BEIJING All work and little play is the norm for most children in China, where stiff competition for future jobs and ambitious parents mean long hours in the company of school books, not friends.
China’s one-child policy has contributed to putting enormous pressure on children to succeed, and there is no shortage of wealthy Beijing parents these days willing to stump tens of thousands of yuan for elite educational institutions to give their offspring an academic head-start.
“Children have so much pressure to do well. There is a Chinese idiom: ‘Every parent wants their boy to be a dragon and daughter to be a phoenix’,” said Li Hongyan, who runs the $9,960 a year MEG Bilingual International kindergarten.
But between maths, language and other so-called enrichment classes, there is often little time for play, which children’s rights groups say is essential for healthy development.
Last Friday marked Universal Children’s Day, which aims to promote the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, established 20 years ago to protect the fundamental rights of all children - including the right to play.
“This is what we usually call the ‘forgotten right,’ because of course adults think the right to play is perhaps a luxury. They don’t realise that this is actually a necessity,” said Kirsten Di Martino, Chief of Child Protection at UNICEF China.
Through play, children learn how to socialise, communicate and share as well as solve conflicts - skills that can’t be taught from a book, she said.
But for parents who pour all their hopes and ambitions into just one son or daughter, and know they will face a highly competitive society, those skills may be too abstract.
Introduced in the late 1970s to ease strain on the country’s limited resources, the one-child policy forbids most urbanites from having two children, although there is more leeway for ethnic minorities and rural parents whose first child is a girl.
In the Experimental Class for the Gifted and Talented Children at Beijing’s No. 8 High School, which churns out “geniuses,” students are used to a seven-day school week.
Reuters
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