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Grandparents take kids to class in summer heat
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There are not too many people outside at midday in the scorching heat in Hangzhou. But grandmother Yu Shuiying often can be seen hurrying by, holding her grandson’s hand, under the protection of parasol, sun hat and wet towel.
The senior citizen and the child are heading to a private English school, which has enrolled hundreds of students during the summer vacation.
But it is the hottest summer in more than 60 years in Hangzhou, with the high hitting 40 degrees Celsius for days at a time.
That does not mean kids get to stay out of the heat, because many Chinese parents enroll their children in training classes. And since most parents need to work, the grandparents take on the responsibility for getting their grandchildren to and from classes.
This is grandmother Yu’s daily schedule for the summer: Get up at 6:30am; prepare breakfast for the family; leave home at 7:20am; be at the school by 8am for her grandchild’s Chinese writing and math classes.
At 11:30am she brings the child home for lunch; at 1pm, the hot part of the day, grandmother and the child are out again, heading to English class at another school.
“I have to do it,” Yu says. “I have to get him occupied with some studies, otherwise he would only play iPad and watch TV at home.”
At least she’s not alone — Hangzhou’s largest child-training institute, Hangzhou Youth and Children’s Palace, provides about 20 subjects during vacation, from art and music to sports and science.
There are classes in each subject at different times of day, and the most popular course — the ancient Chinese board game “go” — is taught at 17 different times a week. Each class has an average of 20 students.
Every day, hundreds of grandparents cluster near classrooms — on the stairs, under large trees or anywhere there is shade.
They are armed with fans, wet towels, fruits and other snacks for their grandchildren, as well as newspapers and books to kill time. Sometimes they chit-chat about which teachers and schools are good, or they watch their kids’ performance in class through windows.
They get busy when there is a break in classes, giving their grandchildren food and drink, fanning them and exhorting them to “listen to teachers’ words during class.”
“We don’t expect the kid to learn a lot, but we cannot let her fall behind others,” says Chen Ping, 60. “My toil does not matter.”
Her peers agree. Chen, a 65-year-old grandfather, takes his grandson to four training classes at four different locations every day. Is the weather too hot? Does he get tired? He always gives the same answer, “It just does not matter.”
The ages of children in training classes vary, and some are of pre-kindergarten age. “We want the child to experience what a class is like,” says a grandmother of a four-year-old girl, who is enrolled in music class.
However, experts worry that sometimes parents use classes as a substitute for their responsibility of communicating with their children.
“Parents do not meet and talk much with children even when they are on vacation, which is not right,” says Song Jiannan, director of 12355 hotline for children and teenagers.
“Decreasing the amount of time for communicating feelings between parents and children will lead to kids’ indifference as well as their lack of sociability,” he says, suggesting parents should at least spend the weekends with their children.
Another concern is the solicitousness of the grandparents. “We find that many grandparents do too much work for their children, like feeding them and carrying bags for them. It misleads children, who may get the idea that, ‘I only need to study and eat,’ and makes them selfish,” Song says.
Plus, not many people in their 60s and 70s in China were well-educated because they were born in times of turbulence, so their communication skills are simple, Song says.
He quotes a study saying that many grandparents speaking to their grandchildren don’t go too far beyond repeating words like “eat more,” “walk slowly,” or “listen to your teachers.”
“A simple language environment weakens children’s language learning ability,” he says.
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