3/11/23 - She can stand by her principles without having to necessarily bring pain and suffering to her nephew.
The newly elected officials of the State Council are sworn in at the National People’s Congress. The comments are full of celebrations and hopes for a stronger, better China.
Mother asks for advice on how to stop her son’s classmate from coming over to her house. Her son is in fifth grade. He has a classmate whose mom owns a nail salon near OP’s house, so the classmate comes over often. As soon as the classmate comes over, he and OP’s son go into his room, close the door, and all she can hear is they’re talking in there. She doesn’t mind her son having friends, but every time, this means that her plans for her son’s studying, reading, and exercise schedule are all messed up. She’s asked her son to only let his classmate come over on Fridays, but that doesn’t work either. Because the classmate comes over around 7:30pm and stays until 10pm. Although its Friday, so the daily load is lighter, he’s still missing his 8:30pm exercise, 9:00pm before bed reading, and 9:30pm bedtime. For example, today, it’s almost 11pm, and the classmate is still not leaving, and she’s too shy to kick him out. She complains that what kind of irresponsible mother lets her child stay over at someone else’s place ’til this late?
Comments agree that she’s just being used as free childcare and suggests that she can just insist on her son sticking to his usual schedule, and after he goes to bed, the classmate can just play on his phone on the couch quietly until it’s time to go.
A lady is exposing a buffet for not letting her take leftovers home. She checked into a hotel in Hangzhou on a business trip. While she is eating free breakfast, she gets a call from a customer and needs to meet with him right away, but she wasn’t done eating yet. So to avoid running off hungry, she was going to pack some food to take with her. The employees wouldn’t and an argument broke out.
She claims that she’s a customer of the hotel, she has a right to the free breakfast buffet, there’s no reason to short her on her food. Hotel employees say that buffets never let you pack up extra food, that’s just industry standard. You can eat as much as you want, but you can’t start taking things away in bags.
She left at the time because she was in a hurry, but she returned afterwards with journalists to expose the hotel. The hotel chef tells the journalists that she was packing up seven or eight buns, way more food than she can eat by herself. But the manager still apologised on behalf of his staff and offered her monetary compensation.
Comments say that they’ve never had a problem taking a single bun or a little pack of yogurt off of a buffet line on their way out. She clearly way overdid it. They’d had an incident where a woman borrowed the bathroom at their workplace and they caught her stealing toilet paper while she was in there. They said that the toilet paper is free to use, but you can’t take it with you, and the woman erupted in embarrassed anger and got into a huge argument. And now people are no longer allowed to borrow their bathroom anymore.
Someone posts saying that it’s better to study at school than at home, because she’d just did the calculations that she spends 4-5 hours a day on housework. She hadn’t left her house in a month. She does housework during the day and studies at night. And yet, her parents think that she’s just lounging around all day, lazy as fuck, never studies. But she feels she’s super busy. If she was at school, she can just check herself into the library at 7am and study until 10pm at night. But not only is there not any entertainment options at home, but she’s only getting 3 hours a day for studying.
If she wants to go out and relax for a bit, her parents immediately yell at her for not properly preparing for her exams.
A blogger responds to this post saying that it’s mostly only girls that are distracted by housework while preparing for exams at home. No one asks boys to study and also cook three meals a day and keep the floors clean.
Comments are all wondering what kind of food one needs to make to spend 4-5 hours a day on it.
Someone asks for advice on which guy they should date. One is a PhD from Xi’an Jiaotong (Chinese ivy league equivalent), born 1991, 172cm, roughly 65kg, makes little over 10K a month. He is currently working as a high school teacher. The school provided housing subsidies, so he owns a house and a car. His family is from rural village, his mom works in a restaurant, and his dad works on a production line out of state. He has an older sister who is married. He has a project that needs to final approval on his hands. Once it gets approved, he’ll get another 300K. He’s not very generous though. They’ve went out twice and he paid both times, but both times it was under 120 RMB.
The other guy works in government, born 1993, working in market regulation. 8K a month, no house, no car, has a younger sister, 180+cm. His dad also works in city government, his mom runs a business. Because his dad doesn’t care about family much, they only have an old house given by his work place. As a colleague, she got along really well with him, felt like he was a very caring and sweet guy. But he weighs over 220 pounds, though he is working on losing weight.
She is born 1993, 170cm, 53kg, Bachelor’s degree, has a house in a small city, has a younger brother, works in government as a long-term hire, a little over 2K a month. Owns a car and a small amount of savings.
Comments are reassuring her that she’s spending entirely too much energy on a pointless problem, because neither man will want her.
A long post on childcare advice. OP says that her nephew has been living with her from birth to 3-years-old. One time, they went to the mall together and came across an ice cream store.
Her nephew has a sensitive stomach. As soon as he eats anything cold, he’ll throw up, get diarrhoea, and get a fever, so she usually never lets him have anything cold. But that day, he insisted on getting an ice cream.
Usually, she tells him, “But if you eat ice cream, you’ll have to go to the hospital and get stuck with a needle,” and he’ll give up. But that day, for some reason, he was adamant. He cried. He wailed. He screamed like he was going to explode.
She squatted in the fire escape with him as he cried his little heart out, and she held him and wiped up his tears with an occasional, “Let me get that snot and you can keep crying,” and petted his back.
Once his crying had calmed down a little, she said, “Did all that crying tire you out?”
He nodded.
“Yeah, crying is super hard work. If I take you to get a shot, can you promise not to cry?”
“I don’t wanna get a shot! Wahhhhh!”
“But if you have to eat ice cream, then you have to get a shot. Do you still want ice cream?”
“I want ice cream!” he insisted.
“But then you have to cry like this again at the hospital. That’d be even more exhausting. Can you really do it?”
He pauses, thinking about it, and quietly said, “I probably can’t.”
She said, “Sometimes I want ice cream too, but I can’t have it. I’ve got a good solution, do you wanna hear me out?”
He nodded, “Yeah.”
“Ice cream is too cold. If you eat it, you’ll get sick, then you’ll need to get a shot, so you’ll have to cry, and that’s just too tiring. How about we go buy an ice cream cone? It’s also tasty, and you don’t have to get a shot. How about it?”
He didn’t say anything but he pouted.
“If you don’t agree, you can cry for a little bit longer. I’ll stay with you. Once you’re done crying, we can go get an ice cream cone. I want one.”
He stood there for a moment, and then suddenly said, “I’m done crying.”
She took him back into the mall to the ice cream place and ask him, “Do you want a cone?”
He says, “No, I want ice cream!” He’s about to start crying again.
She bought a cone for herself and sat down in the shop, holding him in her lab as she ate. “Wow! So tasty! It’s sweet and crunchy! Look, what a big cone! It’s round at the top and pointy at the bottom.”
He’s staring at her, so she says, “Do you want my pointy end? That’s the best bite. I only share it with my best friend. Do you want my pointy cone bit?”
He said, “Yeah, I want the pointy end.”
She let him eat the pointy end and ask, “Is it tasty?”
“Yeah.”
“Does it taste like eggs?”
“It’s better than eggs.”
“Is it better than seaweed?”
“It’s better than seaweed.”
“Is it crunchy?”
“It’s crunchy.”
“Do you want a whole cone to yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll buy you one, and after you’re done, we’ll go to the grocery store and get some milk for you, okay?”
“Okay.”
And he ate another cone by himself happily and got milk with her at the store.
While he’s drinking the milk at home, she said, “Ice cream is made from milk, and you ate a cone today, so in a way, you did eat ice cream today! And you don’t have to go to the hospital. Isn’t that great?”
He nodded.
“Next time you want ice cream but you don’t want to get a shot, we can go buy a cone and drink some milk again, right? Next time, I can even get you strawberry-flavoured milk.”
He happily agreed.
“When you grow up, you’ll get stronger, and you won’t have to get a shot to eat ice cream anymore. Then we can have ice cream together. How about it?”
Once again, he happily agreed.
While she had her nephew, she had made several thick journals documenting her life with him. There were a lot of incidents like this in her diary and many, many conversations like above.
She was only in her early twenties then, had no clue how to raise a child. Even though she had just started working as a teacher, she didn’t really know what she was doing. She raised her nephew by instinct alone.
Her nephew started talking early. He could say “you” and “me” at 10 months old. At his check up, even the doctor was shocked. This is probably because she talked to him a lot. The way she talked to him was super simple, she just made conversation as though he was an adult, whether he could understand her or not. She’s almost never used baby talk with him, and has never lied to him.
One day, he insisted on buying an extension cord at the store, and she told him, “You can buy this, but you can’t play with it once we get home. This isn’t a toy, this is to charge electricity. That dangerous little square we’re not allowed to play with on the wall? We plug this into that and electricity will flow through it, and that way, we can plug electronics into this and use it. Like your nightlight, it gets charged by this. That’s how it shines.” Then she asked him, “Do you want to buy this so we can charge stuff at home, or do you want a toy?”
To her delight, he instantly said, “I want a toy.”
In the end, she bought him a 5 dollar toy at the store, and he left satisfied. At home, she showed him the extension cord they already had, and first unplugged his nightlight and asked him to turn it on. Then they plugged it in, and had him turn his nightlight on and off. He seemed to slowly grasp what an extension cord was.
That’s her general attitude whenever he wants something unreasonable: don’t tell him off, don’t get stressed out, give comfort. She never tells him, “You can’t have that!” She would never tell him, “Stop crying!” If he starts tantrumming in public, she’ll pick him up and take him somewhere with no people around. She’ll tell him that it was a little crowded back there, she doesn’t want to interrupt other people, and it’s kind of embarrassing to cry in front of people, yeah? So let’s cry here.
She is accepting his emotions. That’s the first step with any problem from a child—to accept their feelings and give them companionship and comfort. She’d never tell her nephew to not cry because crying is okay. If you can’t get something you love or make something you want happen, it’s perfectly natural to be upset about it.
In this process, you are letting a child know that you care about his feelings, you care about him, and you are sharing in his upsetness. For example, by petting his back, and wiping his tears and snot.
In this comfort, first, his negative emotions are getting released, and second, you are distracting him with all your little movements. One time, while she was wiping up her nephew’s nose, for example, she said, “Wow, you’re crying so hard, your nose is bright red. Hmm, who has a red nose again?”
And her nephew instantly said, “Rudolph!”
And that was the distraction he needed to slowly calm down. And you need calm emotions if you’re going to solve problems.
Then, she’ll very sincerely explain why she can’t fulfil his demands. Personally, if he presents a good argument, she’s open to being convinced. This is the basis of equal communication. And if she really can’t do what he wants, she offers a compromise. That helps resolve some of his disappointment.
Her nephew is now a grown man, living overseas. He often tells his mother, “Aunty is a super nice person. She’s really calm.” Honestly, she just wants to be calm when she’s dealing with a little kid. Even at her young age, she instinctively understood that there’s no point in seriously “fighting” with a child. Although she has bottom lines that she absolutely stands by, she can stand by her principles without having to necessarily bring pain and suffering to her nephew. She cares about his feelings. She cares about him.
Later on, she learned that this is called, “gentle insistence.”
She advocates that people shouldn’t underestimate the power of being calm—to communicate calmly and to problem-solve calmly. Eventually, your child will grow up to be a calm person too. And when he encounters other problems in life, he will not lose control so quick and break down.
Though, of course, every child is different and every child needs to be raised in their own way. The best childrearing techniques are the ones that work for your child.
In the end, she wishes all the kiddos in the world can grow up happily and healthily in a loving environment.
Comments say, “Yeah, can’t do it. Only beatings work for my daughter.”