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 ....
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. ..."
She had been an unwanted Newark French teacher until her Havana uncle had a lucky hunch about Fonstein. They were married and, thanks to him, she obtained her closure, she became the tiger wife, the tiger mother, grew into a biological monument and a victorious personality ... A figure!
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.
Noun: "a mother who drives her child/children very hard to succeed in school and/or in extracurricular studies like learning a musical instrument"
2005, J. G. Ballard, "Now parliament is just another hypermarket", New Statesman, 9 May 2005:
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.
That other woman, she knows nothing about being a tiger mother. I know tiger mother. After math, vocabulary words, and literature, there is knitting. That’s right. My children are going to make the longest scarves that the world has ever seen.
"Worries about the Chinese economy have been followed by worries about the Chinese military and even by overblown fears that Chinese educational values and 'tiger mothers' may be superior to American ones," wrote Niu Xinchun, deputy director of the Institute of American Studies at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, in an opinion piece last week.
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.
They may have "tiger mothers" like Amy Chua who demand nothing less than perfection from their children — or parents who take a more nurturing approach.
"Nor is success culturally determined, a product of Confucianism, rote learning or 'tiger mothers'," the report said, the latter a reference to ethnic-Chinese parents who push hard for their children to succeed.
Thanks to a recent book, talk has swirled around tiger mothers — mothers who force their children to overachieve and practice musical instruments rigorously.
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.
