The psychology of Vietnamese tiger mothers: Qualitative insights into the parenting beliefs and practices of Vietnamese-Australian mothers

To remedy the obscurity in perceptions linked with the Tiger mother phenomenon, and the dearth of research within immigrant-Asian subgroups, we attempted to provide an exploratory analysis on the parenting beliefs and practices of Vietnamese mothers. The voices of seven immigrant Vietnamese-Australian mothers from Western Australia were presented through Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. The emergent themes revealed the development of a bi-cultural identity, education, respect, and parental control. Moreover, we found that many beliefs and practices hinge upon the cultural concepts of filial piety and Confucianism. Our findings also support the growing concern which suggest that parenting styles under Baumrind's (1971) typology are inaccurate for cross-cultural populations. Implications pertaining to culturally competent practice and directions for future research are discussed.