Which came first: The tiger mother or the pussycat father?

SINGAPORE — Mothers’ Day in its present Hallmark-card incarnation may be all pastels, hearts and flowers, but it’s worth remembering on this occasion that there is also no creature on earth so fierce or frightening as a mother fending for her young. That’s reflected in a recent TV trend: Tiger mothers are the “in” thing in television these days, judging by how many of them have been rearing their feline heads on our screens lately.

When Amy Chua rolled out her autobiography Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother in 2011, she didn’t anticipate that what started out as a culturally Chinese phenomenon — the strict, disciplinarian mother doing whatever it took to raise little overachievers — would become fodder for various television comedy series.

From Huang Biren in MediaCorp TV Channel 8’s Tiger Mum and Taraji P Henson in Empire to Zhao Wei in Tiger Mom, it certainly seems as if we can’t turn our TV on without seeing an acid-tongued, Type A, alpha female roundly schooling her cubs, her man and pretty much any errant passer-by who happens to cross her path.

TV isn’t serving up “just wait until your father gets home” lessons any more. Today’s special is good-cop-bad-cop role reversal. Long gone are the days of Ozzie and Harriet, Seventh Heaven, Growing Up or Under One Roof, where the father was the head of the household and wielded the authority to subject his brood to long and painful morality stories with impunity. It’s the women who wear the proverbial pants now, and the men who are kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. (Well, you know what I mean.)

You can put the blame where you will for the overbearing-woman phenomenon: A post-feminism allergic over-reaction to shifts in the gender status quo, the urban rat-race and its pressures, global warming. But for all their roaring, snarling and tail-twitching, we know that tiger mothers’ barks are always worse than their bites. After all, their hearts are always in the right place, even if their Draconian methods make Mussolini look like Little Miss Muffet.

What is more interesting, though, is the fact that the domineering mother would not exist if not for the ineffectual father. It’s a yin-yang thing. Maybe, in TV-land, these pussycat dads are the older versions of the emasculated man-children of shows such as The Big Bang Theory, Man Up, Flight Of The Conchords or Shy Guys. They gravitated towards tough-as-nails “mean girls”, such as the women of 2 Broke Girls, Don’t Trust The B---- In Apartment 23 and Gossip Girl. They got hitched, engendered offspring and, through it all, remained resolutely clueless about what to do with themselves.

Were these men the maladjusted products of overly controlling tiger mothers? Will they perpetuate the vicious cycle by standing idly by — with the TV remote being the only thing they have control of — as their tiger wives raise timorous concert pianists, eye-contact avoiding astrophysicists and diffident neurosurgeons with frightening efficiency?

Tune in to the next wave of TV shows to find out. For now, it’s worth noting that the “tiger mother, pussycat father” trope is always played to comic effect, gently showing us up for where we might be lacking — or overcompensating — and allowing us to reflect on our own foibles. Otherwise, it would be a tragedy of Freudian proportions. Or worse, Masters Of The Sea.

Which are tiger mums causing an uproar on TV? Find out at http://tdy.sg/todaytelevision