One Style Does not Fit All Amy Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, caused an uproar in the US media. It’s triggered a nationwide debate about the merits of different parenting approaches, mainly comparing ‘Tiger’/Asian-style parenting to ‘Western’/American-style parenting. Throughout her book, Chua exclaims that strict Chinese or ‘Tiger’ parenting is effective because it forges academic success. According to columnist for the New York Times David Brooks, author of the article “Amy Chua is a Wimp,” her book “plays into America’s fear of national decline” (269). One of the biggest components of the debate between parenting styles is that American children are academically inferior to other countries. Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer for the New Yorker writes that the only area in which American students “outperform the competition is self-regard” (276). American students are ranked seventeenth in the world in reading, twenty-third in science, and thirty-first in math, while students from Shanghai ranked first in all three categories. Much of the blame for the decline in America’s academic ranking is placed on the parenting style. Western parents often claim that their children are “talented” or “gifted,” Chua says, while Asian parents highlight the importance of hard work and academic dominance. Yet, “research performed by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has found that the way parents offer approval affects the way children perform, even the way they feel about themselves” (Suissa). This raises the questions: Are the children with tiger moms better off than the children with American? And are the children of either parenting style happy and mentally healthy? Should we encourage our children through tender praise, or do we embrace the “tiger mom” strategy of punishment and criticism? The answer is neither. Raising a child is a complex and