Alexander F. Yuan / AP, file

A parent takes photos of her daughter playing the drums at a children's play area in a shopping mall in Beijing on Jan. 10.

BEIJING -- Parents throughout the world have been known to tell a white lie to cajole dinner into a fussy child or explain the pile of gifts that appears under the Christmas tree as if by magic. 

According to a new study, Chinese parents rank among the biggest fibbers. 

The study in the International Journal of Psychology titled “Instrumental lying by parents in the US and China” found that most respondents -- 84 percent of Americans and 98 percent of Chinese -- admitted that they lied to their children. Chinese parents, however, were far more likely to lie to force changes in behavior, it found.

“A larger proportion of the parents in China reported that they employed instrumental lietelling [sic] to promote behavioral compliance, and a larger proportion approved of this practice, as compared to the parents in the U.S.,” the authors said in the report.

The researchers from the University of San Diego, the University of Toronto and Zhejiang Normal University interviewed 114 American and 85 Chinese parents who had at least one child aged 3 years or older.

The participants were given a list of fibs and asked to report which ones they had told their children.

For example, 68 percent of Chinese respondents reported telling their children, “If you don’t follow me, a kidnapper will come to kidnap you while I’m gone.” Only 18 percent of American respondents made similar claims.

Sixty-one percent of the Chinese parents said they would tell their children, “Finish all your food or you’ll grow up to be short.” Just 10 percent of American parents utilized that particular little white lie.

According to the study, Chinese parents surveyed told 15 out of the 16 “specific instrumental lies” at higher rates than American parents.

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The only exception was a false claim that there is no more candy in the house, which was reported by 57.5 percent of parents in the United States as compared with 42.9 percent of Chinese parents.

American parents reported using more of what the study calls comparison lies -- untrue statements intended to generate positive feeling or to promote fantasy characters.

Sixty percent of Americans said they would use the line, “That was beautiful piano playing,” even if they thought it sounded terrible. In contrast, 44 percent of Chinese declared they would lie in those circumstances.

The results could be interpreted to mean that Chinese parents are more comfortable lying in general, but the study’s authors said that Chinese parents “made more negative evaluations of children’s lies,” and expressed more negative views than their American counterparts on fibs about fantasy characters like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Indeed, 88 percent of American respondents said they had used the lie, “Santa Claus will come to deliver your present on Christmas Eve.”

The study suggested that the wide acceptance of parental lying among Chinese adults could be driven by a strong desire for social cohesiveness and an emphasis on respect and obedience, according to the authors.

In other words, lying can be an effective tool in socializing children.

Or as one Chinese parent put it, “When teaching children, it is okay to use well-intentioned lies. It can promote positive development and prevent your child from going astray.”

BEIJING—The school term may be coming to a close for summer, but education remains a hot topic.

At least that’s the way the China Times sees it.

The Taiwan-based newspaper invited Amy Chua, author of the controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, to Beijing for several public speaking engagements earlier this week.

“She uses the Chinese way to educate her kids, and it’s very successful,” said Shao Jian Biao, the deputy editor in chief at China Times.  “But parents here in China have been trying the western way, because they thought it was better.  A lot of parents are confused.”

East or West?
Monday morning saw a small group of Chinese reporters—all of them female—turn up a hotel business center, eager to get Chua to expound on her views on raising children.

“I’m a mother, and I read her book very carefully,” said Shen Feng Li, Vice Director of Shanghai Morning Post.  “In China, we pay a lot of attention to education.”

Courtesy Citic Press

A Chinese translation of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother."

At a corporate gathering in another hotel, the audience was again largely female.  “I have a little boy, and I read her book.  I agreed with it,” said a stylishly-dressed executive who did not want to give her name.

For any parent who might have been living under a rock this year, Chua’s book was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal in January with a headline that served as a wake-up call (of sorts) to Americans already anxious about a rising China: “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.”

As it turned out, her book isn’t really about how the Chinese make better parents.  It’s a much more personal account of the challenges facing a mother wanting the very best for her children.

“I actually wrote this book in a moment of crisis, when my younger daughter, Lulu, turned 13, became a teenager, and rebelled against my very strict parenting,” Chua explained.

In fact, Chua took great pains to set the record straight.

“A lot of people in China…misunderstand.  They think [the book’s] like a parenting guide, and they don’t realize it’s supposed to be funny,” she said. 

The book, which was translated into Chinese and available almost immediately after its release in the U.S., was titled “Being a Mom in America” in China.

Among the greater misunderstandings amongst Chinese, Chua continued, is that “they don’t realize that at the end of the book I actually change and loosen up….  Many people in China only saw the opening about these strict rules, and they thought I was telling everyone, ‘Hey, everybody should do this.’”

Adrienne Mong

Amy Chua (right) and her daughters meet with Chinese reporters in Beijing.

Nonetheless, many people here disagreed with the parenting method Chua described in her book.

“An overseas Chinese wrote a book about China and teaching” so people were curious, said Dr. Henry Wang from the Center for China & Globalization, a think tank in Beijing.  But “people feel that even now the Chinese parents may not be that restrictive, or as harsh, or perhaps more demanding.”

“I think today’s parents in China have a different perspective and attitude than she does,” said Shen.  “I’m not sure her method would work here.”

Better to be balanced
Chua agreed.

“There needs to be balance,” she repeatedly told audiences.  “I think when the children are very young, the Chinese way is very good.  You have to guide them, teach them, to have respect, to have self-discipline [and be] hard-working.  But when they’re older, you have to be freer.”

In fact, the Yale Law School professor at times sounded evangelical about mixing East and West.

“I think China and America have opposite problems,” she said.  “The Chinese school system is already very strict….  But in America, it’s very free, everybody’s playing all the time.  So I felt I had to be stricter.”

Ultimately, audiences were curious about Chua’s daughters, 18-year old Sophia and 15-year old Lulu.  After all, their success—as students, as individuals, as daughters—would ultimately give credence to her choice of parenting style.

At the smaller gathering of reporters, Sophia (who calls herself a Tiger Cub and writes a light-hearted but thoughtful blog of her own) parried questions in fluent Mandarin with poise and confidence.

When a reporter asked the teenager whether she regretted “spending all that time practicing the piano,” Sophia rejected the notion.  “Not really….  Now I’m grown up.  I have a lot of time to do what I whatever I want, and I have the confidence to know that I can be good at it,” she said. 

Moreover, said the 18-year old, who will start college at Harvard in the autumn, “I think I will also be a Tiger Mother.  Maybe I will give my children more choice to choose their own activities.  When they’re very little, if they don’t like the activity I’ve picked for them, I won’t make them continue.  Whatever they want to pursue is fine.  As long as they’re very good and work very hard at it.”

Spoken like a true cub.

Adrienne Mong / NBC News

Is she a superior mom?

BEIJING – As if the Western media’s predilection for pitting a rising China against a declining America in the political, diplomatic, economic, and military realms weren't enough, now we have to contend with the culture wars.

Over the weekend, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua fired the first salvo in what someone on Twitter dubbed “the global mommy wars.”

“Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best,” Chua wrote in her essay, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” in The Wall Street Journal Saturday.  The essay was an excerpt from her new book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which will be released Tuesday in the United States. (Chua appears on NBC's Today Show on Tuesday morning.)

In the article, Chua tries to address what it is about Chinese parenting that produces a plethora of wunderkind math geniuses, violin virtuosos or piano prodigies who ace their way into Ivy League colleges and other top educational institutions.

The essay quickly became the most popular article on the Journal’s website over the weekend: it had over 1,770 comments by Monday and 85,000 people had “liked” it on Facebook. All the attention bewildered Twitter users: “Chinese Mothers is a trending topic?? LOL”

‘Mommie Dearest’ with Chinese characteristics
In the excerpt – which reads alternately like a how-to guide, a satire or a lament – Chua identified three key qualities in Chinese parents that enable “success”: a lack of fussing over their children’s self-esteem; a belief that kids owe their parents everything; and an unshakeable belief that the parents know what’s best.

“The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable – even legally actionable – to Westerners,” wrote Chua. “Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

o attend a sleepover
o have a playdate
o be in a school play
o complain about not being in a school play
o watch TV or play computer games
o choose their own extracurricular activities
o get any grade less than A
o not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
o play any instrument other than the piano or violin
o not play the piano or violin.”

The article sounds so incredible to Western readers – and many Asian ones, too – that many people thought the whole thing was satire.

But drawing on personal experience and after an informal canvassing of Chinese friends, acquaintances, and family, I would argue that it’s no joke. If anything, aspects of her essay resonated profoundly with many people, especially Chinese Americans – not necessarily in a good way.

“I can’t speak for every parent in China, but I’ve seen enough strict parenting and I’ve been through it,” said one friend, B., a mainland Chinese native. (For privacy reasons, I've identified some friends just by their initials.) “My mom would make me kneel down or smack me in the head if I didn’t make an A.”

I, for one, remember being berated – at 6 or 7 years old – for bringing home a report card that showed I’d scored only a three out of 10 in arithmetic. That tattered document still bears the marks of a rolling pin that my mother used to bang on the document in anger and frustration. And that was just one of innumerable instances of feeling like a complete failure.

As Chua wrote, “Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe their child can get them.”  There is no such thing as mediocrity or failure – unless it’s deliberate.

“When I think about my teenage years, all I can remember is constant fear, fear that she would find out I had a crush on a boy, fear that I would fail in a test, fear that she would find out I had lied to her,” said B.

L., an American-born Chinese woman whose mother died when she was only 10 years old, said, “I was raised that same way, relentlessly for 10 years,” and she recalled similar fights over how much to practice piano.

Adrienne Mong / NBC News File

Chinese children participate in a salsa class in Shanghai.

Where is the love?
The three qualities that Chua describes as defining Chinese parenting might make for a certain kind of success story, but, again, many of the friends and family I spoke to thought otherwise.

One of my uncles, Ping Mong, used to work at a big American company where he helped to hire employees from Taiwan. The graduates came typically from the best universities, he said, and “they do well in individual study and research.”  Problems arose, however, whenever they were expected to work on team projects. “They’re so good at focusing on the academic background … that they lack presentation skills, negotiating skills, interpersonal skills.”

Education, he continued, is of course important, but so is developing as a human being.

And that, many people have argued, is the flaw with the Chinese parenting style – at least the one described by Chua.

Though she continues to feel the loss of her mother decades later, L. said, “My mother never touched us, never embraced us or said she loved us.  She clothed us, put food in my rice bowl nightly, put me in a bath and peeled and cut fruit for me nightly. That was her way of expressing love, and many Chinese are no different.”

In Chinese society, especially when older generations are included, parents just don’t express much affection.  (Although that trend seems to be changing for young urban middle class families in China who can only have one child.  J., a mainland Chinese friend, noticed that most of her friends “do not want or do not raise their kids in the same way their parents did.”)

But try growing up in a society like America where people hug even when they just say hello, and you start noticing the fact that your parents never hug or kiss you. Try growing up in a society which places a high value on positive reinforcement and you might start wondering why it is that your parents only ever notice your faults and your inability to be the best student in your entire class.

When it comes to guilt, high expectations and an emphasis on success, especially academic success, “Jewish mothers are just as bad,” joked A., another American-born Chinese friend. “But at least therapy is acceptable in Jewish society.”

Indeed. 

Therapy, like failure, is considered by many Chinese to be an expression of weakness – which often leads to tragic consequences. It’s been widely reported that, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, Asian American women aged 15-24 have the highest suicide rates amongst all ethnic groups. One of the chief culprits cited is the pressure to achieve academic success.

Adrienne Mong / NBC News File

NBC News cameraman Maurice Roper films a news story about Chinese children enjoying their extra-curricular activities.

Balancing instead of clashing cultures
Of course, with every generalization or cultural stereotype, there are numerous exceptions.  L.Q. said she feels lucky that she “was not subjected to the pressure and guilt” described in Chua’s article. “However, I know my father must have gone through some of her angst.  He was forced to play the violin to such a degree … that to this day he can’t listen to any music with the violin in it,” she said.

In fact, despite the snappy headline in Saturday’s newspaper, it turns out Chua isn’t necessarily arguing that her form of parenting is really superior. “This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a 13-year-old,” she wrote.

Instead of pitting one against the other, friends and family say parents could use a bit of both.

L.Q., a third-generation Chinese-American, is married to a Colombian. Theirs was a relaxed household – at least until she read Chua’s excerpt to her husband. “Afterwards, [he] was inspired to call a family meeting later that day to create a calendar and schedule in time for the girls to practice the piano five days a week for 30 minutes a day,” she told me. 

And, of course, there was that final arbiter – at least in my life:

“I think [Chinese parenting] is different, but I wouldn’t necessarily say better,” said my mother after she read the article. “I have seen kids brought up and do well and perform well and not necessarily have Chinese parents. They’re from Western families.”

She thought a bit more and then added, “Maybe it’s a better way to discipline the children. But it doesn’t mean you make better parents.”

More on the parenting debate on the Today Moms blog:

The 'Tiger Mother' defends her harsh parenting

Behind the scenes with the 'Tiger Mother' and daughters