‘Tiger Mom’ daughter starts a blog, heads to Ivies
America’s best-known “Tiger Mother,” Yale Law Professor Amy Chua, may soon face some literary competition from her daughter. High school senior Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, who along with her younger sister is featured in their mother’s book advocating an intensely strict mode of parenting, started a blog earlier this month called “New Tiger in Town,” where she sounds off on some of the controversy around her family. (Chua, whose memoir “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” came out in January, says she’s even received death threats for her parenting stance. NPR talked to a panel of mothers who were “horrified” at the restrictions Chua said she placed on her children.)
“When the whole world’s calling you a mindless robot, you kind of get the urge to start talking!” Chua-Rubenfeld writes of why she started the blog. “Even though ‘Sophia’ in the book is much more impressive than Sophia in real life. I think I’m sullying my impeccable image one post at a time, but so be it.” The accomplished pianist jokes that she hopes to “sleep all day, rave all night. Learn by osmosis,” while at college. She also published a lively and funny defense of her mother in the New York Post. “One problem is that some people don’t get your humor,” she writes. “They think you’re serious about all this, and they assume Lulu and I are oppressed by our evil mother. That is so not true. Every other Thursday, you take off our chains and let us play math games in the basement.”
The blog Above the Law first reported on April 1 that Chua-Rubenfeld was accepted to both Harvard and Yale (and planned to attend Harvard). The post was titled the post “Tiger Mom Triumphant,” suggesting that Chua’s controversial child-rearing methods were vindicated in her daughter’s Ivy League prospects. Chua-Rubenfeld took to her blog to set the record straight, writing that she is “seriously considering both Yale and Harvard,” and hasn’t yet decided where to go yet.