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Author: Ding Yang

This is the “Education Weekly Insights” column of Tencent News Education Channel. Each issue will analyze and comment on hot topics in education, policy directions or personal opinions in the past week.

Recently, a new artificial buzzword "Lanweiwa" has attracted a lot of attention. What does it mean? The author quotes the relevant introduction: "It refers to children who study hard for more than ten years, become unemployed upon graduation, know nothing, achieve nothing, and their lives start to go wrong... As the developers of "Lanweiwa", parents are also powerless and can only watch their hard work go to waste."

Doesn’t it sound heartbreaking?

What is even more heartbreaking is that if you accept this concept, you may have to admit that as the "chicken baby" trend has gone through more than a decade, due to the limited number of places defined as "successful", the "unfinished babies" have reached the time when they are ready to die in large numbers.

Moreover, this kind of thing is often difficult to avoid. For example, some children become less interested in learning the more they are motivated, and even suffer from depression. For example, some children lack talent in certain tracks, and no matter how hard they work, they can hardly get good results, and their childhood, which should be happy, is filled with frustration.

Recently, the education self-media “Bund Education” introduced a study on American families[1], which may further make Chinese parents anxious. This study is aimed at those families in the United States that have experienced “consumption downgrades”, that is, how middle-class dual-income families cope with their children’s education expenses after one of them loses his or her job. The study found that most American dual-income families will still try their best to maintain a high level of spending on their children’s education even if one of them loses his or her job. In other words, “consumption can be downgraded, but raising children should not be left unfinished.”

One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that in recent years, the United States has seen a trend of "risk privatization," which means that if children from ordinary families do not become successful in the future, the risk of maintaining their lives will increase. Although the situation in China and the United States is different, this risk is of reference significance to a certain extent. If the family's income situation changes, the possibility that the family will have to cut other expenses to maintain the child's education expenses is increasing.

The question here is, is the concept of "bad-tail baby" really valid? Is it really that scary?

In many cases, parents are overly worried. The article in "The Bund Education" mentioned that "more and more studies have shown that ineffective internal competition is useless." A study led by Nobel Prize winner in Economics Angrist in the United States found that when students from a super elite high school and an ordinary high school with huge differences in scores at the time of admission began to prepare for college after three years of study, the researchers examined their PSAT, SAT, AP test scores... The results showed that there was no significant difference in the students' grades. Other studies have shown that "there is not much difference in the ability to earn money after graduation between Ivy League students and students who almost didn't get into the Ivy League."

Although the situation in China is different from that in the United States, there are similar studies because some essential reasons are the same:Learning is a long-distance race, and so is life. Going to a prestigious school, which is an artificial definition of "success", does not necessarily mean that you will win the long-distance race. On the other hand, it is not the way for responsible parents to regard their children as "unfinished children" because of some temporary and artificial failures.

In recent years, we have seen many parents who refuse to "push their children to grow up quickly" and advocate for their children to grow up naturally. As long as they maintain this mentality for a long time, there will naturally be no "unfinished children".

Tencent News Education’s “Mom’s Truth” column recently introduced a mother of an elementary school student in Haidian, a “holy land for raising children”, who decided to “slow down parenting”[2]. Her ideas are worth considering:

"On weekends, we usually take a whole day to take him out to play, visit parks, catch small fish and frogs, watch big ducks and little ducks swim around, and go to Beiwu to catch fireflies. We go to the mall, read books with him at home, or hang out with friends. He can be in a daze, do nothing, explore freely, or even do some damage. Children need to have enough free time at their disposal."

This mother is not completely preventing her child from receiving advanced education, but rather she is capturing her child’s characteristics and what he or she likes, and then providing the resources he or she needs. This is a very good attitude.

To be such a parent, you need some leeway and some vision. More importantly, the whole society needs to advocate this mentality, so that more and more parents will realize that "ineffective involution" is unnecessary. From the perspective of population structure, it will probably be after 2036 that the supply and demand situation of higher education students will change significantly - from obvious oversupply to insufficient supply. This means that concepts such as "chicken baby" and "involution" will probably dominate for another ten years. During this period of time, the education sector and the whole society need to try their best to make parents realize that it is meaningless to "chicken baby" and "volume" excessively.

And rejecting the bad man-made concept of "unfinished baby" is a good approach.

Further reading:

[1]

[2]