The best gloss on Tiger Mother is The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller’s classic study of the miseries inflicted by the kind of status- oriented parenting that Chua practices. The “gifted” or accomplished child, Miller says, is one who learns to satisfy her parents’ need for gratification through achievement. But the demand is insatiable, because its satisfaction is always provisional. The child is “never good enough,” so she tries to be perfect. And thus she swings between the poles of grandiosity and depression: the delusion of supremacy and the self-disgust that ensues upon its inevitable collapse. Superiority, inferiority. As for self-control—or rather, self-erasure—the child’s desires are neither validated nor acknowledged, so she simply learns to ignore them.