After the piano sales avalanche, I had an epiphany: why can't the road of middle-class families go on
Life is the best teacher.
No matter whether it is bumpy or flat, this exam can teach children to grow.
Author | ciyu
I don't know if you have noticed a piece of news.
Piano sales fell off a cliff, various piano stores went bankrupt, piano training was cold, and piano-related industries suffered a cold winter.
Even if most people pay attention to this news, they don't care or pay attention.
But I have mixed feelings in my heart.
I've seen the boom in piano learning and I've seen it fade now.
The history of learning the piano for my own baby is neither long nor short, about 5 years.
At that time, learning piano was one of the must-have projects for chicken babies.
Even if it costs a lot of money, nine out of ten parents can't help but follow suit, the rich make it lightly, and the poor smash the pot and sell iron.
As an ordinary person, I also stomped my feet and gritted my teeth to let my children learn the piano.
Five years later, I quit the Chicken Baby Contest.
Why?
Three words: can't be drawn.
With the principle of "if you want to do a good job, you must first sharpen your tools", I spent more than 70,000 yuan to buy a mid-to-high-end piano for my child under the recommendation of professionals.
This is just the beginning of burning money.
In order to hire a good piano teacher, it is common for a few hundred yuan for a lesson, but it costs tens of thousands of dollars a year.
In addition, in the name of accumulating experience and practicing typhoons, I participated in various competitions, and these registration fees, clothing fees, and travel expenses added up to a lot of money.
In addition, learning the piano is painful for the child, and it is also torture for me.
Boring practice, let the child reject from the bottom of his heart.
While I had to endure the dissonance of the piano, I had to suppress my anger and supervise the children's practice.
If the child can become a dragon and a phoenix in the end, it will not be in vain to spend a lot of money and energy.
The ideal is plump, and the reality is skinny.
After my baby learned the piano, at most, during the New Year's holidays, she won the joy of her relatives and friends.
Therefore, I was not surprised to see the news of the collapse of piano sales, which is a logical and inevitable result.
Middle-class parents are becoming more and more aware that "chicken baby" is a thing with a very high sunk cost.
The deputy secretary general of a musical instrument association once said: In 2023, those who learn the piano and those who buy the piano seem to have disappeared out of thin air overnight.
Those who learn the piano and those who buy the piano are not so much disappearing overnight, but rather the result of a deliberate weighing of the pros and cons of middle-class parents.
They found that the road of chicken babies is actually a dead end in the end.
Desperate for chicken babies, in fact, it is a very cost-effective thing.
Economists point out that if you calculate the "chicken baby cost" and "return on investment", you will find that this is most likely a money-losing transaction.
You bought a school district house at a sky-high price, and worked hard to support it for more than ten years, but after your children graduated, you couldn't even pass the resume.
You endlessly put on education, and the child only found a job for three or four thousand yuan when he came out.
This is the reason why the road of middle-class family chicken babies cannot go on, because you are likely to produce a mediocre child.
Some time ago, a post by a senior executive of a Hong Kong foreign bank in Shanghai caused discussion.
This executive pursued an elite education and spent tens of millions on three children, but none of them achieved "success" in the secular sense.
The eldest is 34 years old, and she was sent to a prestigious British university to study dentistry.
After graduating, she didn't want to do this business, so she switched to photography, and now she is interested in theology.
At present, I am squatting at home, unable to support myself, so I can only live with my parents.
The second child is 31 years old, and he also studied architecture at a prestigious university in the UK.
After graduation, he worked in the Hong Kong government, with a low salary, barely able to support himself.
At present, there is no independent housing, so I can only live with my parents and sister.
The youngest is 26 years old and was also sent to England to study.
Because he couldn't adapt to the environment, he was depressed after one semester and was advised to drop out by the school.
After returning to Hong Kong, he underwent more than a year of psychotherapy before he slowly came out.
At present, I am working as a pharmacist in Australia, and my income cannot support my life, so I need the support of my parents.
The education of these three children was completely thrown out of money.
They grew up in various training courses from an early age, and under the operation of their parents, they all went to university abroad.
But the result?
When they return from school, they have no ability to live independently, and they are still "gnawing at the old".
You see, the kids who win at the beginning don't necessarily win at the end.
For every family, raising a baby is an investment.
In this investment, high investment, low return, and if you are not careful, you will lose all your money, which is not something that any middle-class family can bear.
Chicken baby, it is indeed possible that the chicken will produce a phoenix that flies to the branches, and it is more likely that the chicken will produce a free-range chicken.
If it's the former, I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart.
If it's the latter, can you accept such a gap?
The 2022 National Blue Book on Depression shows:
More than 30% of the 95 million people with depression are under the age of 18, and more than 28.5 million children suffer from depression.
Fifty percent of depressed patients are school students, and 41% have been suspended due to depression.
Why have so many children's spirits been crushed in recent years?
Obviously, this is the result of the chicken baby competition.
The education of middle-class parents depends on two words, one is "smashing" and the other is "brushing".
Throwing money, smashing school district houses, smashing cram schools, and the money thrown out has become a five-finger mountain that weighs on the children.
Brush grades, piano, chess, calligraphy and painting, various examinations, and finally brush out a child who has lost his spirituality.
As Professor Xu Kaiwen, a psychologist, sighed: The babies you raised with anxiety have all been sent to me.
Writer Chen Yu once told the story of a girl.
This girl comes from a wealthy family and has always been a top student in elementary school.
When she was admitted to one of the top local junior high schools, the aura of a top student around her disappeared.
Her parents, who had always been open-minded, began to push her to study hard.
In addition to the homework assigned by the school, her parents also added extra weight, and she had to stay until two or three o'clock in the morning every day.
Under long-term stress, the girl suffered from severe anxiety and depression and was forced to leave school at home.
Even so, her mother was worried that she would delay her school classes and forced her to continue going to school.
On the second day of the new semester, the girl attempted suicide by climbing onto the windowsill of the classroom, but was fortunately saved by other parents.
This is another reason why the road of middle-class family chicken babies cannot go on, because you are likely to have an unhappy child.
Parents only want their children to be excellent, ignoring their feelings, and the seeds of tragedy are planted.
Whether it is Qingbei or a prestigious school, happiness is the most important thing.
If the chicken baby loses the light in the child's eyes in the end, why should we join in this kind of fun?
Seeing this, many people will ask:
If you can't win others, you can't roll an excellent child, so how do we raise children?
You think back to when you were a child.
You spread your legs and play crazy as soon as you have a vacation, and that doesn't stop you from going to college.
You've caught crickets and chased the sunset, so you've been touched by some texts, and you no longer feel like dry words.
Therefore, real education is to give freedom back to children and let them come into life.
When Yan Ning was a child, her parents took her into the fields and taught her to plant seedlings and observe the solar terms and seasons.
Accompany her to read books, read newspapers and listen to the radio, so that she can increase her knowledge and open up her knowledge.
Years later, Yan Ning was admitted to Tsinghua University and later became a tenured chair professor at Princeton University.
When Yan Ning was a student, there were no expensive research groups and various summer camps.
She uses knowledge and life as the key to open up a wide world.
For children, the real education is in life, not in the boring training courses and endless questions.
So, you don't have to spend money desperately, we actually have many ways to raise children.
Blogger @ Birthday Sister once shared her experience.
When she was a child, she often climbed up and down, lit firecrackers, dug pits and built houses, read all kinds of books, and played a lot of messy things, but her parents never interfered with her because they took up "studying" time.
Because she has accumulated a lot of experience in playing and experiencing, she can always think of the life scenes she has played and seen, and grasp the difficult and abstract concepts in books.
For example, various axioms of solid geometry, she immediately imagined a house made of mud to understand the points, lines and surfaces of this space.
When the teacher talked about functions, she thought of the different times caused by the different speeds of moving cars, and the different landing points caused by different forces of throwing paper airplanes.
Tao Xingzhi said: It is necessary to liberate children's minds, hands, feet, space, and time, so that they can fully get a free life and get a real education from a free life.
Life is the best teacher.
When Professor Chu Yin was asked what he thought of the current "chicken baby" phenomenon, he said:
In less than 10 years, the phenomenon of "chicken baby" will basically disappear.
He believes that chicken babies are actually a problematic phenomenon, and if everyone is eager to "succeed", it means that the environment is pathological.
To break the dilemma of chicken babies, there is not only the promotion of external forces, but also the awakening of parents.
Back to the beginning, why did piano sales collapse?
Because middle-class parents hit the south wall, they know that using money to lift their children is a hardship for themselves and their children.
Because middle-class parents have woken up, raising children doesn't have to stand on the pile of money.
Give it a thumbs up and encourage your friends.