Alternative Chinese Tiger Mother Parenting: Send Your Gifted Children to a Reform School for Delinquents to Scrub Toilets

Jen-Hsun Huang, president of multi-billion dollar company Nvidia owes his success to cleaning toilets at a reform school for difficult teens in Kentucky. Huang's parents moved all the way from Taiwan (via Thailand) for the opportunity to send their children to American schools. Consider the reform school approach to be a "tougher love" approach to Chinese Tiger Mother Parenting.

Mr Huang was born in Taiwan. His father was a chemical and instrumentation engineer and his mother was a home-maker intent on teaching her children English even though she couldn't speak it herself.

The family moved to Thailand but political upheaval there resulted in Mr Huang and his brother being shipped to relatives in Tacoma. The two boys were later sent to Oneida Baptist Institute in eastern Kentucky. They thought it was a prep school but soon discovered it was for "difficult" children [a reform school]:
... Mr Huang ... remembers that his main job as a nine-year-old at the school was to clean all the toilets in the dorm.

He reckons that taught him the value of hard work, and says that he has worked his entire life:

"Work ethic is important. There are a lot of smart people around the world and today's industry is 24-7 global where nobody stops.

"Your competition doesn't go to sleep. Your customers don't go to sleep. Your competitors are everywhere. Your customers are everywhere. It doesn't matter how smart you are, because there is always someone smarter than you." _BBC

Finally rescued from reform school, he eventually graduated from Oregon State and Stanford – a school to which he has since pledged $30-million (U.S.) in donations. _Globe&Mail

For those who considered Amy Chua's approach to Chinese Tiger Mother Parenting to be tough, look at how much tougher the approach of Huang's parents was. Although Huang's parents and relatives now claim that sending the children to the school was accidental, don't be too sure. Tiger Mother Parenting is not for the soft-hearted, and you cannot argue with success. Most reform school students fail to derive as many useful and profitable lessons from the experience as Mr. Huang, perhaps because they were not as naturally gifted.