Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School. In January she published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a book that recounts how she raised her two children Sophia and Louisa. To publicize the book, she wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal under the title "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior."
Even without the provocative title, the article proved controversial. Chua argues that to become accomplished at anything worthwhile requires diligent, prolonged practice. And by anything worthwhile, she means academic subjects, music, but little else. When they were growing up, Sophia and Louisa were forbidden to
- attend a sleepover
- have a playdate
- be in a school play
- complain about not being in a school play
- watch TV or play computer games
- choose their own extracurricular activities
- get any grade less than an A
- not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
- play any instrument other than the piano or violin
- not play the piano or violin
The apparently harsh, joyless regimen paid off. The elder daughter Sophia was accepted by both Harvard and Yale—but not, I presume with confidence, to major in physics.
Since the mid-1990s, the Nobel Foundation's website has published laureates' autobiographies. Not every laureate has provided details of his or her childhood, but enough of them have to identify common features.
As you might expect, several laureates thanked their parents for encouraging and supporting their interest in science. Talented and dedicated teachers were also cited. But what the laureates also tended to have in common was the freedom their parents gave them to pursue their own interests, whether scientific or not.
Three of the most detailed and, as it happens, most engaging autobiographies are those of the physicists Steven Chu, Robert Laughlin (shown here), and John Mather. As youngsters, Chu taught himself to pole vault, Laughlin disassembled TV sets to discover how they worked, and Mather kept eight baby rats under the kitchen table and fed them different diets for a science fair project.
Granted, some laureates faced parental pressure. George Smoot, who shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with Mather, wrote in his autobiography, "My mother tutored me in additional science and history, while my father drilled me in the basement, force-feeding trigonometry and introductory calculus courses that were not given at my high school." Laughlin recalled:
At dinnertime one of my parents, usually my father, would lead a discussion about some controversial matter, such as racial integration of schools, whether John Lennon should have compared himself with Jesus Christ, support of Israel, or the morality of the Vietnam war, and all of us were expected to air and defend our views on these things, even if we did not want to.
But I've yet to find an autobiography that describes a household regime like Chua's. Can a tiger mother raise a Nobel Prize–winning physicist? I don't know for sure, but the evidence suggests the answer is no.
