Parenting: Dialing Back the Tiger Mom: Parenting the Gen Z Teen
Too many of us assume that when our kids are gainfully employed in a well-paying, professional track, then we’ll be able to relax and tell them to start enjoying their lives, not realizing that being able to do so is itself a skill that we may be failing to cultivate.
[Left] The author’s daughter, Anavi Hebbar-Shah (2nd from left), with her Indian dance group at a Diwali event.
My husband and I have a problem. We’re perpetually torn between wanting to push our teenage daughters to go the extra mile and wanting to just sit back and tell them how much we love them for being who they are. Has any generation of parent ever dealt with this conundrum before, a dilemma compounded by being desi and constantly witnessing the hyper- competitiveness of Asian parents?
For example, my daughter has, for unexplained reasons, taken a break from her Bollywood dance training. Two years ago, she lived for her Bollywood class—the rhythm, the camaraderie, the shared identification with a tribe of similar girls who both feared and mocked their over-the-top, strict dance teachers. Last year, facing being shut out of her world, she organized a series of weekend dance sessions, pulling in Indian girls from three or four county high schools and coordinating a virtual dance performance for a Kamala Harris campaign event. The girls danced outside in the grass, often masked, sometimes getting dangerously close to each other to watch what they had just performed on each other’s phones. Our neighbors were intrigued, curious. My daughter seemed delighted with the company, announcing, “I love this group.”
But now she’s moved on to cheerleading for the basketball team. She’s also become obsessed with taking epic-long showers while Taylor Swift and Harry Styles play loudly on her shower radio. She’s preoccupied with riding in cars with friends who can drive. She has become busy with shopping, lunching and hanging out in name-brand sweatpants and watching Outer Banks. She’s sixteen. I understand. And I can relate, to an extent.
But how do I tell the difference between a kid who may be in a rut and a kid who’s just evolving towards different interests? Also, how do I know it isn’t me, instead, who needs to evolve? After all, isn’t it the most Indian thing in the world to want to have control over your children’s lives? Which one of us really needs to check herself here?
I don’t think parents today realize that the crazed days of twenty-first-century-parenting, characterized by extracurriculars that cost thousands of dollars per year and require hours of commitment akin to holding a part-time job, actually began in the days of Gen Xers like me. In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, the legacy of Title IX and the resulting interest in girls’ team sports was already decades into being. But it was still shy of the professionalization parents would experience a decade or so later with options for children to be on traveling teams, and the now almost asphyxiating conventional wisdom that team sports and other extracurricular activities would “look good for college.”
Back in the day, as some of us attended pioneering magnet schools, we noticed—though we were not able to talk openly about it—the pattern of Asian kids scrambling to signify their mastery of college-prep aptitudes, both academic and non-academic. Few people may know that the first Indian Scripps National Spelling Bee champion was crowned in 1985, making the then 13-year-old Balu Natarajan a prototype of the hyper-competitive Asian Gen Xer. This moment was itself two decades in the making as families like Natarajan’s made up the first wave of Indian immigrants, which was largely comprised of professionals and students in the wake of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 lifting of Asian quotas on American immigration.
I am the product of such a trend—the daughter of involved, hands-on parents who encouraged after-school activities, attended informational meetings, and collected the yearly school awards won by their children meticulously in manila folders. My father graduated in IIT Bombay’s first-ever class, and now his granddaughter goes to school with non-Indian kids who ask openly, “Isn’t that like the Harvard of India?”
I bring these points up to highlight the fact that our current atmosphere of competition, anxiety and constant striving did not just happen because colleges have overnight become “more competitive,” as some parents like to say. Like most social trends that are a cause for concern, this one has been decades in the making. Some of us Gen X parents are recovering former Asian hyper-competitive students, ourselves the children of former Asian hyper-competitive students.
How long should this chain go on, and to what end? Shouldn’t we be striving for more balance, for something less quantifiable, particularly given the daily reported increase in depression and anxiety among young people today?
[Right] Anavi with her cheerleading group.
Many years ago, in a book club comprised of suburban Indian moms, I read Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother. For a while, I was impressed by its message. My daughters were still in elementary school at the time, and I was years from facing the repercussions of the social trend that Amy Chua lambasts in her book—the American tendency to overpraise and, as she sees it, mollycoddling kids instead of challenging them. All the moms in the book club agreed that Chua made a good point. Kids need to be pushed to swim harder sometimes; otherwise, they’ll sink. But all these years later, one wonders how Chua’s children, the ones she pushed to practice violin with her for upwards of two hours a day, will view what their mother did.
I think too many of us assume that when our kids are gainfully employed in a well-paying, professional track, then we’ll be able to relax and tell them to start enjoying their lives in a more basic way, not realizing that being able to do so is itself a skill that we may be failing to cultivate. Even more concerning, I don’t think that most of us ABCD parents of teens today feel the pressure to push our kids because we really understand what it means to struggle. In
my peer group, Gen Xers, who grew up with parents who were doctors or comfortable professionals, are just as likely to push their kids as those who grew up with immigrant parents who could afford no luxuries when they were new to the U.S.
I’ve noticed that the same can be said of almost every metro-area suburban non-Indian parent today, too. To me, this shared behavior indicates that something deeper is afoot. What residual dreams of domination lingering from our own teen years is this desire for showy performance in our kids hiding? Or is this all a result of social media culture, the comparison- making, the longing to post clickable content and turn our ordinary lives into something extraordinary?
Neither interpretation is flattering. In any case, our children are already victims of instant-update culture as they check their phones incessantly for new grades and the latest TikTok trends, flash new-model iPhones so that they won’t face ostracism, and long to graduate to a world of Instagram and hundreds of likes.
But none of this musing will help me get my daughter dancing to that Bollywood beat again. I drop her off at school in her cheerleading outfit and feel wistful. But it’s both regret at what might have been lost—her glowing face, eyes kohl-lined over an electric smile on stage during her last Sensation performance, when she and her friends were at the top of their world—and pride at her now gaining a different experience.
I try to embrace the contradictions and poetic multiplicity of a once-Asian-nerd Indian mom driving her minivan away from her progeny entering the school in a sis-boom-bah uniform, looking about as American as they come.
Reshmi Hebbar (@reshmijhebbar) is an Associate Professor of English at Oglethorpe University specializing in multicultural literature. In 2006, she wrote a monthly column, “Confessions of a Grown-up ABCD” for Khabar. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Slate and her fiction has been published in several literary journals. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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