The 'tiger mother' shows her stripes

It's a paean to parenting of the extreme kind and is likely to generate extreme responses.

Chinese American Amy Chua's first-person narrative about how she raised her two daughters (their father is the Jewish-American lawyer and novelist, Jed Rubenfeld) in New Haven, Connecticut, in the "Chinese way", sounds so retrogressive that one's not even sure if she really means it.

As often happens with immigrants trying to hang on to their native roots, Chua's idea of "Chinese parenting" is based on a mangled view of what Confucius might have suggested when he stressed the importance of filial devotion in keeping the institution of the family in place.