sleeping. The survey asked parents whether their child slept with them during the toddler and early elementary school years. Response options were Yes and No. No reliability was estimated because it was a binary variable. If the response was yes, parents were asked to specify at which age the child started sleeping in his or her own room. Korean traditional disciplinary practices with young children. Parents were asked whether they used practices such as hitting a childs palms with a stick, hitting a childs calf with a stick, or having a child raise his or her arms for a prolonged time as punishment when their child was preteen. Although over 80% of parents reported that they had used one of three methods, correlations among the items were quite low, indicating that each practice may have been used but not as a cluster of practices. Thus, a composite scale using these items seemed inappropriate. Accordingly, the responses were coded either as 0 for no use of the
The data are from the Korean American Families Project, a survey of Korean American youth and their parents living in the Chicago metropolitan area, collected over a 2-year period. The family was the sampling unit. Korean immigrant families with early adolescents (ages 1114 years) were eligible to participate in surveys administered by bilingual interviewers. In 2007, 291 families were interviewed (220 youth, 272 mothers, and 164 fathers; N 656).5 A follow-up interview was completed a year later at the end of 2008 with 247 families (220 youth, 239 mothers, and 146 fathers; n 605). Parents were provided $40 and youth $20 for their participation. Three sources (phonebooks, public school rosters, and Korean church or temple rosters) were used to recruit survey participants. About an equal number of families was sampled from each data source, and families did not statistically differ in age, gender, and sociodemographics across sources. However, there were two statistically significant differences in the main study constructs by the sampling source. Specifically, school roster-based participants reported a higher endorsement of Korean traditional etiquette, F(2, 433) 3.837, p .05, and a higher use of negative forms of discipline, F(2, 433) 4.489, p .05, than did church or temple roster-based participants. Sample sources were controlled in the later analyses to account for these differences. The survey was available in Korean and English. Survey items for parents were first developed in Korean and youth items in English. Translations of survey questionnaires went through numerous iterations and back-translations and several pretests were conducted with parents and youth. All parents except one filled out the Korean version, and most of youth filled out the English one.
Sample Characteristics
At the time of the first survey, average ages were 12.97 years (SD 1.00) for youth, 43.4 years (SD 4.57) for mothers, and 46.3 years (SD 4.69) for fathers. This study used only the parent data from the first survey. The level of parental education was high: 63.7% of mothers and 70.3% of fathers reported having at least some college education, either in Korea or in the United States. All parents were born in Korea and the average number of years living in the United States was 15.44 (SD 8.36). Sixty-one percent of the children were born in the United States, having lived in the United States for 10.44 years (SD 4.14) on average. About 47% reported an annual household income between $50,000 and $99,999, and 8% reported less than $25,000, 23.6% between $25,000 and $49,999, and 22% over $100,000. A total of 21% of mothers reported having received public assistance, food stamps, or qualifying for the free or reduced-price school lunch programs, and 15% were currently receiving these programs. Overall, the characteristics of the sample were similar to the socioeconomic characteristics of Korean parents in the United States, that is, urban middle-class immigrants with a high proportion being smallbusiness owners (40% of fathers), Protestant (77%; Min, 2006), and fairly comparable to the parent profile in national data sets (such as the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health).
5 Although both parents and a child from each family were invited to complete the survey, participating members varied across families. For example, for the first survey, the number of families in which both parents and one youth participated was 120. Eighty-five families had a mother and a child, 14 had a father and a child, 26 had both parents but no child, 41 had mothers only, and four had fathers only. The primary reasons of nonparticipation were unavailability, time conflict, or refusal to participate, rather than because the family was a single-parent household.
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specified disciplinary practices or 1 for use of any practices. No reliability was estimated because it is a binary variable. Western parenting constructs. Authoritarian parenting style. Seven items were used to assess authoritarian parenting style from the Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ; Buri, 1991). The PAQ was constructed to measure Baumrinds four parenting styles. Examples of items for the authoritarian style include It is for my childs good to be forced to conform to what I thought was right, even if my child doesnt agree with me and I do not allow my child to question any decision I make. Reliability coefficients ranged from .64 to .73. Authoritative parenting style. Five items from the PAQ (Buri, 1991) measured authoritative parenting style. Examples include When family policy [rule] is established, I discuss the reasoning behind the policy with my child and I take my childs opinion into consideration when making family decisions but I would not decide for something simply because my child wants it. Reliability coefficients ranged from .66 to .75. Parental warmth. Seven items from the Parenting Practices Questionnaire (Robinson, Mandleco, Olsen, & Hart, 1995) assessed parental expression of affection, sympathy, and responsiveness toward their children. Examples include I express affection by hugging and holding my child and I give comfort and understanding when my child is upset. Reliability coefficients ranged from .85 to .89. Parental acceptance. Nine items from a short version of the Parental Acceptance and Rejection Scales (PARS; Rohner, 2004) were used to assess parents caring, attentive, and comforting behaviors (such as saying nice things to my child, making it easy for my child to tell things that are important, and paying a lot of attention). Reliability coefficients ranged from .87 to .89. Parental monitoring. Eight items were adopted from several sources to cover a range of monitoring behaviors of parents. The sources include the Linking the Interests of Families and Teachers (LIFT) Project and the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS). Items asked parental monitoring on childs whereabouts, friends and their parents, free time, money management, and after-school activities. One example is When your child is away from home, how often do you know where s/he was and who s/he was with? Reliability coefficients ranged from .85 to .90. Parent child communications. Six items from the LIFT and the PYS assessed how parents and children communicate in the family. Examples include Is your child free to say what s/he thinks in your family? and Do you find it easy to discuss problems with your child? Reliability coefficients ranged from .79 to .86. Parental negative discipline. Six items from the LIFT assessed a range of negative disciplinary behaviors by parents, such as raising ones voice; giving a disapproving look to child; restricting privileges; slapping or hitting with hand, fist, or object; spanking; and getting angry. Reliability coefficients ranged from .78 to .85. Parental rejection. Fifteen items also adopted from a short version of PARS (Rohner, 2004) assessed how much parent rejects child, for example, resenting a child, hurting a childs feelings, and paying no attention to a child. Reliability coefficients ranged from .77 to .79. Control variables. Several control variables include the sampling sources (dummy coded, phone-based sampling as a reference) and demographic variables (age, gender, income, and education of parents as well as youth age and gender). Gender
was dummy coded with mothers and girls as a reference. In addition, parental acculturation was adjusted as a control. Acculturation is a multidimensional and multifaceted construct. Thus, several measures were used to assess parents level of adapting to the mainstream culture as well as their level of maintaining their culture of origin. Specifically, the number of years living in the United States, English-language competence, engagement in social and cultural activities of the mainstream (i.e., reading, music, media use, foods, social clubs, and holidays), and a sense of American identity were used to indicate the level of acculturation among parents. Parallel to the acculturation items, parents engagement in the culture of origin and a sense of Korean identity were also included. These measures were adapted from the Language, Identity, and Behavior Scale (Birman & Trickett, 2002). All these measures showed high internal consistency with the sample. (Details on acculturation items are available from the first author.)
Analysis Plan
We first examined descriptive statistics of main constructs, including bivariate correlations and means and standard deviations for continuous variables or proportions for binary variables. We used the full sample of parents and also mothers and fathers separately. Second, to examine the associations between Korean and Western parenting measures, we used hierarchical multivariate regression analyses with Korean parenting constructs as independent variables and Western parenting constructs as dependent variables. The decision to model the Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk construct as an independent variable is not to imply a causal or a predicting relationship in which one precedes the other. Multivariate regressions enable simultaneous modeling of the ga-jung-kyo-yuk measures (reflecting the reality in which these values and behaviors are likely to be practiced together) in testing their associations with Western parenting. The Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk constructs together were regressed on each of Western parenting measures individually while not accounting for any controls (Step 1), resulting in eight regressions. In Step 2, we examined the associations after accounting for sampling source and demographic controls. In Step 3, we added several parental acculturation variables. In Steps 2 and 3, to examine whether the associations differed by parental gender, we created interaction terms (the product term of independent variables by parental gender) and entered them into the regression models. When interactions were statistically significant, we used simple slope analyses (Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003) and graphically plotted slopes to visualize the relationships by mothers and fathers. There were missing responses in the survey, ranging from 5% to 10% depending on the regression models. The analyses were conducted using multiple imputations method (Schafer & Graham, 2002). We used STATA/SE (Version 11.1) for the analyses.
Results Descriptive Statistics and Correlations

Descriptive statistics of the main study constructs are summarized in Tables 1 and 2. Table 1 reports means and proportions for
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fathers and mothers. We examined the differences by gender in means or proportions using independent t tests or chi-square statistics. Mothers reported higher rates than fathers in Korean traditional parent virtues, parental warmth, acceptance, monitoring, and parent child communication, as well as Korean traditional disciplinary practices. Table 2 shows correlations among the study constructs. One notable finding is that authoritarian parenting style was positively correlated with authoritative parenting style in both mothers and fathers. We explicitly examined the statistical differences by gender on the associations among constructs in the subsequent regression analyses by testing interaction terms.
Hierarchical Regression Models

The results on the regressions in Steps 13 are quite similar in terms of the size of coefficients and statistical significance. In other words, the associations between Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk and Western parenting measures did not change when demographic characteristics and parental acculturation variables were accounted for. The results from the final model (Step 3) are described in Tables 3 and 4. Hypothesis 1: Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk will be positively associated with both authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles. The overall pattern of findings seems to support the study hypothesis, although in varying ways, depending on the parenting constructs under examination. Specifically, after accounting for all control variables, Korean disciplinary practices were positively related to authoritarian style, and Korean traditional parental virtue and enculturation of familial/cultural values were positively associated with authoritative style. Korean traditional etiquette was positively associated both with authoritarian and authoritative styles. Hypothesis 2: Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk will be positively associated with Western positive parenting characteristics. As hypothesized, Korean traditional parental virtue was positively associated with all positive parenting constructs (warmth, acceptance, monitoring, and communication). Enculturation of familial/ cultural values was positively associated with warmth and accep-
tance but not significantly associated with monitoring and communication. Korean traditional etiquette was positively associated only with acceptance. Cosleeping, age of separate sleeping, and Korean traditional disciplinary practices were not significantly associated with any of the positive parenting constructs. Hypothesis 3: Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk will be negatively associated with Western harsh parenting. Traditional parental virtue, enculturation, traditional etiquette, and cosleeping were not associated with harsh parenting, which includes parental rejection and negative discipline. Age of separate sleeping, unexpectedly, was positively related to negative discipline. Traditional disciplinary practices were positively associated with the Western harsh parenting, as hypothesized.
Testing the Associations by Mothers and Fathers

The majority of interactions were not statistically significant, revealing that the associations between Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk and Western parenting measures are largely similar across mothers and fathers. Three interaction terms were statistically significant: the relationships between traditional disciplinary practices and monitoring, traditional etiquette and rejection, and traditional etiquette and negative disciplines. Simple slope analyses show that mothers who used traditional disciplinary practices were significantly less likely to practice monitoring (b 0.280, p .05), but this relationship was not significant among fathers. Although the interaction term was significant, the relationship between traditional etiquette and rejection was not statistically significant in either parental gender, so it was not plotted. The endorsement of Korean traditional etiquette was correlated with negative discipline among fathers (b 0.169, p .05) but not among mothers. The plots are shown in Figure 1.
Discussion
Family is, without a doubt, crucial to the development of children, while also representing culture and ethnicity. For youth who
Table 1 Means or Percentages of Study Constructs by Mothers and Fathers

Construct Korean traditional parent virtues, Mean (SD) Enculturation of familial cultural values, Mean (SD) Important Korean traditional etiquette, Mean (SD) Cosleeping, % Age of separate sleeping (years), Mean (SD) Korean traditional disciplinary practices, % Authoritarian parenting style, Mean (SD) Authoritative parenting style, Mean (SD) Parental warmth, Mean (SD) Parental acceptance, Mean (SD) Parental monitoring, Mean (SD) Parentchild communication, Mean (SD) Parental rejection, Mean (SD) Parental negative discipline, Mean (SD) Mothers (n 272) 4.64 (0.44) 4.24 (0.40) 4.44 (0.64) 82 6.69 (4.47) 86 2.66 (0.58) 3.84 (0.53) 4.13 (0.63) 4.19 (0.54) 4.26 (0.49) 3.89 (0.66) 1.55 (0.34) 2.27 (0.66) Fathers (n 164) 4.53 (0.52) 4.20 (0.40) 4.45 (0.67) 81 5.97 (4.11) 76 2.70 (0.57) 3.73 (0.60) 3.89 (0.70) 3.97 (0.63) 3.85 (0.66) 3.57 (0.69) 1.54 (0.37) 2.16 (0.64)
Note. Sample sizes slightly vary depending on the construct (i.e. 269 to 272 for mothers and 161 to 164 for fathers). Because missing data were none to very few per construct, only the sample sizes of complete cases for mothers and fathers are reported here. The statistical differences were tested using independent sample t tests for continuous variables and chi-square for dichotomous variables. p .05. p .01. p .001.
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Table 2 Correlations Among Main Constructs

Construct 1 2
10
11
12
13
14
1. Korean parent virtues .352 .292 .201 .084 .100 .145 .427 .362 .415 .280 .385 .035 .045 2. Enculturation .367 .339 .095 .110 .020 .183 .298 .295 .341 .099 .134 .026 .139 3. Korean etiquette .185 .241 .075 .134 .011 .226 .250 .123 .157 .022 .130 .089 .195 4. Cosleeping .001 .049 .213 .694 .076 .054 .000 .067 .094 .045 .105 .027 .030 5. Age of separate sleeping .025 .077 .154 .699 .059 .090 .031 .062 .074 .087 .047 .064 .022 6. Traditional discipline .099 .040 .091 .203 .204 .161 .172 .041 .085 .037 .017 .113 .313 7. Authoritarian style .016 .059 .218 .125 .143 .180 .195 .081 .031 .019 .021 .228 .436 8. Authoritative style .280 .283 .162 .053 .052 .013 .140 .480 .514 .240 .452 .174 .029 9. Parental warmth .286 .367 .114 .080 .025 .151 .013 .389 .718 .409 .579 .365 .093 10. Parental acceptance .302 .345 .241 .015 .024 .108 .015 .443 .659 .406 .592 .485 .139 11. Parental monitoring .282 .122 .142 .066 .071 .202 .052 .183 .311 .400 .567 .314 .051 12. Communication .259 .245 .128 .021 .020 .121 .032 .377 .449 .565 .521 .323 .058 13. Parental rejection .106 .064 .096 .100 .085 .202 .297 .151 .377 .373 .276 .303 .585 14. Negative discipline .058 .070 .033 .167 .209 .288 .402 .033 .164 .172 .119 .154 .602 Note. Correlations below the diagonal are for mothers; those above are for fathers. p .05. p .01. p .001.
are a cultural or racial/ethnic minority, including Asian Americans, the importance of an enhanced and accurate understanding of the family cannot be understated. However, there is lack of empirical knowledge on Asian American parenting. Some, such as the tiger
mom, portray Asian American parenting as extremely controlling and harsh (Chua, 2011). Others maintain that Asian American parenting is a unique combination of parental control and warmth that, although different from Western parenting, is not coercive,
Table 3 Associations Between Ga-Jung-Kyo-Yuk and Authoritarian and Authoritative Styles, Parental Warmth, and Acceptance (N 431)
Dependent variable Authoritarian Independent variable Sampling source controls School-based sampling Church-based sampling Demographic controls Parental income Parental education Fathers Parental age Boys Youth age Parental acculturation controls Years in United States English competence Mainstream culture American identity Korean culture Korean identity Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk constructs Traditional parental virtue Enculturation of values Korean traditional etiquette Cosleeping arrangement Age of separate sleeping Traditional disciplines Interactions Gender Parental virtue Gender Enculturation Gender Etiquette Gender Cosleeping Gender Separate sleep Gender Disciplines 2 R b 0.018 0.033 0.013 0.065 0.081 0.008 0.039 0.003 0.003 0.001 0.035 0.004 0.175 0.100 0.018 0.026 0.161 0.022 0.010 0.231 0.056 0.087 0.002 0.023 0.000 0.020 13.51% SE 0.071 0.066 0.029 0.032 0.060 0.007 0.055 0.004 0.004 0.049 0.052 0.040 0.046 0.045 0.064 0.075 0.046 0.098 0.009 0.073 0.127 0.153 0.091 0.203 0.019 0.145 Authoritative b 0.033 0.156 0.004 0.015 0.139 0.006 0.035 0.037 0.012 0.119 0.087 0.023 0.010 0.044 0.268 0.212 0.099 0.159 0.004 0.122 0.123 0.042 0.037 0.241 0.011 0.242 24.76% SE 0.064 0.060 0.027 0.029 0.054 0.006 0.050 0.022 0.004 0.045 0.047 0.037 0.042 0.041 0.058 0.068 0.042 0.089 0.008 0.066 0.115 0.138 0.083 0.183 0.017 0.131 b 0.046 0.010 0.032 0.026 0.257 0.013 0.058 0.002 0.002 0.034 0.212 0.029 0.118 0.013 0.260 0.364 0.026 0.118 0.008 0.102 0.171 0.144 0.005 0.027 0.002 0.078 26.70% Warmth SE 0.075 0.071 0.031 0.034 0.064 0.007 0.058 0.026 0.005 0.052 0.055 0.043 0.050 0.048 0.068 0.079 0.049 0.104 0.009 0.078 0.135 0.162 0.097 0.216 0.020 0.154 Acceptance b 0.011 0.086 0.010 0.026 0.254 0.017 0.015 0.023 0.009 0.059 0.190 0.011 0.018 0.028 0.255 0.297 0.098 0.016 0.001 0.115 0.175 0.029 0.113 0.091 0.006 0.010 27.85% SE 0.066 0.062 0.027 0.030 0.056 0.006 0.051 0.023 0.004 0.046 0.048 0.037 0.044 0.042 0.059 0.069 0.043 0.091 0.008 0.068 0.118 0.141 0.085 0.188 0.017 0.134
Note. The top rows show coefficients from the main effect models (without interactions) and the rows under Interactions show only interaction coefficients from the models with interaction product terms added. p .05. p .01. p .001.
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Table 4 Associations Between Ga-Jung-Kyo-Yuk and Parental Monitoring, ParentChild Communication, Parental Rejection, and Negative Discipline (N 431)
Dependent variable Monitoring Independent variable Sampling source controls School-based sampling Church-based sampling Demographic controls Parental income Parental education Fathers Parental age Boys Youth age Parental acculturation controls Years in United States English competence Mainstream culture American identity Korean culture Korean identity Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk constructs Traditional parental virtue Enculturation of values Korean traditional etiquette Cosleeping Age of separate sleeping Traditional disciplines Interactions Gender Parental virtue Gender Enculturation Gender Etiquette Gender Cosleeping Gender Separate sleeping Gender Disciplines R2 b 0.082 0.008 0.016 0.001 0.456 0.007 0.062 0.033 0.000 0.047 0.211 0.053 0.056 0.026 0.263 0.022 0.040 0.100 0.007 0.118 0.151 0.016 0.158 0.178 0.028 0.339 24.56% SE 0.076 0.071 0.031 0.034 0.064 0.007 0.059 0.026 0.005 0.053 0.056 0.043 0.050 0.049 0.068 0.081 0.050 0.105 0.009 0.078 0.135 0.163 0.099 0.215 0.020 0.154 Communication b 0.002 0.029 0.017 0.007 0.347 0.010 0.064 0.001 0.006 0.008 0.279 0.016 0.020 0.065 0.304 0.130 0.081 0.016 0.000 0.082 0.244 0.292 0.002 0.019 0.004 0.228 22.08% SE 0.081 0.076 0.033 0.037 0.069 0.008 0.063 0.028 0.005 0.057 0.060 0.046 0.053 0.052 0.073 0.086 0.054 0.113 0.010 0.084 0.145 0.175 0.106 0.232 0.021 0.166 b 0.020 0.062 0.016 0.061 0.019 0.007 0.028 0.021 0.003 0.058 0.044 0.017 0.029 0.041 0.063 0.001 0.005 0.020 0.004 0.117 0.032 0.010 0.149 0.066 0.004 0.099 8.54% Rejection SE 0.045 0.042 0.019 0.020 0.038 0.004 0.035 0.015 0.003 0.031 0.033 0.026 0.030 0.029 0.041 0.048 0.029 0.063 0.005 0.046 0.080 0.096 0.058 0.128 0.012 0.091 Negative discipline b 0.034 0.141 0.006 0.096 0.010 0.024 0.158 0.049 0.007 0.019 0.043 0.063 0.113 0.022 0.005 0.083 0.031 0.095 0.022 0.416 0.182 0.001 0.245 0.091 0.019 0.018 21.00% SE 0.078 0.073 0.032 0.035 0.066 0.007 0.060 0.027 0.005 0.054 0.057 0.044 0.051 0.050 0.070 0.082 0.050 0.108 0.009 0.080 0.138 0.166 0.099 0.220 0.020 0.157
Note. The top rows show coefficients from the main effect models (without interactions) and the rows under Interactions show only interaction coefficients from the models with interaction product terms added. p .05. p .01. p .001.
punitive, or harsh (Chao & Tseng, 2002; Kagitibasi, 2007). This study contributes to this understudied area of research by empirically testing the associations between a set of recently developed Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk measures and several commonly used Western parenting measures to accurately describe Asian American family processes, specifically those of Korean Americans. Overall, the results of the study present a nuanced and detailed picture of Korean American parenting as a blend of Western concepts of authoritative and authoritarian styles and show the coexistence of positive andalthough quite limitednegative parenting. In short, certain aspects of ga-jung-kyo-yuk are positively associated with the authoritative or authoritarian style, or even with both of them simultaneously. In fact, the positive bivariate correlation between authoritative and authoritarian styles may provide additional empirical support that, among Korean immigrant parents, authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles are not clearly distinctive or negatively related, as is the case in European American families (Deater-Deckard et al., 2011). In addition, the study finds that the associations between Korean ga-jung-kyo-yuk measures and Western parenting measures
remain unchanged, regardless of whether demographic and parental acculturation variables are accounted for. They also are largely similar across mothers and fathers with only a couple of exceptions.
Associations of Korean Ga-Jung-Kyo-Yuk and Western Parenting

The endorsement of traditional core cultural values (indicated by traditional parental virtues and enculturation of familial/cultural values) was positively associated with several parenting constructs that are regarded as ideal and positive in Western parenting theory, such as authoritative parenting style, parental warmth and acceptance, monitoring, and parent child communication. This finding is not surprising, given that core Korean values include an emphasis on parental role-modeling of good behaviors, including respect for parents and elders, trust between parent and child, the centrality of family, and family obligation. Although varying in degrees, these values are shared across cultures and likely promote parenting that establishes
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Figure 1.
Simple slope analyses of significant interactions.
strong parent child relationships by practicing firm rules and monitoring, parental warmth, acceptance, and communication. It is also possible that Korean American parents may be establishing bicultural parenting in which they continue to endorse traditional cultural values while adopting certain idealized Western parenting practices and values. A traditional Korean parenting virtue is sternness, with few overt expressions of parental love (K. Kim, 2006). Accordingly, warmth is often expressed nonverbally and indirectly. In fact, in the survey used in this study, more than 90% of Korean immigrant parents reported employing indirect expressions of affection (e.g., cooking a childs favorite dishes, working hard, sacrificing, etc.). However, the item of stern parenting was dropped from the original Korean traditional parental virtue scale (Choi et al., 2012), a sign that stern parenting may be no longer endorsed in this new cultural environment, which further supports the possibility of bicultural parenting. In a similar vein, the results show that the indicators
of parental acculturation to mainstream culture (i.e., English competence and participation in mainstream culture) were positively associated with authoritative style, warmth, and communication (see Tables 3 and 4). Adherence to Korean culture, on the other hand, was associated positively with authoritarian style and negative discipline but also with warmth, providing additional evidence of possible bicultural processes among immigrant families. Nonetheless, the associations between Korean American and Western parenting measures were unchanged when parental acculturation variables were accounted for, which indicates that the associations are immune to parental acculturation. However, parenting itself may go through the process of acculturation, and bicultural explanation cannot be ruled out. The degree to which parents would like to maintain Korean traditional etiquette was associated with both authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles as well as parental acceptance. This
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finding may suggest that, although teaching a certain set of culturally appropriate behaviors that represent core values of family hierarchy and respect for elders may demand a strict set of behavioral rules (thus authoritarian) as alluded to earlier, parents may emphasize traditional etiquette while also providing the rationale of the behaviors and in the context of parental acceptance. In addition, despite the positive relation with authoritarian parenting, the emphasis on traditional etiquette was not related to parental rejection or negative discipline, indicating that the endorsement of the traditional etiquette does not evoke harsh parenting. Another set of notable findings is on the measures of parenting practices of ga-jung-kyo-yuk. Eighty-two percent of parents reported cosleeping with their children, which is thought to be a way to build parent child bonding. However, such sleeping arrangements did not have significant relationships with any of the parenting constructs, positive or negative. In addition, beginning separate sleeping when the child was older was positively related to negative discipline. From these data, it is not clear whether there is a threshold of cosleeping in Korean culture, and that beginning separate sleeping later is an indication of a childs problems (i.e., separation anxiety) or an overendorsement of the traditional method that may result in parent child conflict and subsequent use of negative discipline. The use of Korean traditional discipline was associated with authoritarian style, rejection, and negative discipline. In contrast to the hypotheses, it did not significantly relate to authoritative style or positive parenting constructs. Even though they were once used widely in Korea, these disciplinary practices among Korean immigrant families are associated with parental rejection and negative discipline. Because there are social sanctions on corporal punishment and because these specific methods are associated with negative parenting, which may increase parent child conflict, Korean immigrant families will need to gradually phase out these practices from the ideal sense of ga-jung-kyo-yuk, in which one of the main goals is to establish a close parent child relationship.
Study Limitations and Future Research

The study has some limitations that bear mentioning. First, the associations were tested using participants self-reports and selfassessments of their parenting behaviors. Although self-reports are shown to provide valid and reliable information, it is also possible that children view these behaviors differently. Youth perception of parenting and family process is often significantly different from that of parents (Choi, He, & Harachi, 2008). The next steps of the research should be cross-validations of parental and youth reports of parenting behaviors and values, and a determination of how different or similar perceptions by youth and parents influence youth developmental outcomes. Except for the measures of traditional disciplinary practices and sleeping arrangement, the majority of current measures of ga-jungkyo-yuk focus on parental values. Conversely, the guan and qin measures evaluate specific behaviors of parental control and warmth. Because the value measures assess cultural beliefs and ideals, it may not be surprising that the measures are positively correlated with authoritative parenting, parental warmth, and acceptance. As discussed earlier, it may be universal for parents to desire close and accepting relationships with their children. However, it may be actual parenting practices that are culturally distinct. For example, the specifics of parental involvement in childs education, decision making, and family rules and regulations may vary more significantly across cultures. However, guan behavioral measures were significantly and positively correlated with the ga-jung-kyo-yuk value measures (Choi et al., 2012), demonstrating a possibility that ga-jung-kyo-yuk behavioral measures may also overlap with ga-jung-kyo-yuk value measures. Nonetheless, the next step of research should include further development of specific parenting behaviors that are part of ga-jung-kyo-yuk and empirical examination of the relationships with Western parenting behavior measures. Cultural differences and similarities in family process are complex and require rigorous methods, including culturally appropriate and specific measures and empirical support of relationships that can debunk stereotypes and misperceptions. This study contributes to building knowledge in this area. We have shown both the utility and the limitations of Western styles of authoritative/authoritarian parenting to explain Asian American parenting processes, specifically, the Korean American process called ga-jung-kyo-yuk. Research should expand to enhance our understanding on specific family processes across cultures, especially understudied groups, such as Asian Americans and their subgroups, to better understand universals and culture specifics of family process. Such knowledge is critical for informing intervention programs that target the culturally diverse United States, as well as global populations.
Mothers and Fathers: Similarities and Differences

The associations between Korean and Western parenting show great similarity across mothers and fathers. Two notable differences include that only mothers who use traditional disciplinary practices are less likely to provide parental monitoring, and only fathers who endorse Korean traditional etiquette are more likely to use negative discipline. Among both mothers and fathers, traditional disciplinary practices indicate parental rejection and negative discipline, whereas mothers reported a higher rate of using physical discipline than fathers in the survey. The negative impact on parental monitoring among mothers may be another reason to discourage the use of traditional physical discipline among Korean immigrant families. The culture of the Korean immigrant community, especially among the parent generation, remains largely patriarchal and male-centered (Min, 2006). It is possible that fathers may practice forceful or negative parenting in emphasizing tradition, such as Korean traditional etiquette. Korean traditional etiquettes were positively related to authoritarian parenting among both mothers and fathers, and it may be that this is an area in which stricter parenting is practiced, especially by fathers.
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American and European American families. In C. C. Park, A. L. Goodwin, & S. J. Lee (Eds.), Research on the education of Asian and Pacific Americans (pp. 75104). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Kagitibasi, . (2007). Family, self, and human development across cultures: Theory and applications (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Kim, E. (2005). Korean American parental control: Acceptance or rejection? Ethos, 33, 347366. doi:10.1525/eth.2005.33.3.347 Kim, E., Cain, K. C., & McCubbin, M. A. (2006). Maternal and paternal parenting, acculturation and young adolescents psychological adjustment in Korean American families. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, 19, 112129. doi:10.1111/j.1744-6171.2006 .00059.x Kim, E., & Hong, S. (2007). First-generation Korean-American parents perception of discipline. Journal of Professional Nursing, 23, 60 68. doi:10.1016/j.profnurs.2006.12.002 Kim, K. (2006). Hyo and parenting in Korea. In H. R. Kenneth & O. B. Chung (Eds.), Parenting beliefs, behaviors, and parent child relations: A cross-cultural perspective (pp. 207222). New York, NY: Psychology Press. Kurasaki, K. S., Okazaki, S., & Sue, S. (Eds.). (2002). Asian American mental health: Assessment theories and methods. New York, NY: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press. doi:10. 1007/978-1-4615-0735-2 Min, P. G. (2006). Korean Americans. In P. G. Min (Ed.), Asian Americans: Contemporary trends and issues (pp. 230 261). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. doi:10.4135/9781452233802.n10 Park, Y. S., Kim, B. S. K., Chiang, J., & Ju, C. M. (2010). Acculturation, enculturation, parental adherence to Asian cultural values, parenting styles, and family conflict among Asian American college students. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 1, 6779. doi:10.1037/a0018961 Robinson, C. C., Mandleco, B., Olsen, S. F., & Hart, C. H. (1995). Authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting practices: Development of a new measure. Psychological Reports, 77, 819 830. doi: 10.2466/pr0.1995.77.3.819 Rohner, R. P. (2004). Parental AcceptanceRejection Questionnaire (PARQ). Storrs, CT: University of Connecticut. Rubin, K. H., & Chung, O. B. (Eds.). (2006). Parenting beliefs, behaviors, and parent child relations. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Schafer, J. L., & Graham, J. (2002). Missing data: Our view of the state of the art. Psychological Methods, 7, 147177. doi:10.1037/1082-989X.7 .2.147 Steinberg, L., Lamborn, S. D., Darling, N., Mounts, N. S., & Dornbusch, S. M. (1994). Over-time changes in adjustment and competence among adolescents from authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent and neglectful families. Child Development, 65, 754 770. doi:10.2307/1131416 Vinden, P. G. (2001). Parenting attitudes and childrens understanding of mind: A comparison of Korean American and Anglo-American families. Cognitive Development, 16, 793 809. doi:10.1016/S08852014(01)00059-4 Ward, C. (1996). Acculturation. In D. Landis & R. Bhagat (Eds.), Handbook of intercultural training (2nd ed., pp. 124 147). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Way, N., Okazaki, S., Zhao, J., Kim, J. J., Chen, X., Yoshikawa, H.., Jia, Y., & Deng, H. (2013). Social and emotional parenting: Mothering in a changing Chinese society. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 6170. Wu, C., & Chao, R. K. (2011). Intergenerational cultural dissonance in parentadolescent relationships among Chinese and European Americans. Developmental Psychology, 47, 493508. doi:10.1037/a0021063
Received April 30, 2012 Revision received October 4, 2012 Accepted October 18, 2012
Understanding Tiger Parenting Through the Perceptions of Chinese Immigrant Mothers: Can Chinese and U.S. Parenting Coexist?
Charissa S. L. Cheah, Christy Y. Y. Leung, and Nan Zhou
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
How Chinese immigrant mothers perceive Chinese and U.S. parenting and changes in their parenting postmigration remains unclear, despite recent interest in Chinese parenting particularly in response to A. Chuas (2011) controversial book on Tiger Mothers (Chua, A., 2011, Battle hymn of the tiger mother. New York, NY: Penguin.). The present study addressed this issue by examining the parenting beliefs and practices of Chinese immigrant mothers through qualitative interviews. Participants included 50 firstgeneration Chinese immigrant mothers (mean age 38.39 years; SD 5.19) with a 3- to 6-year-old child. Mothers had been in the U.S. for an average of 10.20 years and were interviewed regarding their perceptions of the contrasts between typical Chinese and U.S. parenting, the strengths of Chinese and U.S. parenting, and what changes (if any) occurred in their own parenting after they migrated to the U.S. Mothers identified key differences between the parenting in the 2 cultures across 4 themes. Importantly, mothers endorsed different aspects of parenting from both cultures and attempted to achieve a balance between supporting their childs development of autonomy and individuality versus maintaining a sense of relatedness and familism in their parenting, contrary to Chuas (2011) portrayal of rigid Chinese parenting. With regard to their parenting acculturation, mothers discussed having to be flexible across different areas of their parenting in order to accommodate the cultural values of the larger societal context and promote their childs development in the U.S. These complex dynamics highlighted the challenges that Chinese immigrant mothers face as they adapt and adjust to the new cultural context, and how their parenting beliefs and practices acculturate. Keywords: Chinese immigrant mothers, parenting beliefs and practices, acculturation
Harkness and Super (2002)s developmental niche framework specifies that the culturally constructed environment of the child consists of the physical and social settings in which the child lives, culturally regulated customs of child care, and the psychology of the caretakers. These three components operate together as a system, although each is functionally embedded in aspects of the larger culture. For immigrant parents of young children, the unique parenting niche that they construct is influenced by their immigrant context, traditional parenting customs, acculturative experiences, and the parenting values of the larger mainstream culture. When parents migrate to a new country, they are likely aware of some implicit influence of their heritage cultural values on their family relationships, socialization goals for child development, and child-rearing practices (Bornstein & Cote, 2001). However, these parents also interact in varying degrees with socialization agents in the dominant society who may possess different ideas
Charissa S. L. Cheah, Christy Y. Y. Leung, and Nan Zhou, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This research was funded by the Foundation for Child Development and NICHD (1R03HD052827-01). We are grateful to the families for their valuable time and information. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Charissa S. L. Cheah, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250. E-mail: ccheah@umbc.edu 30
about optimal developmental outcomes and desired characteristics in children, and therefore endorse different socialization goals and child-rearing strategies (Bornstein & Cote, 2010). Thus, parenting acculturation for immigrants involves constant negotiation between the values and practices of the host and heritage cultures (Bornstein & Lansford, 2010). However, researchers rarely ask parents directly about their beliefs regarding the parenting values and practices of the host versus heritage cultures. The large numbers of immigrants to the United States in recent decades (Grieco et al., 2012) make it imperative to learn more about these families. Knowledge of how mothers who are acculturating think about the parenting of others and evaluate their own parenting is important for understanding cultural variations in parenting (e.g., Bornstein, 1991) and the role of acculturation in parenting. This understanding is also crucial because a lack of cultural knowledge of the mainstream culture may contribute to misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and confusion about what parenting to endorse in the new cultural context (Roer-Strier, 2001). Higher levels of mainstream culture orientation among Chinese immigrant parents indicating greater familiarity with the mainstream culture has been found to be associated with greater parenting efficacy, which in turn was associated with more positive parenting practices (Costigan & Koryzma, 2011). Thus, this parenting knowledge is imperative so that psychologists, educators, and practitioners can effectively assist acculturating families and promote their childrens healthy development and well-being.
CHINESE AND U.S. PARENTING
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Moreover, perceptions of a minority groups parenting by the larger mainstream culture can also lead to contention and stereotyping. One clear example is the focus of the current special issue: the resultant controversy and media attention paid to Chinese parenting generated by Amy Chuas book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. In this book, Chua described her strict Chinese parenting, which she espouses to be superior to permissive Western parenting (Chua, 2011). A heated debate was raised by individuals of different cultures as to whether the extremely harsh and academically focused parenting portrayed by Chua accurately depicted Chinese parenting (i.e., practices endorsed by Chinese mothers) and the consequences of such parenting for children and adolescents. Using qualitative interviews, we aimed to shed some light on this issue by illustrating how Chinese immigrant mothers conceptualized parenting espoused by the Chinese culture and the mainstream U.S. culture (hereinafter referred to as Chinese parenting and U.S. parenting). We also investigated what these mothers liked about the parenting of each culture and how their parenting changed since immigrating to the U.S. Examining the themes raised by Chinese immigrant mothers will contribute to our understanding of the parenting challenges that these mothers face as they adapt and adjust to the new cultural context and their parenting acculturation.
with positive outcomes in immigrant children such as high selfesteem, positive racial and ethnic identities, achievement motivation, and overall adaptive psychosocial adjustment (Cheah & Leung, 2011; Killian & Hegtvedt, 2003). Bicultural socialization prepares immigrant children to learn diverse and complementary values, acquire different coping strategies from various cultural and social experiences and attain competence in the multicultural American society. Immigrant mothers have been shown to recognize the need to adapt their parenting to the new environment in order to prepare their children to function well in the mainstream society (Qin, 2008). Furthermore, more research is needed on the parenting values and practices that may be important to these mothers and, thus, more likely to be integrated into their own parenting toward achieving bicultural competence in parenting. Therefore, our second goal was to investigate what Chinese immigrant mother liked about Chinese and U.S. parenting and their reasons why.
Parenting Acculturation
One key issue for immigrant parents is the reconciliation of differences between their culture of origin and their adopted culture with regard to socialization beliefs, practices, behaviors, and values. This process is known as acculturation and has been conceptualized as the process by which an individual changes due to contact and interaction with another distinct culture (Berry, Trimble, & Olmedo, 1986). Parenting cognitions includes parents beliefs, attitudes, goals, and knowledge regarding their parenting, and work to motivate and organize parenting activities and moderate the effectiveness of their child-rearing practices (e.g., Bornstein & Cote, 2006; Sigel & McGillicuddy-De Lisi, 2002). Cognitions related to child rearing and socialization are thought to be rather resistant to change (e.g., Ngo & Malz, 1998) and contribute to the continuity of culture by helping to define culture and the transmission of culture across generations. However, few researchers have directly studied parenting or the dynamics of parenting cognitions among acculturating (i.e., immigrant) mothers. Instead, most of the existing literature on acculturation and parenting independently assess parents general level of acculturation and then attempt to determine if associations exist with specific parenting beliefs or practices (e.g., Kim, Chen, Wang, Shen, & Orozco-Lapray, 2012; Shin, Bayram-Ozdemir, Lee, & Cheah, 2010). This approach may be problematic because acculturation likely does not impact all aspects of parenting in the same way. Instead, the associations may depend on the components of acculturation (e.g., observable vs. nonobservable aspects of culture) and parenting (e.g., beliefs or behavior) being examined. The findings in the literature are inconsistent with some studies reporting significant but weak associations between acculturation and parenting (e.g., Lim & Lim, 2005; Yagmurlu & Sanson, 2009) and others reporting no associations (e.g., Costigan & Su, 2008; Hulei, Zevenbergen, & Jacobs, 2006). Therefore, a more direct and thorough examination of parenting acculturation is greatly needed. The current study significantly advanced our understanding of how Chinese immigrant mothers acculturate in their parenting beliefs and practices through our third goal. Specifically, our third goal was to examine changes in these mothers parenting (if any) since
Chinese Immigrant Parents

As of 2010, 4.8% of the total U.S. population was Asian, and the Chinese were the largest Asian American ethnic group (Hoeffel, Rastogi, Kim, & Shahid, 2012), representing people mainly from the Peoples Republic of China (P.R.C.), Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Chao & Tseng, 2002). Discrepant values such as a general focus on independence (in the U.S.) versus interdependence (in China) may create greater social difficulties for Chinese Americans (e.g., itibasi, 2003). Developing relationships beyond their own Kag ethnic networks has been identified as a difficult task for Chinese Americans, which may limit their social support networks and resources for parenting (e.g., Tsai, 2006). Furthermore, Asian immigrants tend to retain their traditional collectivistic values within private domains concerning family, intergeneration relationships, and parenting (Bornstein & Cote, 2006; Chao & Tseng, 2002). This higher likelihood to retain traditional values might lead to additional challenges in parenting acculturation, particularly as children get older. A qualitative analysis by Qin (2008) found that parenting for Chinese immigrants became more challenging after migration to the new U.S. cultural context. During their interviews, parents talked at length about the difficulty of assimilating into the U.S. society because of language barriers and perceived discrimination. In discussing the challenges that they encountered in their family dynamics, these families mentioned several key differences between their traditional parenting from those of the mainstream culture. However, these parenting differences were not directly examined. Thus, our first goal was to assess Chinese immigrant mothers awareness and perceptions of the differences between the typical parenting of their own heritage Chinese culture and that of the host U.S. culture. Importantly, bicultural socialization, the means by which children acquire the norms, attitudes and behavior patterns of two ethnic groups (Rotherham & Phinney, 1987, p. 24), is associated
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CHEAH, LEUNG, AND ZHOU
their migration in order to assess mothers own perceptions of their parenting acculturation.
Table 1 Sample Characteristics of Mothers

Characteristic Age (in years) Mother Child Child gender Male Female Child birth place In the U.S. Outside of the U.S. Percentage of mothers who had a child prior to coming to the U.S. Number of children in the family One Two Three Four Maternal educational level High school graduate or GED Partial collage University graduate or higher Marital status Married Married but separated Remarried Religion Buddhist Christian None Place of origin China Taiwan Hong Kong Length of time in U.S. (in years) Reasons for migration Education Marriage/came with spouse Family reunification Better living opportunities Political reasons Family SES Number M 38.39 (SD 5.19); range 3056 M 5.09 (SD 0.82); range 36 27 23 42 8 46%
Method Participants
The sample consisted of 50 Chinese mothers with at least one child between the ages of 3 and 6 years old. All the mothers were first-generation immigrants who migrated to the U.S. at the age of 13 years or older from mainland China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong. All the spouses of the mothers were also Chinese immigrants. On average, the mothers had been in the U.S. for about 10 years. Most mothers had at least college degrees and more than one child. About equal numbers of mothers reported no religious affiliation versus being Christian, with a small number who reported being Buddhist. The representativeness of the current sample was limited to Chinese immigrants in the U.S. with high levels of education. Specific details on the sample characteristics are presented in Table 1.
18 25 6 1 2 3 45 48 1 1 3 23 24 38 6 6 M 10.20 (SD 5.00); range 0.7521 20 21 5 3 1 50 middle-class
Data Collection Instruments

The demographic measure and parenting interview were originally constructed in the English language and were translated to Chinese (both simplified and traditional forms) by bilingual translators using a translation and back-translation procedure to ensure that the original meaning of the instruments was maintained. All discrepancies were discussed until consensus was reached among the translators (Pea, 2007). Demographics. A modified version of the Family Description Measure (Bornstein, 1991) was used to obtain detailed demographic and descriptive information about the child, mother, and father, and other information relevant to immigrant families, such as the mothers place of origin, length of time in the U.S., and reasons for migrating to the U.S. Interview on parenting. A structured interview was designed to understand the themes raised by Chinese immigrant mothers in the U.S. regarding (a) what mothers perceived to be the differences between Chinese and U.S. parenting, (b) what (if anything) they liked about Chinese and U.S. parenting and why, and (c) whether there had been changes in their parenting since their migration to the U.S. and how they described these changes (if any).
Note. GED General Educational Development; SES socioeconomic status.
Procedure
Families were recruited from churches, community centers, preschools, and daycare centers throughout Maryland. After obtaining approval from the appropriate authorities, announcements about the study were made at these organizations along with a question-and-answer session with parents. Interested parents provided their contact information to the research assistants and were later contacted to schedule a home visit. The questionnaire administration and interviews were conducted separately but during the same home visit by two trained research assistants who were fluent in the mothers preferred language or dialect (English, Mandarin, or Cantonese). Written consent was first obtained from the mothers. The course of the audiotaped interview was structured by an interview script containing written instructions for interviewers and a detailed sequence of carefully worded questions and probes (Hill et al., 2005). Trained researchers conducted the interviews in a comfortable and informal manner in which mothers were encouraged to freely share their thoughts with the interviewers. The interviews lasted between 15 and 30 min on average. Almost all mothers chose to respond to the questionnaires and the interview in Chinese, 93.3% and 94%, respectively.
Data Analysis
A qualitative content analysis (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006) using a consensus-based iterative coding framework was conducted by Charissa S. L. Cheah and Christy Y. Y. Leung to
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systemically classify and describe the parenting themes revealed by the mothers. A mixed deductive and indicative approach was adopted to integrate the deductive thematic analysis (Crabtree & Miller, 1999; Miles & Huberman, 1994) with the inductive coding process (Boyatzis, 1998), such that codes were derived theoretically to address the research questions and generated to capture the new themes that emerge in the interviews. The audiotaped interviews were transcribed, translated, and checked by multiple bilingual students for accuracy. A start list was first created in which each research question served as a higher-order code accompanied by corresponding subcodes that captured theoretical concepts. On the basis of the start list, open coding was conducted during which interview transcripts were analyzed to identify distinct ideas and create codes pertaining to similar meanings of distinct ideas. Then axial coding was conducted during which codes representing over-
lapping themes were grouped into higher-level codes and the definitions of those codes were revised. Finally, a cross-analysis was conducted to construct common themes across mothers. The process of identifying themes, creating conceptual codes, abstracting the core ideas, auditing, establishing coding guidelines, and cross-analyzing was guided by Hill et al.s (2005) consensual qualitative research (CQR) method to monitor research bias. During the iterative process, coding was first conducted by Christy Y. Y. Leung, and then reviewed by Charissa S. L. Cheah. On the basis of a series of conjoint review and discussion sessions, the team modified and refined the coding until any disagreements were resolved by consensus (Barbour, 2001; Hill et al., 2005; see Table 2 for the list of codes). To ensure the creditability and accuracy of the data, we established trustworthiness in the present study by prolonged engage-
Table 2 Coding Categories, Definitions, and Number of Mothers Addressing Specific Categories (N 50)
Coding category Definition Number of mothers 39 18 8 14 15 36 29 26 31 5 15 31 22 21 28 22 4 9 10
Differences between Chinese and U.S. parenting Strict discipline Chinese parents are stricter, exert more control and disciplinary actions, and more accepting of physical punishment than U.S. parents. Regulatory reasoning U.S. parents are more likely to enforce the established rules and utilize reasoning and guidance to correct childrens behaviors than Chinese parents. Social comparisons Chinese parents are more likely to compare their own children with other children to correct their childrens behaviors than U.S. parents. Encouragement and U.S. parents are more likely to have a positive attitude interacting with their praise children, and encourage and praise their children than Chinese parents. Familial Chinese parents are more likely to emphasize interdependence among family, interdependence and provide children with constant care and protection than U.S. parents. Independence or selfU.S. parents are more likely to grant autonomy to and foster independence in reliance their children than Chinese parents. Emphasis on Chinese parents are more likely to focus on childrens education, and have academics high expectations for academic achievement than U.S. parents. Overall child U.S. parents are more likely to foster their childrens overall (social and development physical) development and individual interests. Positive evaluative perceptions of Chinese and U.S. parenting Strict discipline or Parental strictness, discipline, and firm control in Chinese parenting. firm control Regulatory reasoning Consistent enforcement of the established parenting rules, the use of reasoning and guidance in U.S. parenting. Encouragement and Maintaining positive attitudes and giving children encouragement and praise praise in U.S. parenting. Familial Promoting a sense of interdependence and reciprocity within the family, and interdependence maternal devotion to children in Chinese parenting. Independence or selfFostering independence and granting autonomy in U.S. parenting. reliance Emphasis on Strong emphasis on childrens education and high aspirations for childrens academics success and achievement in Chinese parenting. Overall child Emphasis on childrens overall (social and physical) development and development individual interests in U.S. parenting. Changes in parenting after coming to the U.S. Control and Reasoning Mothers became less restrictive, engaged in less physical punishment or verbal hostility, enforced the established parenting rules more consistently, and utilized reasoning and guidance more. Independence or selfMothers became less protective towards, granted more autonomy to, and reliance fostered more independence in their children. Emphasis on Mothers focused less on their childrens academic achievement, fostered their academics childrens individual interests more, or utilized more developmentally appropriate strategies. Overall child Mothers focused more on fostering childrens self-esteem, and social, moral, development or personality development.
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ment with the participants (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). The mothers in the current sample had been visited by research assistants at their home four times over the course of 2 years as part of a larger project, and this interview was conducted at the end of the second year. Thus, some levels of trust and rapport between the mothers and our research team had been established, allowing mothers to share more openly during the interview. To minimize the authors biases, Charissa S. L. Cheah and Christy Y. Y. Leung discussed and came to a mutual understanding that they would attempt to put aside their expectations throughout the coding and data analysis process in addition to utilizing Hill et al.s (2005) CQR method.
Results
Table 2 presents the final list of coding categories, the description for each code, and the number of mothers who addressed each code.
Mothers Perceptions of Differences between Chinese and U.S. Parenting and What They Liked About Chinese and U.S. Parenting (Evaluative Perceptions)
The Chinese immigrant mothers in our sample were easily able to discuss their perceptions of how typical Chinese and U.S. parenting differed. None of the mothers asked for clarification on what we meant by Chinese or U.S. parenting. Five themes emerged pertaining to cultural differences in specific areas of parenting. Harsh discipline versus regulatory reasoning. Mothers indicated that Chinese parents rely on strict discipline and firm control to ensure that their children act or behave according to their parents wishes. Moreover, Chinese parents were believed to be more likely to use physical punishment or verbal hostility than U.S. parents, including inducing fear in their children. For example, Ms. Yang, a mother with a 5-year-old daughter, described how children react to the strict discipline by acting in ways that will avoid parental anger: What will dad and mom think if I do this? Will I get yelled at? Unlike Chinese parents use of harsh punishment, some mothers such as Ms. Xie, a mother of a 6-year-old boy, believed that U.S. parents engage in more regulatory reasoning with their children:
If children do not listen, [U.S. parents] do not use physical punishment. They think that is not humane. [They] really emphasize using other ways to explain and guide their children, or give their children opportunities to improve. If you misbehave, [they] do not punish you right away to make you listen/follow because of fear.
mother with a 5-year-old daughter, described how she helped her child understand the negative consequences of her misbehavior through guidance and reasoning: There are some positive ways [of talking to children]. For example, if you have done something wrong, you will be treated in this way or that way later. Likewise, if you have done something good, you will end up with this or that. These mothers also expressed an interest in learning more about regulatory reasoning. For example, Ms. Hai, a mother with a 4-year-old son, related, I dont know what their parenting methods are, how they can socialize [their] children so well that when parents say some things are prohibited then the kids form a habit of not doing that. . .I am interested in getting to know how Americans socialize [their children]. Social comparisons and criticism versus encouragement and praise. Most mothers also noted Chinese parents tendency to use social comparisons with other children to correct their childrens misbehaviors, as compared to U.S. parents tendency to use encouragement and praise. Ms. Zhou, a mother of a 5-year-old girl, stated that Chinese parents always use comparative words [to remind the child that] you are not as good as others, you need to catch up. Mothers noticed that U.S. parents did not tend to make such comparisons. For example, Ms. Qiao, a mother of a 5-yearold boy, described the following:
When they [Chinese parents] teach [socialize] their children, they always compare them with other children. They always say you see how that child is doing. . .and so forth. So their children have more pressure. However, according to my observations, parents in the U.S. are not like that.
Evaluative perceptions. Mothers generally reported liking the use of strictness and discipline in Chinese parenting because certain restraints were thought to be necessary to enforce childrens compliance. These mothers, such as Ms. Chiang, who had a 5-year-old son, believed that Children should be given certain constraints or restrictions. You may need to give children some restrictions, or some necessary corrections. In this aspect, Chinese parents tend to pay more attention, whereas American parents tend to be more permissive. Several mothers favored the use of regulatory reasoning in U.S. parenting because they believed that children are less likely to misbehave when their parents consistently enforce established parenting rules with them. Ms. Wu, a
In contrast, mothers described how U.S. parents emphasize using encouragement and praise and generally have a more positive attitude when interacting with their children than Chinese parents. For example, Ms. Zhou, a mother with a 5-year-old daughter, said, U.S. parents would say, Ah, you are terrific! [Whenever children] make something, [they would say], Ah, really good! Impressive, good, awesome, words like these. Mothers believed that U.S. parents use encouragement and praise to highlight their childrens positive virtues and foster their childrens strengths and self-confidence. For instance, Ms. Le, a mother with a 5-year-old daughter, commented, The difference is that the U.S. way of parenting is positive. [Parents] always encourage [their] children, foster confidence in [their] children, create many opportunities for [their] children, praise them, and give them a lot of freedom. . .. I think that U.S. parenting tries to discover childrens positive virtues, whereas Chinese parenting tends to [point out] childrens shortcomings. Evaluative perceptions. Many of our mothers reported liking the use of encouragement and praise in U.S. parenting. The Chinese mothers in our sample admired how U.S. parents socialize their children with such positive attitudes, and believed that this parenting practice enables young U.S. children to have more confidence interacting with others and exploring their environment. For example, Ms. Kou, a mother of a 4-year-old girl, indicated I think that [giving children] encouragement and praise is also very good because it can foster childrens sense of selfconfidence from a young age. She further discussed the importance of fostering childrens self-confidence in order to overcome challenges in life:
CHINESE AND U.S. PARENTING They feel great about themselves because they have been constantly getting praise and encouragement since they were young. This [selfconfidence] is very important for us. Everyone will face difficulties at some point in his or her life. The key [to success] is whether or not you can persist [through the difficulties].
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Interdependence versus independence. In addition, mothers highlighted the emphasis on a sense of interdependence and reciprocity between Chinese parents and children. Chinese mothers were described as inseparable from their young children, and devoted to providing them with constant care, protection, and guidance. Ms. Ji, a mother with a 6-year-old son, indicated that I think [it is good that] there is a lot of parental involvement [in Chinese parenting]. Mothers also indicated that U.S. parenting instead emphasizes fostering childrens independence from parents. For example, Ms. Han, who had a 4-year-old daughter, indicated, I think that Chinese parents are more protective of their children, whereas U.S. parents foster their childrens independence more. For example, U.S. parents make their children do housework, whereas Chinese parents take care of everything [in the house]. Moreover, U.S. parents are perceived to allow their children freedom to discover their own interests and encourage their children to express their own thoughts and feelings. For example, Ms. Chiang, a mother with a 5-year-old son, indicated:
In the United States, parents give children as many choices and assistance as possible, which allows them to develop more freely,
childrens academic performance in contrast to U.S. parents focus on childrens overall development. Mothers discussed how Chinese parents highly value their childrens education and engage their children in learning activities from early childhood. For example, Ms. Zhuo, a mother of a 4-year-old boy, indicated that Chinese parents force their children to learn many things when they are young. These mothers discussed how Chinese parents expect their children to excel academically because they consider academic achievement to be the best pathway leading to career achievement, financial success, and increased socioeconomic status. Ms. Bai, who had a 4-year-old daughter, used a four-character Chinese idiom (Hoping ones child becomes a dragon) to express Chinese parents high aspirations and expectations for their childrens success. In contrast to the emphasis on academic performance in Chinese parenting, mothers mentioned that U.S. parenting focuses on childrens overall development. For example, Ms. Li, a mother with a 6-year-old daughter, indicated that:
The parents here [in the U.S.] focus on their childrens personality, understand their strengths and weaknesses, rather than just focus on attending college and lead their childrens development in one direction. I think that [the U.S. way of parenting] understands the child more comprehensively.
and Ms. Hui, a mother of a 6-year-old boy, indicated that

[U.S. parenting] encourages children to express themselves, to have their own opinions, and also, [allow] different opinions.
Evaluative perceptions. Mothers endorsed the Chinese values pertaining to maternal devotion and believed that young children will develop a sense of security when they are provided with love and care by their devoted mothers. For example, Ms. Pi, a mother with a 4-year-old son, indicated that I think in traditional Chinese child rearing, there is a bond between the parent and the child when the child is very young. I agree with this very much. Moreover, these mothers highly regarded family interdependence in Chinese culture, especially family values such as respect for the elderly and love and care for young children. For instance, Ms. Cao, a mother of a 5-year-old boy, talked about how The Chinese [style] is about respecting the elderly and caring for the young, which are our traditions However, at the same time, mothers also considered the emphasis on fostering young childrens independence in U.S. parenting to be beneficial for their [childrens] future such that children will be able to live independently, have good judgment and be assertive when making decisions. Mothers also indicated the importance of granting their children freedom along with established rules and guidance. For instance, Ms. Gao, a mother of a 5-year-old girl, described the approach she preferred to foster childrens independence,: I like having many rules in terms of giving children freedom. So, children can see that [there are] principles, but [we] also do not restrict childrens free development. Academic performance versus overall development. Mothers talked at length about Chinese parents emphasis on
Many mothers further indicated that U.S. parents encourage their children to engage in sports to promote their physical development, provide their children with guidance to develop positive social skills, and allow their children to have play time with peers to enhance their socioemotional development. For example, Ms. Ran, a mother of a 5-year-old boy, indicated, The U.S. families rather have the kids play and do sports, but in our family, we focus more on education and extracurricular activities. More important, these mothers also discussed how U.S. parents tailor their parenting to their childrens personality in order to address their individual needs and abilities as illustrated by the following response from Ms. Guo, a mother with a 6-year-old son: Regarding the Chinese method of raising children, I think that U.S. parents tailor their parenting according to their childrens psychological needs [whereas] Chinese parents pay little attention to childrens psychological development. Evaluative perceptions. Mothers discussed liking the Chinese parents emphasis on childrens academic performance because parents are responsible for providing children with opportunities to maximize their potential and chances of success. For example, Ms. Hui, a mother with a 6-year-old son, indicated that:
I think that [Chinese] parents have higher expectations regarding their childrens academics [than American parents], which help children to foster a habit of studying on their own. This is a very good habit because I think that the U.S. way is relatively permissive on this aspect. I also think that in the traditional [Chinese] way, [parents] have many demands of [their children], which is basically more beneficial for maximizing childrens opportunities, experiences, and discipline.
Mothers viewed U.S. parents focus on childrens well-rounded development favorably as well. Mothers appreciated the emphasis on fostering childrens social development in U.S. parenting. As Ms. Cao, a mother with a 5-year-old son, described, The U.S. way of child rearing is to foster morality in their children, [to encour-
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age] them to participate in group activities or public activities more and to foster and respect the development of their personalities. Mothers also liked U.S. parents focus on childrens individual characteristics. Mothers such as Ms. Ma, a mother of a 6-year-old girl, endorsed the child-centered nature of U.S. parenting that were thought to optimize their childrens development: [It is] the stronger emphasis on the individual person; [it is to] discover their own abilities/potentials. [It is] to maximize ones strengths, and to encourage one to do what he or she is good at or what he or she likes. Several mothers also favored U.S. parents emphasis on promoting childrens physical development and participation in sports or extracurricular activities in order to have a balanced, healthy development. For example, Ms. Chiang, a mother of a 5-year-old boy, expressed that I like how children in the U.S. pay more attention to their physical training; they are given more time to have outdoor activities, various sports activities, and opportunities for all kinds of extracurricular activities.
instance, Ms. Hai, a mother of a 3-year-old boy, illustrated how she changed her parenting since being in the U.S.: Now, [I think I] should stick to my principles. No indulgence. Fostering childrens independence. Some mothers talked about changes in their parenting associated with their childrens independence. Mothers acknowledged that they used to be very protective of their children and did everything for them, especially with regard to their daily routines. As a result, their children did not have the opportunity to develop skills to resolve conflicts with peers or handle their own daily self-care or chores. Thus, mothers discussed implementing changes in their parenting after moving to the U.S. that allowed their children to develop more independence in each of these areas. For example, Ms. Chen, a mother with a 3-year-old daughter, indicated:
I used to think that [I] should protect my child a lot, never let others bully him or let him fall or things like that. Now [I] think it is normal for children to have conflicts and [I] should let him learn how to deal with them. And [I used to] take care of him a lot, did a lot of things for him. Now, I dont do them for him.
Parenting Acculturation: Changes in Parenting Since Migration

Overall, all mothers indicated that there were changes in their parenting since they migrated to the U.S. Four specific areas of parenting were identified. Decreased coercive parenting and increased regulatory reasoning. During the interviews, mothers discussed how some of the traditionally endorsed Chinese parenting practices were considered maladaptive in U.S. society. Specifically, many mothers indicated that they became more flexible and less restrictive in their parenting after moving to the U.S. After arriving here, [I] feel that even though children are only children, they deserve respect and they need to have rights, thoughts, and opinions, as described by Ms. Xie. Moreover, mothers also recognized that they could no longer rely on coercive strategies to discipline their children. For example, Ms. Yang described how she reacts differently to her 5-year-old daughters wrongdoings after moving to the U.S.: Before [when we] were back in China, I might hit [physically punish] her if [my] child made mistakes or misbehaved. Now, I do not [do this] anymore since [I] came to the U.S. More importantly, these mothers realized that the use of physical punishment or verbal criticism might generate childrens resistance toward their parents. As Ms. Bai stated, [My] beliefs have changed . . .. I actually talk with my children more [than I hit them]. Hitting children may generate resentment in children, and lead to further resistance and rebellion; therefore [I] do not hit my children easily. Instead, these mothers reported using more reasoning and explanation of the consequences of misbehavior with their children when correcting their wrongdoings as they observed U.S. parents doing. Also, mothers talked about criticizing their childrens mistakes less and providing guidance instead. For example, Ms. Yang described that When she [her 5-year-old daughter] is not doing so well in something, I remind/guide her when it is necessary, but I do not say too much [make too many negative comments]. These mothers talked about learning from U.S. parents how to be more consistent when enforcing established parenting rules with their young children and to provide age-appropriate guidance and discipline in order to regulate their childrens behaviors. For
Decreased emphasis on childrens academic performance. Although mothers reported liking the Chinese focus on education, they also talked at length about the overemphasis on childrens academic performance in Chinese societies and its associated impact on Chinese parenting. However, two subpatterns were identified regarding mothers conceptualization of their childs education. Although many mothers themselves were socialized in their home country to emphasize education since early childhood, they mostly disapproved of this value after immigration. The first subpattern pertained to mothers who said that they chose not to pressure their young children. These mothers indicated that the cultural context of the U.S. society allowed them to be more relaxed about their childrens education during early childhood, compared with their counterparts in China. For example, Ms. Au contrasted her expectations of her 5-year-old sons homework habits with those of her friends in China:
We sometimes called our friends in China. We do not want my child to study too hard, like the children in China who do their homework until 1 oclock in the morning. Oh, my God! We can understand it because we also grew up and were educated in China. There are more opportunities here. So even if you dont go to college, you still have other ways unlike in China where the college entrance examination determines your destiny. Therefore, I feel that he may not need to work too hard as he is still too young.
Mothers whose responses fell within the second subpattern also generally disapproved of the overemphasis on childrens academic performance in Chinese societies but discussed different changes in their parenting related to this issue. Rather than decreasing their focus on academic achievement, these mothers talked about now allowing their children to choose their future academic paths. For instance, Ms. Shiu, a mother of a 4-year-old boy, discussed how she discovered her childrens interests through observing them, and her expectations regarding their future development:
[I] observe what [my] children like and what [they are] interested in, but I do not plan what they need to do for them. I think that many [Chinese] parents require their children to attain (certain levels of) education and obtain certain types of job. I do not do that.
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These mothers expressed that it was important for their children to develop their own interests, even when they were different from their own expectations. Mothers whose responses reflected this second pattern also focused on educating their children in a more developmentally appropriate manner. For example, in order to encourage her childrens learning, Ms. Song, a mother of a 5-yearold girl, reported adapting her parenting practices to better suit her childs characteristics and age:
I now teach her 10 Chinese words every day. However, it is only 15 minutes. If she still cannot remember after spending more than 15 minutes, [I let her go]. We will just start again the next day. Because I found out about childrens attention span. [It is] difficult for her [my child] to focus on a task for too long.
Increased emphasis on childrens overall development. Complementing the changes in their parenting goals and practices with regard to their childrens education, mothers increased their attention on their childrens emotional development. In particular, these mothers discussed how they now value fostering their childrens self-esteem more and believe that Chinese children tend to have low self-esteem because their parents rarely praised them. For example, Ms. Zhou, a mother with a 5-year-old daughter, discussed:
I think that the U.S. [parents] mostly encourage their children, which is a good approach. This approach is different from the [parenting] approach in which I have been socialized to [in China] ever since I was little. I used to think that I needed to improve because I was not as good as other people. [However,] here in the U.S., the goal is to accomplish something rather than be recognized. I think that is a completely different approach, and this is the approach that should be used.
Ms. Kou explained how she learned to praise her 4-year-old daughter more from observing other parents: I encourage her more in the U.S. When they are getting off from school, her classmates parents are always surprised when they see their childrens projects and they give their children compliments. So, [I tend to give] more praise here [in the U.S]. These mothers also articulated their belief in the importance of fostering their childrens self-confidence and esteem through the use of encouragement and praise in order to help their children better adjust to the U.S. society. Ms. Hwang described changes in her parenting since moving to the U.S.: My child was criticized more when he lived in China. Now we give him more self-confidence by encouraging him. Furthermore, most mothers talked about changes in parenting associated with paying more attention to their childrens social, moral, or personality development after moving to the U.S. and not just on taking care of their childrens basic needs. For example, Ms. Yang, a mother with a 6-year-old daughter, reported, Yes, there are changes. The biggest change is with regard to my childs personality development. [I] mostly adopt an approach that lets nature take its course [in terms of my childs personality development].
Discussion
The study of parenting among Chinese immigrant parents of young children is limited, and almost exclusively dependent on
quantitative methods that rely on investigator-directed parenting themes (Zhou, 2000). As such, our understanding of dynamic processes underlying the various complex and interrelated parenting themes and the associated parenting goals and practices has been restricted. The present study contributes to the current literature by examining parenting themes that emerge from qualitative interviews regarding the two main cultural dimensions that Chinese immigrant mothers encounter in their daily lives (i.e., Chinese and U.S.), and their parenting acculturation. Across the questions, our analyses revealed that Chinese immigrant mothers were able to coherently identify the typical parenting in the two cultures. Specifically, several Confucian-based tenets related to the socialization of children, parent child relationships, parenting roles and goals, and preferred parenting strategies to achieve these goals (e.g., Ho, 2008) were highly salient to all the Chinese immigrant mothers and highlighted across all the questions. For example, a central theme raised by mothers throughout the interviews was Chinese parents reliance on harsher discipline, as compared to the use of more regulatory reasoning, praise, and encouragement in U.S. parenting. Children are thought to develop desirable characteristics and behaviors when their parents provide proper discipline, which reflects a traditional Confucian belief that a childs disposition derives from environmental influences (Wu, 1996, p.144) and parents bear the full responsibility of teaching their children using proper discipline (Ho, 2008). Another practice, the use of social comparisons to other children, reflects a Confucian focus on the socially oriented self, which emphasizes ones self-conception as a connected being who is bound to others (Lu, 2008). Interestingly, Qin (2012) identified that such comparisons with other children who were academically superior to their own was an often-used strategy by Chinese immigrant parents to motivate their adolescents to study harder. However, this strategy was resented by these adolescents and became a common source of parent child conflict. Traditionally, Chinese parents tend to be emotionally restrained and reluctant to express explicit positive comments and praise in child rearing due to the belief that the frequent use of praise may threaten parental authority and lead to the childs selfcontentedness and lack of motivation to improve and achieve (Cheah & Li, 2010). In contrast, European American parents were found to believe that praising children even for small successes can reinforce childrens good behavior and help them develop positive self-esteem (Chao, 1995). Thus, mothers identified parent-centered goals, harshness, and strictness to be characteristic of Chinese parenting as discussed in Chuas (2011) book. However, in contrast to what was portrayed by Chua, most of the mothers in our sample endorsed and attempted to achieve a more nuanced balance between the parenting goals and practices of both Chinese and U.S. cultures. For example, mothers reported supporting their childs development of both autonomy and relatedness in their parenting rather than choosing interdependence or independence (e.g., Juang, Syed, Cookston, itibasi, 2005). This hybrid of providing Wang, & Kim, 2012; Kag autonomy with regulation reflects the socialization of an itibasi, 2003). The autonomousautonomous-related self (Kag related self may be particularly relevant for Chinese immigrant families who tend to maintain their collectivistic cultural values of interrelatedness, while adjusting to new lifestyles in the host society that render autonomy adaptive. Thus, rather than construing
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autonomy and interrelatedness as polar opposites, a recognition of the distinctness and coexistence of both dimensions is important. We also identified another idea that has received less attention in previous research, which must be interpreted in light of the age of the child in the current study. Young Chinese children below the age of understanding (about 6 years of age) who are perceived to be incapable of understanding right from wrong are treated with indulgence and leniency in order to solidify the interdependent parent child bond (e.g., Ho, 2008). Although mothers valued the strong mother child bond and interdependence fostered by Chinese parenting, they also believed that the inconsistent parenting resulting from this leniency is a weakness of Chinese parenting. These mothers talked about learning from U.S. parents how to be more consistent when enforcing established parenting rules with their young children and provide age-appropriate guidance and discipline in order to regulate their childrens behaviors, reflecting aspects of authoritative parenting valued by the U.S. mainstream culture (Cheah, Leung, Tahseen, & Schultz, 2009). Moreover, mothers discussion of the use of strict and harsh parenting mostly pertained to childrens education and academic achievement. This focus on education and achievement is characteristic of many foreign-born parents in the U.S. due to the importance of upward social mobility among immigrants (e.g., Hao & Pong, 2008). However, the education system in China may foster an especially intense focus on academic achievement among immigrant parents from this region. Unlike their peers in the U.S., high school students ability to pursue higher education in China is purely determined by their performance on the college entrance examination. Thus, there is immense pressure to perform well and the psychological and financial costs of not doing so are immense (Cheung, 2009). Many Chinese parents feel an intense need to prepare their children to maximize their chances for success. Some mothers in our sample discussed how they were able to relax this aspect of their parenting because they learned that other pathways toward success were possible for their children in the U.S. (Ho, 2008). Although most mothers disliked the overemphasis on children to succeed academically, some mothers spoke more generally about decreasing this pressure, whereas others focused on specific ways to foster their childrens intrinsic interests in learning and selfesteem. Thus, some mothers appeared to have more concrete ideas about how to change their parenting to support their new ideas. Mothers also indicated that they now encourage their children to have play time with peers in their daily routine, which is not common among families in their Chinese societies of origin (Leung, 2011). These shifts in parental expectations regarding education were similar to those noted by the parents of nondistressed high-achieving adolescents in Qins (2008) study. Relatedly, physical activity and sports are generally less valued in Chinese cultures compared to North America as these activities are perceived to interfere with academic pursuits (Ha, Macdonald, & Pang, 2010). Some mothers spoke specifically about wanting to provide their child with opportunities for physical activity, perhaps because they were more knowledgeable regarding the benefits of physical activity. These practices may be particularly relevant in the new U.S. context where there is a high rate of childhood obesity and much media attention paid toward its prevention (Cheah & Van Hook, 2012).
Parenting cognitions and practices are often believed to be adopted from ones culture of origin with little modification, as opposed to being the product of individual deliberation (see McGillicuddy-De Lisi, 1992). Importantly, our findings indicated that Chinese immigrant parenting is much more active and dynamic than previously revealed by quantitative studies. How parents negotiate and balance the parenting from both cultures is certainly more complicated than was portrayed in Chuas (2011) book. Importantly, the parent-centered, punitive, and psychologically controlling parenting espoused by Chua were identified to be no longer adaptive and desirable in the new cultural context by almost all our Chinese immigrant mothers. These mothers were easily able to identify and talk about various aspects of U.S. parenting that they liked and appreciated, in addition to aspects of more traditional Chinese parenting that they also valued and attempted to maintain. Many of these themes matched the sources of conflict and problematic family dynamics among Chinese immigrant and Chinese American families with older children and adolescents identified in previous research (e.g., Juang et al., 2012; Qin et al., 2012). Thus, Chinese immigrant parents are already struggling with these issues early on, and greater attention to these topics should be paid to immigrant parents of young children. All the mothers discussed having to be flexible with their parenting values, attitudes, and behaviors in different ways in order to accommodate their childs development in the U.S. Mothers often indicated that they were constantly learning and adjusting their parenting as they themselves acculturated and learned more about child development and interacted with the larger social context. These findings are encouraging given the strengths of bicultural socialization mentioned previously, and the potential for immigration to be a positive, growth-enhancing experience for immigrant families and children (Chase-Lansdale, DAngelo, & Palacios, 2007; Garca Coll & Magnuson, 1997).
Limitations and Future Directions

Several limitations of the present study need to be noted. First, our sample comprised middle-class first-generation Chinese immigrant families and our findings cannot be generalized to immigrant families with lower socioeconomic status (SES) or those beyond the first generation status. Several studies (e.g., Qin et al., 2012; Yamamoto & Li, 2012) have indicated SES differences in Chinese immigrant family functioning and parenting. For example, parents in middle-class families likely have more time and resources to be involved in their childrens lives (Lareau, 2002). Although these findings cannot be generalized to Chinese immigrant mothers beyond the first generation, the advantage of focusing on first-generation immigrants is that their negotiation between the values and practices of the host and the heritage cultures is likely more salient (Bornstein & Lansford, 2010). Indeed, some mothers were able to directly compare their parenting with the same child before and after moving to the U.S. Future research should examine the role of important demographic variables (e.g., SES level, generation status) in Chinese immigrant parents parenting beliefs and practices. Importantly, some mothers may have greater access to parenting resources and gain knowledge of child development. These mothers may be more likely to make adaptive changes in their parenting practices to support the changes in their
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goals (Costigan & Koryzma, 2011). It would be important for future research to examine where these mothers obtain their parenting information in our attempts to support them. We focused on mothers only despite the different parenting roles of mothers and fathers (Chao & Tseng, 2002). The parenting efficacy and acculturative experiences of Chinese immigrant mothers versus fathers have been found to differentially affect children (Costigan & Koryzma, 2011). Moreover, although both Chinese immigrant fathers and mothers adaptation after migration influences their parent child relationships, fathers adaptation difficulties were particular important for their physical and psychological presence in their childrens lives (Qin, 2009). Therefore, additional research is needed on mothers and fathers understanding of cultural parenting differences and changes following immigration. Another limitation pertained to the researcher-imposed nature of our interview questions. In order to address the research topics of interest, the course of the interview was guided by an interview script. However, these interview questions and probes were fairly structured and likely restricted the mothers from freely generating other new themes or topics and resulted in relatively short interviews. Mothers were asked to think about differences between Chinese and U.S. parenting, which likely amplified their awareness of potential differences and limited the nature of their responses. Future research should utilize a less structured interview paradigm. In conclusion, on the basis of these findings, we strongly agree with Qin and colleagues (2012) call for more studies that capture the complexities in the family dynamics of Chinese immigrants. The use of different methodological approaches can increase our understanding of mechanisms and lived experiences. Our findings contest the rigid and extreme portrayals of Tiger Mom parenting depicted by Chua (2011). Complex parenting acculturation processes were clearly revealed when we asked mothers to describe how their parenting changed since their migration using their own words, tapping more directly into their perceptions of parenting acculturation. These findings shed some light on why previous quantitative studies have not systematically reported significant associations between mothers general acculturation scores and their parenting cognitions, styles, or practices. Future study should incorporate a developmental strengths-based approach to examine how Chinese immigrant parents individual characteristics, relationships, and social contexts may lead to enhanced coping skills, life experiences, psychological benefits, and positive parenting. Together, this information can be used to support the healthy family functioning and development of children and youth from these families.
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Received May 21, 2012 Revision received October 11, 2012 Accepted October 18, 2012
Tiger Mothering and Hmong American ParentAdolescent Relationships

Andrew J. Supple and Alyson M. Cavanaugh
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
This study examined associations between indicators of the parentadolescent relationship (academic support, monitoring, normative conflicts, and culture-based conflicts) and outcomes related to academic motivation and psychological well-being. Findings suggested that parental academic support was associated with higher self-esteem and academic motivation and monitoring was associated with higher self-esteem in a sample of 93 middle-school Hmong American students. Whereas normative conflicts reported by adolescents (fighting over hairstyles or clothes) were unrelated to any outcomes, reports of culture-based conflicts were associated with greater self-deprecating thoughts for all adolescents and with greater depressive symptoms among boys only. In addition, findings suggested that monitoring moderated associations between culture-based conflicts and psychological well-being. Hmong American parents who engage in Asian parenting practices may promote positive developmental outcomes for both boys and girls when they engage in behaviors perceived to be supportive and as moderately controlling (i.e., monitoring). Parentadolescent interactions that lead to culture-based conflicts, however, may be harmful to the well-being of Hmong American boys and in cases in which parents do not promote connection via monitoring behaviors. Keywords: cultural dissonance, parentadolescent relationships, Hmong Americans, Asian parenting, acculturation gaps
Amy Chuas (2011) book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother paints a portrait of Chinese parenting that promotes heavy parental control of children including the use of coercive tactics and shaming as a mean to promote success. Chua conjectures that such an approach to parenting exists across cultural and ethnic groups but is more common among parents from more collectivistic cultural orientations that, in particular, are less concerned with promoting autonomy development, self-esteem, or indulging children. In families with such cultural orientations, an overall parent adolescent relationship resulting from traditional Asian parenting (high control, use of coercion, less emphasis on warmth) is not expected to harm self-esteem or lead to behavioral problems but, rather, to promote desirable outcomes such as academic success and lower conflict and filial piety. Although in conflict with many findings from the general parentadolescent literature, Chuas observations are consistent with research suggesting that Asian parents (typically of Chinese descent) more strongly endorse parenting that is restrictive, lacking overt warmth and affection, and as more concerned with promoting respect for elders than self-esteem or autonomy in children (Chao & Tseng, 2002; Supple, Ghazarian, Peterson, & Bush, 2009). Moreover, during the late
This article was published Online First December 31, 2012. Andrew J. Supple and Alyson M. Cavanaugh, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Funding for this project was provided to Andrew J. Supple by the Office of Research and Economic Development, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Andrew J. Supple, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, PO Box 26170, Greensboro, NC 27402-6170. E-mail: ajsupple@uncg.edu 41
1990s and into the 2000s, researchers described Asian or sometimes Chinese parenting in terms consistent with Chuas book and also found that highly controlling parenting with less emphasis on autonomy and warmth had no adverse influence on children and adolescents of Asian descent (Chao, 1994, 2001). Despite research suggesting that Asian parenting or tiger mothering has different associations with developmental outcomes for Asian American adolescents, there are several gaps that exist in the literature. First, the majority of studies have included samples of Chinese-descent parents and adolescents from the western regions of North America. Because Asian Americans constitute a broad panethnic group with great variation across nationalities, socioeconomic and generational statuses, sending and receiving conditions (for immigrants and refugees), regional/residential variation in the United States, and familiarity with U.S. customs and norms, research is needed on diverse groups of Asian Americans. Second, a growing body of research suggests that harmful aspects (relative to family cohesion and child mental health) of the parentadolescent relationship result when culture-based conflicts result from parenting practices (Juang, Syed, Cookston, Wang, & Kim, 2012). Although researchers have begun to examine both culture-based and normative conflicts in studies of parentadolescent relationships in Asian American families, the circumstances under which conflicts are adversely related to outcomes are largely unexplored. Third, gender variation in associations between parentadolescent relationships and developmental outcomes should be considered given that some cultural groups (e.g., the Hmong) have very strong patterns of gendered socialization. Finally, studies have rarely considered whether putatively positive elements of Asian parenting (indirect support, behavioral control) interact with the more negative aspects of Asian parenting (conflict) to differentially relate to outcomes. As such, a more nuanced consideration of
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SUPPLE AND CAVANAUGH
Asian parenting is lacking in that the extent to which conflicts are adversely related to outcomes in contexts of low connection and perceived support has not been considered. To address these gaps in the literature, the current study examined how parental academic support (indirect support), monitoring (behavioral control), and conflicts (both normative and culturebased) are associated with academic motivation and psychological well-being. In addition, gender was considered as a moderator variable so that associations between aspects of the parent adolescent relationship and outcomes could be considered across boys and girls. Finally, to address how negative aspects of the parentadolescent relationship (conflict) may be offset by behaviors that are more positive in nature (support, control) for Hmong American adolescents, we also considered Conflict Parenting interactions.
Hmong American ParentAdolescent Relationships

The Hmong are a cultural group who came to the United States primarily as refugees fleeing Southeast Asia during the 3 decades following the military conflict in Vietnam. Culturally, the Hmong were a highly self-sufficient and agrarian group living primarily in the highland regions of Laos (but also China, Vietnam, and Thailand). Because of their social and economic isolation and due to coming as refugees either directly from traumatic experiences or after years in refugee camps, Hmong refugee parents in the United States frequently had limited education, English-language ability, and familiarity with U.S. cultural norms and laws. In addition, given their traditional religious and medical beliefs (Shamanism, animism, healing practices focused on spirits), like many Southeast Asian refugee groups, Hmong Americans experienced hardships related to acculturative stress (learning a new language, adjusting to new customs and laws) and living in low-income areas. Early scholarly work on Hmong Americans painted a bleak picture of cultural conflicts, high frequency of mental health problems, and high intergenerational conflict (Chan, 1994; Hsu, Davies, & Hansen, 2004; Lao Human Rights Council, 2001; Lo, 2001; Lor & Chu, 2002). Census estimates suggest that there are roughly 260,000 Hmong Americans residing in the United States, with the largest populations residing in California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Carolina (Hmong National Development, 2010). Although there is only a limited body of research on Hmong American parentadolescent relationships, the bulk of the literature tends to point to three main themes: (a) significant concern regarding cultural dissonance between parents and adolescents, (b) Hmong American parents as relatively high in control but low in overt signs of love, and (c) gender-based differential socialization of children. The first major theme related to Hmong American parent adolescent relationships concerns intergenerational cultural dissonance. Alternatively described as acculturation gaps, cultural dissonance, or dissonant acculturation, intergenerational conflicts that are culture-based have been the primary focus in the literature on Hmong American families. As is the case with other immigrants or refugee groups, cultural dissonance is expected to result when parents and adolescents develop divergent views about appropriate levels of autonomy, how children should spend free time, or the appropriateness of specific disciplinary techniques (Bahrassa, Juan, & Lee, 2012; Juang, Syed, & Takagi, 2007; Lee, Choe, Kim, & Ngo, 2000; Tsai-Chae & Nagata, 2008; Yang, 2003). These
divergent viewpoints are common in cases in which adolescents more rapidly acculturate toward individualistic values because of relatively high exposure to American majority culture in their interactions with teachers and peers at school or with media at home. Hmong American parents, on the other hand, are often highly motivated to retain cultural patterns that emphasize respect for elders, spending time with family, and fear their children becoming Americanized. Studies have suggested that Hmong American adolescents view the difficult balance of trying to assimilate toward expectations with peers and at school with different expectations and values present in the family or home as the primary source of acculturative stress (Supple, McCoy, & Wang, 2010; Xiong, Eliason, Detzner, & Cleveland, 2005). Moreover, a major concern in the Hmong community is that Hmong American youth are failing to retain cultural values and that resulting lack of familiarity with parental cultural values and their subsequent family conflicts are the root cause of developmental problems (e.g., deviance, school failure, psychological distress; Lee, Jung, Su, Tran, & Bahrassa, 2009; Yang, 2003). A key factor that has yet to be considered, however, in studies of Hmong American adolescents is a distinction between normative conflicts that most adolescents have with parents (e.g., regarding clothes, hairstyle, or dating) and culture-based conflicts that are particularly salient for Asian Americans (Juang et al., 2012). It is possible that normative conflicts, although unpleasant, do not necessarily adversely influence family dynamics or adolescent outcomes. Culture-based conflicts, however, may be much more damaging both to perceptions of family harmony (Juang et al., 2012) and adolescent well-being because those conflicts often involve intractable disagreements and also a critique of who the adolescent is becoming. The second key theme in the literature are findings that Hmong American parents (relative to mainstream American parents) tend to be more controlling and restrictive, more focused on respect for elders and familial obligations than promoting autonomy, and less overtly warm and affectionate (Lamborn & Moua, 2008; Supple, McCoy, & Wang, 2010; Supple & Small, 2006). Given their concerns regarding the Americanization of their children, Hmong American parents may react with greater restrictiveness, which in turn may intensify intergenerational conflicts (Bahrassa et al., 2012; Supple & Small, 2006; Xiong, Rettig, & Tuicomepee, 2008; Yang, 2003). In reference to low levels of affection and warmth, some data suggest that Hmong American youth feel loved by parents despite these characterizations because they recognize that many parenting strategies are intended to convey love indirectly. Consequently, parental expressions of love may be more passive and involve instrumental support such as helping with homework, attending school events, or by simply saying just know we love you. Additional expressions of love include parental sacrifice, being there, attempting to support schoolwork, and placing restrictions on adolescents activities and social interactions (Chao & Kaeochinda, 2010; Lamborn & Moua, 2008; Moua & Lamborn, 2010; Supple et al., 2010; Xiong et al., 2005). The final theme in the literature on Hmong American parent adolescent relationships centers on gendered socialization. A limited body of research suggests that Hmong American parents are particularly restrictive of girls who often are expected to spend greater time at home assisting with family needs (cooking, cleaning), whereas boys are allowed greater freedom to date, socialize outside of the home, and express opinions (Bahrassa et al., 2012;
TIGER MOTHERING AND HMONG ADOLESCENTS
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Lee et al., 2009; Supple et al., 2010). Although such gender differences in parenting are assumed, empirical studies have suggested no gender differences in reports of conflict with parents between Hmong American girls versus boys (Bahrassa et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2009). Moreover, there is only mixed evidence (with samples of college students) suggesting that gender may moderate associations between family conflict and substance use (associated with more alcohol use among Hmong American female college students, but less smoking for boys; Lee et al., 2009) but not between culture-based conflicts and psychological distress (Bahrassa et al., 2012). In sum, Hmong American parents are typically characterized as highly emphasizing respect for elders and interdependence, as highly controlling and restrictive of free-time activities, as low in promoting or being supportive of autonomy (particularly so for girls), and as conveying their love less through warmth and affection and more through indirect support such as encouraging achievement, working hard, being there, and listening to their children. In addition, Hmong American parents also may engage in shaming practices such as making children feel guilty and using social comparisons with other children as a means of shaming their children into better behaviors (e.g., Look at Mae, she is so polite to her grandparents, her parents must be so proud) or threaten children with unrealistically harsh punishments (e.g., If you dont get better grades, you will have to leave the house; Lor & Chu, 2002; Supple et al., 2010; Xiong, 2000). Given the depictions of Hmong American parenting in the literature, it seems reasonable to conclude that many Hmong American parents engage in practices similar to those described as either traditionally Asian (guan or training with an emphasis on achievement and respect and not warmth and love; Chao, 2001) or as consistent with being a tiger mom.
Conceptual Framework
The conceptual framework guiding this study proposes that aspects of the parentadolescent relationship are the key proximal processes associated with adolescent well-being and academic motivation. According to Bronfenbrenner (Tudge, Mokrova, Hatfield, & Karnik, 2009), proximal processes are ongoing and frequent interactions that occur with people, social settings, and cultural symbols (values, beliefs, orientations) and that provide the engine that drives development. Although socialization of young people takes place across ecological levels that vary from broader societal and cultural factors (i.e., the macrosystem) to smaller social units such as families, schools, and peer groups, it is these latter social units (i.e., microsystems) in which the continuous processes are maximally influential in shaping development (Tudge et al., 2009). Based on previous research on Hmong American parentadolescent relationships, four indicators were selected to represent key processes that may be related to outcomes in adolescents: (a) academic support, (b) parental monitoring, (c) normative conflicts, and (d) culture-based conflict. Another key element to Bronfenbrenners theory is that the ultimate impact of proximal processes varies across individual characteristics and also larger cultural contexts within which the interactions take place. Macrosystem characteristics such as cultural beliefs, values, and attitudes likely influence how proximal processes shape development and proximal processes within microsystems. As such, cultural beliefs alter or shape how similar parenting behaviors (high
levels of control) associate differently with outcomes such as academic achievement or self-esteem. The expectation resulting from this proposition was that for Hmong American adolescents, their motivation to achieve in school and their psychological well-being would be associated with elements of the parentadolescent relationship that convey love and concern through culturally expected ways (academic support and behavioral control). On the other hand, conflicts with parents were expected to be associated with lowered psychological well-being as most scholarship on Hmong American parent adolescent relations tends to suggest that cultural dissonance is a key cause of problematic outcomes for adolescents. In sum, the proposed conceptual model suggests that academic support and monitoring by parents would be associated positively with adolescent wellbeing. Conflicts, on the other hand, were expected to be related negatively to well-being; however, the exact nature of these associations was only tentatively proposed. That is, one key aspect of this study was to differentiate normative conflicts from culture-based conflict to ascertain whether one or both of these elements of the parentadolescent relationship are associated with well-being. Gender is also a key factor that shapes how proximal processes impact development. Girls, compared with boys, are more strongly controlled, are required to be at home more often, spend more time helping parents by translating/interpreting and performing stereotypically female tasks in the home (cooking, cleaning, childcare), and generally report greater dissatisfaction with relationships with parents (Lee et al., 2009; Supple et al., 2010). It remains unclear, however, whether or not parentadolescent processes may vary in associations with development across males and females. Previous research has suggested that culture-based conflicts have similar associations with psychological well-being across Hmong American college-age youth (Bahrassa et al., 2012). On the other hand, conflicts were found to be associated with greater alcohol use by Hmong American college females (Lee et al., 2009) and greater academic success for males. As such, there is some evidence to suggest that culture-based conflicts may more adversely influence females than males. Finally, this study also proposed that associations between conflict and adolescent outcomes should vary as a function of more positive aspects of the parentadolescent relationship. Previous studies have suggested that culture-based conflicts in Asian American families adversely influence adolescents possibly due to adversely affecting family cohesion (Juang et al., 2012). As such, an important possibility to consider is whether culture-based conflicts have lowered negative associations in relational contexts that manage to remain more positive. That is, the expectation in this study was that the association between culture-based conflicts and adolescent outcomes would vary as a function of academic support and parental monitoring.
Method Participants
Participants included 93 Hmong American middle-school students selected from one county school district in North Carolina. All students self-reported their ethnicity as Hmong and 97% of respondents were born in the United States. The remaining three students were born in Laos or Thailand and moved to the United States as infants. The majority (86%) lived with two biological
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parents, with 92% of mothers and 98% of fathers reported as born in Southeast Asia (with the vast majority being born in Laos). Although 86% of respondents indicated that they feel as if their families income was about average or above, 73% indicated that they qualify for free or reduced lunch programs at school. All adolescents indicated that they spoke English; however, 29% reported that they mostly spoke Hmong at home, 47% that they spoke both English and Hmong at home, and 24% that they mostly spoke English at home. The average age of the sample was 13 years (SD 1.28), and 59% of participants were boys.
Procedure
Parental consent forms (in Hmong and in English) were distributed to students by their middle-school homeroom teacher. Students who returned signed consent forms were provided with a questionnaire to complete in their middle-school homeroom class. All participants who returned a consent form and a questionnaire were given a gift card to a fast food restaurant. A total of 95 questionnaires were returned (of 185 possible) for a response rate of roughly 50%. All questionnaires were completed in English. Two respondents were dropped from the final sample because of significant missing data across survey items, resulting in a sample of 93.
Measures
Culture-based conflicts. Adolescents reports of culturebased conflicts were assessed using the 10-item Asian American Family Conflicts Scale (Lee et al., 2000). This measure assesses, from the perspective of the adolescent, how frequently the adolescent feels conflicts with the parents that are culture-based. Sample items from this scale include I want to state my own opinion, but my parents considerate it to be disrespectful to talk back. The 5-point response format ranged from 1 (almost never) to 5 (almost always), and the Cronbachs alpha for this sample was .82. Items were averaged to create an overall score on this measure. Normative conflicts. Normative conflicts with parents were assessed with nine items assessing frequency of conflicts (from 1 almost never to 5 almost always) regarding everyday issues such as schoolwork, media choices, and household chores or work (e.g., How frequently do you argue with your parents about schoolwork?). Items were averaged to create a summary variable, and the Cronbachs alpha for these items was .85. Parental academic support. Adolescents were asked to report on each of their mothers and fathers level of support related to schoolwork (This parent makes me feel good when I study or get good grades; This parents attends school-sponsored activities) using a seven-item scale (Plunkett & Bmaca-Gmez, 2003). The 4-point Likert response format ranged from 1 (strongly agree) to 4 (strongly disagree), and items were reverse coded so that higher scores were indicative of greater perceived academic support (s .73 and .76 for reports of mothers and fathers, respectively). Because the summary scales (after averaging across items) were highly correlated (r .56), reports of fathers and mothers were averaged to create an overall measure of parental academic support. Parental monitoring. Parental knowledge of adolescent freetime activities (monitoring) was assessed using a six-item measure
(Peterson, 1985). Sample items included This parent knows who my friends are and This parent knows where I am after school. Response options ranged from 1 (strongly agree) to 4 (strongly disagree), and items were reverse coded so that higher scores were indicative of greater perceived monitoring by parents. Cronbachs alphas in this sample were .72 for reports of mothers and .74 for reports of fathers. Items were averaged to create an overall monitoring score for reports on both mothers and fathers, but these summary scores were highly correlated (r .70), so the two measures were averaged to create an overall measure of parental monitoring. Depressive symptoms. Depressive symptoms were assessed using the 20-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale for children (CES-D; Radloff, 1977). Depressive symptoms were measured in reference to symptoms an individual may have experienced over the course of the past month (response options range from 0 never to 3 almost every day). Items were averaged to create an overall score for depressive symptoms, and the Cronbachs alpha was .84 for this sample. Self-esteem. Self-esteem was assessed using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES; Rosenberg, 1989). Although the RSES includes 10 items (with response options ranging from 1 strongly agree to 4 strongly disagree), recent studies suggest that method effects associated with the negatively worded items bias overall self-esteem scores. Moreover, studies also suggest that the RSES may assess two distinct (although related) subdimensions, one that is the typical conceptualization of self-esteem (positive feelings toward the self) and another element of negative self-esteem or self-deprecation that is more similar to depressive symptoms (for a review, see Supple, Su, Plunkett, Peterson, & Bush, in press). As such, in this study, summary scores were created by averaging across the five positively worded RSES items to assess self-esteem ( .73) and across the five negatively worded items to assess self-deprecation ( .75) after all items were reverse scored so that higher scores would indicate greater self-esteem and self-deprecation.
Results
Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations for all study variables are presented in Table 1. An examination of these associations suggests that girls, compared with boys, reported greater depressive symptoms, monitoring by parents, and academic motivation. Consistent with previous studies, Hmong American boys and girls in this study reported comparable levels of conflict (both normative and culture-based) with parents. Correlations also suggest that academic support and parental monitoring are associated positively with self-esteem and academic motivation, but are unrelated to self-deprecation and depressive symptoms. Culturebased conflicts, on the other hand, are associated positively with self-deprecation and depressive symptoms, but are unrelated to self-esteem and academic motivation. Normative conflicts are only associated with higher self-deprecation. Also of note, the association between normative and culture-based conflicts was positive and moderately strong, suggesting that adolescents who report greater frequency of culture-based conflicts also tend to report greater normative conflicts with parents. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the main research questions. A model was estimated with each of the four
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Table 1 Correlations and Descriptive Statistics of Key Variables (N 93)

Variable 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. M SD Age Gender Family income Reduced lunch Depressive symptoms Academic motivation Self-esteem Self-deprecation Parental monitoring Parental academic support Culture-based conflict Normative conflict 1 .05 .05 .12 .08 .07 .02 .06 .07 .20 .07 .13 13.00 1.28 2 .04 .03 .29 .40 .04 .15 .27 .12 .17 .02 1.41 0.49 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
.01 .06 .10 .01 .01 .09 .03 .13 .00 2.97 0.68
.04 .06 .16 .03 .01 .09 .06 .03 .73 0.43
.12 .28 .52 .04 .10 .23 .10 2.03 0.44
.46 .14 .43 .41 .02 .14 2.39 0.47
.29 .48 .50 .14 .19 2.04 0.43
.07 .15 .44 .37 1.48 0.57
.65 .02 .07 2.24 0.46
.01 .10 1.90 0.51
.60 2.68 0.82
2.52 0.88
Note. Gender was coded as 1 boys and 2 girls. Reduced lunch qualification was coded as 0 no and 1 yes. p .05. p .01. p .001.
outcome variables regressed onto adolescent gender, perceived family economic standing, free/reduced lunch at school, and the four measures of the parentadolescent relationship. Variables representing family socioeconomics were included as control variables; however, because these variables were unrelated to any other variables in the study, their coefficients are omitted from the tables and results and discussion. In a subsequent model, Gender ParentAdolescent Relationship product terms were included. Product terms were created by multiplying gender by each parentadolescent relationship variable and then each of these product terms was regressed on gender and the relevant parentadolescent variable. The residuals from that analysis were used as product terms so that product terms and their constituent variables had zero associations (Kline, 2011). A similar approach was used to create Monitoring Culture-Based Conflict and Academic Support Culture-Based Conflict product terms for a total of six interactions examined. The results are presented in Table 2 by each dependent variable and with nonsignificant coefficients for product terms omitted. In reference to depressive symptoms, only gender was significantly associated, which suggested that girls, on average, reported greater depressive symptoms than boys. The gender difference remained after parentadolescent variables were included in the model. A significant Gender Culture-Based Conflict product term, however, suggested that the association between this aspect of the parentadolescent relationship and depressive symptoms varied for boys and girls. An examination of simple slopes suggested that there was a statistically significant and positive association for boys (B .14, p .03) between culture-based conflicts and depressive symptoms; however, among girls, there was no association (B .11, p .43). The nature of this interaction is demonstrated in Figure 1. In addition, there was a significant Monitoring Culture-Based Conflict product term. This negative association (B .34, p .005) suggests that, at higher levels of parental monitoring, the positive association between culture-based conflicts and depressive symptoms becomes less positive. The nature of this interaction is presented in Figure 2. In addition, simple slopes suggested that the association between culture-based conflicts and depressive symptoms was nonsignificant at high (B .24, p .11; 1 standard deviation above the
mean) and medium levels of parental monitoring (B .10, p .27; at the mean) but positively associated at low levels of parental monitoring (B .44, p .001; 1 standard deviation below the mean). Such findings suggest that culture-based conflicts are more strongly associated with depressive symptoms in instances in which adolescents experience lower parental monitoring. Put another way, parental monitoring may offset the association between culture-based conflicts and depressive symptoms. In reference to self-deprecating thoughts, the only significant association was observed between culture-based conflicts and increased self-deprecation. There were no significant interactions. With selfesteem as the outcome, however, both parental academic support and parental monitoring were related positively. There was a significant Monitoring Culture-Based Conflict interaction (B .26, p .01), suggesting that at higher levels of parental monitoring, the negative association between culture-based conflict and self-esteem becomes more positive. Figure 3 displays this interaction, and simple slopes suggested that at high levels of parental monitoring, there was a positive association between culture-based conflicts and self-esteem (B .25, p .02), whereas at low levels of parental monitoring, there was a negative association between culture-based conflicts and selfesteem (B .28, p .03). The association between culture-based conflicts and self-esteem was nonsignificant, on the other hand, at medium levels of monitoring (B .01, p .83). This interaction suggests that culture-based conflicts are most strongly and adversely related to self-esteem at lower levels of parental monitoring. With academic motivation as the outcome variable, findings suggest that gender (girls were higher on average) and academic support were significantly associated. These findings suggest that girls and those adolescents reporting greater academic support by parents indicated greater academic motivation. There were no significant interactions, however, with academic motivation as the outcome.
Discussion
Results suggested that elements of the Hmong American parentadolescent relationship that convey support and connection were associated with higher motivation to achieve in school and
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Table 2 Hierarchical Multiple Regression Analyses With Adolescent Depressive Symptoms, Academic Motivation, Self-Esteem, and SelfDepreciation Regressed on ParentAdolescent Relationship Indicators
Variable Step 1 Gender Parental monitoring Parental academic support Culture-based conflict Normative conflict Step 2 Culture-Based Conflict Gender Culture-Based Conflict Monitoring Step 1 Gender Parental monitoring Parental academic support Culture-based conflict Normative conflict Step 1 Gender Parental monitoring Parental academic support Culture-based conflict Normative conflict Step 2 Culture-Based Conflict Monitoring Step 1 Gender Parental monitoring Parental academic support Culture-based conflict Normative conflict B SE B R2 .15 .22 .10 .16 .13 .03 .25 .34 .10 .13 .12 .07 .06 .11 .12 .25 .10 .19 .24 .06 .23 .29 .20 .23 .33 .31 .17 .24 .01 .05 .09 .12 .11 .07 .06 .33 .17 .26 .02 .10 .34 .07 .30 .29 .06 .10 .23 .39 .24 .10 .03 .16 .33 .16
Dependent variable: Depressive symptoms
Dependent variable: Academic motivation
Dependent variable: Selfesteem .06 .28 .25 .03 .05 .26 .08 .11 .10 .06 .06 .10
Dependent variable: Selfdeprecation .12 .04 .18 .23 .10 .12 .16 .14 .09 .08
Note. Gender was coded as 1 boys and 2 girls. Family income and reduced lunch qualification were included in analyses but not shown above. p .05. p .01. p .001.
higher self-esteem. Culture-based conflicts (but not normative conflicts), on the other hand, seemed to have an adverse association with well-being in terms of greater depressive symptoms for boys and self-deprecation for both boys and girls.
Figure 1. Interaction between culture-based conflict and gender on adolescent depressive symptoms.
In reference to the debate regarding the effectiveness of tiger mothering or Asian parenting for Hmong American adolescents, these findings suggest that different elements of parenting relate to adolescent outcomes in different ways. When it comes to putting in effort at school and a positive sense of self, experiencing parents who are supportive (through their efforts to support academic success) and who possess knowledge of the childs activities and whereabouts are positive factors. As such, Asian American parents who can convey support and concern, even indirectly by attending school events, asking where children are going after school, or knowing about their childs activities solely by being there may have a positive influence on their children. These same factors, however, seem unrelated to early adolescents internalized negative feelings. Culturebased conflicts, on the other hand, were associated with increased self-deprecating thoughts for both boys and girls and with depressive symptoms for boys. Such findings are consistent with other studies of Asian Americans suggesting that conflict with parents may be associated with increased psycho-
47
Figure 2. toms.
Interaction between culture-based conflict and parental monitoring on adolescent depressive symp-
logical distress and that culture-based conflicts are particularly problematic for Hmong Americans (Bahrassa et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2009). On the other hand, these results are inconsistent compared with those of Juang et al. (2012), who found that normative conflicts were directly associated with lowered psychological well-being, but that culture-based conflicts were mediated by parentadolescent relationship factors using samples of Chinese Americans. These findings highlight a nuanced understanding of how elements of being a tiger mother should be viewed as benign or unrelated to outcomes for Hmong American adolescents. When adolescents perceive that their desire to have an opinion or interest in having non-Hmong friends is met with accusations that the child is not behaving Hmong there may be adverse psychological consequences, particularly for boys. These findings and those of other recent studies (Bahrassa et al., 2012; Juang et al., 2012; Lee
et al., 2009) suggest that elements of Asian parenting may be associated with conflicts that are associated with feelings of cultural dissonance, which may, in turn, be associated with more negative parentadolescent relationships and lowered adolescent psychological well-being. The first implication of these findings is that when it comes to evaluating the desirability of a tiger mother approach to parenting, understanding correlates of child outcomes depends on the aspect of the parentadolescent relationship and the outcome. Some aspects of Asian parenting or tiger mothering may be unrelated, but others are negatively associated in ways that are not overtly obvious. That is, children of tiger mothers may well have high self-esteem and do well in school; however, less obvious outward signs related to the development of self-deprecating thoughts may be more common among adolescents who feel a sense of rejection based on the parents disapproval of who the child is becoming (i.e., an American).
Figure 3. Interaction between culture-based conflict and parental monitoring on adolescent self-esteem.
48
Previous research has suggested that, compared with boys, girls experience much greater restrictiveness from parents and are expected to spend more time at home alongside parents assisting with family responsibilities (Bahrassa et al., 2012). Although greater restrictiveness by parents was reported by girls in this sample (see Table 1), boys and girls did not vary in their reports of either normative or culture-based conflicts, which also is consistent with previous studies of Hmong American college students (Bahrassa et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2009). Perhaps because Hmong American boys are granted more freedom and autonomy, when their actions or behaviors are met with derision from parents (a boy who wants to spend more time with peers is told he is not respectful), there is a perceived role violation. Consequently, culture-based conflicts in early adolescence might be more detrimental to Hmong American boys in terms of their depressive symptoms. On the other hand, culture-based conflicts were associated in a similar manner across gender to greater self-deprecating thoughts. In reference to debates regarding Asian parenting and tiger mothers, there is some evidence (although limited) to suggest that boys may react differently to such parenting compared with girls. In addition, associations between culture-based conflicts and depressive symptoms and self-esteem were moderated by perceptions of parental monitoring. In both cases, greater reports of parental knowledge of free-time activities and surveillance efforts by parents tended to offset possibly adverse influences of culturebased conflicts and these outcomes. The measure of parental monitoring used in this study (often deemed to actually assess knowledge or even child disclosure; Stattin & Kerr, 2000) may assess perceptions of parental concern, relatedness, or being there for Hmong American early adolescents. In such a context, culture-based conflicts may be interpreted differently and be less likely to adversely influence self-esteem or depression. Moreover, recent studies with Chinese Americans have suggested that culture-based conflicts may erode family cohesion (which in turn negatively impacts mental health; Juang et al., 2012). As such, an implication for tiger mothering is that if parents engage in behaviors that may appear coercive or that involve shaming (and are culture-based) but also show concern by knowing about and restricting their childrens activities, these parenting behaviors may not adversely influence adolescents and, in some cases, may even enhance self-esteem. Put another way, when parents convey cultural disapproval in the context of less relatedness (Juang et al., 2012), that disapproval and culture-based conflict may be particularly damaging to the development of internalized negative thoughts about the self. Limitations associated with this study include reliance on only adolescent-report data from a relatively small sample surveyed at one time point. Associations between study constructs are not possible to differentiate in terms of causes versus effects. For example, this study suggests that the perception of cultural conflicts may be associated with greater depressive symptoms among boys, but it is also plausible that boys who suffer depressive symptoms may negatively view their relationship with parents. In addition, the reliance on adolescent reports only is not the ideal manner in which to study acculturation gaps according to some researchers (Birman, 2006), and our findings are limited in that, rather than pointing to actual gaps between parents and adolescents, we only assessed adolescents perceptions of culture-based conflicts. Researchers are begin-
ning to observe, however, that actual conflicts or gaps are not as relevant for Asian Americans as are feelings associated with those gaps. For example, it may be internalized conflicts that an adolescent experiences due to conflicts with parents that are perceived to be cultural (Bahrassa et al., 2012) that are responsible for disrupted family relations and adverse outcomes for adolescents (Fuligni, 2012). Future studies regarding culturebased conflicts and their contribution to adolescent well-being should include longitudinal data to assist in determining whether there are particular points in adolescence when such conflicts are highest and also more or less detrimental to psychological well-being. Larger and more culturally diverse samples are also needed to further explore gender differences in parentadolescent relationships and in associations between these factors and adolescent outcomes. In addition, this study examined a limited number of constructs related to the parentadolescent relationship, some of which may not map exactly onto factors related to tiger mothers. For example, the measure included in this study to assess monitoring or behavioral control may be similar to restrictiveness, but likely does not capture the strong nature of restrictiveness some Hmong American adolescents may experience (e.g., not being allowed to participate in extracurricular activities). Moreover, the measure of monitoring may be more accurately described as an assessment of parental knowledge (Stattin & Kerr, 2000), with that knowledge resulting from child disclosure or, in the case of Hmong Americans, requiring children to be at home and with the family (i.e., not monitoring activities away from home). Findings that varied from those reported in Juang and colleagues (2012) study of Chinese Americans may have been due to different measures selected for each study as well. Future studies should continue to examine how normative and culture-based conflicts impact family factors including indicators of relatedness and familism, and how those processes are associated with adolescent outcomes both in mediational (family factors are responsible or transmit effects of culture-based conflict) and moderation models (culture-based conflicts are not as negatively related in contexts of high relatedness) for Asian American adolescents. Despite these limitations, the current study adds to the literature on Asian parenting or tiger mothers by suggesting that parent adolescent relationships that include elements of restrictiveness (knowing where adolescents are) and indirect support may be associated with greater self-esteem and academic outcomes. Aspects of the parentadolescent relationship that result in conflict, but only culture-based conflicts, may be adversely related to internalized negative feelings directed toward the self. In sum, Hmong American tiger mothers may express care and concern in culturally appropriate ways (indirect support and monitoring rather than warmth and affection) to enhance their childrens achievement and self-esteem. If parents convey disapproval that children are not Hmong enough, their early adolescents may begin to develop negative feelings about themselves resulting from internalized conflicts regarding their relations with parents and what it means to be Hmong American. Particularly when those conflicts occur in conjunction with less connection to parents, they may be particularly detrimental.
49
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Hmong American Adolescents Perceptions of Mothers Parenting Practices: Support, Authority, and Intergenerational Agreement
Susie D. Lamborn, Jacqueline Nguyen, and Joel O. Bocanegra
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Twenty-four Hmong American adolescents participated in individual interviews regarding their perceptions of mothers parenting practices. A content analysis revealed a set of nine parenting practices that were represented in the responses. The adolescents talked about supportive parenting practices that included caretaking, positive communication, acceptance, and involvement. The adolescents also talked about parental assertions of authority that included high expectations for achievement, family obligations, and supervision. Less commonly discussed were the categories of psychological autonomy and intergenerational support. This study captured youth perceptions of family interactions, which revealed a range of parenting practices that represent Hmong American mothers. Keywords: parenting practices, Southeast Asian, adolescents
The Asian American population experienced the largest growth of any other ethnic group in the past decade (46%; United States Census Bureau, 2010). With nearly a quarter of the population comprised of children under the age of 18, the nature of Asian American parenting and child development is an important topic of research. Mainstream interest in the topic was piqued by Amy Chuas (2011) memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she describes a strict approach to parenting that she claims is rooted in traditional Chinese cultural approaches to parenting. The notion that there is a Chinese, or more broadly, Asian approach to parenting is supported by Chaos (1994) model of Asian parenting that emphasizes the concepts of guan (caring and governing) and chiao shun (training). In this model, Chinese immigrant parents are represented as having high control but without the negative emotional climate that is often thought to characterize strict families. In particular, families are described as using a style in which parents have high expectations for educational outcomes and emphasize hard work, self-discipline, and obedience. Warmth and responsivity are shown through investing time and having high expectations rather than verbal or physical expressions of closeness and intimacy in the parent child relationship. These interactions occur within a hierarchical family structure in which respect for parents is highly valued. Children largely experience positive psychosocial and academic outcomes in the context of the guan or training style
This article was published Online First December 31, 2012. Susie D. Lamborn, Jacqueline Nguyen, and Joel O. Bocanegra, Department of Educational Psychology, University of WisconsinMilwaukee. This study was supported by a research grant from the University of Wisconsin System Institute of Race and Ethnicity. Transcription support was provided by the Consulting Office of Research and Evaluation (Director, Cindy Walker) in the School of Education at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Susie D. Lamborn, Department of Educational Psychology, Enderis Hall 7th Floor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Hartford Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53211. E-mail: slamborn@uwm.edu 50
(and their equivalent models in other Asian cultures; for a review, see Chao & Tseng, 2002). These cultural models pervade research on Asian and Asian American parents. However, there has been limited attention to other Asian populations within the diaspora, as these characterizations of Asian parents are drawn largely from studies of Chinese families living in the United States, China, or Taiwan. The models of parenting presented by both Chua and Chao argue that different meanings and manifestations of parental control exist in Chinese and other Asian families, compared with Western families. Chao explains that these conceptualizations differ from parenting practices that have characterized European American families, and to accurately understand the relationship between parenting and child outcomes in Asian American families, it is important to understand the perceptions of parental control and warmth that are driven by culture (Chao, 2000a; 2000b; Cheung & Pomerantz, 2011). However, the bulk of research on Asian American parenting has focused on East Asian ethnic groups, despite some evidence of variation within the diaspora (Chao & Tseng, 2002). Limited research has examined parenting practices by Hmong American parents, a Southeast Asian ethnic group with a history as refugees (e.g., Supple & Small, 2006; Lamborn & Moua, 2008). The current study examined perceptions of mothers parenting practices for a group of Hmong American adolescents with parents who originate from Southeast Asia. Consideration will be given to how these perceptions compare with previous research on Hmong American adolescent perceptions of parents, and whether these findings support mainstream and Asian models of parenting practices.
Hmong Families History of the Hmong

The Hmong are an important ethnic group to study due to their unique history of being a hidden ethnic minority, both in their homelands of Laos and Thailand and in the United States (often
HMONG PARENTING PRACTICES
51
being identified in research as Laotian or aggregated into a broader Asian American label). Due to the history of displacement and persecution experienced by this refugee group, research tends to focus on trauma, delinquency, adjustment problems, and other negative psychosocial outcomes. There is a great need to examine normative development in Hmong American adolescents. The Hmong are members of a clan-based ethnic minority group who have lived in the mountain regions of Laos and have been engaged in swidden (slash-and-burn) farming practices (Hein, 2006; Vang, 2010). During the Vietnam War, they allied with the United States military and engaged with the United States CIA in a secret war that took place in Laos, which was supposedly neutral territory during the Vietnam War. After the United States troops pulled out of the region, many Hmong were left to fend for themselves in Laos, where the new government viewed them as enemies. Due to conditions of war and ethnic persecution, many of the families fled to refugee camps in Thailand before immigrating to the United States. In the United States, a large number of families have settled in California and the Midwest as secondary migration patterns have brought extended family and clan members together. California has the largest population of Hmong in the United States, followed by Minnesota and Wisconsin (91,224, 66,181, and 49,240, respectively; United States Census Bureau, 2010).
Research
A small but growing literature examines aspects of normative family functioning in Hmong American families as perceived by adolescents. In a culturally comparative study, Supple and Small (2006) administered surveys to assess Hmong and European American adolescent reports of various parenting practices and styles. Hmong American youth reported their parents to be supportive, knowledgeable about activities, and engaged in joint decision making, and these parenting practices were positively related to school performance and other aspects of positive adjustment. However, their perceptions of these parenting practices were lower than those of European American youth. Supple and Smalls study relied upon preexisting measures of parental authority and support to operationalize these constructs; however, there is the potential for cultural variability in the definitions of these very constructs. Rather than imposing definitions for parenting variables, Xiong, Eliason, Detzner, and Cleveland (2005) conducted open-ended focus-group interviews of Hmong adolescents and parents and asked respondents to describe the difference between good and bad parents. Adolescents reported that good parents give love and care, communicate in a positive fashion, protect youth through monitoring, and show understanding. Parent participants agreed with these perceptions, but also asserted that good parents provide for the childs needs for food, clothing, and other material goods. Of note, parents felt that provision of basic needs was more central than emotional expressions of love and caring. The focus-group interviews analyzed in this study reveal generational differences in perceptions of good parenting and also shed light on additional aspects of parenting that are highly valued by some members of the Hmong community. Lamborn and Moua (2008) revealed similar reports of Hmong parenting practices and found, in addition, that parental involve-
ment and family interdependence were emphasized as forms of closeness to parents. The study (interviews of a small sample of Hmong American adolescents) also uncovered themes that are unique to the immigrant experienceparticularly that of firstgeneration immigrants from more impoverished backgrounds: hardworking but absent fathers and parents desires for children to achieve economic and educational mobility. These themes reflected the parents efforts to advance the family so that the children could experience a more economically stable lifestyle than the parents experienced as working-class immigrants with limited educational backgrounds and English language skills (Ngo & Lee, 2007). We found it striking that adolescents in these two studies did not emphasize intergenerational tension or conflict in the parent child relationship, a common theme in studies of Asian American families, particularly over issues on which adolescents and parents have differential rates of acculturation (Lee, 2005). Lee examined the effects of acculturative orientations on educational outcomes in what she calls traditional and American United States Hmong adolescents. The traditional group was more successful in maintaining stronger ties to their traditional beliefs. This group also accepted parents desires for them to fulfill family obligations by sharing in household responsibilities, translating, and performing other support behaviors. Strong family ties and links to cultural practices served to support educational achievement, as many families viewed education as a way to advance economically. Parents supported selective acculturation in which they encourage young people to become biculturally competent (Ngo & Lee, 2007). In contrast, the Americanized group had more problems at school and at home. Relationships with parents tended to be more conflicted as intergeneration tensions mounted through dissonant acculturation. The teens adopted American practices more quickly than their parents, who viewed these behaviors as disrespectful and undermining parental authority. According to Ngo and Lee (2007), the research literature emphasizes educational struggles that Hmong youth may face as they learn to manage cultural practices, such as kinship responsibilities, early marriage for girls, and family obligations, all of which may interfere with educational success. This small body of literature on Hmong parents reveals two findings: (a) a similarity between Hmong and non-Hmong approaches to parenting, namely the presence of warmth and closeness, and (b) within-group heterogeneity, in which some Hmong families experience greater conflict regarding parental expectations and practices, whereas others have little intergenerational tension. It is also evident that there may be some difference between Hmong parenting approaches and the models of parenting presented by both Chao (1994) and Chua (2011). Missing from the current literature appears to be the notion of extremely high pressure for academic achievement and training with regard to hard work, obedience, and discipline. However, the parenting variables examined across these studies vary greatly, and there is a need to more closely examine these issues to explore some of the cultural factors that may inform adolescent perceptions of their parents behaviors and values, and inform our understanding of how Hmong families may differ from the largely Chinese families that comprise the predominant perspectives on Asian parenting practices.
52 Current Study
LAMBORN, NGUYEN, AND BOCANEGRA
The extensive research on the training, or guan model of parenting has dominated research on Asian families. However, this model has been evaluated primarily on Asian and Asian immigrant families from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Less information is available about how the training model addresses parenting practices in Southeast Asian families. Furthermore, a more recent parenting model for Asian families, the tiger-mother model, has also focused most directly on Chinese American families. Based on a memoir, little empirical research is available regarding this parenting model. Finally, each of these models has been presented in contrast to a well-known, mainstream parenting-practices model that examines warmth, behavioral control, and psychological autonomy granting (Steinberg, 2001). Controversy persists over whether this model is appropriate for Asian families, although the controversy is more limited when emphasis is placed on the individual parenting practices rather than on the parenting styles that can be constructed by combining across the parenting practices. Thus, an important goal of the current study will be to evaluate whether the perceptions of parenting practices provided by this group of Hmong American adolescents support previously developed mainstream and Asian (training, tiger-mother) models of parenting practices. In addition, the findings will be compared with previous research on Hmong American adolescents perceptions of parenting. The current study focused on understanding Hmong American adolescents perceptions of their mothers parenting practices. This was investigated through semistructured, individual interviews to explore how youths perceived their mothers parenting practices without directing them with preconceived questions.
cated that they intended to attend college. The average response was to complete a 4-year college degree, although the responses ranged from completing a degree at a technical college to gaining an advanced degree beyond a bachelors degree.
Procedure
The students were invited to participate through the Asian Club, an informal after-school club that allowed students to gather socially and support each other academically. The faculty sponsor of the Asian Club permitted the researchers to attend several meetings to explain the study and pass out consent forms. Students provided written parental consent and also assented to be a part of the study. Each student received $10 for participating in the study. About 60% (24) of the students who attended during the recruitment sessions participated in the study. The study sample distribution of girls and boys was similar to that in the Asian Club, which included more girls. The study was approved by the universitys institutional review board. The participants engaged in individual, semistructured interviews with trained interviewers. Participants were offered the option to complete the interview in English or Hmong (with a Hmong native interviewer) and all, including those fluently bilingual, elected to do so in English. Participants were asked to talk about their mothers or female guardians general parenting practices. We focused on the mothers, as they were primary socialization agents in most of the families, given that the children had more interactions with them on a daily basis. Ninety-two percent answered for their mother. One boy did not have a mother or female guardian and answered for his father. The lead question was, Tell me what your mother (or female guardian) is like when she is with you. Probing continued until adolescents identified six characteristics or qualities regarding their mothers. The interviews were audiotaped and the interviewer took notes regarding the adolescents statements during the interviews on data sheets. Information from the data sheets was typed into coding sheets. This reduced problems with legibility of the data sheets and resulted in clearer and more consistent coding results. The coding was completed from the typed coding-sheet summaries. Checks were made with the transcripts when needed.
Method Sample
Participants were 24 Hmong American adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18 years (M 15.8) who attended an ethnically diverse high school in an urban area in the Midwest. Girls represented 67% of the sample. The majority of the students lived with both of their parents (83%), and the remaining 17% lived in another family arrangement. Half of the students (54%) were born in the United States; the others were born in Southeast Asia. This second group arrived in the United States as infants or young children and were raised and educated in the United States (1.5 generation; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). The sample was predominantly working class, based on parents educational levels. Thirtysix percent of the fathers and 52% of the mothers had not attended school at any level. Twenty-four percent of the fathers and 22% of the mothers had some schooling up to high school graduation. Sixteen percent of the fathers and 12% of the mothers had some college or more. Finally, some of the students reported that they did not know the educational background of their fathers (24%) or mothers (14%). According to the adolescents, all parents except for one father were born in Southeast Asia and immigrated to the United States. All of the parents were Hmong from either Laos or Thailand. The students reported grades that ranged from mostly As and Bs to mostly Cs and Ds. The mean response of the sample indicated B-level performance at school. All of the students indi-
Content Analysis
Using content analysis, the data were coded to reveal parenting practices as described by Hmong American youth. In preliminary reviews of the data, it became apparent that many of the contents were consistent with a coding scheme used in an earlier study of Hmong American adolescents (Lamborn & Moua, 2008), which included 10 parenting-practices codes that were consistent with mainstream parenting practices (support, behavioral control) and a cultural ecological model that emphasizes the role of culture in development (maternal caregiving, family obligations) (Chao & Otsuki-Clutter, 2011; Cheung & Pomerantz, 2011; Fuligni, Hughes, & Way, 2009; Garc ia Coll et al., 1996; Wu & Chao, 2011). Therefore, this scheme was adapted for the current study, but additional codes that emerged from the data were added in a dynamic process. Saturation was evident when categories repeated and new categories did not emerge. After coding all responses under the final coding scheme, percentages of responses were
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calculated on the total sample. This information is presented in Figure 1. Reliability of the content analyses was evaluated using percent agreement between two coders. Training for coding took place in weekly meetings over a 2-month period. Responses from 10 of the participants or 40% of the sample were coded for reliability. This data included 60 responses, with percent agreement at 95%. After discussing the codes together, coding discrepancies were corrected and modest revisions in the codes were conducted.
Results
There were nine primary categories within which adolescent descriptions of mothers parenting practices were coded. These categories represent four major themes which emerged from the data: (a) parental support, comprised of caretaking, acceptance, positive communication, and involvement; (b) parental authority (high expectations, family obligations, and supervision); (c) other (intergenerational agreement and psychological autonomy); and (d) opposite framing of responses. Interview excerpts exemplifying each type of parenting practice appear in Table 1.
Parental Support
The first theme of support included four categories. Collectively, these four categories reflected mothers thinking about what the adolescent needs and wants, expressing acceptance, talking openly, and participating in activities with the adolescent. Caretaking. Caretaking was a central element of the parenting practices that were revealed by this group of Hmong American adolescents. The adolescents spoke warmly about their mothers caring and provision through managing the house, cooking for
20
them, and generally working hard inside and outside the house. As one youth stated succinctly, Shes a normal mom, housewife, cook, clean, go to work. Another teenager indicated that his mother loves us, gives us what we want, cooks . . . Some participants discussed mothers caretaking behaviors during illness, both in terms of nurturance and cultural knowledge of healing as the two following participants discuss: Shes great, what a moms supposed to be. Shes a mom, taking care of me when Im sick and feeling down; trying to cheer me up, buy me things sometimes. and [My mom] uses Hmong medicine to help us get better. When we cry, we go to her. She makes us feel better. When were sick, she finds us medicine. The important recognition of parents time and employment sacrifices was clear in the interviews. One mother was described as someone who works hard, sacrifices her time for us. Her work schedule is around us. [She] works third shift. Acceptance. Acceptance included expressions of love and caring, accepting the teenager for who she or he was, and bringing a quality of friendship or fun to the relationship. One girl described her mother as her best friend, someone who was always there for her. She went on to say that she and her mother were really close and explained that there was no distance between us. Another teenager described her mother as fun to be with: She is very, very goofytells us a lot of jokes. Makes fun of my boyfriend a lot. Makes fun a lot. Similarly another youth commented that I can joke with her . . . Shes fun . . . has a good sense of humor. The emphasis on being able to joke with parents indicates a level of comfort and acceptance between the adolescent and parent. Emotional comfort was also emphasized. One young woman described her mother as a nice person, forgiving. I get her mad, next day if I ask her to do something for me, she will, even still
Posive
Opposite 15
10 15.3 11.8 9 6.3 2.8 0 0.7 2.1 4.9 0 2.8 1.4 0 3.5 2 2 9
14.6 11.8 5
-5
Acceptance Involved Posive Communicaon Support Caretaking Supervision High Expectaons Authority Family Obligaons Psychological Autonomy Intergeneraonal Agreement
Other
Figure 1. Percentage of responses for Hmong American adolescent perceptions of mothers parenting practices.
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Table 1 Content Analysis: Examples of Hmong American Adolescents Perceptions of Mothers Parenting Practices
Category Acceptance Caretaking Sample Response Were best friends. She wants me to know Im loved. Shes a caring person. Still supports me [even though shes] disappointed that I got pregnant and married. My mom is very caring. In my house, she will get up, like so early in the morning just to cook breakfast for me. And she will come and wake you up, tell you that the food is ready and stuff like that. She basically, shes just like a very caring mom. Yeah, she listens to me. We, we often talk, we have a lot in common, me and my mom. We do everything together. She always encourages us, like, Oh, yeah, you know, you can do better next time, you know, next time that you just do better, more. If you think that youre failing or something. [Interviewer: So, its kind of like in a positive way.] Yeah, just in a positive way, but not in a negative way. They want me to go to college, and, I mean, getting the good grades and doing all this extra stuff, helps get into college. I know they dont want to pay for college, so they want me to stay in school . . . I guess when we moved to the U.S., that was their first, main thing for us to do. So since, and I was only five, so I guess I grew up like that; always focusing on school. She has a very strong work ethic. She wants me to be on time and considerate of others. Shes always concerned about us, if were like off to someplace, and you know, she always kinda like, call to make sure that were there and were safe, or at least like, supposed to call her back and tell her that like, Yeah, were safe, and you know, theres nothing going on . . . [Interviewer: So, one of the things she does, is she definitely keeps track of you.] Yeah, she keeps track of us . . . I have a cell phone, so I either call her and tell her where Im at, or Im safe and stuff. Or either shell call me and ask me where am I, or what am I doing, am I safe and all this stuff. Its sort of like a little training thing, or like, she tells us that we need to be good, you know. Only good people can have a good future, and stuff like that. We learn how to cook right away, and we, the girls always have to watch the mother do everything. I grew up like that, so then you know whats expected. But when shes there and how to act, you know, like you cant be silly around her. But when shes there you wont act silly. Tells us to work around the house. When shes tired, she wants us to help, washing dishes, help out. Well my parents were not born here. So theyre basically like in the old, Hmong way, which is my religion. So theyre more open minded about how we act, how this generation acts different from the older generation . . . In our religion, back then, the girls couldnt play sports. Basically they were supposed to do in the house, just clean up the house. Basically, a typical housewife, I guess. That was your role as a woman. Now since we came to the United States, I mean its basically girls who have the same rights as any man, so you dont have to do housework if you dont want to. Basically you have a choice now, so . . . [Interviewer: And your mom kind of agrees with that?] Yeah, she agrees with that. She gives more freedom. Shell let us go out with a boyfriend. She wants me to experience the world, lets me go out. Trust. She trusts me.
Positive communication Involved This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
High expectations
Supervision
Family obligations
Intergenerational agreement
Psychological autonomy
mad. Another stated that her mother is a caring person, in that she tries to be there for me in an emotional way. She understands when Im sad or in a bad mood. Shes there when you need her. Finally, one participant described the relationship with the mother as best friends. She wants me to know Im loved. These responses illustrate emotional closeness between the mother and teenager. These responses emphasized friendship, humor/fun, and general acceptance, in contrast to the next category that specifically addressed open communication. Positive communication. Positive communication was discussed by participants as a form of closeness with their mothers. The adolescents talked openly with their mothers about their lives and problems, and viewed their mothers as good listeners. One girl
said that her mother is easy to talk to. Were close, we talk a lot. I spend time every night talking with her if I have problems. Echoing this theme, another youth commented, I tell her everything. If I have a problem at school, I tell her my feelings. According to another adolescent: Shes always there for us. If Im feeling low, she will talk to me, gives advice, listens well. We talk often. One girl explained the closeness between herself and her mother: . . . I will just tell her stuff . . . like whos giving me problems and stuff like that. Just basically tell her. Like shes basically my journal entry, I guess, I tell her all my feelings and stuff to her. These Hmong American teenagers had open and flexible channels of communication with their mothers. They viewed their mothers as people with whom they could share their
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daily experiences and consult on problems. They also indicated that their mothers shared information with them. Involved. Involvement included spending time together and engaging in shared activities. One of the teenagers described her mother in the following terms: Shes really nice. We dont have a lot of life problems . . . We hang out and do a lot together. Similarly, another teenager explained that we do everything together . . . we enjoy time together, were close. A third adolescent commented that she and her mother go shopping together. Another teenager explained, Like Im in soccer, she cheers me on and picks me up (from practice and games). This category also included general descriptions of mothers providing support and encouragement.
Parental Authority
Parental authority included the coded categories of high expectations, supervision, and family obligations. The teenagers felt that the mothers conveyed high expectations for current and future school performance. The mothers made efforts to keep track of them by knowing their friends and whereabouts, and had strict rules and consequences. Finally, mothers expected them to complete household responsibilities as part of their obligations to the family. High expectations. High expectations included mothers emphasis on educational and behavioral outcomes. A primary emphasis was on educational success. The mothers were described as supporting strong achievement outcomes during high school, as well as aspirations for students to attend college in the future. Responses included, Shes into school, asks about school, homework, reviews it and She wants me to get good grades. Whereas some of the comments focused on current school performance and success, other mothers were focused on high school performance as a means to college admission and completion. For example one adolescent commented that her mother wanted her to finish school. She wants me to have success in life, go to college, finish school and find a good paying job. The expectations for doing well extended to behavior and moral character as well. One youth explained, She doesnt want me to do bad things like smoke and stuff. Mothers were reported as having high expectations for both education and general behavior. Supervision. According to participants, mothers engaged in supervision through monitoring and managing activities and friends, strictness, and effective disciplinary practices. According to one teenager, On school days, I cant go out. On weekends I have to be home by 10 p.m. I go right home . . . She keeps track of who Im with, where Im going. She knows most of my friends and their parents, most are relatives. One girl described her mother as really protective in a good way, calls my friends and checks on me. Similarly, another girl described her mother as protective in that she asks a lot of questions, wants to know everything. Another youth described the mothers approach to enforcing family rules and expectations: Instead of yelling, she words things nicely, explains as nicely as possible. Then, if I dont listen she yells. These responses indicated that the mothers were proactively involved in supporting positive youth outcomes by keeping track of youth, having strict rules, and engaging in positive forms of discipline.
Family obligations. These Hmong American adolescents reported that they were obligated to help the family with household responsibilities, caring for siblings, and translating for parents with limited English language skills. One girl described her mothers expectations for her at home: There are lots of expectations for cooking for the family. As the oldest daughter, Im supposed to stay at home doing chores. She elaborated that she also has to teach her younger siblings to cook or her mother becomes upset. Another participant explained that the girls in her family have to take turns, cook the whole meal for our family. One adolescent conveyed that her mother was very demanding around the house. She expects kids to take care of parents. Another teenager explained, She wants me to be a role model for my younger siblings. The role model responsibility included completing household chores, doing well at school, and behaving correctly. Several adolescents were expected to translate for the mother outside of the home, for example when she went shopping. In some cases, the adolescents described expectations for completing everyday household chores, such as taking out the garbage or washing dishes that are similar to expectations in many United States homes. An element of this theme was obligation to the extended family. One youth described her mother as . . . really nice. If my cousin comes over and needs money, shell give it and wants to help. Similarly, another youth described her mother as someone who helps everybody. She babysits for other people, relatives and friends, helps with problems. The adolescents were also expected to support the extended family in various ways, such as through babysitting nephews and nieces. Sometimes these activities were presented as interfering with time spent together with the parents. One teenager felt that the parents focused on helping relatives rather than spending time with their own children. The mothers both modeled providing support to the extended family as well as expected the teenagers to participate in family obligations to the extended family.
Other Responses
Two additional categories were placed in an Other category and included psychological autonomy and intergenerational agreement. These categories were not mentioned as often as some of the other categories, but seemed to reflect important elements of the youths perceptions. Psychological autonomy. Psychological autonomy was reflected when the mother was described as allowing freedom to experience life, was trusting of the youth, and invited the youth to express their opinions through shared decision making. One teenager described her mother in this way: She wants me to experience the world. Another teenager described his relationship with his mother in terms of trust: My mom trusts me. Another adolescent described the mother as follows, She gives more freedom. Mothers were rarely described as inviting shared decisions and engaging in discussions that allow for differences of opinion between parent and child. This type of parenting was more likely to be represented as a negative characteristic of mothers, as becomes evident in the section on opposite responses (below). Intergenerational agreement. In discussing intergenerational agreement, adolescents discussed the potential for conflict between Hmong and United States lifestyles or expectations but
56
mentioned that mothers supported or even encouraged some acculturation toward United States norms. The mothers were sometimes described as accepting the more flexible roles for women regarding delaying marriage, going to college, and having a career that were part of the United States value system, as illustrated by one female participant: My sister got married at 16. She tells me to go to college then get married.
attempts to be involved in community activities outside the house. Some of the Hmong American adolescents in this study perceived that their mothers expectations were traditional or old-fashioned. Parental expectations that conveyed Hmong values were viewed as discordant with the dominant United States lifestyle. The students described United States values as allowing more freedom to explore and date, focusing on education, and encouraging the English language at home.
Opposite Responses
Overall, the adolescents had positive descriptions of their mothers. However, in a minority of the responses (17.4%), the mother was described in what we label opposite framing of the parenting characteristics. In describing negative communication patterns with his mother, one teenager indicated that she speaks to children only when she orders them around. In another description of problematic communication patterns, a different teenager commented that his mother doesnt always listen. She doesnt want to be bothered, wants to be alone. This mother was reported as stressed and challenged by the dual responsibilities of home and work. Another instance of work disrupting the establishment of a close mother-child relationship was evident when one student responded that She works, spends little time with me. She works 3 p.m. to 12 a.m. so we dont see each other, just on weekends and summer. This mother worked as a seamstress for a factory. Psychological autonomy included responses that were opposites, or some form of psychological control. One teenager described his mother as overprotective: She doesnt trust us. She thinks were out doing bad things. He elaborated that this position was unfair because it was a general assessment of his behavior and indicated mistrust rather than directly relating to the participants behavior. According to one teenager, She doesnt want to hear options; doesnt take into consideration my ideas. These Hmong American adolescents expressed dissatisfaction with psychological control as a form of parenting. In summary, the opposite descriptions revealed strains in the motheradolescent relationship that were evident through disrupted communication and restricted time together. Sometimes, the mothers were viewed as stifling the teenagers freedom and expression of ideas through overprotective parenting practices. In other instances, the overextended work lives of the mothers simply did not allow time for talking and spending time together. Opposite responses to intergenerational agreement addressed cultural tensions associated with generational separation in which the mothers aligned with the traditional Hmong values of their upbringing in Southeast Asia, whereas the teenagers felt more comfortable with the American point of view that they experienced growing up in the Midwest. According to one participant:
She expects me to be like how she was when she was younger. Um, cause back then they had to farm and everything, but now we dont farm. She wants me to be able to cook, be polite when people come, and know how to serve them. And just like, be around the house and be like what a girl should be. And I should be able to speak in my own language when Im at home.
Conclusions
The interview responses allowed these Hmong American adolescents to voice their perceptions of the parenting practices they experience in daily interactions with mothers. These perceptions reflected a uniquely Hmong American parent child experience that is consistent with the groups Hmong American background and lifestyle of being raised and educated in the United States Midwest by mothers who were originally from Southeast Asia. The mothers were described as warm, caring, and loving when they engaged in caregiving, accepted the adolescents, listened and communicated effectively, and engaged in joint activities with them. Thus, support was defined as active participation in various elements of adolescents lives in addition to emotional warmth and basic caregiving. The youth also discussed mothers assertions of authority through supervision, high expectations for education, and family obligations. Finally, they occasionally talked about intergenerational agreement with parents over cultural differences in Hmong and mainstream American values, as well as opportunities for freedom and independence.
Parental Support
Contrary to dominant lay and academic perceptions of Asian American mothers as overly strict and authoritarian, a perspective perpetuated by the recent Chua memoir, the mothers in this study were rarely described in negative terms. Notably, even when discussing parental authority, adolescents framed these discussions positively, with little discussion of the intergenerational tension over issues of authority that pervade research on Asian American parent child relationships (e.g., Lee & Liu, 2001; Su & Vang, 2005). Despite the emphasis on conflict in the Asian American literature, the current findings in which parents were presented as supportive, are consistent with many results from the studies of Hmong American adolescent perceptions of parents previously reviewed in this manuscript. Moreover, the displays of support discussed by adolescents did not differ greatly from those of non-Hmong, European American youth: Mothers can be fun, have humor-filled relationships with their children, and are partners in communication. These demonstrations of warmth have not been documented in many studies of Asian families across the diaspora. Instead, it has been found that more often, parental support (and sometimes warmth) are demonstrated through caregiving behaviors, including sacrifice (Chao & Kaeochinda, 2010). Moreover, intergenerational tension can arise when parents and adolescents have incongruent beliefs about the adequacy of this expression of support (Wu & Chao, 2005). In contrast, this group of adolescents clearly recognized caregiving behaviors as a means for mothers to express support and love for them and were supportive of their mothers
Another participant explained that her mothers mindset represented a cultural barrier. I volunteer, she wants me at home. She doesnt speak much English. She speaks mostly Hmong. The mothers traditional values were viewed as conflicting with her
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demonstration of warmth through these means. This finding is similar to another study of Hmong Americans living in the Midwest (Lamborn & Moua, 2008), but differs from findings by Xiong et al. (2005), who found that the parents but not the adolescents viewed caretaking as an important aspect of good parenting. In a previous study (Lamborn & Moua, 2008), as with this one, the adolescents described patterns of open communication. Yet another finding that distinguishes this group of Hmong American families are the descriptions of parent child communication through openly talking, sharing information, and listening to what adolescents had to say. Some of the Hmong Americans in this study described their mothers as friends with whom they could confide in almost any topic and with whom they talked regularly. When mothers were available to engage in positive communication exchanges, the teenagers valued this commitment and viewed it as expressing love and caring for them. These outward expressions of emotion are inconsistent with the training model and with a Chinese form of warmth or qin (Wu & Chao, 2011). Moreover, these findings are a departure from many studies of Asian and Southeast Asian parentadolescent relationships, which find that acculturation gaps are contributing factors to internal and external intergenerational conflict and negative psychosocial outcomes in adolescents (e.g., Fuligni, 2012; Xiong et al., 2005). The narratives of participants in this study counter this dominant narrative of cultural modes of parenting that are argued to be endemic to Asian (and Southeast Asian) ethnic groups. Instead, the results yield insight into a potential cultural shift toward new forms of parentadolescent communication in the Hmong community. Participants in this study largely belong to the 1.5 generation and second generation and have young or youthfully oriented parents who were themselves influenced by United States values and customs. It is likely these mothers have experienced some acculturation toward dominant United States norms and altered their behaviors after feeling disaffected with their own parents form of caregiving, particularly with regard to warmth. As members of the Hmong community acculturate and develop relationships with their children that vary from traditional modes of interacting, a cultural shift could rapidly occur, altering the face of parentadolescent relationships within the Hmong community and perhaps Southeast Asian communities at large. However, it is important to note the geographic specificity of this study and acknowledge that this cultural change may occur within a localized community with a relatively small number of Hmong families.
Parental Authority and Training

The Hmong American adolescents also emphasized expressions of parental authority through high expectations, supervision, and family obligations. The youths spoke extensively about the mothers strong expectations for helping to manage the house and for doing well in school. The mothers wanted their children, especially the girls, to be capable of running a household. These expectations are typically framed as family obligations, which are a common element of family life in many immigrant families (Fuligni et al., 2009). Hmong girls transfer from their family of birth to the husbands family when they marry (Donnelly, 1994). The skills that they take with them achieve multiple goals. The girls are able to run their own homes independently if they have been trained well by their mothers. They may be valued more or treated better
in their new extended family when their household management skills are strong. They also may represent their childhood family and bring respect as well as avoid shame to the family, particularly the mother, when they are viewed as good wives. If these activities are reframed as a form of training activity (marriage or household training), rather than solely socialization toward family obligations, it is indeed the case that Hmong mothers are engaged in a training model of parenting. The mothers expectations for household responsibilities and childcare duties, especially for girls, seemed aimed toward ensuring that daughters could run their future households on their own. The strategy used by these immigrant Hmong mothers seemed to focus on an apprenticeship model in which the teenagers are shown explicitly how to perform cooking, cleaning, and caretaking responsibilities. The teenagers, beginning in childhood, were expected to follow the modeling of the parents and eventually take over these responsibilities on their own. This might be described as an apprenticeship or scaffolding mechanism of direct transfer of skill performance from mother to child through observation, modeling, and direct training. This training is gendered, however, and the burden of this form of caregiving is placed largely upon girls. While this training model may persist in Hmong families, the impetus for such training may diverge from the models discussed by Chao (1994) or Chua (2011). Due to the extreme poverty in which Hmong families live in the United States compared with other East Asian populations (Hernandez, Denton, & Macartney, 2009), it may be a mandatory requirement that young women learn these roles simply for the household to function while parents work the third shifta common occurrence in Hmong families in this study. In addition to socialization for cultural reasons, Hmong adolescent girls receive training out of necessity. This is an important contrast to Chuas description of strict parenting and socialization toward Asian norms. As highly educated members of an elite social and economic class, Chua has had the luxury to pick and choose the cultural ideals to which she prefers to socialize her daughters. Socialization toward household responsibilities is not born out of necessity in the same way it is for low-income Hmong families. The outcomes for both child and parent under these different motivations for use of a training model of parenting merits further attention. Similarly, Hmong mothers in this study were perceived to have high academic aspirations for their children: to attend college and have good jobs. As reported in other studies of Hmong American families, it is possible that these forms of expectations reflect social class issues as much as cultural values (Brown, Bakken, Nguyen, & Von Bank, 2007; Lamborn & Moua, 2008). Often, parents educational expectations were perceived by adolescents as strategies to encourage teenagers to aim for careers that would protect them from factory work, which sometimes required working late or double shifts. Future research could help to further understand how social class and cultural values interact to influence parenting practices (Garc ia Coll, et al., 1996; Lau, 2010). In some families, high expectations for education could also be interpreted as a vehicle for career advancement to provide youths with more independence in their adult lives. However, as with other elements in these families, these goals may have been combined with expectations to support the family. As others have suggested (Ngo & Lee, 2007), the adoption of new cultural values is complex in that Hmong
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American parents and adolescents do not just adhere to American or Hmong values but construct their own mode of parenting as a result of the cultural values of their ethnic group and those of their economic class.
Other Parenting Practices

It is important to note, providing opportunities for the expression of psychological autonomy was only represented in a limited fashion in the adolescents responses. In addition, the descriptions of psychological control were presented with a negative emotional tone, suggesting that these youths resented excessive emotional restrictions from mothers. This finding is consistent with earlier descriptions of Hmong American and other Asian American families, suggesting that Asian American parents differently value youth expressions of their own point of view or other aspects of independence training (Lamborn & Moua, 2008; Brown et al., 2007). Nevertheless, the mothers could be viewed as promoting self-sufficiency through behavioral management that occurred through high expectations for education and family obligations. The expressions of independence training may appear differently in different cultures. Some of the adolescents felt cultural dissonance between Hmong and American cultural values (Brown et al., 2007). Interestingly, in some cases this was expressed as intergenerational conflict, whereas in other cases, the mother shared those adolescents American-based values that emphasized education, careers, and gender equality. Cultural dissonance becomes interesting to consider in relation to the training and tiger-mother models: How do parents balance the high expectations for success in school and community with the traditions that describe the need to be a contributing member of the household? Acculturative discrepancies between parent and adolescents may contribute to how well cultural parenting models explain adolescent outcomes (Choi, He, & Harachi, 2008). Chao (1994) and Chua (2011) both may describe parenting practices that have a stronger fit with the adolescents current sociocultural environment. The Hmong American adolescents in this study sometimes were faced with parenting expectations that did not resonate with their day-to-day lives, due to mothers adherence to traditional values. For instance, Chua might encourage her children to be involved with the community because she knows that volunteering is an essential component for college admissions in the United States. When there is more alignment between parent and adolescent expectations, as some of these Hmong American youths expressed, there may be more adaptive child outcomes. This suggests that a goodness of fit between parent and child expectations may support more positive adjustment, as has been suggested by previous research (Juang, Lerner, McKinney, & von Eye, 1999).
discussed. For example, the findings related to the training model in that the adolescents discussed high expectations for education, family obligations, and strictness. They also discussed caretaking as a form of love. However, contrary to this model, they described mothers who expressed love and acceptance through positive communication and open emotional displays of affection. This type of support is more consistent with mainstream parenting models. On the surface, the findings seem to support the tiger-mother model as well. However, on closer inspection, these families differed noticeably on the dimension of social class. The expectations for achievement were focused on the adolescent doing as well as possible to get good grades, finishing high school, and graduating from college. However, the press for perfect grades and admission to elite, high-status universities was not conveyed by these mothers. The emphasis on household chores also reflects a different set of cultural values blended with practical concerns. Girls in particular were trained to manage a household so that they would be valued as future members of their husbands extended family. Training was also a practical strategy for running the current household while both parents held blue-collar jobs that kept them away from home during evening and early morning hours. Supervision helped to keep adolescents safe in troubled neighborhoods. The tiger-mother model focuses on household chores and strict supervision to keep children from a higher social class environment grounded and focused on extreme achievement standards to prepare them for entry to elite schools.
Culturally Blended Parenting

Representing the diversity that occurs within specific subgroups of Southeast Asian families is an important focus of this study. These Hmong American adolescents described parents who expressed support and love by taking care of them, accepting them, talking openly with them, and participating in their lives. They also portrayed parents who asserted their authority through high expectations for education, supervising teenage activities and friendships, and defining family obligations. Sometimes, parents and teenagers aligned together to achieve goals that were consistent with what American culture dictated was important. In other instances, intergenerational conflicts brought tensions to the parentadolescent relationship. These Hmong American parents and teenagers together fashioned a new cultural portfolio that blended elements from both traditional Hmong culture and mainstream American culture. An important message from this study is the value of understanding the range of parenting practices that are apparent when listening to the voices of Hmong American adolescents. This within group variability in perceptions of parenting practices becomes lost in many quantitative descriptions of Asian American parents. The goal of recognizing the diversity in Asian American parenting can be supported by including qualitative and mixed methods approaches that allow adolescents to voice their perceptions of parent-youth interactions. The Hmong American adolescents in this study revealed a range of parenting practices that were characteristic of immigrant Hmong mothers.
Comparisons With Previous Family Models

The findings of this study are only partially consistent with previous research on Hmong American adolescents and with mainstream and Asian models of parenting practices. These adolescents talked about parental support and authority that were consistent in some ways with each perspective. However, neither previous research on Hmong Americans nor mainstream or Asian parenting models seemed to adequately capture everything that the youths
Limitations
Several limitations are evident in this study. The participants were a small sample of Hmong American students from one high
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school who were also members of the schools Asian Club. Various aspects of the recruitment process, including the requirement for written parental consent, may have biased the sample toward more well-functioning families. Therefore, these findings will not necessarily apply to all Hmong American adolescents. Further research on normative aspects of family functioning in Hmong American families is desirable to build a stronger normative research base for this Southeast Asian group. In addition, due to the overrepresentation of girls in this sample, better representation of Hmong American boys will be useful in future work. Traditional Hmong culture treats boys and girls differently, beginning in childhood (Vang, 2010; Yang, 2008). These gender-role expectations can be the source of cultural conflict between the generations and need to be understood better. These types of gender patterns in ethnic socialization have been emphasized in other immigrant groups as well. Of importance, the interview procedure of this study permitted access to adolescents perceptions of their mothers parenting practices. It may be important to differentiate parent perspectives from that of adolescents (Kakihara & Tilton-Weaver, 2009). These perspectives often diverge and can have different implications for the prediction of adolescent outcomes. For example, other research has shown that adolescents perspectives of intergenerational cultural dissonance and parent child conflict predicted youth outcomes differently than when information was collected from the parents points of view (Choi et al., 2008). In a family such as Chuas (2011), her perspective of how she parents may not be shared by her daughters. Ultimately, these differing perspectives can have serious implications for youth outcomes, as with Chuas younger daughter. Although we were not able to examine these important linkages in the current study, past research attests to the importance of considering adolescents perceptions of family dynamics in relation to youth outcomes (Kakihara & Tilton-Weaver, 2009).
References
Brown, B. B., Bakken, J. P., Nguyen, J., & Von Bank, H. G. (2007). Sharing information about peer relations: Parent and adolescent opinions and behaviors in Hmong and African American families. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 116, 67 82. doi:10.1002/cd.189 Chao, R. K. (1994). Beyond parental control and authoritarian parenting style: Understanding Chinese parenting through the cultural notion training. Child Development, 65, 11111119. doi:10.2307/1131308 Chao, R. K. (2000a). Cultural explanations for the role of parenting in the school success of Asian American children. In R. Taylor & M. C. Wang (Eds.), Resilience across contexts: Family work, culture, and community (pp. 333363). Mahwah, NJ: Earlbaum. Chao, R. K. (2000b). The parenting of immigrant Chinese and European American mothers: Relations between parenting styles, socialization goals, and parental practices. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 21, 233248. doi:10.1016/S0193-3973(99)00037-4 Chao, R. K., & Kaeochinda, K. F. (2010). Parental sacrifice and acceptance as distinct dimensions of parental support among Chinese and Filipino American adolescents. In S. T. Russell, L. J. Crockett, & R. K. Chao (Eds.), Asian American parenting and parentadolescent relationships (pp. 6177). New York, NY: Springer Science. doi:10.1007/978-1-44195728-3_4 Chao, R., & Otsuki-Clutter, M. (2011). Racial and ethnic differences: Sociocultural and contextual explanations. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 21, 47 60. doi:10.1111/j.1532-7795.2010.00714.x
Chao, R., & Tseng, V. (2002). Parenting of Asians. In Bornstein, Marc H. (Ed), (2002). Handbook of parenting: Vol. 4. Social conditions and applied parenting (2nd ed., pp. 59 93). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Cheung, C. S., & Pomerantz, E. M. (2011). Parents involvement in childrens learning in the United States and China: Implications for childrens academic and emotional adjustment. Child Development, 82, 932950. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01582.x Choi, Y., He, M., & Harachi, T. W. (2008). Intergenerational cultural dissonance, parent child conflict and bonding, and youth problem behaviors among Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrant families. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 37, 8596. doi:10.1007/s10964-007-9217-z Chua, A. (2011). Battle hymn of the tiger mother. New York, NY: The Penguin Press. Donnelly, N. D. (1994). Changing lives of Hmong refugee women. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Fuligni, A. J. (2012). Gaps, conflicts, and arguments between adolescents and their parents. New Directions for Child & Adolescent Development, 2012, 105110. doi:10.1002/cd.20006 Fuligni, A. J., Hughes, D. L., & Way, N. (2009). Ethnicity and immigration. In R. M. Lerner, & L. Steinberg (Eds.), Handbook of adolescent psychology: Vol. 2. Contexts of development (3rd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Garc ia Coll, C., Crnic, K., Lamberty, G., Wasik, B. H., Jenkins, R., Garc ia, H. V., & McAdoo, H. P. (1996). An integrative model for the study of developmental competencies in minority children. Child Development, 67, 18911914. doi:10.2307/1131600 Hein, J. (2006). Ethnic origins: The adaptation of Cambodian and Hmong refugees in four American cities. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Hernandez, D. J., Denton, N. A., & Macartney, S. E. (2009). School-age children in immigrant families: Challenges and opportunities for Americas Schools. Teachers College Record, 111, 616 658. http://www .tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId15331 Juang, L. P., Lerner, J. V., McKinney, J. P., & von Eye, A. (1999). The goodness of fit in autonomy timetable expectations between Asian American late adolescents and their parents. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 23, 10231048. doi:10.1080/ 016502599383658 Kakihara, F., & Tilton-Weaver, L. (2009). Adolescents interpretations of parental control: Differentiated by domain and types of control. Child Development, 80, 17221738. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01364.x Lamborn, S. D., & Moua, M. (2008). Normative family interactions: Hmong American adolescents perceptions of their parents. Journal of Adolescent Research, 23, 411 437. doi:10.1177/0743558407310772 Lau, A. S. (2010). Physical discipline in Chinese immigrant families: An adaptive culture perspective. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 16, 313322. doi:10.1037/a0018667 Lee, R. M., & Liu, H. (2001). Coping with intergenerational family conflict: Comparison of Asian American, Hispanic, and European American college students. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 48, 410 419. doi:10.1037/0022-0167.48.4.410 Lee, S. (2005). Up against whiteness: Race, school, and immigrant youth. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Ngo, B., & Lee, S. J. (2007). Complicating the image of model minority success: A review of Southeast Asian American education. Review of Educational Research, 77, 415 453. doi:10.3102/0034654307309918 Portes, A., & Rumbaut, R. G. (2001). Legacies: The story of the immigrant second generation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press and Russell Sage Foundation. Steinberg, L. (2001). We know some things: Parentadolescent relationships in retrospect and prospect. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 11, 119. doi:10.1111/1532-7795.00001
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LAMBORN, NGUYEN, AND BOCANEGRA Wu, C., & Chao, R. K. (2011). Intergenerational cultural dissonance in parentadolescence relationships among Chinese and European Americans. Developmental Psychology, 47, 2, 493508. doi:10.1037/ a0021063 Yang, K. K. (2008). The latehomecomer: A Hmong family memoir. Minneapolis, MN: The Coffeehouse Press. Xiong, Z. B., Eliason, P. A., Detzner, D. F., & Cleveland, M. J. (2005). Southeast Asian immigrants perceptions of good adolescents and good parents. Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied, 139, 159 175. doi:10.3200/JRLP.139.2.159-175
Su, J. L., & Vang, R. M. (2005). Intergenerational family conflict and coping among Hmong American college students. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52, 482 489. doi:10.1037/0022-0167.52.4.482 Supple, A. J., & Small, S. A. (2006). The influence of parental support, knowledge, and authoritative parenting on Hmong and European American adolescent development. Journal of Family Issues, 27, 1214 1232. doi:10.1177/0192513X06289063 United States Census Bureau. (2010). Race reporting for the Asian population by selected categories: 2010 census summary File 1. Retrieved from http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/ productview.xhtml?pidDEC_10_SF1_QTP8&prodTypetable Vang, C. (2010). Hmong American: Recreating Community in Diaspora. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Wu, C., & Chao, R. K. (2005). Intergenerational cultural conflicts in norms of parental warmth among Chinese American immigrants. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 29, 516 523. doi:10.1080/ 01650250500147444
Social and Emotional Parenting: Mothering in a Changing Chinese Society

Niobe Way, Sumie Okazaki, Jing Zhao, and Joanna J. Kim
New York University University of Pennsylvania
Xinyin Chen
Hirokazu Yoshikawa
Harvard University
Education Development Center, Waltham, Massachusetts
Yueming Jia
Southeast University
Chuas (2011) book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother generated vigorous debate regarding its description of Chinese parenting ideology and practices. In this article, the authors analyzed the narratives from 24 Chinese mothers of middle school students in Nanjing, China to explore their parenting ideology and practices. In sharp distinction to the Tiger Mother image, our analysis indicated that although all mothers wanted their children to do well in school, their primary goals were focused on raising socially and emotionally well-adjusted children who had the capacity to be self-sufficient and gainfully employed in the future. With few exceptions, the mothers strategies for achieving these goals included providing their children the freedom to make their own decisions and not forcing their children to engage in particular activities. These strategies were based on their concerns for the childrens short-term and long-term happiness as well as a perception that the way they were raised was no longer relevant to raising their children; consequently, the mothers allowed their children more autonomy and control to forge their own path than the mothers themselves were allowed as children. Our findings draw attention to the social, political, and economic context of China and how this changing context is shaping parenting goals and practices. Keywords: Chinese, mothers, adolescents, parenting
Huihua Deng
Amy Chuas (2011) book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ignited a storm of controversy surrounding what Chua dubbed the Chinese way of parenting that emphasizes strict parental control, uncompromising imposition of parental rules, high expectation for children in effort and achievement, and a singular focus on childrens success. At the heart of the uproar was the description of the relentless and harsh manner by which a tiger mother drives her children to work hard and achieve success; Chua wrote, . . .the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish, and shame the child (p. 52). Chua explained the reason behind such punitive and shaming child rearing practice: . . . Ive noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their childrens
This article was published Online First December 31, 2012. Niobe Way, Sumie Okazaki, Jing Zhao, and Joanna Kim, Department of Applied Psychology, New York University; Xinyin Chen, Department of Human Development, University of Pennsylvania; Hirokazu Yoshikawa, School of Education, Harvard University; Yueming Jia, Education Development Center, Waltham, Massachusetts; Huihua Deng, Research Center for Learning Sciences, Southeast University, Nanjing, China. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Niobe Way, Department of Applied Psychology, New York University, 246 Greene Street, New York, NY 10003. E-mail: niobe.way@nyu.edu 61
self-esteem. . . Chinese parents arent. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently (p. 52). By pushing her daughters from an early age to master and excel at academic and music performance, which invariably required hours of drilling and practice at the cost of play dates and entertainment, Chua believed that she was giving them not only skills and work ethics but also confidence in their capacity to achieve much more than the children initially thought possible. Chuas characterization of Chinese parenting struck a chord as it flagrantly challenged the American cult of self-esteem (Twenge & Campbell, 2009). To be fair, Chua (2011) stated at the outset of her book that she uses the term Chinese mother loosely, as a short hand for the type of strict parenting that aims to produce high-achieving children. Chua also stated that she had intended her writing to be self-mocking and sardonic. Yet the abundant references to these parenting methods as Chinese in her book, and her eagerness to contrast them with Western parenting, have resulted in the widespread impression that Chinese parenting is marked by excessive focus on academic success, high parental control, and shaming. Thus, we are compelled to ask, what are actual parenting ideologies and practices of contemporary mainland Chinese parents? To what extent do Chinese parents exercise authority over their adolescent children? Are the Chinese parenting notions of Chuaa second generation Chinese American, raised by parents
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who grew up in a Chinese diaspora community in the Philippinesrelevant in contemporary Chinese society? In this study, we examine the parenting ideologies and practices of parents of adolescents in a sample from urban China.
Portraits of Traditional Chinese Parenting

To an extent, Chuas (2011) inclination to draw a marked contrast between Chinese and Western parenting has a basis in empirical literature that makes cross-cultural comparisons. Traditional Chinese parenting has been described as more controlling, more authoritarian, and less affectionate than American parenting (Chao, 1994). Chen et al. (1998) found that, relative to North American parents, Chinese parents were more likely to endorse a punishment orientation as a method of discipline and more likely to use high-powered coercive strategies. Fong (2007b) found, furthermore, that urban Chinese parents consistently stressed the importance of achieving excellence (youxiu) to their adolescent children, specifically through academic achievement. Values and characters associated with moral personhood included determination, perseverance, an ability to tolerate hardships, (and) a willingness to forego immediate satisfaction for the delayed gratification of future achievement (Woronov, 2007, p. 44), which were not only reflective of traditional Chinese culture but also the values promoted during the Mao era. By the beginning of the 21st century, however, these values were considered old-fashioned to many affluent urban Chinese parents (Woronov, 2007). And indeed, contemporary Chinese parenting appears to be a combination of traditional Chinese and Western ideologies and practices. On the basis of data from parents of preschool-aged children in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Lieber, Fung, and Leung (2006) identified four sets of Chinese childrearing concepts: training, shame, authoritative, and autonomy. The first two constructs appear to be consistent with traditional Chinese cultural ideologies, based on the Confucian notion that parents are responsible for training the child to be socially and morally responsible and that shame serves as a key emotion in the socialization of childrens social sensibilities. The latter two constructs resemble constructs from the West, with the beliefs that parents should encourage and nurture childrens self-esteem, independence, and expressions of opinions and feelings. Questions of how to instill creativity and independence have also become salient concerns over the past decade among mainland Chinese educators and parents (Woronov, 2007).
Shifting Contexts for Parenting

The shifts in Chinese parenting ideologies reflect the rapid societal changes in China over the past 3 decades (Chen, 2012). With the transition to a market economy in a globalized marketplace, Chinese parents have had to contend with expanded repertoire of desirable characteristics to cultivate in their children, centered on the notion of quality (suzhi) (Fong, 2007a; Kipnis, 2006). Accordingly, Chen and Chen (2010) have noted a considerable shift in parental child-rearing attitudes and values. For example, even between a period as short as 4 years (between 1998 and 2002), Shanghai parents scores on parenting measures evidenced a notable shift toward higher warmth and autonomy support and toward lower power assertion. Among the children,
shyness, which had been a traditionally valued trait associated with modesty and self-control, was correlated with positive psychological adjustment in 1990. However, by 2002 shyness was negatively associated with peer acceptance and school adjustment and positively correlated with depression and peer rejection among Chinese schoolchildren (Chen & Chen, 2010). This shift in the correlates of shyness likely reflects an increasingly capitalistic system where shyness is less adaptive to success than in the past (Chen & Chen, 2010; Yoshikawa, Way, & Chen, 2012). The transition from state socialism to market economy in China has, furthermore, created anxieties for parents over their childrens character, skills, and psychological quality (xinli suzhi) that could meet the heightened demands for academic success (Anagnost, 2008). Chinese parentsspurred on by popular media discourse fear that their children will be unprepared for the new kind of future that values individual initiatives, emotional intelligence, and practical knowledge. The dizzying economic changes as well as the one-child policy have reconfigured the affective life of the Chinese family dramatically within one generation. Parents beliefs about autonomy and social relations have shifted considerably as China has transitioned from the iron rice bowl command economy (centered on state-sponsored occupations with guaranteed lifetime employment and benefits) to market economy involving more entrepreneurial and merit-based careers in both stateowned and private firms (Yoshikawa et al., 2012). Among the parents, in the demolition of the socialist project, that which once had value has now been evacuated of it (Anagnost, 2008, p. 66), there has been an increase in attention to childrens socioemotional competence as well as real worries about what it would take for their only children to be able to provide postretirement housing, health, and economic securities for their parents. In an analysis of ethnographic data from families of late adolescents in Dalian City, China, Fong (2007a) described the parents struggles in finding successful strategies for raising their only children. The parents agreed that they wished to inculcate values of excellence, independence, obedience, and caringsociableness in their children. However, because these values were often contradictory (e.g., to be obedient yet independent) and the parents had no coherent ideology for simultaneously fostering these values, the adolescents felt confused and stressed by their parents contradictory and inconsistent messages. Fong argued that the parent child conflicts in China mirror the uneasy coexistence of multiple contradictory values brought about by rapid social, political, economic, and demographic changes. She wrote, [p]arents dissatisfaction with their children results largely from parents inability to keep pace with the changing world and their changing children (p. 116). Taken together, there is evidence to suggest that the changing political, economic, and social context in a globalized world evokes considerable anxieties and ambivalences among Chinese parents over how to parent. Indeed, the emerging literature on Chinese parenting in contemporary China is a far cry from the unwavering ideology that Chua (2011) described in her book on parenting her 3rd generation Chinese American daughters the Chinese way. However, the extant literature on Chinese parenting is still largely dominated by studies that repeat old world notions of Chinese parenting and, furthermore, investigate the parenting of young children exclusively using a cross-cultural comparative paradigm contrasting immigrant Chinese American
CHINESE MOTHERING
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and European American parents or Chinese and American parents. Aside from Fongs (2007a, 2007b) studies, we know very little about how Chinese mothers parent their adolescent children in the context of a rapidly changing social, political, and economic world. In the present study, we examine the parenting ideologies and practices of contemporary urban Chinese mothers drawing from the interviews of 24 mothers of junior high school-aged adolescents in Nanjing, China. Consistent with qualitative approaches in cultural psychology (Hammack, 2008), our qualitative analysis of mothers interviews allows for a discovery of the mutual constitution between the individual parenting goals and strategies and the larger societal and cultural master narratives about cultivating successful, modern, and Chinese young adults.
Method Participants and Setting

The data for these analyses were drawn from a longitudinal mixed-method study on parenting and child development in Nanjing, China. In fall 2006, 710 families with Grade 7 children (355 girls, 355 boys) from three public middle schools in Nanjing participated in the first wave of study. The mean ages of the students, mothers, and fathers in the first wave of the study were 12.3 (SD 0.5), 38.8 (SD 3.2), and 41.7 (SD 4.2), respectively. The same families were followed when the students were in 8th grade and again in 9th grade. Among them, 3 families from each 7th grade classroom, for a total of 60 families, were purposively sampled by gender (30 boys and 30 girls) and invited to take part in an interview component of the study. In-depth interviews were conducted with 60 students and their mothers at 7th grade, with follow-up interviews conducted with a smaller subset of families in 9th grade. For this analysis, we randomly selected a sample of 24 mothers among the 60 mothers who participated in the qualitative study. We selected mothers from the entire qualitative sample for our analysis rather than simply from the longitudinal sample as we wanted to include a broader sample than only those who chose to remain in the study over time. Furthermore, we did not expect change over time in mothers child-rearing goals and practices over 2 years (7th to 9th grade) during middle school. The current sample consisted of 13 girls and 11 boys in middle school with mean age of 12.8 (SD 1.0). The mothers selected from this study did not appear to differ from the larger study sample, with the mean age of 38.3 (SD 3.6; range 28 46) at the time of the interviews. The majority (79.2%) of the mothers reported an educational attainment of high school or less, whereas the rest (20.8%) held 2- or 4-year college degrees. As the capital of Jiangsu Province in eastern China, the city of Nanjing is a medium-sized city with a population of over 6 million in 2006. It was chosen for research because it is considered a modal urban city, neither a first-tier city that has experienced dramatically rapid economic reform and growth (e.g., Beijing, Shanghai) nor a rural city that has been slow to embrace social and economic development. It provides an ideal environment for studying parenting beliefs and practices in the context of contemporary urban China. The majority of the parents in our study grew up in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and experienced profound social and economic changes in their adolescence and
adulthood, as China transitioned from a planned to a market economy. Also important to note is the influence of the one-child policy on family planning in Nanjing. All children of families in this sample were born after Chinas one-child policy was introduced in 1979. As such, all but 2 of the 24 mothers interviewed were speaking about their experiences raising their first and only child. Grade 7 in Nanjing is equivalent to Grade 7 in the U.S. secondary education system; Grades 7 through 9 are a part of the same middle school, entailing no school transitions. Although Grade 9 is the final year of compulsory education in China, most students will attend senior high school (Grades 10 through 12), although some may attend vocational and technical schools. In Nanjing, the middle schools themselves are ranked with respect to levels of achievement (high, middle, and low). Of the present sample of 24 mothers, 29% (7) of the children attended the low-achieving school, 42% (10) of the children attended the middle-achieving one, and 29% (7) of the children attended the high-achieving school.
Procedure
Participants for the longitudinal study were initially recruited in fall of 2006 from three different middle schools in Nanjing (low, middle, and high achieving). Consent forms were distributed throughout the school and signed by students and parents who were interested in participating. Families were reimbursed for the cost of the transportation to the research site. At each wave of qualitative data collection, students and their mothers each participated in in-depth semistructured interviews. Interviews with mothers included questions about their familys daily routine, mothers views on her childs characteristics, parent child relationships, goals for child, childs schooling and academics, childs friendship and gender socialization, and the mothers and fathers work. The interviews were conducted at the end of the spring semester in the 7th and 9th grade at a local university. Interviews typically lasted between 90 and 120 min and were conducted in Mandarin. The interviews were audiorecorded, transcribed verbatim in Chinese, and then translated into English by bilingual native Chinese speakers from mainland China and Taiwan. Names of the participants were substituted with pseudonyms to protect their identity. The data analysis consisted of conducting a content analysis of the interview data using narrative summaries as a way to condense the amount of data for each participant (see Way, 2011). Narrative summaries are intended to briefly characterize the responses in each section of the protocol (e.g., parent child relationship, childrearing goals), while relying on direct quotes from the interview as much as possible to prevent inference leaps and inaccurate summaries of the data. Two data analysts created narrative summaries for each topic in each of the interviews. The data analysts were research assistants with extensive experience in China, with one having been born and raised in China and the other having been a teacher in Nanjing, China for 2 years. They were trained in the technique of narrative summaries by a senior researcher on the project who has used this technique for over 2 decades and has lived and worked in China. The senior researcher read the narrative summaries created by the research assistants to check for accuracy of the summaries. Following these steps, themes were then gen-
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WAY ET AL. might be willing to talk, but a stranger, he is not good at dealing with them . . . I think in this society, you have to learn how to communicate with people. You have to get help from other people sometimes, right? . . . Because if you communicate well with people, they will help you. . . . Interpersonal communication is very important. . . It is something that you cannot survive without in your life.
erated independently from the narrative summaries by the two research assistants and two senior researchers on the project. A theme had to be identified independently by at least three of the four researchers for it to be considered a theme. Each of the themes presented in this article was identified independently by each of the four researchers. Although six of the mothers in the sample had more than one data point (7th and 9th grade data), we detected no thematic change over time. Thus, we collapsed the interviews for each participant into one narrative summary. There were no differences in the themes detected between those who had longitudinal data and those who did not. Each of the themes detected in the current analysis were evident in the 7th grade data for those who only had one data point and in the 7th and 9th grade data for those who had two data points.
Twelve out of 24 mothers in our study indicated that they felt anxious about their childrens introversion, often attributing their childrens struggles at school to their shyness. Trying to understand why her daughter gets bullied on a regular basis at school, Kenan Gong said:
I think [my daughters] introversion is not good. She should be playing and making noise with other children. That would be good. Why does she sit there quietly? . . . In fact my daughters personality is what I worry about the most. She is very introverted. I dont know how to deal with it. I really dont know how to solve it. In school, other children make noise together and play but she is always alone. . . What should I do? I feel she isnt happy because she is always alone. Her teacher says so. Nobody plays with her. She has few friends, few friends, yes very few friends.
Results
The Chinese mothers in our sample maintained a clear set of social, emotional, and academic goals for their children. Mothers wanted their children to be socially skilled, happy, healthy, autonomous, and to attain good grades. Yet there was variation in the extent to which mothers valued these goals, with most mothers placing equal or more emphasis on social and emotional goals than on academic ones. Only two mothers in our study emphasized academic achievement above all other goals. Some mothers believed that their children had achieved these social and emotional goals, whereas others worried about their childrens introversion or lack of friendships, their bad moods, their childrens dependence and lack of assertiveness. With few exceptions, mothers believed that if their children were not socially and emotionally adjusted, they would not thrive in school. Mothers also repeatedly underscored the importance of fostering the autonomy of their child and not forcing their children to do anything, as they believed that such actions would backfire and make their children unhappy. The mothers discussed the challenges they faced in meeting their parenting goals in a rapidly changing society in which their knowledge was perceived by both the mothers and the children to be outdated and, thus, no longer valuable. They expressed frustration that they had little control over their adolescent children and, thus, parented in a permissive style with the hopes that such an approach would lead to happier children and less conflict in the home. Mothers saw their parenting approaches as a direct response to a changing society where what it means to be a child as well as a parent has changed dramatically.
Kenan Gongs anxiety is readily apparent as is her frustration in regard to how to help her daughter become less introverted. Social skills, friendships, and mental health were intimately linked for the mothers in our study. One mother said, friendships help children relieve anxiety. Lina Zhu said about her son:
If you do not make friends, you only know how to study and become closed off from the outside world. You will not know how to communicate with people. You will not know how to get along with them. Even when you grow up and learn technology, you cannot go anywhere. . .. You have to learn to get along with people. Then they [children] will not be limited in their job in the future. They will not be lost in how to talk to people.
Raising Social Children

The mothers in our study spoke repeatedly about the need for their children to be able to communicate with others as well as have good friendships. A mother in our study, Juan Li, said she wants her daughter to have the capability to meet the demands of societyto communicate with people, work with others, be tolerant, and hold her own stance. Zhongyu Guo, another mother, said about her son: If he doesnt talk at his job, it will be bad. When you are looking for a job, the potential employer wont appreciate you. If you dont talk, you wont be hired. Yenjia Liu spoke favorably about her child but is concerned about his shyness:
When hanging out with people, he is not actively engaged. If you are someone that he likes or if you have a common language with him, he
Like the other mothers, Lina Zhu saw friendship as a route to particular outcomes rather than being valuable in and of itself. She added, Friends are important because [it would help my child] develop in moral, intellectual, and physical ways and in an all around way. Friendships, according to the mothers, not only help their children communicate but also foster healthy development in multiple domains. Mothers of daughters, in particular, also spoke about wanting to be friends with their daughters. Dai Wen said about herself and her daughter: There is nothing that we cannot talk about. Whether she was happy or not, she would talk to me, about all happy and unhappy things. Another mother said:
I said to her that I hope you regard me as your friend. Whatever happens, I hope you can talk to me. I was your age in the past. . . . I know how to deal with things and how to help you. . . . I do not force my thoughts onto her. When we talk. . . she can speak her mind.
Yue Ma said that she wants a friendship with her daughter as well: I feel she and I are able to get along with each other like friends. Similarly, Juan Li said that she and her daughter are
just like friends. I told her, you can consider your mom your friend. Just talk to me. I will not criticize you. I want to help you. She can talk to me about the thoughts and feelings in her heart. In this way I understand my daughter better.
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The emphasis for these mothers was on the emotional support that they offered to their daughters. On occasion, but less frequently, mothers expressed a desire to be friends with their sons as well. Yenjia Liu said,
I think we two are like friends. . . Sometimes we chat about everything. Sometimes we just lie there, chat, play tricks on his dad. I think it is harmonious. . . . I think it is good. At least when he comes back home, I make him happy, its not an anxious atmosphere . . . I think the communication between me and my child is pretty good. I mean, he asks me about almost everything.
The mothers in our sample, in sum, wanted their children to have both social skills and friendships, as they believed that these goals were critical to the future success of their children. Mothers of daughters, furthermore, considered themselves to be, or wanted to be, friends with their children as a way to enhance the happiness of their children.
expressed that, personally, she would like to see her daughter become a doctor, but she also wants her daughter to choose the career she is interested in because if you ask her to do what she is not interested in, she can never do it well and be respected. If you are interested in it, you will do it well, then naturally you will be respected. Wangmei Pan, a mother of a son, also linked happiness and health with autonomy when she said, We only have one child. If he is happy, we are happy. If he is not happy, we are not happy. We do not force him [to do things or make certain choices]. His dad does not force him either. Ying Fang, a mother of a daughter who has won many awards in various competitions, gave the following as a reason why she does not force her daughter to compete:
Mental health is important too. . . you have to face life with an optimistic attitude. You cannot be defeated by difficulties. The key is to have a good mind to face it. My thought is as long as she is trying her best, it is enough. As for grades, although I expect her to do well in school, I feel sometimes you cannot treat it as the only measure for her. I think grades are important but characteristics and psychological conditions, sometimes, are even more important.
Raising Happy and Healthy Children

Across the interviews, mothers were first and foremost concerned about their childrens happiness and health. Mothers talked extensively about being lenient, tempering their expectations, and providing opportunities for autonomy with their children to ensure their health and happiness. Ming Li said, I just think when my son is healthy, we do not need to worry about his academics, when I see his round and smiley face, I am very happy. Another mother, Juan Li, said,
I am not that strict with my daughter. It is not possible for everybody to get great grades. My daughter does not have the top grades [in her class]. If she worked harder, she would be better. I just spoil my kid. Why work that hard everyday and make yourself exhausted? I believe childhood should be spent happily. So I let it be. . . I do not give her impossible requirements.
Fang repeated this theme in her interview the following year:

I believe all parents want their children to go to college, but if you cannot, you have to face reality. To go to college is not the only way. To be healthy physically and mentally is more important. You can be accomplished in other ways. . .. I think the healthy growth of a child is more important than anything else. The key is to let her have a good attitude and discipline her to be a human, then you can have her educated as well. . . . Anyway, I believe as long as she tries her best, it is okay to me. I do not force her to meet my requirements.
Kenan Gong said the following about her daughter:

I dont worry a lot about her studies. I think humans should be happy. I hope that she can be happy. She can grow up happily and be healthy. Regarding her studies, as long as she can keep up, thats enough. I dont have very high requirements for her.
Making her values explicit, Fang said what is important to her is her daughters studies and her feelings. . .. Only when you are happy to study, you can make it well. If we force her, or if she studies passively, I think she cannot make progress. A sentiment indicated by one mother but repeated by many mothers was:
I am relatively indulgent to my child. I let him do as he wishes. . . no matter what he wants, I mainly satisfy him . . . Almost no matter what he does, I satisfy him. That is to say, I let him do as he wishes, I dont rebuke him. . .. As long as he is willing to learn, he can do well.
Even at points when mothers did not explicitly mention their childrens happiness and health, they implicitly underscored such goals and described the strategies they used to ensure happiness. Primary among these strategies was allowing their children to make their own career choices. Mothers reported that they wished for their children to find future careers that are stable, free of excessive stress, and well-matched with their childrens personality and interests. Yenjia Liu considered her sons preferences and interests as crucial in deciding what career he pursues: I think he will do something with computers but I will let him decide. . . . It should be close to something that he likes and then it will be easy for him to find a job in the future. Even one of the most stringent and demanding of the mothers in our sample, Chun Huang, repeated the theme of wanting her son to be happy and, thus, allowing him to make his own career choices: He can become whatever he wants to be. He can do whatever he wants. We will support him. . . Even if he wants a blue-collar job that will be his own business. We will not be able to stop him. Mei Wang
Happiness, health, autonomy of choice, and success were intimately linked together for the mothers in our studies. Lina Zhu said about her son: I just wish him to have an expertise, to raise himself, to be safe, and to have a smooth life. A common impediment to happiness and health, according to the mothers, was the amount of academic pressure placed on their children. Yue Ma worried about the amount of homework that is assigned to her daughter. If she were a smart kid and she could manage her time well, I would not say anything to her teacher. But right now, I feel she is too tired. Zhouhui Shao expressed her anxiety about her son experiencing too much academic stress and the potential consequences of such stress:
In the newspaper today, you hear about a kid who jumped off the top of a building to commit suicide, tomorrow another kid will kill himself. We are scared when we hear about a lot of them. So usually we are not tough on our son. We usually do not scold him if he is doing okay.
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Ming Li said,
WAY ET AL. M: She can take care of herself. I: What do you mean? M: She. . . no matter what it is, she can deal with it, and solve little things.
Being too hard on yourself could sometimes turn out to be a bad thing. There are a lot of examples of this. Many kids jump off the tops of buildings and commit suicide. Why? They are expecting too much of themselves. They cannot bear failure. I do not like that either. I wish a person could be content with an ordinary life and have a good state of mind. If you face life with a negative attitude, it is pointless no matter how knowledgeable you are. . . I always tell my son. If something is bothering you, just say it. As long as you are happy it is good.
Mothers were acutely aware of the dangers for their children of too much pressure or expectations that are too high and sought to provide a more balanced home life with the hope that that would enhance their childrens happiness and health. In response to their concerns about stressed-out children, mothers provided relaxation opportunities for their children. Lan Peng, who worried about her daughter being too tired, said, I have heard from educational experts that when the child has been in class for a whole day, you should give her some time to rest. Otherwise, she would feel tired. Rest can help her do homework better. Her strategy to help her daughter relax includes going on walks together in the early evening. Another mother said,
At the very beginning I did not let him watch TV, but lately, we saw that the pressure on him was increasing. We wanted to keep things as they used to be. . . . It would not help him if we just put unnecessary limitations on him. It would only add extra burdens on him.
Like Lichun Tao, mothers heavily emphasized the importance of their sons and daughters being independent and able to take initiative. Chun Huang said, I think I provide input less with my child so he can have more input. If I input more, he will input less. Lan Peng said:
I teach my daughter, if you want something, you should ask someone yourself. For example, at the very start, you want ketchup in KFC. If you want, you should ask people for it yourself. If you want me to ask for it, I wont do it. I think that my daughters self-care ability is very strong.
The value of taking initiative was also evident in the expression of ideas. Lan Peng said:
My daughter has her own point of view. She is not following the crowd. Now I dont think a docile child is goodthat kind of child who does whatever you tell her to do. That kind of child, if you ask her to go outside, she doesnt have any opinions, she cant make up any solution. She will tell you, Oh my mother hasnt told me about it or I will ask my mom about it at home. Other people may behave like this but my daughter wont. . . . I know she knows her own mind. She makes up her mind, generally speaking, and you cannot dissuade her.
Delicately attuning her parenting style to the needs of her son, this mother, like most of the mothers in our study, changes her practices to keep up with what she believes her son needs. Wen Dai, a mother of a daughter said, Sometimes my daughter reads newspapers and books but her dad thinks she should read nothing except for textbooks. You cant only read textbooks. . . .. You have to let her catch her breath occasionally.
Mothers wanted their children to be able to assert themselves, express what they believe, and take a leadership role in and out of the classroom. Ming Li said the following about her son:
He has to make the decision himself. I said, It is your own life, you make the decision and finish it yourself. One day there was an issue and he called me. I said, Actually you can solve it yourself. Why did you have to call mom? I even said, You called me and I cannot be there in a second. Couldnt you solve the problem yourself?
Raising Autonomous Children

The theme of autonomy in the mothers narratives can be divided into two subthemes. On the one hand, mothers encouraged their children to make their own choices, be assertive, take care of themselves, and think for themselves. The mothers believed that such behavior is valuable in and of itself, and the mothers also hoped that this strategy would enhance their childrens happiness and health. On the other hand, they also allowed their children autonomy through maintaining a no-forcing policy because they felt powerless to change their childrens behaviors. This latter theme stemmed in large part from the macro-level changes occurring around them, which led them to feel insecure about their authority. The mothers relegated many of the daily decisions to their children with the hopes that that would maintain peace in the household. Below we discuss both subthemes under the primary theme of raising children to be autonomous. Fostering Autonomy. Mothers often spoke of encouraging their children to be autonomous. Lichun Tao, one of the mothers in our sample, said:
I: What do you think is good about your daughter? Something you are proud of?
Mothers sought to enhance their childrens self-sufficiency by actively challenging their children to be more independent. They believed that dependency would stifle their childrens ability to thrive in the future. Lina Zhu said the following about her son:
I think, as a mom, you should give the children freedom and respect, if it is appropriate. . . as long as he does not wander onto the wrong road, its better to keep your hands off appropriately. Overdependence does not do any good to children. . .. Children have their own road to take. If we, as parents, design it for him, it would be a problem.
When Lina Zhu is asked about how her child has changed as he grows up, she responded with pride in her voice: He has become more independently aware. He has many more opinions of his own. Parents stressed, in particular, that their children ought to have their own opinions. Juan Li said:
My daughter is not too dependent on me. She has her own thoughts. She can handle many things by herself. . . . She has her own opinions. She does not do what she is told. She makes decisions based on her own understanding of the situation.
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The importance of independence and self-assertion was expressed most frequently by those mothers who were poor or working class and who did not believe they had the social connections or the finances to support their children in the future. Ming Li, who works as an administrator at a hospital said:
I said to my son that we as parents do not have the capability to arrange everything well for you. You have to strive for it yourself, including the school you want to go to this time. . . If you want to rely on your parents, you are doomed to fail.
you want to ask him to do something, you cannot be too demanding. In her interview Lina Zhu said:
I told my husband, students have their own opinions. You cannot force our opinions on our son. Therefore I let him watch TV when he wants. It is impossible for me to forbid him to watch because I do not like it.
Jingwei Zhang said the following about her son:

I let him be himself. I do not want to put him in a bad mood. Otherwise, his grades will be affected. I ignore the trivial and do my best to satisfy his needs in daily life. . . . I do not want to over control him. Too much pressure on him is meaningless. Nowadays if you do not let kids use the Internet at home, they go outside and do it. Anyway he has money so when he wants to use the Internet, I do not control it too much.
For less well-connected and financially stable parents, independence was not simply a value, it was a necessity for survival. Lina Zhu, who works as a cashier in a department store, said,
We do not make plans for him. . . We are just normal people, how could we make any plans for him? We do not have a family enterprise or something like that. . . . We parents do not have the power and influence to make any arrangements like someone else could. For an ordinary family, you have to work hard, master some technology, and fight for your life on your own.
Zhuojun Ren, who sells medicine in a local pharmacy, also wants her daughter to be an independent people and not listen to others on everything. She believed that her daughters academic performance and life will be all depends on yourself, and also repeated several times that she wants her to find a stable job so that she can support herself and rely on herself. Low-income mothers in particular were worried about their childrens future and believed that their childrens autonomy would allow them more opportunities to thrive. Mothers used various strategies to achieve their goals of autonomy. In addition to allowing their children to choose their own careers, as described previously, mothers also gave their children the freedom to decide when and how they wanted to study (e.g., to listen to music while studying), to choose their own friends, to return home from school when they wanted, and to eat the type of food that they liked. These strategies were used not only to enhance their childrens happiness and health, as discussed previously, but were also strategies to support the mothers goals of raising children who are able to take care of themselves, have their own opinions, and act independently. These qualities, the mothers believed, would lead to happy, healthy, and successful children. Allowing for Autonomy. Mothers were also aware of the limitations of autonomy for their children, especially when their childrens thoughts and opinions conflicted with the mothers own values and views. In these cases, mothers expressed a lack of control over their child and a self-doubt regarding their parenting strategies. They questioned the effectiveness of allowing complete autonomy, yet they also felt, at times, that they had no choice but to allow their children to do as they pleased. Lina Zhu expressed concern that nowadays children have too many opinions. . . . Everybody insists on their own viewpoint and no one compromises. Lan Peng said about parents in general: On one hand we are hoping our own children will listen to us. On the other hand, we think [our childrens] independent character is pretty good, which might be useful in society. Zhouhui Shao said, I just feel that since this semester (spring of 8th grade), he has become increasingly hard to control. He is not like what he was in the past. . .. Now he has his own thoughts. You cannot control him. If
As suggested by Jingwei Zhang, autonomy in the home is not necessarily the preferred strategy but, at times, simply a reaction to seemingly stubborn children and a desire to maintain peace at home. Wangmei Pan said about her son: If he wants to study, he learns. If he does not, it is pointless if you force him. Usually we leave it to him. We do not force him. Its useless. He does not listen to me. Ying Fang said the following about her daughter:
You cannot try to control her and tell her that she was not allowed to read [a non academic book] at all. Of course, even if you do not allow it, she would still do it anyway, but you will have no ways to deal with her. Nowadays kids are just like that. I said, If you really, really want it, I will buy it for you.
Notably, mothers commonly attributed this no-forcing policy to the modern era where parents have little control over their children. Fang believed that a no-forcing policy is the proper way to raise children: You cannot control kids in that rigid way. As people say, No it wont work. You cannot control them. Children today are too thoughtful, too insightful. Yenjia Liu said about her son,
To push him to the highest level that is possible is not realistic. It will be like dragging out a sprout before it comes out. Maybe his brain can only understand problems of this level of achievement. I am afraid it will be inappropriate to push him to a higher level.
Yenjia Liu, like many mothers, wants to keep her expectations realistic and does not see the utility of forcing something that may not be possible. Ming Li said: I understand that there is no use in forcing him to do something that he is unwilling to do. Mothers also thought there would be negative consequences if children were forced. Lan Peng said, Because I think if she doesnt swim well and I force her to swim, she will do even worse. Mothers worried that if their children were not given freedom or were forced to engage in activities, the problem would only increase. Thus, they allowed their children to make their own decisions. Mothers maintained this belief even if it meant that their children did not complete schooling. One mother said to her son, If you really do not want to go to school, we will not force you. However, whatever you do, you have to do it well. Expressing much of the frustration of many mothers in our study, Jingwei Zhang said:
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WAY ET AL. Sometimes kids really have their own will . . . you cannot force it. . . . Trying to force him only makes him unhappy and me unhappy as well. . . .My son will ignore you even when you talk to him. When he listens, he still argues with you. He does not follow what you say. Its not like what it was in the past, he listened to everything you told him. Now, he does things according to his own will. Your talking to him is pointless. . . He has the final say for his own stuff.
The reasons why mothers chose a strategy of no forcing varied. For some mothers, especially those who were more economically stable, not forcing their children was based on the belief that it was a positive parenting strategy to get their children to behave in proper ways and to avoid conflict. For other mothers, many of whom were more overwhelmed with a challenging and stressful work life, a no-forcing policy was the result of not knowing what else to do and feeling like they have little or no choice in the matter. These latter parents often spoke about feeling inadequate as parents and struggling to do the right thing but being at a loss of how to deal with their willful children. They blamed it, at times, on a generation gap or on the new society that allowed children to have much more freedom than they did as children. The confusion mothers felt is described well by Wangmei Pan who described the difficulty she has with her son who will not listen to her:
If we set our feet in, he thinks we are annoying. If we leave him alone, he becomes mad, too; I do not know what he is thinking. We really have no idea what kids of today are thinking about.
more autonomous and their educational paths required more technical skills (e.g., computer, English language) than the previous generation, and they often expressed frustration either at their child or at the changing context that made it so hard for them to be more helpful with their children. The mothers appeared to be trying their best to raise healthy, happy, independent, and academically successful children, but the ways to do that seemed, at times, entirely unclear.
Discussion
Our analysis of the interviews of the Chinese mothers about their young adolescent children revealed foremost the extent to which contemporary urban Chinese mothers are concerned about their adolescents happiness and mental health. Contrary to previous depictions of Chinese parents as being concerned primarily with academic achievement (Chua, 2011; Fong, 2007b), the mothers in our study expressed broader range of beliefs about qualities important for their children. Mothers cited social skills and communication skills as critical to the childrens ability not only to make friends but also to succeed in gaining future employment in the market economy. Consistent with the documented change over time in China on shyness as a now-devalued personal quality (Chen & Chen, 2010), Nanjing mothers of seemingly shy children were especially worried about their childrens mental health. Many mothers expressed a desire for a friendship-like intimacy with their children, particularly with their daughters, and this desire appeared to be closely tied to their belief that an adolescent must be able to talk openly about his or her emotions (happy and unhappy things). However, the mothers desire for the type of close relationship in which their children could talk to them about anything was moderated by the reality of parenting moody adolescents who were perceived to be under considerable academic stress. On the one hand, the mothers wished to have their adolescents feel free to talk about their emotions, yet they also felt that pushing for more openness and trying to initiate conversations may alienate their children. Notably absent was any mention of the use of shaming to shape their childrens character or behavior. In fact, mothers stressed that criticizing would not only be ineffective, but also potentially damaging to their children. The majority of the mothers reported a large degree of permissiveness in their parenting style, with only a small minority of mothers expressing that they set strict limits on their children and stick to the rules. Some mothers articulated their permissive parenting practices and not forcing their children through the ideology of individual freedom and autonomy. However, other mothers permissive parenting practices appeared to be borne out of not only a concern for their childrens well-being (i.e., a belief that upsetting a child by enforcing a rule would result in negative outcomes) but also their desire to avoid conflictual relationships with their only children. This finding seems consistent with a recent longitudinal survey study with junior high school students and their mothers in mainland China (Shuster, Li, & Shi, 2012), which found that the mothers who reported valuing social and interpersonal harmony were also likely to refrain from using psychological control with their children. Yet, notwithstanding the reports that permissive parenting in China is generally on the rise possibly due to the one-child policy (Chen, Liu, & Li, 2000), we detected frustration at the perceived necessity of such lax parenting
The insecurity expressed by Pan was common among the mothers in our study. This insecurity stemmed from a changing context in which they believed that they lacked the knowledge necessary of what was best for their children. One mother said, Sometimes you do not have a choice. You have to adapt to the situation. Sixteen out of 24 mothers explicitly referred to societal changes in China as a context for their own parenting dilemmas, with 12 mothers repeatedly using phrases such as todays children and nowadays to emphasize their awareness of the changing mores. Ying Fang said about her daughter:
Now she has her own thoughts. If we make requirements on her according to our old way of thinking, of course, she wont accept them easily. . .. Now because the teachers teach them innovative ways of thinking, I do not set my feet in as much. . . .When my daughter faces some problems, for example, a hard problem, we have no ways to help her, no way at all. We can be of no help at all. I think other children have their parents to teach them, but we cannot. I feel sorry for my child.
Kenan Gong expressed the same type of frustration with her daughter: I cant help her. The coming courses for her are beyond my knowledge, I cant help her really. I dont understand. . . . I can only find some tutoring for her. I cannot help her in other ways. Another mother, Mei Wang, said, Children are hard to educate. There are too many ways to educate children. Our ways may not be suitable for contemporary childrens ways of thinking. The mothers narratives suggested a keen awareness that Chinese society has undergone enormous changes within one generation and that todays children face a very different future with respect to the necessary social capital, work life, and family obligations. The mothers recognized that their children should be
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styles. Many of the mothers expressed that there is no use in trying to enforce rules about studying, daily routine, or other activities because their children would not listen. These descriptions of tensions surrounding parental authority and defiant adolescents certainly echo familiar dynamics of parenting adolescents. However, what may be unique to China are the attributions that these mothers make to their sense of low parenting efficacy. With the rapid modernization and cultural change within a generation, the majority of the mothers in this study were substantially less educated than their childrens academic trajectory. Many mothers repeatedly used the phrase nowadays to signify their awe (and sometimes dismay) at the changes in the societal mores since they themselves were children. Not only did the children call their parenting outdated, but many mothers themselves felt outdated in their knowledge about the world. Our findings are consistent with recent ethnographic and sociological portraits of urban Chinese families (Anagnost, 2008; Crabb, 2010; Fong, 2007a, 2007b), which all point to considerable parental anxieties about raising their children in a societal context strikingly different from those of their own upbringing. In her ethnographic study of upwardly mobile Beijing families educational strategies for their middle-schoolchildren, Crabb (2010) reported that teachers and parents frequently complained of an unhealthy level of academic focus in children, yet also communicated resigned acceptance of this fact, with the phrase meibanfa (or theres no [other] way; p. 392). That we found the mothers to be concerned with their childrens overall wellbeing and happiness and not singularly focused on academics may be due to a few different factors. First, our study used an in-depth interview on wide-ranging topics concerning family and work life, which allowed for prevailing issues of concern to be expressed by the mothers. Second, our study did not use a comparative design in which Chinese parenting was contrasted with Western parenting, thus, allowing room for the more nuanced and contextualized portrait of Chinese mothers parenting dilemmas to emerge. Third, the mothers appeared keenly aware of the risks of poor psychological health among contemporary urban Chinese youth, as multiple parents referred to the news of adolescent suicides. As Fong (2007a) suggested, the singleton status of the children may have heightened the mothers sensitivities to their childrens happiness, resulting in parenting strategies that were accommodating to the childrens moods and wishes in ways that were previously not considered within a traditional Confucian family structure. And finally, Nanjingwhile a large metropolis by many standards with a population of over 6 millionis still considered a second-tier city with respect to population size and city economy scale. As such, competition for the most elite academic credentials and cosmopolitan strivings seen in the research in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai may not be quite as fierce in Nanjing. The findings must be interpreted with the particular contexts of the study. Our study points to the enormous challenges facing urban Chinese mothers who face an uncertain future in a rapidly globalizing world. The data suggest that mothers in urban China are raising their adolescent children without a sure roadmap. Notably, observers have noted that Amy Chua herself is not parenting in contemporary China, as she is an American-born daughter of ethnic Chinese immigrant parents from the Philippines, married to an American Jewish partner and raising their daughters in the United
States (Guo, 2011; Jen, 2011; Kohler, Aldridge, Christensen, & Kilgo, 2012). Guo (2011) noted that Chuanot having grown up in contemporary China holds an image of Chinese culture that is very old. Jen (2011) also suggested that Chuas particular family background as an elite ethnic minority in both the Philippines and the United States who faced hostility and discrimination shaped Chuas notion of Chinese culture. Thus, Chuas parenting, too, can be said to be a product of the particularities of her familys time and place within a global context; yet her notions of the Chinese way of parenting would be viewed as outdated according to contemporary Chinese mothers. This study has some important implications for scholars and practitioners who work with immigrant Chinese American families in the United States. First, as our findings suggest, the meanings attached to Chinese parenting ideologies and practices can vary greatly between contemporary urban Chinese families and later generation Chinese American families in contradictory ways. For example, American-born Asians may hold fast to their parents and their grandparents notion of their heritage culture from bygone eras, whereas more recently immigrated Asians may hold attitudes and values shaped by their nations recent global and cosmopolitan striving. Scholars and practitioners should conduct a careful assessment of individuals and families with respect to their cultural positions rather than to assume that the recency of immigration is associated with the degree to which Asian Americans hold Asian ideologies and practices about family, children, and schooling. Second, it is critical to acknowledge that happiness and well-being are of salient importance to urban Chinese mothers in raising their childrena finding born out of a qualitative, discovery-oriented study. It would be of keen interest to scholars and practitioners to uncover as well the parenting goals and practices of Chinese fathers as well as Chinese American and Asian American parents. Our findings suggest that that parenting ideologies and practices are intimately shaped by the particular societal and economic contexts of the time and place. Nevertheless, as suggested by the emerging pluralist-constructivist perspective of human development (Chen, 2012), the challenges and stresses of parents adapting to rapidly globalized cosmopolitan society are accompanied by new opportunities for young people to develop new sets of qualities and skills that would enable them to not only function flexibly and effectively in changing contexts but also to create new cultures. What Amy Chua, a second generation Chinese American mother in the United States, and the urban Chinese mothers in our study have in common is that they are all parenting their children in a rapidly changing societal context, looking (or not looking) to culture as guideposts for the uncertain future.
References
Anagnost, A. (2008). Imagining global futures in China: The child as a sign of value. In J. Cole & D. Durham (Eds.), Figuring the future: Globalization and the temporalities of children and youth (pp. 49 72). Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press. Chao, R. K. (1994). Beyond parental control and authoritarian parenting style: Understanding Chinese parenting through the cultural notion of training. Child Development, 65, 11111119. doi:10.2307/1131308 Chen, X. (2012). Human development in the context of social change: Introduction. Child Development Perspectives, 6, 321325. Chen, X., & Chen, H. (2010). Childrens socioemotional functioning and
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WAY ET AL. Kipnis, A. (2006). Suzhi: A keyword approach. The China Quarterly, 186, 295313. doi:10.1017/S0305741006000166 Kohler, M., Aldridge, J., Christensen, L. M., & Kilgo, J. (2012). Tiger moms: Five questions that need to be answered. Childhood Education, 88, 5253. doi:10.1080/00094056.2012.643724 Lieber, E., Fung, H., & Leung, P. W.-L. (2006). Chinese child-rearing beliefs: Key dimensions and contributions to the development of cultureappropriate assessment. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 9, 140 147. doi:10.1111/j.1467-839X.2006.00191.x Shuster, M. M., Li, Y., & Shi, J. (2012). Maternal cultural values and parenting practices: Longitudinal associations with Chinese adolescents aggression. Journal of Adolescence, 35, 345355. doi:10.1016/j .adolescence.2011.08.006 Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2009). The narcissism epidemic: Living in the age of entitlement. New York, NY: Free Press. Way, N. (2011). Deep secrets: Boys friendships and the crisis of connection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/harvard .9780674061361 Woronov, T. E. (2007). Chinese children, American education: Globalizing child rearing in contemporary China. In J. Cole & D. Durham (Eds.), Generations and globalization: Youth, age, and family in the new world economy (pp. 29 51). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Yoshikawa, H., Way, N., & Chen, X. (2012). Large-scale economic change and youth development: The case of urban China. New Directions in Youth Development, 135, 39 55. doi:10.1002/yd.20027
adjustment in the changing Chinese society. In R. K. Silbereisen & X. Chen (Eds.), Social change and human development: Concepts and results (pp. 209 226). London, England: Sage. doi:10.4135/ 9781446252161.n10 Chen, X., Hastings, P. D., Rubin, K. H., Chen, H., Cen, G., & Stewart, S. L. (1998). Child-rearing attitudes and behavioral inhibition in Chinese and Canadian toddlers: A cross-cultural study. Developmental Psychology, 34, 677 686. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.34.4.677 Chen, X., Liu, M., & Li, D. (2000). Parental warmth, control, and indulgence and their relations to adjustment in Chinese children: A longitudinal study. Journal of Family Psychology, 14, 401 419. doi:10.1037/ 0893-3200.14.3.401 Chua, A. (2011). Battle hymn of the tiger mother. New York, NY: Penguin Press. Crabb, M. W. (2010). Governing the middle-class family in urban China: Educational reform and questions of choice. Economy & Society, 39, 385 402. doi:10.1080/03085147.2010.486216 Fong, V. L. (2007a). Morality, cosmopolitanism, or academic attainment? Discourses on quality and urban Chinese-only-childrens claims to ideal personhood. City & Society, 19, 86 113. doi:10.1525/city.2007.19 .1.86 Fong, V. L. (2007b). Parent-child communication problems and the perceived inadequacies of Chinese only children. Ethos, 35, 85127. doi: 10.1525/eth.2007.35.1.85 Guo, K. (2011). Pondering the Tiger Mother: Parenting in changing cultural contexts. Early Education, 49, 2528. Hammack, P. L. (2008). Narratives and the cultural psychology of identity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12, 222247. doi:10.1177/ 1088868308316892 Jen, G. (2011, February 17). Mother superior: How Chinese is the Chinese mother? The New Republic, 6 7.
Received June 18, 2012 Revision received September 4, 2012 Accepted September 7, 2012
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COMMENTARY
On Better Footing to Understand Parenting and Family Process in Asian American Families
University of California, Los Angeles
Anna S. Lau
Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California
Joey Fung
Amy Chuas now notorious Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011) was not a scholarly treatise on the empirically tested merits of Chinese versus European American parenting traditions. The advance publicity for the memoir drew national and international attention to parenting in Chinese and Asian American families. The public reaction to Chuas description of her methods of Chinese mothering drew vehement criticism both from mainstream media and from ethnic studies scholars. The former decried the use of strict parenting practices seen as promoting achievement at the costs of child self-esteem and emotional well-being; the latter abhorred the promotion of stereotypical model minority images of Chinese American families. Both camps objected to Chuas claims about the merits of so-called Chinese parenting, based on her family experience rather than rigorous research. Yet, her memoir has achieved the effect of organizing a new and valuable nexus of research centered on this topic. The articles included in the current issue represent a collection of articles that helps us advance our understanding of Chinese and Asian American parenting. Chuas proclamation of the merits of tiger mothering was met with two strands of outrage. First, there was objection to the stereotypic depiction of Chinese parenting as harsh and relentlessly demanding. Second, there were wrenching testimonials of Asian Americans who suffered personal distress in the wake of being parented in this very manner. Frank Chi (2011) spelled out both objections, decrying Chuas perpetuation of stereotypes and her glorification of shared childhood traumas of Asian Americans. On the face of it, these two grievances are somewhat at odds with each other. Does Chaus characterization reflect a false generalization about cultural differences in parenting? Or are these differences observable at the aggregate level and have they harmed Asian American children collectively? This commentary integrates
the original research in this special issue to deconstruct three claims that Chua makes in the Battle Hymn: (a) compared with European American parents, Asian-origin parents favor tiger parenting marked by harsh control and emphasize achievement over emotional and social developmental outcomes, (b) differences in parenting between European American and Asian American parenting are attributable to culturally shaped values, and (c) tiger parenting results in high levels of achievement and well-being.
Cultural/Ethnic Differences in Parenting

The first and most straightforward of Chua claims asserts a main effect of culture or ethnicity such that, compared with Western mothers, Chinese mothers place greater emphasis on childrens achievement rather than social adjustments and positive parent child relations. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, researchers in this special edition debunked widely held stereotypes of Chinese (American) families and the ways in which parents exert control and discipline. Cheah, Leung, and Zhou (this issue, pp. 30 40) discussed the acute awareness of first generation Chinese immigrant mothers in understanding the nuanced differences in American and Chinese contexts for parenting. Cheah, et al.s respondents described the respective strengths of each approach and highlighted aspects of Western parenting they admire and appreciate. For example, while mothers stated that they generally prefer strict discipline to enforce childrens compliance, they reported valuing the use of praise and encouragement in building confidence and fostering childrens social development. Contrary to Chuas claim that Chinese mothers tend to focus exclusively on childrens scholarly achievement, a majority of immigrant Chinese expressed dismay at a perceived overemphasis on childhood academic success. Most mothers discussed holistic attention to the childrens social, moral, and personality development. Such findings echo narratives from Way et al.s (this issue, pp. 6170) study of Chinese mothers of middle schoolers in Nanjing. While all mothers believed in the importance of academic success, they all placed equal if not greater emphasis in raising children to be socially skilled, happy, healthy, and autonomous. Mothers were acutely aware of the amount of pressure placed on their children and some disapproved of the amount of homework assigned. The mothers spoke about the need for their children to have good communication skills, demonstrate independence, take initiative, and assume leadership. Mothers wished to be intimate friends with their children rather than
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Anna S. Lau, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; Joey Fung, School of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. Preparation of this article was supported by grants from the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the Patrick and Lily Okura Foundation for Asian Pacific American Mental Health, and the Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR)UCLA Center for Culture Brain and Development. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Anna S. Lau, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, Box 951563, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563. E-mail: alau@psych.ucla.edu
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LAU AND FUNG
merely authority figures and strived to give their children the freedom to make decisions about activities, prioritizing childrens personal happiness over success. The theme of mother and child as friends also emerged in the narratives from Lamborn, Nguyen, and Bocanegras (this issue, pp. 50 60) study of Hmong American adolescents perceptions of their mothers. Most Hmong adolescents described feeling loved and accepted by their mothers, some even naming their mothers as their best friends. Furthermore, contrary to notions of tiger parenting that is primarily hierarchical in nature, most Hmong adolescents described being able to talk candidly about problems with their mothers who were a major source of emotional support. Emic descriptions of family socialization processes have moved the field forward in understanding parenting in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the comparative, superior-inferior lens. Choi, Kim, Kim and Park (this issue, pp. 19 29) described an indigenous parenting construct, ga-jung-kyo-yuk (family socialization and processes) to capture family processes that are specific to Korean American families. Their description of ga-jung-kyo-yuk yields a more nuanced and detailed understanding of one variant of Asian American parenting that involves directive control (e.g., emphasis on family hierarchy, demonstration of respect for and the use of appropriate etiquette with parents and the elderly and family obligations) as well as reasoning, warmth, and a close parent child bond. Indeed, endorsement of ga-jung-kyo-yuk was found to be positively associated with both the Western concepts of authoritative and authoritarian styles, suggesting that Korean American parents are likely establishing bicultural parenting in which they retain traditional cultural practices that serve families well in the local context while adopting certain more American-identified practices and values that promote family adaptation. Perhaps most to the point of the question of whether the moniker of tiger parenting applies to Chinese American parents is Kim, Wang, Orozco-Lapray, Shen, and Murtuzas (this issue, pp. 718) novel study leveraging the utility of latent class analysis for empirically laying out a typology of Chinese American parenting. To assess parenting profiles using an expanded model of parenting dimensions that may better reflect the parenting practices of a sample of Chinese Americans, Kim et al. identified four parenting profiles in Chinese American families based on multiple positive (warmth, reasoning, monitoring, and democratic parenting) and negative (hostility, control, shaming, and punitive parenting) parenting dimensions. Contrary to the common perception, tiger parenting (high positive and high negative) was not the most typical parenting profile in Chinese American families, regardless of informant. Supportive parenting profile (high positive and low negative), on the other hand, was the largest group, constituting a half or more of the parents sampled. The studies collectively suggest that Asian parenting is much more dynamic and multifaceted than suggested by the tiger mother brand. Parents of Asian descent in America and in Asia appear to be constantly negotiating and balancing emphases from both East Asian heritage cultures and migration and globalization influences. Data also suggest that most Asian parents appear to have relinquished certain domains or types of control, seeking to cultivate emotional closeness with their children and foster their independence and autonomy in contexts that increasingly demand individuation and self-expression. While most parents con-
tinue to express a desire for their children to succeed academically, they are often aware and vigilant of the negative emotional consequences that are associated with academic pressure and thus refrain from exacerbating these demands. As such, a concern about their academic or career future is often balanced (or at times substituted) by a concern for personal happiness and well-being.
Attributions of Cultural/Ethnic Differences in Parenting

A second related assertion made by Chua is that differences between Chinese American families and European American families are attributable to something about culture or culturally shaped personal values. Indeed, Chua locates the origin of her reliance on tiger mothering in her Chinese ancestry and associated cultural practices and values. Yet, she also acknowledges that anyone can be a Chinese mother (e.g., a Ghanaian father), and that some ethnically Chinese mothers (usually born in the West) do not engage in Chinese mothering, by choice or otherwise. May-Lee Chai (2011), for one, argued that Chuas perspective is grossly essentialist, ignoring how the extremes in child rearing recounted are related more to class privilege than ethnicity or culture. For example, Chuas investments in her daughters success are afforded by human and financial capital enabling such driven devotion to child achievement. Thus, Chuas assertion of tiger parenting as a product of static cultural mores fails to take into account the power of broad ecological, economic, and social conditions that shape what is important in the everyday world of families that drives choices and habits in parenting. To this point, Chuas categorization of Chinese parenting fails to take into account the context of rapid societal changes in China that holds important implications for parenting ideology and practices. Child rearing practices as well as the level of parental support and investment are largely impacted by resources associated with social context and class. Chuas family assets, class privilege, and high income allow her to invest in her daughters schooling and academic success in ways that most Chinese families cannot. Indeed, there are important differences among families within the Chinese diaspora that can be understood within population-level changes in social and economic societal contexts, and individual-level transitions in the social and economic priorities of families. Greenfield (2009) has articulated how changing sociodemographic ecologies alter cultural values and the resultant socialization and development of children. Globally, developing societies show increased movement from rural residence, informal education at home, subsistence economy, and low-technology environments to urban residence, formal schooling, commerce, and high-technology environments. These societal developments toward urbanization tend to shift cultural values in an individualistic direction and developmental pathways toward more independent social behavior and values. To that end, contemporary Chinese parents have had to contend with an expanded repertoire of desirable characteristics to cultivate in their children. Indeed, evidence suggests that cultural ideologies and parenting are changing rapidly in mainland China as a reflection of the rapid societal changes in China over the past three decades. From Cheah, et al.s (this issue) qualitative interviews, Chinese immigrant mothers described that while academic attainment is important, they became more flexible and relaxed when they realized that the
PARENTING AND FAMILY PROCESS
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larger academic environment is not as competitive in the United States as it was for them in mainland China. With the realization that there are multiple pathways to success, mothers are in fact more open to having their children choose their future academic paths or develop their own interests even when they are different from the parents expectations. Furthermore, narratives from Way et al.s (this issue) study of Nanjing mothers also highlight that, attributable in part to publicly salient negative outcomes associated with academic pressure (e.g., the news of adolescent suicides), mothers are now resisting the high academic pressure in China and seeking to provide a more balanced home life with the goal of raising children to be socially and emotionally well-adjusted. This is in line with cultural studies that suggest that child shynesssensitivity, which once was an indicator of peer acceptance and maturity in China (Chen, Rubin, & Sun, 1992), may have become increasingly unsuitable for the demands of the changing society. There appears to be a shift to qualities such as independence, assertion, and self-confidence as valued socialization goals in the new social environment (Chen, Cen, Li, & He 2005). Likewise, the studies by Lamborn, et al. (this issue) and Supple and Cavanaugh (this issue, pp. 41 49) of Hmong American adolescents highlight the historic context in which Hmong immigrant families were situated. Because of the military conflict in Vietnam, first generation Hmong families who migrated to the United States faced a great deal of social and economic hardships as most of them came as refugees either directly from traumatic experiences or after years in refugee camps. The unique contextual demands and challenges placed upon immigrant parents often result in their desire to advance the family so that the children could attain economic and educational mobility, which then leads to the use of stricter discipline and higher levels of parental control. Much earlier, Sue and Okazaki (1990) discussed the concept of relative functionalism promoting academic achievement as the single attainable avenue for socioeconomic advancement among Asian American groups in the 1970s and 1980s. When the early post1965 generations of Asian Americans migrated to the United States, Asian American youth may have been steered toward higher education for upward mobility because other avenues toward advancement were largely blocked to them. However, later generation parents having attained greater social capital may modify such a single avenue plan as the landscape of opportunity and needs for survival and advancement are perceived to change in the larger societal structure. As such, with reduced stress to gain upward social mobility, parents may relinquish some control and grant greater autonomy to their children. Beyond the larger socioeconomic and political contexts in understanding parenting behaviors, Kim et al.s (this issue) study highlights the importance of examining parenting behaviors in the context of development across adolescence. In her three-wave longitudinal study spanning 8 years, Kim et al. showed that parenting styles evolve within Chinese American families. The proportion of so-called tiger mothers decreases across waves and virtually disappears when offspring reach young adulthood, when parents relinquish control. While previous studies have shown that autonomy timetables are delayed among Chinese families compared with European Americans (e.g., Stewart, Bond, Deeds, & Chung, 1999), Kim et al.s findings reaffirm that the expected developmental endpoint of offspring autonomy is shared among Chinese American families.
Developmental Correlates of Parental Control

The third claim asserted in Chuas Battle Hymn is that strict Chinese parenting results in high levels of achievement and selfefficacy among children. She argues that the tiger mothers imposition of relentlessly high expectations for achievement is rooted in the fundamental belief in the ability and resilience of her children. While most would characterize the punitive nature of certain of Chuas methods as detrimental to children, there is a healthy debate about whether the effects of parental control vary according to the larger social and cultural context in which it occurs (Pomerantz, Ng, & Wang, 2008). This body of research examines how parental control dimensions relate to other aspects of family adjustment, as well as child academic and emotional development. In terms of family adjustment, Choi et al. (this issue) found that certain aspects of ga-jung-kyo-yuk (Korean parental virtues and enculturation of familistic values) were positively associated with positive parenting dimensions (warmth, acceptance, monitoring and communication) and were not significantly associated with harsh parenting (rejection and negative discipline). This finding harkens other research demonstrating that indigenous East Asian forms of parental behavioral and psychological control are associated with family affective climate among Asian families in ways not observed among European American families (e.g., Chao & Aque, 2009; Fung & Lau, 2012). Supple and Cavanaugh (this issue) also found that parental behavioral control in the form of close monitoring buffered the negative emotional correlates of family cultural conflict among Hmong American adolescents. In these respects, data from the special issue suggest some support for a cultural relativism in the associations between parental control strategies and family relational climate for Asian American adolescents. Yet, the forms of parental control that appear most ameliorative for youth functioning do not resemble the extreme demanding and shaming tactics described in the Battle Hymn. For example, Way, et al. (this issue) and Cheah, et al.s (this issue) qualitative data from Chinese mothers reveal beliefs that the use of praise and encouragement helps foster child self-confidence and curiosity, which ultimately promote achievement. Furthermore, most mothers interviewed by Cheah, Leung, and Zhou believed that using upward social comparisons creates pressure which is unproductive whereas pointing out childrens strengths and offering encouragement bolsters the confidence needed to persist. Way, et al. noted that none of the mothers in her sample reported using shaming to shape their childrens character or behavior. In fact, some mothers stressed that criticizing their children would not only be ineffective but also potentially damaging. Two quantitative studies that link data on parental control to youth outcomes support the wisdom of these maternal beliefs. Supple and Cavanaugh (this issue) found that parental monitoring and support were positively associated with achievement motivation and self-esteem among Hmong adolescents. Moreover, Kim et al. (this issue) found that a supportive parenting profile (high positive and low negative), which was most common, was associated with the best developmental outcomes, followed by easygoing parenting (low on positive and negative), tiger parenting (high on positive and negative), and harsh parenting (low on positive and high on negative). Contrary to what Chua suggested, tiger parenting did not result in better educational attainment;
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LAU AND FUNG Chen, X., Cen, G., Li, D., & He, Y. (2005). Social functioning and adjustment in Chinese children: The imprint of historical time. Child Development, 76, 182195. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2005.00838.x Chen, X., Rubin, K. H., & Sun, Y. (1992). Social reputation and peer relationships in Chinese and Canadian children: A cross-cultural study. Child Development, 63, 1336 1343. doi:10.2307/1131559 Chi, F. (2011). Amy Chua: Manipulating childhood trauma and AsianAmerican stereotypes to sell a book. Retrieved from http://www.boston .com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/blogs/the_angle/2011/01/amy_chua _manipu.html Choi, Y., Kim, Y. S., Kim, S. Y., & Park, I. J. K. (2013). Is Asian American parenting controlling and harsh? Empirical testing of relationships between Korean American and Western parenting measures. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 19 29. Chua, A. (2011). Battle hymn of the tiger mother. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Fung, J., & Lau, A. S. (2012). Tough love or hostile domination? Psychological control and relational induction in cultural context. Journal of Family Psychology, 26, 966 975. doi:10.1037/a0030457 Greenfield, P. M. (2009). Linking social change and developmental change: Shifting pathways of human development. Developmental Psychology, 45, 401 418. doi:10.1037/a0014726 Hong, Y. Y., Chiu, C. Y., Dweck, C. S., Lin, D. M. S., & Wan, W. (1999). Implicit theories, attributions, and coping: A meaning system approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 588 599. doi:10.1037/ 0022-3514.77.3.588 Kelley, M. L., & Tseng, H. M. (1992). Cultural differences in child rearing: A comparison of immigrant Chinese and Caucasian American mothers. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 23, 444 455. doi:10.1177/ 0022022192234002 Kim, S. Y., Wang, Y., Orozco-Lapray, D., Shen, Y., & Murtuza, M. (2013). Does Tiger Parenting exist? Parenting profiles of Chinese Americans and adolescent developmental outcomes. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 718. Lamborn, S. D., Nguyen, J., & Bocanegra, J. O. (2013). Hmong American adolescents perceptions of mothers parenting practices: Support, authority, and intergenerational agreement. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 50 60. Kornadt, H. J. (1991). Aggressive motive and its developmental conditions in Eastern and Western cultures. In N. Bleichrodt & J. D. Pieter (Eds.), Contemporary issues in cross-cultural psychology (pp. 155167). Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger. Olsen, S. F., Yang, C., Hart, C. H., Robinson, C. C., Wu, P., Nelson, D. A., . . . Barber, B. K. (2002). Mothers psychological control and preschool childrens behavioral outcomes in China, Russia, and the United States. In B. K. Barber (Ed.), Intrusive parenting: How psychological control affects children and adolescents (pp. 235262). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/10422-008 Pomerantz, E. M., Ng, F. F., & Wang, Q. (2008). Culture, parenting, and motivation: The case of East Asia and the United States. Advances in Motivation and Achievement: Social Psychological Perspectives, 15, 209 240. Qin, D. B. (2008). Doing well vs. feeling well: Understanding family dynamics and the psychological adjustment of Chinese immigrant adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 37, 2235. doi:10.1007/ s10964-007-9220-4 Stewart, S. M., Bond, M. H., Deeds, O., & Chung, S. F. (1999). Intergenerational patterns of values and autonomy expectations in cultures of relatedness and separateness. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 30, 575593. doi:10.1177/0022022199030005002 Sue, S., & Okazaki, S. (1990). Asian-American educational achievements: A phenomenon in search of an explanation. The American Psychologist, 45, 913920. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.45.8.913
rather, it was associated with lower GPA and levels of perceived pressure that was as high as that associated with harsh parenting. Furthermore, tiger parenting was associated with lower sense of family obligation and higher levels of depressive symptoms and alienation. Contrary to the notion of an achievement/adjustment paradox in which Asian American youth may demonstrate high levels of educational attainment, but poorer emotional adjustment (Qin, 2008), Kim et al. found achievement and adjustment went hand in hand. Regardless of the parenting profile, academic achievement was always associated with emotional wellness; whereas low academic achievement was associated with low levels of adjustments. These prospective findings provide strong evidence refuting Chuas claims that restriction of autonomy and hostile control promote achievement and adjustment. Chua acknowledges that all decent parents want to do what is best for their children, but have vastly different ideas about what is best. She argues that tiger parenting is rooted in her faith that her children can rise to challenge. In the face of subpar performance the solution is to excoriate, punish, shame and then pursue supplemental study/practice until performance meets standards. In contrast, Chua criticizes Western parents as being too anxious about their childrens self-esteem so that they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance (p. 52). She argues that, theres nothing better for building confidence than learning something you thought you couldnt (p. 62). Instead, she sees Western parents as respecting their childrens individuality and providing positive reinforcement as children pursue activities, suited to their talents and interests. As with the rest of Chuas claims, aspects of this mantra hold water empirically. From Hong, Chiu, Dweck, Lin, and Wans (1999) seminal work, we know that instilling an incremental view of intelligence or ability promotes child persistence and achievement, which can indeed grow a sense of self-efficacy. Likewise, there is support for the notion that Asian and Asian American parents endorse greater mean levels of parental behavioral and psychological control than European American parents (Kelley & Tseng, 1992; Wu et al., 2002). And indeed, there is some data suggesting cultural variation in the associations between parental control and child developmental outcomes (Kornadt, 1991; Olsen et al., 2002). Yet the trouble with the tiger mother portrait is that it takes sound tenets regarding motivation and the importance of cultural context to the extreme resulting in reductio ad absurdum, which can have the unfortunate effect of leading people to reject otherwise important principles of cultural relativism and diversity. The excellent data provided in this special issue bring us back on sound footing to better understand Asian and Asian American family process.
References
Chai, M. L. (2011). Mother tiger trope masks class privilege. Retrieved from http://mayleechai.wordpress.com/2011/01/20/mother-tiger-tropemasks-class-privilege/ Chao, R. K., & Aque, C. (2009). Interpretations of parental control by Asian immigrant and European American youth. Journal of Family Psychology, 23, 342354. doi:10.1037/a0015828 Cheah, S. L., Leung, C. Y. Y., & Zhou, N. (2013). Understanding Tiger Parenting through the perceptions of Chinese immigrant mothers: Can Chinese and U. S. parenting coexist? Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 30 40.
PARENTING AND FAMILY PROCESS Supple, A. J., & Cavanaugh, A. M. (2013). Tiger mothering and Hmong American parentadolescent relationships. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 41 49. Way, N., Okazaki, S., Zhao, J., Kim, J. J., Chen, X., Yoshikawa, H., Jia, Y., & Deng, H. (2013). Social and emotional parenting: Mothering in a changing Chinese society. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 6170. Wu, P., Robinson, C. C., Yang, C., Hart, C. H., Olsen, S. F., Porter, C. L., Jin, S., Wo, J., & Wu, X. (2002). Similarities and differences in mothers
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parenting of preschoolers in China and in the United States. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 26, 481 491. doi:10.1080/ 01650250143000436
Received January 7, 2013 Revision received January 15, 2013 Accepted January 18, 2013
COMMENTARY
Tiger Parents, Other Parents

Kirby Deater-Deckard
Virginia Tech
The current special issue tackles its goal, to evaluate the tiger mother type of parent with creativity and rigor, by investigating the potential causes and consequences of this type of parenting while generating new insights into the developmental processes linking parenting and child development in Asian-heritage family contexts. As the articles demonstrate, the discovery of the tiger mother by Western popular media presents a golden opportunity for family scientists and practitioners to ponder more deeply the very nature of parenting and child/adolescent development. My goal is to use this commentary to share a few ideas, inspired by this opportunity and this excellent collection of studies. As I read the articles, my thoughts landed on three basic points, phrased below as questions about culture, parenting, and child development. These points are about (a) integrating universal and culture-specific, as well as dimensional and categorical, approaches to studying parenting; (b) building consensus about how to validate the most relevant dimensions and categories; and (c) tackling within-family (sibling differentiation) as well as betweenfamily variation in these dimensions and categories.
Universals and Specifics, Degrees and Types

Individual differences develop over the life span, driven by complex transactions between the individual and her or his environment. These transactions operate in ways that are speciestypical (i.e., universal parenting behaviors that seem to have the same causes and consequences in all cultures), group-specific (i.e., culturally distinct parenting behaviors that seem to have different causes and consequences, depending on the culture in question), or both (i.e., some parenting processes may have universal and culture-specific subcomponents). Furthermore, studying these processes requires simultaneous consideration of qualitative distinctions like the tiger mother (i.e., different types of parents) as well as quantitative distinctions (i.e., differing degrees/levels of parenting behaviors) that contribute to developmental outcomes. Too often, emphasis is placed on universal versus culture-specific, or qualitative versus quantitative, at the expense of integrating knowledge from different frameworks and methodological approaches. In the end, a fuller and more useful understanding of Asian-heritage child rearing and development, as well as understanding of human development more generally, requires us to
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kirby Deater-Deckard, 109 Williams Hall (0436), Blacksburg, VA 24060. Email: kirbydd@vt.edu 76
incorporate knowledge of universals and culture-specifics, and types as well as dimensions/degrees. Therefore, unpacking tiger mothering involves identifying the things that distinguish this qualitatively distinct type of parent (if she truly exists) from other typesin Asian-heritage families as well as in other cultural groups. The most rigorous approach also involves identifying the underlying quantitative dimensions that serve to define the tiger mother type and any other theorized type of parent. So, here is my first question: How do we use the tiger mother, as well as other types of parents, to generate and test competing hypotheses that move us toward a clearer understanding of the categories/types and dimensions/degrees of child-rearing behaviors that operate in Asian-heritage and other culturally distinct groups of families? Categorical and dimensional views and empirical methods often seem so distinct from each other. It is easy to forget that, within positivist quantitative approaches like those used in most of the research in the current issue and in our scholarly disciplines, it is often the statistical interactions between the continuous underlying dimensions of parenting behaviors or cognitions that, only in combination, define the types of parents that interest us. Thus, when it comes to any human caregiving attributes that vary between individuals within and between predefined groups or populations, those multiple dimensions are the same things that we use to identify qualitatively distinct types of caregivers. This is exemplified in the many theories of human thought, emotion, and behavior that use a Cartesian coordinate system to simultaneously quantify between-individual variations on two dimensions, and identify qualitatively distinct types within that two-dimensional space. (It is plausible, though obviously more complex, to use three or more dimensions.) In our fields of developmental and family sciences, the most influential example of this is Baumrinds (1966) parenting style typology; it appears explicitly or implicitly in nearly all of the current articles (see Juang, Qin, & Park, this issue, pp. 1 6). Baumrinds authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting styles are distinguished and often interpreted as representing distinct types of parents, yet these types represent and are defined by the interaction of the underlying dimensions of parent demandingness/control and responsiveness/warmth. As the special issue demonstrates, focusing attention on child rearing in Asian-heritage families leads to important insights about ways in which demandingness/control and responsiveness/warmth can be articulated, and how such dimensions of caregiving cooccur in those cultural contexts (see Cheah, Leung, & Zhou, this issue, pp. 30 40; Choi, Kim, Kim, & Park, this issue, pp. 19 29). Such inquiry provides potential innovations in the ways that we
TIGER PARENTS, OTHER PARENTS
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measure, test, and interpret data on cultural niches in ethnically homogeneous and heterogeneous populations. I emphasize potential innovations, because their real value will be realized only when applied more broadly to studies of multiple cultural groups in multiple populations while examining dimensionally distributed variables and categorically distinct groups (e.g., in large international comparison studies of dimensions and types of caregiving behaviors and constructs, such as Bornstein et al., 2012, and its corresponding collection of articles). Eventually, the integration of targeted empirical investigations like those in the current issue, with broad international studies of multiple cultural groups, will be necessary to identify the interplay between dimensions and discrete categories of parenting and, more importantly, how their distributions/prevalences vary between meaningful subgroups of families. Tiger mothers may exist somewhere in that mix, as scores on dimensions of control and warmth and as a discrete type of caregiver that very likely resides (perhaps unrecognized) in multiple cultures.
Validating a Categorical Type or a Continuous Dimension

The first question immediately leads to a second. Distinguishing and integrating dimensions and types of caregivers requires consensus on how such information is to be validated. How do we define the universal and culture-specific features of a dimension or category of child rearing by its own attributes or characteristics (as implied by the prior question), by apparent effects on child and adolescent development, or both? Put another way, does the tiger mother exist as a categorically distinct type of parent, if the variance in and covariates with the developmental outcomes among children of tiger mothers are similar to those among children of other types of parents (e.g., authoritative and authoritarian parents in non-Chinese Asian-heritage families as well as other cultural groups)? This question remains largely unanswered, in part because it requires scrutiny of group differences in variances and covariances, not just means. Returning for a moment to Baumrinds parenting typology, several types of parents can be identified by levels of parental demandingness/control and responsiveness/warmthtwo theoretically independent dimensions of caregiving that in theory and practice appear to exist in all of the cultures that have been studied. However, variation between families in these parenting types and in their underlying dimensions of control and warmth are not always associated with child and adolescent developmental outcomes in the same way, or in ways that one would expect based on the literature for European-origin cultural groups (see Supple & Cavanaugh, this issue, pp. 41 49). For example, in my collaborative research on parental discipline, we have found that the variance in use of physical punishment is not consistently associated with variance in child/adolescent behavioral and emotional problems when we make comparisons across culturally and nationally distinct groups using an etic approach to measurement (Deater-Deckard, Dodge, & Sorbring, 2005). Furthermore, part of the complexity arises from differences in parents and childrens perceptions and interpretations of harsh caregiving practices differences in perceptions that may operate in part as a function of whether adults and youth alike believe the parenting in question reflects loving, well-intentioned caregiving (as opposed to hostile, reactive rejection) that is deemed as culturally appropriate and
normative (see Lamborn, Nguyen, & Bocanegra, this issue, pp. 50 60). This complexity can only be fully grasped by integrating etic and emic viewpoints as well as quantitative and qualitative methods (see Kim, Wang, Orozco-Lapray, Shen, & Murtuza, this issue, pp. 718; Way et al., this issue, pp. 6170). As a field of scholars, should we expect the variance in tiger mothers dimensions and type to be similarly associated with her tiger cubs developmental outcomes, or would we expect these associations to vary across development and sociocultural contexts, even within the various Asian-heritage groups and populations that can be identified? The current special issue tackles this question in a number of interesting ways, using quantitative and qualitative measurement as well as emic and etic frameworks. Looking to the future, our science will be even stronger and certainly more unified if we can take findings like these and begin to build consensus around what should be the essential tests of competing hypotheses regarding anticipated patterns of means, variances, and covariances in parent and child/adolescent behaviors, emotions, and cognitions (e.g., Should strict measurement invariance be required?; Huang et al., 2012).
Is Differential Parenting Typical?

The third and final point is quite a departure from the thrust of the special issue, but I raise it because it is so important to any discussion of child rearing and youth development. Does a tiger mother (or any other type of parenting and its underlying dimensions) behave like a tiger mother toward all of her children? This final question is predicated on a well-established finding that a great deal of the variance in developmental outcomes varies within families across siblingsa reality reflected in Chuas (2011) descriptions of the differences between her daughters and her relationships with them. This has led many scholars (particularly those like me who study geneenvironment correlation and interaction in development) to call for thorough examination of parent child dyad-specific parenting effects. Answering this third question requires researchers to unpack the tiger mother within each family that has multiple children, to examine the degree and type of child specificity that is found in these and other caregiving contexts. In studies of Western-heritage families, investigators consistently have found that many individual attributes of interest to developmental scientists, ranging from physical health to scholastic achievement to personality to psychopathology, differ across siblings within families (Dunn & Plomin, 1991). Clearly, some of this differentiation arises from complex transactions between the environment and genetic differences between siblings. However, as Dunn and Plomin emphasized, it also is clear from sibling studies that many aspects of child rearing vary systematically across siblings within the same family. The interpretation of this pattern is that differential parenting of siblings reflects the different relationships that one parent has with her or his multiple children, based in part on siblings different attributes and in part on the parents distinct perceptions of and beliefs about each individual child. In many families, sibling children are not treated in the same wayparticularly if you ask for the opinions of the children or adolescents themselves (Kowal & Kramer, 1997). In closing, it is important to bear in mind that nearly all of the research on differential caregiving and sibling differences has been conducted with families in cultural contexts that emphasize indi-
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DEATER-DECKARD Dunn, J., & Plomin, R. (1991). Why are siblings so different? The significance of differences in sibling experiences within the family. Family Process, 30, 271283. doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.1991.00271.x Huang, L., Malone, P. S., Lansford, J. E., Deater-Deckard, K., Di Giunta, L., Bombi, A. S., . . . Bacchini, D. (2012). Measurement invariance of discipline in different cultural contexts. Family Science, 2, 212219. doi:10.1080/19424620.2011.655997 Juang, L. P., Qin, D. B., & Park, I. J. K. (2013). Deconstructing the myth of the Tiger Mother: An introduction to the special issue on Tiger parenting, Asian-heritage families, and child/adolescent well-being. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 1 6. doi:10.1037/a0032136 Kim, S. Y., Wang, Y., Orozco-Lapray, D., Shen, Y., & Murtuza, M. (2013). Does Tiger Parenting exist? Parenting profiles of Chinese Americans and adolescent developmental outcomes. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 718. doi:10.1037/a0030612 Kowal, A., & Kramer, L. (1997). Childrens understanding of parental differential treatment. Child Development, 68, 113126. doi:10.2307/ 1131929 Lamborn, S. D., Nguyen, J., & Bocanegra, J. O. (2013). Hmong American adolescents perceptions of mothers parenting practices: Support, authority, and intergenerational agreement. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 50 60. doi:10.1037/a0031045 Supple, A. J., & Cavanaugh, A. M. (2013). Tiger mothering and Hmong American parentadolescent relationships. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 41 49. doi:10.1037/a0031202 Way, N., Okazaki, S., Zhao, J., Kim, J. J., Chen, X., Yoshikawa, H., Jia, Y., & Deng, H. (2013). Social and emotional parenting: Mothering in a changing Chinese society. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 6170. doi:10.1037/a0031204
viduality and autonomy. By comparison, to my knowledge, there has been very little research on the question of differential parenting within cultural groups that emphasize harmony in the family or the group through socialization and reinforcement of interdependence. Addressing the gap in knowledge about child rearing and sibling differentiation in Asian-heritage families also remains a critically important future direction in our field. My hope is that if we tackle this and the other questions in this commentary, along with those put forward by the authors contributing to this special issue, we will move our field forward and increase the odds of doing research that improves the lives of children and families.
References
Baumrind, D. (1966). Effects of authoritative parental control on child behavior. Child Development, 37, 887907. doi:10.2307/1126611 Bornstein, M. H., Britto, P. R., Nonoyama-Tarumi, Y., Ota, Y., Petrovic, O., & Putnick, D. L. (2012). Child development in developing countries: Introduction and methods. Child Development, 83, 16 31. doi:10.1111/ j.1467-8624.2011.01671.x Cheah, C. S. L., Leung, C. Y. Y., & Zhou, N. (2013). Understanding Tiger Parenting through the perceptions of Chinese immigrant mothers: Can Chinese and U.S. parenting coexist? Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 30 40. doi:10.1037/a0031217 Choi, Y., Kim, Y. S., Kim, S. Y., & Park, I. J. K. (2013). Is Asian American parenting controlling and harsh? Empirical testing of relationships between Korean American and Western parenting measures. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 4, 19 29. doi:10.1037/a0031220 Chua, A. (2011). Battle hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York, NY: Penguin. Deater-Deckard, K., Dodge, K. A., & Sorbring, E. (2005). Cultural differences in the effects of physical punishment. In M. Rutter & M. Tienda (Eds.), Ethnicity and causal mechanisms (pp. 204 226). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Received January 3, 2013 Revision received January 15, 2013 Accepted January 18, 2013

Tiger Parenting, Asian-Heritage Families, and Child/Adolescent Well-Being

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Tiger Parenting, Asian-Heritage Families, and Child/Adolescent Well-Being

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Asian American Journal of Psychology 2013, Vol. 4, No.

2013 American Psychological Association 1948-1985/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0032136

Michigan State University

Desiree Baolin Qin

University of Notre Dame

JUANG, QIN, AND PARK

Tiger Parenting and Gaps in the Literature

Six Empirical Studies in This Special Issue

DECONSTRUCTING THE MYTH OF THE TIGER MOTHER

Asian-Heritage Parenting: Typologies, Prevalence, and Links to Childrens Adjustment

JUANG, QIN, AND PARK

Where to Go From Here: Two Commentaries and Future Directions

Parenting and Links to Childrens Adjustment

DECONSTRUCTING THE MYTH OF THE TIGER MOTHER

Asian American Journal of Psychology 2013, Vol. 4, No. 1, 718

2012 American Psychological Association 1948-1985/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0030612

Parenting in Asian Americans

KIM, WANG, OROZCO-LAPRAY, SHEN, AND MURTUZA

Parenting Dimensions and Profiles

A Variable-Centered Versus a Person-Centered Approach

Parenting Profiles and Adolescent Outcomes

Parenting Profiles Across Adolescent Developmental Periods and Across Reporters

KIM, WANG, OROZCO-LAPRAY, SHEN, AND MURTUZA

Results Analysis Plan

KIM, WANG, OROZCO-LAPRAY, SHEN, AND MURTUZA

Parenting Profiles and Adolescent Adjustment

KIM, WANG, OROZCO-LAPRAY, SHEN, AND MURTUZA

.21 .25 .18 .43 .25 .28

.12 .11 .09 .26 .21 .11

.10 .11 .13 .27 .16 .21

H .08 .12 .16 .33 .18 .27 .14

.19 .29 .14 .41 .05

KIM, WANG, OROZCO-LAPRAY, SHEN, AND MURTUZA

Asian American Journal of Psychology 2013, Vol. 4, No. 1, 19 29

2013 American Psychological Association 1948-1985/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0031220

Clark Atlanta University

You Seung Kim Irene J. K. Park

University of Texas at Austin

University of Notre Dame

Culture and Parenting

CHOI, KIM, KIM, AND PARK

Asian American Parenting Measures

KOREAN AMERICAN AND WESTERN PARENTING MEASURES

Relationships Between Asian American and Western Parenting

22 Method Overview of the Project

CHOI, KIM, KIM, AND PARK

KOREAN AMERICAN AND WESTERN PARENTING MEASURES

Results Descriptive Statistics and Correlations

CHOI, KIM, KIM, AND PARK

Hierarchical Regression Models

Testing the Associations by Mothers and Fathers

Table 1 Means or Percentages of Study Constructs by Mothers and Fathers

KOREAN AMERICAN AND WESTERN PARENTING MEASURES

Table 2 Correlations Among Main Constructs

CHOI, KIM, KIM, AND PARK

Associations of Korean Ga-Jung-Kyo-Yuk and Western Parenting

KOREAN AMERICAN AND WESTERN PARENTING MEASURES

Simple slope analyses of significant interactions.

CHOI, KIM, KIM, AND PARK

Study Limitations and Future Research

Mothers and Fathers: Similarities and Differences

Asian American Journal of Psychology 2013, Vol. 4, No. 1, 30 40

2013 American Psychological Association 1948-1985/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0031217

CHINESE AND U.S. PARENTING