tiger mother

English

Alternative forms

• tiger mom, tiger mum

Etymology

Sense “ambitious mother” popularized by the 2011 parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua.

Noun

tiger mother (plural tiger mothers)

1. A woman who is fiercely protective of one or more people in her care. [from 20th c.]

   Synonyms: mama bear, mama grizzly

   Coordinate term: wolf father

   • 1907, Elizabeth Fremantle, Comrades Two, William Heinemann, page 237:

     […] I spent all last night on my knees, beseeching the Great Physician to hear me and heal my boy. […] but the instinct of the tiger-mother is tearing my heart to pieces […] .

   • 1975, Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift‎^[1], Viking:

     When she was in her busy mood, domineering and protecting me, I used to think what a dolls' generalissimo she must have been in childhood. "And where you're concerned," she would say, "I'm a tiger-mother and a regular Fury. […] "

   • 2005 May 8, Jane Hutchinson, “Be my baby”, in Sunday Telegraph Magazine:

     "My sister calls us 'tiger mothers', because we're so protective," she says.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:tiger mother.
2. A mother who drives her child/children very hard to succeed in school or in extracurricular studies like learning a musical instrument. [from 21st c.]

   Coordinate term: eagle dad

   • 2005 May 9, J. G. Ballard, “Now parliament is just another hypermarket”, in New Statesman:

     I would like to see Oxford and Cambridge turned into graduate universities entirely devoted to research, which at a stroke would cool the ardour of the "tiger mothers" of Holland Park and Hampstead determined to set their three-year-olds on the path to Oxbridge, whatever the human cost.

   • 2011 November 2, Anne McElvoy, “Take care, children: China's tiger cubs are on your tail”, in London Evening Standard‎^[2]:

     If you have tiger mother tendencies, the very worst thing you can do is visit China. It will only increase your determination to squeeze some achievement out of your young.

   • 2012 April 28, Frank Bruni, “The Imperiled Promise of College”, in The New York Times‎^[3], →ISSN:

     Tiger mothers and $125-an-hour tutors proliferate, and parents scrimp and struggle to pay up to $40,000 a year in tuition to private secondary schools that then put them on the spot for supplemental donations, lest the soccer field turn brown and the Latin club languish.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:tiger mother.

Usage notes

Often, but not always, used to refer to women of Asian heritage.

Translations

protective woman — see mama bear

ambitious mother — see tiger mom