Taming the Tiger of Achievement

I went to Stuyvesant High School, considered the most competitive of New York City's specialized high schools, so I know a thing or two about Tiger moms. Or rather, I’m familiar with their work: students crying over exams, an unhealthy obsession with Harvard and enough teen angst to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

My own parents were supportive, but never put pressure on me to get straight-As or go to an Ivy League college. As long as I did my best, that was good enough for them. It turns out that it was more than good enough: I became valedictorian of Stuyvesant and, to prove it wasn’t a fluke, graduated from Columbia University with the highest GPA in my class.

So what accounts for my academic performance? Am I a genius who can do linear algebra and read Faulkner in my sleep? Far from it. I had unusual difficulty grasping concepts in class -- I suspect an undiagnosed learning disability -- and had to work extra hard to keep up. A lot of things contributed to my success: good work ethic, study skills, competitiveness, ambition and intellectual curiosity, to name a few.

But what about other academic standouts -- surely they had parents who harassed and threatened them into the top of their class? Actually, just the opposite seems to be true.

For research on a book I’m writing about how to achieve academic success in high school and college, I devised a survey to try to find out what motivates exceptional students. The survey asks them about their study habits, their background, their attitude towards school and techniques that have helped them succeed.

So far, I have had responses from 20 such students, who include an assortment of Rhodes scholars, valedictorians, salutatorians, Intel and Fulbright winners and a Scripps spelling bee champ. I am continuing to seek other high achieving graduates to participate in the survey.

In their answers so far, one thing really caught my eye: for the most part, these students said that their parents did not pressure them to get good grades. Only 10 percent said their folks were demanding. Most of them, or 80 percent, described their parents as supportive without being pushy, while the rest said they didn’t care about their grades at all.

That’s not to say they didn’t feel pressured, but most of that pressure came from within -- from their own desire to learn and succeed. The students in my survey were able to motivate themselves without having to be poked and prodded by their parents.

When asked what they most attributed their success to, their answers were pretty evenly split between determination and hard work. Nearly all said that pressure from self was a much bigger factor than threats from mommy and daddy.

My mother never once said she wanted me to go to Harvard, or any school for that matter. (For the record, I didn’t even apply to Harvard -- it wasn’t close enough to home. I actually liked my parents and didn’t want to get away from them at the earliest opportunity.)

But how do top students become self-motivated in the first place? Perhaps they really do have tiger parents, but have internalized their lessons so well that their elders can afford to relax a little. Not likely, according to some recent studies.

French researchers Frédérique Autin and Jean-Claude Croizet found that when children are told that failing at some things is O.K., they demonstrate improved working memory capacity and reading comprehension.

"Acknowledging that difficulty is a crucial part of learning could stop a vicious circle in which difficulty creates feelings of incompetence that in turn disrupts learning," said Dr. Autin. The message to tiger moms: telling your kids that failure is not an option does not set them up for success.

As Tali Sharot reports in her book "The Optimism Bias," college students who were primed with words such as smart, intelligent and clever performed better on cognitive tests than those shown words such as dumb, stupid and daft -- and an fMRI machine revealed that their brains responded differently when they realized they had made a mistake (remember this, Amy Chua, next time you call your kids "garbage").

Lastly, Desiree Qin, a professor at Michigan State University, conducted interviews with hundreds of students at Stuyvesant in 2007 and 2008 and found that the Chinese students talked often of the stress of having pushy parents. She said they were more prone to depression and family conflict than their Caucasian peers. Asian students now make up 72 percent of enrollment at Stuyvesant.

So what should you do to turn your kids into natural high-achievers? Start by setting a good example. Let your children see you reading books instead of watching TV, and encourage them to read for fun. Focus on what they're learning instead of what grades they're getting. Tell them that you're proud of them for working hard and doing their best, not for getting into Harvard.

Help them decide what their goals are -- their own goals, not your goals for them -- and what it will take to achieve them. And tell them it's O.K. to fail, as long as they get back up and keep trying.