2024 Homecoming Observation丨Young mothers go to school to raise children in Xiaohongshu, and the more they watch, the more anxious they become

During the Spring Festival, I went back to my hometown in the countryside and chatted with my cousin-in-law, who was in her early 30s, and the topic started with why she wanted to have two children—my cousin and sister-in-law had just given birth to their second child. In this regard, my cousin-in-law talked about her ambivalence, giving birth to a second child because she wanted to have a companion after the child, but after giving birth to a second child, the economic pressure will inevitably increase, so she must also go to the city to work. At present, the cousin is the main labor force in a small family, and the cousin-in-law can increase her salary income by going out to work, but the problem is that after she goes out, the two children can only be handed over to the grandparents, which is not good for the children, because it will make the children have "separation anxiety".

Here, the acquisition of economic income and the realization of the ideal of parenting seem to constitute a pair of irreconcilable contradictions. As an only daughter born in the late 90s of the last century, my parents handed me over to my grandparents to raise after weaning, and then went south to Guangzhou to work. On a larger scale, this pattern of parents going out to work and grandparents raising grandchildren is also very common among the author's peers, which is essentially a joint effort of the family to achieve the dual goals of economic and parenting.

The problem today is that it is becoming more and more difficult for families to achieve the goal of parenting, and young parents generally believe that "the elderly must not be able to bring their children well". At the same time, the middle-aged and elderly parents who want to share the burden for their children also have no choice but to say that they "have more than enough heart but not enough".

The reason behind this is that the threshold for family upbringing is getting higher and higher. In contrast, the author's growth is generally a relatively extensive parenting model, and family parenting is basically "raising" aspects such as "food, clothing, warmth, and less illness", so today's parenting is an all-round concern from "raising" to "teaching".

At the level of raising, from birth, it is necessary to follow a set of refined parenting methods. Just "eating" has a lot of "knowledge": what to eat at different times, how much to eat, and what way to process it, there is a set of accurate quantitative indicators. The author remembers listening to a post-80s mother talk about how to eat children when she was researching in rural Henan, and sighed at its complexity: from the birth of the child, we must pay attention to every stage, such as going for a physical examination when the child is full moon, supplementing vitamins and cod liver oil, supplementing egg yolk and rice flour supplementary food at the age of half a year, supplementing calcium and zinc at ten months, and starting to eat protein and staple foods after reaching the age of two......

In addition, at the level of teaching, the role of the family in education is becoming more and more prominent, unlike in the past, when the school was considered to be the main place of education and the teacher was responsible for education (and at the same time was given the authority of education). From primary school to junior high school, many schools have adopted online homework assignments, and this process requires a high degree of cooperation from parents, including but not limited to online checking, printing assignments, supervising completion, and uploading photos, so that daily homework is not only for children, but also for parents. In addition, a series of forms of "home-school co-education" represented by parent committees and parent-child activity organizations are also a manifestation of higher family participation.

In short, whether it is "raising" or "teaching", parenting is becoming more and more refined and scientific, and the threshold is becoming higher and higher. In the cases listed above, parents need to have at least a certain level of education to learn various scientific parenting knowledge, as well as be able to smoothly use mobile phones, tablets and other electronic products to cooperate with the normal teaching tasks.

Needless to say, these require the nurturing entity in the family to have the appropriate individual qualities and invest a lot of time, energy and money. As a result, the grandparents under extensive parenting are excluded, and the responsibility of parenting falls on the younger parents, especially the mothers.

As a result, the paradox of trying to obtain more economic accumulation in order to better assume the responsibility of childcare also makes it difficult to achieve the goal of childcare itself, and this paradox constitutes the real dilemma faced by the vast number of peasant families who have limited economic income and want to achieve social mobility through childcare.

The problem here is that when the threshold for parenting is getting higher and higher, and the success or failure of education is increasingly dependent on the efforts of a particular individual (often the mother) in the family, the lower-middle-class family seems to be doomed from the outset to fail from the outset compared to the upper-elite family, which is more financially, culturally, and time-rich, and this failure is often attributed to the family or even the individual.

It is worth noting that the reason behind the high threshold of parenting and the trend of familyization is, on the surface, it seems to be a subjective choice of the family, which is the embodiment of "paying more attention to children". However, it is important to note that subjective choices can be the result of "shaped choices" or "no choice". In this regard, the author believes that it can be discussed from three aspects.

One is the rise of scientism, in which modern science overwhelms traditional experience with an absolute attitude.

The so-called parenting knowledge is given a scientific character by various psychological and educational theories and their spokesmen, that is, experts, but this kind of science itself is developmental, and there may be different schools of thought within it without absolute truth, which will inevitably bring about the complexity of parenting knowledge. In this regard, my cousin-in-law expressed her confusion, she had read all kinds of parenting knowledge on Xiaohongshu before, but the more she read it, the more chaotic it became, and she felt that many of them were contradictory, and she didn't know what to do. During the chat, my cousin-in-law tried to seek the author's advice on her child-rearing behavior, and in her opinion, although I was not married, let alone had the slightest experience in child-rearing, my doctoral degree seemed to represent a generalized intellectual authority.

The second is the promotion of consumerism, the premise of consumption is to create demand, and the generation of demand lies in dissatisfaction and anxiety about the status quo.

Relevant data show that the current boom in the increasingly large maternal and child market and children's product market also lurks countless "IQ taxes", product marketing often uses untested words to catalyze the anxiety of young parents, and then harvest their money. An ironic statistic is that the results of the 2020 Children's Food Industry Research Report show that the main "additive-free" children's food is in fact a problem of additives.

The third is the change of the education system, the introduction of educational concepts represented by home-school co-education and the emergence of electronic education practices have also made parents actively or passively involved.

If the education system gains legitimacy by emphasizing individual efforts and carrying expectations of social mobility, then the familialization of educational responsibilities and the consequent low-level families are likely to be difficult to win in the competition of families, which is obviously not what we want. In the absence of a practical basis and a consideration of the consequences, so-called more modern and "advanced" educational concepts and methods may have unintended consequences that deviate from the educational goals.