The New Yorker:

Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” prompted controversy thirteen years ago, but, among the upper middle class, variations on her parenting style have proliferated.

By Jay Caspian Kang

Last week, the New York Times ran an article titled “Where Should You Raise Your Children?” The answers, taken from a recent study by the personal-finance company WalletHub, were not particularly surprising, but they were notable in their near-uniformity. Fremont, California, a city of two hundred and thirty thousand people that sits between Oakland and San Jose, posted the highest score. More than sixty per cent of its population is Asian. Irvine, California, whose population is more than forty per cent Asian, came in third place, followed by Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas that is famous for its large population of highly educated immigrants from East and South Asia. One should be careful about drawing too many conclusions from provocatively titled studies, especially those that measure vague criteria, such as “family fun.” Still, the WalletHub study confirmed a bit of conventional wisdom that has taken shape during the past twenty or so years. If you want to move somewhere in America that is within commuting distance of a major city, and you prioritize good schools and public safety, there’s a decent chance you’re going to end up somewhere with a lot of Asians.

A somewhat tongue-in-cheek but not necessarily inaccurate conclusion can be derived from this. If many young, upwardly mobile families want to move to cities like Fremont, Plano, and Irvine—or other academically competitive enclaves, including Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, northern New Jersey, or Chicago’s north suburbs, all of which also have significant Asian populations—then it might be fair to say that the upper middle class has, as a group, adopted the stereotypical Asian parenting ethos. If we accept the information provided by the Times article, and we believe that a healthy Asian population correlates directly with desirability, then perhaps a whole lot of people, regardless of their ethnic background, want to become “tiger parents”—or, at the very least, they want to live near one.

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