Amy Chua stirred up a lot of controversy with her Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, published inJanuary. Some parents were outraged by the harsh techniques she used with her daughters. Other parents celebrated her as a warrior against parental indulgence.

While some of the dust has settled from the battle, it is not clear that we are any wiser as a result of it.

Good parenting requires a balance between three vital practices or processes for raising vibrant, balanced children: Compassion, nurturing, and guidance. We cannot over-emphasize one area, neglect others, and expect to raise confident well-balanced children

Chua advocates a parenting style filled with high expectations. This is an important part of good guidance. Some parents fail their children by expecting too little. Chua didn’t make that mistake.

But the episodes she describes show a woeful lack of balance. Compassion is weak or absent. Nurturing is beaten brutally by guidance on steroids. And even guidance is done in a way that may neglect what we call moral internalization — the vital ability of children to govern their lives by their own mature, internal standards.

The Foundation: Compassion

The foundation for balanced parenting is compassion. If we want to help children, we must pay attention to their needs and preferences. Without understanding and compassion, parents may control their child, but is that really the goal?

 If a parent is determined to make a concert pianist out of a child at all costs, both parent and child may pay a terrible price. We may compromise our relationships with our children and tromp on their sense of self while ultimately failing to get the outcome we seek. Chua learns some part of this lesson with her second daughter, Lulu, who is not willing to be a pianist. In some ways this is like trying to turn a tomato plant into an apple tree. It is better to help a tomato plant be a flourishing tomato plant than try to harvest apples from it.

Understanding their children's world, including developmental stages, personal preferences, life pressures, etc., enables parents to make sensible parenting decisions. No parenting theories or skills will compensate for lacking the right heart towards our children.

Vital Component: Nurturing

Research findings are unequivocal: Nothing matters as much in raising good children as nurturing. Our primary job as parents is helping our children feel valued and loved. This is more challenging than it sounds. Most children don’t want to be loved the way we like to love. If we are to be effective nurturers, we must make thousands of adjustments in order to effectively convey our love and support to our children.

Tiger Mothers can drive children toward high achievement, but that success comes at a real cost. It is not drive but nurturing that helps children develop into loving human beings. Do we really want children who win state competitions but are difficult or impossible to live with?

Key Companion: Guidance

The ultimate goal for most American parents who value autonomy and creativity is to have children make good decisions because of the moral sense that has developed inside of them. This sense can only develop through the process of making thousands of age-appropriate decisions and then experiencing the consequences of those decisions. This requires parental guidance, which is an essential companion to nurturing.

This is one of the places where being a Tiger Mom is especially destructive. When mom’s guiding voice is too loud in children’s ears, the children do not learn to listen to their quiet inner voices that encourage compassion and kindness. The children become robots unless our parenting helps them discover and respond to their inner voices.

My wife, Nancy, and I have a family motto: It’s our job to help our children get what they want—in a way that we feel good about. It is our job both to facilitate their growth and set appropriate limits.

We want to facilitate learning experiences, decision-making, and opportunities for growth for our children. Yet we don’t invite our children make decisions in a vacuum. We provide options. We set limits. As they develop, we provide more options and more freedoms.

It's important for parents to encourage children to listen to their own inner voices of compassion. When a child has treated another child harshly, the wise parent does not jump in with harshness to cure harshness. The wise parent invites the offending child to understand how his or her behavior impacted the other child. The objective here is not to create guilt but to activate empathy.

That capacity to consider the well-being of others is cultivated by capable parents through both example and teaching. For example, a parent may cultivate empathy by responding to problem behavior in sensitive ways: “I can see that you really wanted that toy. How do you think Hannah felt when you grabbed it from her?”

Good Parenting Takes Real Effort

Raising children is complicated! It should not surprise us that the most important work we will ever do requires our very best effort. It will stretch us and occasionally mystify us. We should expect that we will need sensible guidance along the way.

There are some advantages to Tiger Mothering (and Fathering). A strong insistence on excellence can indeed cultivate exceptional performance. But children do not thrive on tiger’s milk alone; they need a complete diet of compassion, nurturing and guidance.

H. Wallace Goddard is Professor of Family Life at the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service, If you would like free resources for parenting, you are invited to sign up for Navigating Life’s Journey, a weekly email series of research based ideas for good parenting, at ARFamilies.org.