The “E.M.B.A.” program that kicks off on a Sunday morning in the heart of Shanghai’s financial district is much like any other curriculum designed to train the future business leaders of China. “We give students the tools they need to build up their confidence,” says Vivian Liu, general manager of the popular two-year-old program, which has seen 1,500 participants pass through its doors. But the difference between Liu’s course and others is this: when the demands of subjects like economics or communications get too taxing, her students might just respond by having a good cry and asking for their mommies. How so? They’re children. The e in this E.M.B.A. program stands not for executive but early, and the oldest student in the class is age 6. Civil servant He Jiachen sends his 3-year-old, He Xingzhen, to the E.M.B.A. course while he and his wife pursue their own adult M.B.A.s. “My son is developing well,” he says. “In class, he isn’t afraid of giving speeches, and he likes to be a team leader in group activities.”
High expectations for children are nothing new in China, where the need to master the thousands of characters necessary for basic literacy—coupled with the educational legacy of Confucius—has turned many an inquisitive, bright-eyed student into a sullen rote learner. But the pressure on even the youngest children is intensifying as their parents embrace the notion that education is a primary driver of the kind of upward mobility that was previously unthinkable in China. Eager to provide their kids with a head start, Chinese parents are signing them up for everything from weekend prep courses for under-sixes to boarding schools for toddlers. And we mean toddlers: for $700 a month parents can send children as young as 3 years old to the Hualan International Village Kindergarten in the port city of Tianjin, where they live full-time in landscaped villas outfitted with 42-inch plasma TVs and pianos.
But given that roughly 60% of Chinese families in major cities now spend one-third of their income on children’s education, parents are expecting results, not just luxurious surroundings. Li Hongbin’s 5-year-old daughter, Xu Yunqiao, attends a private nursery school in Beijing, where she studies from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week. It isn’t enough. Concerned that their children weren’t being prepared for the admissions tests at the city’s better elementary schools, Li and other parents recently campaigned for play times to be trimmed to make way for more study—and got their wish. Li also started sending her daughter to after-school and weekend classes in reading, math and music. A generation ago, few Chinese 6-year-olds knew how to read or do basic arithmetic. Today, top primary schools expect matriculating students to know at least 1,000 characters and their multiplication tables. Her daughter “has 100 math problems to do a week,” marvels Li. “She can do rapid calculations in her head.” But she worries that these skills may come at an emotional cost. “It’s really terrifying,” Li says, of Yunqiao’s packed schedule. “We don’t know if this makes sense, but we have no choice.”
In China, the fact that most parents have only one child helps to explain the extraordinarily acute pressure they feel to produce a superkid—and the resulting proliferation of books with titles like Prodigy Babies and 60 Ways to Ensure Success for Your Gifted Child. But parents across Asia are wrestling with the same conundrum. They’re desperate for their children to do well in life and know that relentlessly hard work and a top-notch education can raise the odds of success. Yet many of them also quietly fear the impact of the ferocious pressure imposed on their children in service of these aspirations—how could they not, when tales of emotionally broken prepubescents and student suicides are a media clich? But however ambivalent they may feel, most parents conclude that the goals are worth the risks. Indeed, the sight of a child being driven to study harder—by a frowning teacher, bullying father or beseeching mother—is a tableau as archetypal to the region as planting rice. Parenting techniques that prioritize the nurturing of a child’s self-esteem are not widely espoused. There are no Oprahs or Dr. Phils to genially wag a finger at the dads who don’t hug their kids or the mothers who berate them for bringing home anything less than straight A’s. Instead, many Asian parents have been free to neuroticize their offspring in ways that would make an entire faculty of child psychologists blanch. Why has this state of affairs persisted?
One answer is the region’s historical instability. The Asian drive for advancement has always been sharpened by traumatic and seemingly haphazard events. There’s a revolution, flood, famine, dictatorship, evacuation, massacre or coup within the memory of almost every Asian. Even if an entire country cleans the mud of the collective farm from between its toes and marches towards a glittering future of service-sector jobs and flat-screen TVs in every home, it only takes a currency crisis or a strange pox like SARS to shake collective confidence to the core. And when the world is looked at this way, the notion of a child’s school years as a halcyon time of finger painting and end-of-term musicals can seem nothing short of scandalous.
Such attitudes towards children are reinforced by Asia’s perennial concerns over familial honor and personal face. “Many parents want to show off their children,” says Dr. Aruna Broota, a clinical psychologist at the University of Delhi who studies the effects of academic pressure on local kids. “They want to say, ‘My son is the best performer in his class’ or ‘he will go to Harvard.’ The child understands that what’s important is not his education but that he is a status symbol for his parents.”
