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Sign up with Google Sign up with FacebookQ: Do Chinese school kids have social lives at all here?
I know it sounds like an obvious NO, but I'm just wondering if some kids do normal kid things like hang out on the weekend, go to the cinema together, play ball in the park...you know. Most of my students tell me they play computers games whenever they get a 5 minute break from their homework, and I'm sure that's something that many of you heard. My question is - have you come across any kids that have anything equating to what we would consider a "normal" social life?
10 years 44 weeks ago in Family & Kids - China
No. I have a student whose every minute of every day of every week of every month of every year is programmed by his father and uncle. Most kids that I have taught or known or seen have their lives filled with their parents' vicarious desires, dreams and unfulfilled wishes. Kids should allowed to just be kids.
It continues for many after the school age. It's a double whammy on loss of freedom, because the parents are also trapped in this. They need to spend all their time telling their children what to do.
poor kids! In my memory, I start to learn pencil sketch when I was very young. But, I cannot create any work . It does not become the way to survive when I grow up. Parents just wanted me to have one more skill. I dont have time play in the park with peers. I think most of them did.
This is China‘s current situation. Parents dont want their kind loose at the starting line.
I don't know any children with a social or recreational life. Everything is lessons and study. I know a few who hate playing piano because they were forced to play when they were younger. Everything is lessons.
OP mentioned they play video games during their five minute breaks. That's my experience; that is their break. That and walking to the gate where their parents will pick them up and take them to more lessons or home to study.
A Saturday afternoon to do nothing? Watch a movie? Chat endlessly with friends? Play basketball till your feet hurt? Forget it. It's study or more lessons.
Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Enter the English teacher!!! Tadaaaa!! Our popularity is due not only to the fact that we look different but we also behave differently with kids. That is, we know how to play with them. Saturday, June 1st, is Children's Day. I have been asked, as the local foreign teacher, to set up some ball games for the kids and basically play with them for 2 hours in the local park. That park will, for the first time since I've been here, have more kids in it for those 2 hours than it had or will have in it's many years of existence. I have never seen kids playing in the park there. Old guys with bird cages, old men and women doing some sword fighting, old folk dancing and going for walks, old guys with nunchukkas, old guys with kites, old guys with tops on string between two sticks but alas.....no kids.
In answer to your question - no, I have not come across any kids that have what we consider to be a normal social life!
More than likely no. I tutored one that said his best memories were of him and his friends sneaking away only to have gotten caught. I guess it was a school trip. Doesn't seem that fun to me!
I was trying to teach him about curfews and that his teachers were trying to protect him and keep him safe. He didn't understand the whole thing about curfews so he was grinning from ear to ear(!!