The frenetic interest in Amy Chua's unexceptional memoir about her dedication to raising children who excel shows the ease with which our anxiety about being the best possible parent is aroused. The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother reveals a previously guessed-at but carefully closeted Chinese approach to child rearing. While western mothers praise a child for every squiggle drawn, Chua learned from her parents to accept nothing less than the best. "Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child does not get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough."

This point in Chua's frequently repeated argument chimes with exciting new research emphasising the importance of teaching children how their own efforts impact on their achievement. When children see that hard work results in achievement, they have far more real confidence than children who trust to their native-born wit. Is Amy Chua, herself a high achieving Yale professor, going to bring down the conventional wisdom about saturating a child with praise? But even before you have time to nod in agreement, you come up against the shock of: "the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child".

Chua is a lawyer, and her writing wields the magic of expert special pleading. The "Tiger Mother" – whom Chua sees as a type of Chinese parent – is cruel to be kind. The cruelty isn't fun, she insists, it is hard work. It doesn't tear a child down, it demonstrates a parent's respect for her child's toughness and potential. Anyway, the proof of the pudding is in the eating; her offspring come out ahead.

With a breezy style and slick logic, Chua draws cultural stereotypes that filter out one central fact: her approach to parenting is as mainstream in the west as it is in China. We all cherish our children's future. The shadow of downward mobility covers every inch of this small planet, and many parents in every country respond to this fear. Sometimes we respond by offering the best possible education; sometimes we respond by putting our child in a pressure cooker. The over-scheduled child, whose every waking moment is devoted to dance, music, art and maths, is a familiar sight in many western families. Few parents would allow a child to give up maths after one rough test, though Chua suggests this is a typical response. A meritocracy puts a great burden on parents as they compete with others who are also doing everything possible to ensure their child is high up in the meritocracy. Sometimes this race results in the "perfect madness" Judith Warner described five years ago, as she watched middle class New York mothers compete to be the best mother, who would of course have the best child.

Chua exercises the charm of apparent candour to minimise the dark side of her message. She summons up scenes that still smoke from the heat of the moment, wherein we sympathise with her plight even as she depicts herself as a manipulative bully. She threatens to take her daughter Sophia's doll's house to a charity shop if she does not master a difficult piano piece. She dismisses her daughter Lulu's longing for a pet by insisting the violin is her pet. Lulu's teenage rebelliousness is drawn with sympathetic clarity, and the teen's public outburst, "I hate you", pulses with comic desperation. Every parent of a teenager knows the sting of those words, so different when she is 13 from the petulant tantrums of a three-year-old. But once again the sense that Chua is offering insight and empathy is clouded over by smugness. ("I am right and she knows I am right.")

When Lulu begs to give up the violin, and Chua eventually "gives in", her daughter is confused and terrified by this uncharacteristic responsiveness. "I really do love the violin," she insists, "but couldn't things be a little less intense?" This achieves an uneasy truce, and Lulu knows she must find some other way to outshine everyone else.

There is unintentional poignancy in the daughter's impasse. The teen faces a profound dilemma: either excel at music and school and leap over every hurdle I put in front of you, or I will excoriate, punish and shame you. As the memoir draws to a close, Lulu is a rising star in tennis. Her mother shouts instructions to her as she practises, secretly texts her coach, and basks in her conviction that her daughter knows her mother is right.

What inspires awe, however, is the sheer force of maternal control. The psychoanalyst Alice Miller coined the term "poisonous pedagogy" to describe some parents' conviction that cruelty and control are justified because it is in the child's best interests. They see the child's own will as something to be broken and reconfigured. Those who teach in (the best) universities have considerable experience with hothouse children, who come from Chinese and western backgrounds alike. What happens to these young people as they stand at the threshold of adulthood, no longer in pouncing distance of their tiger mother?

Many display bland compliance, tinged with deviousness – which may be essential to their personal survival. Obsessed with grades, they often lack interest in their subject. They relish all those frivolous distractions their tiger mother prohibited – television, all-night chats with friends – and some even sneak in pets. I wait, curious as a cat, to read their memoirs of being raised by tiger mothers.

Terri Apter's You Don't Really Know Me: Why Mothers and Daughters Fight and How Both Can Win is published by Norton.