Liu Xiuying

Parents should live their own lives

A recent survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences shows that nowadays the Chinese nation as a whole sees expectations for children's development as the top motivation in life. Given Chinese tradition and culture, such a choice is reasonable, as children hold the promise for a family's future. Besides, parental expectations for their children's development can prompt Chinese families to value children's growth and education, which is conducive to social development.

However, if adults pin all their hopes on the next generation and simply interpret their own meaning of life as the upbringing of the next generation, they will compromise their own self-realization and live their lives vicariously through the next generation.

If that is the case two problems will arise.

The first is the waste of human resources. Many parents want to pour most of their energy into nurturing their children, as children mean everything to them. While such an approach seems to convey unselfish parental love, analyzed in a deeper sense, it implies a shirking of their responsibilities.

Quite a number of parents insist that the reason for their failure to accomplish something significant in their career is that they have sacrificed so much to parenting.

No wonder today we see lots of parents, when they are supposed to be learning themselves, glue their eyes on the study of their children. Although attaching importance to family education, they are focusing on only children's education and ignore the fact that they should be improving themselves.

Apart from the stages of pre-adulthood and retirement, people have on average 40 years of working. The parental role is certainly important but it is not the only role people should play. They are also members of society and have a social contribution to make.

An over-emphasis on parenting means people will compromise their own career development and actually give up their chances for self-realization, resulting in a huge waste of human resources.

The other problem that arises is the heavy pressure the younger generation has to endure thanks to parental expectations.

Many parents who feel they have sacrificed their own possibilities and potential take it for granted that they can harvest whatever they have given up from the next generation.

As a result, children lead a dual life - the life of their own and the life of their parents. To some extent, education per se is a kind of parental input, and it is parental nature to ask for returns from the offspring, though in different forms and to varying degrees.

Chinese parents, especially those from the less developed regions used to ask for their children economic returns, especially when they were getting old. Nowadays, many parents also want their children to lead a decent life to fulfill something that they failed to attain and so bestow social status and make them feel proud.

To harvest that kind of return in the future, parents are endlessly infringing upon children's privacy, arranging and overseeing the daily schedule of their children, ready to correct any misbehavior and clear any stumbling blocks to children's academic development.

It is thus easy to imagine the backbreaking pressure children are bearing. A college student, Yao Jiaxin, was convicted of murdering a cyclist he knocked down to prevent her from reporting the accident. As a grown-up, Yao cannot shirk his legal responsibility, but his recollection of his childhood is worth deeper reflection.

Yao recalled his growth as nothing more than study and playing the piano since the age of 4. "I was locked up in the basement several times because I didn't do well in my studies," he said, "the nonstop piano practice almost stripped me of my hopes for life and even drive me to consider suicide."

"Let it go" is a compulsory parenting course. From infancy to school, to marriage, every stage of growth for children indicates a few more steps away from their parents and a few more steps closer to maturity, independence, and a life of their own.

Parents should value their own life and self-realization as much as their children's.

The author is a researcher and director of Family Research Institute under the China Youth and Children Studies Center.

(China Daily 05/30/2011 page9)