To say who is busiest at the moment, I am afraid that no one will compete with the main force of the "chicken baby" cause for the first place.
The kids who rush to "work" every weekend and holidays are too busy. However, children's interest classes are now more and more varied, in addition to the common piano, dance, painting, but also chess, football and even horsemanship, skating, fencing, ice hockey and so on.
Running on the road with their children are the parents represented by "Haidian mothers". It is worth noting that many of the parents in the "chicken baby" business are middle-class with higher education.
In the book "One Excitement to the End: Raising Children in a Competitive Environment", we find that the "chicken baby" thing did not only happen around us, but also in the United States, which is shrouded in the halo of "quality education", children are also facing the fate of being "chicken dolls".
The author of this book is American sociologist and educational research scholar Hillary Friedman, who takes chess, dance and soccer, three children's competitive extracurricular activities, as examples, and systematically analyzes the socio-historical background, formation causes and operating mechanism of the "chicken baby" phenomenon, integrating data from field observation, adult interviews and children's interviews.
The book says that the double demographic pressure formed by the superposition of the "baby boom" generation and their children's "echo tide" generation is the source of the "chicken boom".
For baby boomers, the environment of more monks and less porridge has long made them see life as a series of competitions. In particular, young parents who have received higher education and have entered the middle class not only foresee that society will be more fierce in the future, but also clearly realize that there is great uncertainty in the future competition.
Therefore, they will do whatever it takes to instill various elements of capital in their children. In addition to academics, they also try to cultivate children's temperament and character through various competitive extracurricular activities, and believe that this is an invisible asset that can benefit children for life, help children maintain their current status in the future, and strive to achieve class transition.
The skills parents want to improve their children through competitive extracurricular activities can be summarized in the following five areas:
(1) internalize the importance of winning;
(2) Learn to get out of failure and win in the future;
(3) learn to complete tasks within a limited time;
(4) learn to succeed in a high-pressure environment;
(5) Be comfortable accepting the judgment of others in public.
Taken together, these five skills and experiences form the basis of what the book calls "competitive capital for childhood."
While no one knows exactly what "competitive capital for childhood" will make their child successful in the future, parents insist that the awards their children win at the event may give them an advantage when they go to school and help their children compete in the workplace in the future. No one would deny their child the chance to succeed, so no one would risk not allowing their child to participate in competitive activities.
For children, the initial desire to win may be essentially the expectation of a reward, but as they become more involved and older, the joy of participating in an activity and winning trophies will gradually become the core motivation to stick with an activity.
Listening to the different voices of parents and children, and understanding the rational mechanism behind the "chicken doll" phenomenon, we also understand why competitions and extracurricular interest classes fill the lives of young children, and why even busy parents are willing to invest a lot of time in "chicken dolls".
The book also reveals the vast industrial chain behind competitive extracurricular activities. We can see how teachers and coaches, training institutions, competition organizers, media, and many downstream businesses such as examination supplies and clothing spare no effort to take advantage of parents' "chicken baby" mentality and regulatory loopholes to maximize benefits.
Although this book is about parents and children in the United States, it is enough to serve as a reference for our current situation. In the face of the rise and fall of the "chicken baby" rivers and lakes, perhaps it can make parents who are deeply involved in parenting anxiety more calm and calm.