Teacher’s Assistant posts a video complaining about a suffocating parent in his class. He teaches after-school English tutoring, with a English-speaking foreigner teaching and him assisting. The teacher is going over simple animal words, and the two year old that he’s teaching isn’t getting it. His mother is sitting in the back of the class, screaming, “Say it! Say it! What’s so hard about saying cat!? Stop wasting my money!” The TA tries to ask her to not rush the kid, give him some time, and the mother bites back, “It’s none of your fucking business, I say what I want to my own kid. With gentle directing from the teacher, the two-year-old was almost on the verge of saying cat, when this mother jumps up, runs up to him, and screams, “CAT! CAT! CAT! WHY CAN’T YOU FUCKING SAY CAT!?” And the whole room of kids and other parents and the teacher are all terrified of her. The TA asks her to leave because she’s being disruptive, so she said to her kid, “Either you say cat right now, or I am going and leaving you here.” And then she got up and left. Of course, the kid starts freaking out and crying. The TA is holding the kid and comforting him, when the mother comes back in and says, “Are you gonna say it?” The kid is crying mommy and tries to hold her, and she pushes him away and says, “You have to say cat if you want a hug.”
Finally, when they get to the actual part where the parents play with the kids, all the other kids are having a lot of fun. Her two-year-old is excited about playing too, but when he goes up, she sits there and refuses to move. She said, “He never fucking learns, all he does is play all day.” So the TA had to go up and act as the kid’s mother.
Of course, at the end of the day, the mother blamed everything on the teacher, that he was bad at teaching. Couldn’t teach her two-year-old how to speak English. Even though the program already told her that her kid is a bit too young for this class, she insisted on putting him in. The TA feels a lot of sympathy for this kid, because this is exactly how he was raised when he was young. His own mom tried teaching him pinyin when he was very young, and he didn’t get it, so she went to the balcony and threatened to jump off. He’s desperately crying on his knees, feeling like he’s so stupid, so stupid that his mother would rather die than put up with him.
An economic analyst writes 15 reasons Chinese women’s birth rates are declining:
3 years of Covid not only changed the way people live their lives, but the way they think about having kids. When people were protesting Covid lockdowns, a video leaked of two government workers in Beijing having an exchange of, “We just need to jail him for 3 days.” “Exactly—his son is the short hairs we’ve got him by. If he has a criminal record, his son won’t have a future anymore.” That line, “children are your short hairs” has chilled every parent’s heart for a long time.
In an agriculture society, children are additional labour and can help your productivity get higher. In modern society, children merely have emotional value, and is otherwise a huge economic drain. From a monetary point of view, they’re simply not worth it, and you can get just as much emotional value out of pets.
Young people nowadays simply have less reproductive ability. Marriage age for women has risen by 0.3 years, it’s common to not have children until you’re in your 30s, and men have a lowering sperm count. The number of couples who have trouble conceiving continues to rise.
The abundance of phones, games, and tiktoks has taken up most of people’s free time and caused a reduction in face-to-face socialisation, and thus people of opposite genders see each other less and therefore sexual encounters happen less.
The ratio of people living in cities is rising, with 90% of people born after 1990 living in urban areas, and urban areas have lower birth rates.
The years of one-child policy has made the traditional aspirations of a big family disappear, and people are increasingly unwilling to put effort into raising kids. East Asian countries which are culturally similar to China all have the lowest birthrates in the world.
Cultural norms and the government still don’t recognise extramaritally born children. It used to be that only 1% of women never married, and now that has risen to 10%, but it’s still very rare to see people have children without getting married. In Europe and America, 40% of infants are born outside of marriage.
Porn reduces sex. There are a lot of people in Japanese society who don’t want to date people who are 3-dimensional, and China is slowly getting there too.
After 1980, women have performed a lot better than men both in school and in society, and they will continue to perform better. Women don’t tend to want a partner who makes less than them or have a lower degree than them, so more and more women will never marry.
The conveniences of modern life (take out and fast food) has made single life a lot easier, and there is less and less pressure from society on people who remain single.
High real estate prices and childcare costs limits how many children one can have. In most major cities, it’s looking increasingly impossible for people born after 1990 to afford a house on their own, so most can’t afford to have a second child even if they want to. This trend is spreading to minor cities too.
After the 1990s, the ratio of boys to girls has been increasingly skewed, for children born after 2000, men to women is 118:100, this causes women to have a lot of pursuers which causes their standards to rise and miss the best marital age, and most stop wanting to marry after 35.
The next few years will have slow economic growth, and thus slow income increase, far below what people expect. Women have high requirements for their spouse’s income—a lot of areas have bride prices that rise far more sharply than housing costs. Most low-income men have given up on marriage.
Single children almost never do house work and never want to do housework after they’re grown, and yet housework is unavoidable after marriage. A lot of marriages fail before kids are even born because of conflicts due to housework.
Women’s degree of education is quickly rising, with over 50% of women born after 2000 going to university. University-graduated women have lower marital rates than women without college degrees.
He notes that it’s also generally true that the longer a country’s average lifespan, the lower their birth rate. Korea has the fastest rising lifespan, and the lowest birth rate in the world.
Man posts his ideal wife on the internet, “Makes 4000 a month, can cook, cleans, doesn’t internet shop, can give her partner a loving home, knows how to be frugal with her spending, 160cm high, less than 60kg, no smoking, no drinking except a little bit occasionally at home, doesn’t flirt with other people, has dedication and responsibility to her relationships.” Asks if he can find such a woman. Internet commenters ask if he can achieve even one of those requirements himself.
Someone notes to be wary of men who are good at playing Mafia or Werewolf or bluff-based games, because that means they’re good at lying to you about other things too. Someone in the comments ask what it means if they’re really good at playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms then?
A journalist also has opinions on why birth rates are not going up even though the government is encouraging three children now. He think that this is due to the primary incentive for having children being extended maternity leave. Because extended maternity leave means that after childbirth, a woman will not be back to work for 3-6 months, this makes employers extremely reluctant to hire women for fear of having to be one man down for long periods of time. Employing only men is much safer, because paternity leave is only 10 days to half a month. This also causes a societal problem where it’s assumed that childcare is solely the responsibility of the mother.
People give opportunities to men because even if he’s not smart or capable, at least he will continue dedicating himself to this field. But if you spend all your energy training and educating a girl, she’ll marry and spend years away from society having kids, and even afterwards, she won’t have nearly the same time to dedicate to her career.
This is why Tokyo University limit how many female medical students they take in, because none of the teachers want female students. Women need a much higher mark than men to get into the same Master’s degree.
He says that women feel a lot less of a sense of security in society too, because the punishment for solving things with violence is so low that it’s not a deterrent at all. It’s simply too dangerous for women to enter into intimate relationships. In the new Womens Rights Protection Act published today, they have finally allowed women to get retraining orders after a breakup, and this is a big step forward. But whether it’s harassment or domestic violence, the punishment is a couple of days of jail or a couple hundred dollar fine at most, so there’s almost no reason not to do it.
In Europe or America, assaulting someone is a serious crime. If you do it, there is certainly a severe punishment. But in Chinese law, we make the punishment tied to the result of assaulting someone. If you only cause minor injuries, even if those injuries are not that minor to the victim, you won’t get hardly any punishment at all. And most domestic violence only ever results in what counts as minor injuries—bruising, lacerations, all of this can be incredibly painful and traumatic for the victim, but it doesn’t even rise to the degree of warranting arrest.
And being forgiving of violence only fosters more violence. There are more cases of people murdering their wife or girlfriend every day. And this makes women very wary of entering a relationship.
He advocates that men should get same length paternity leave, off-set with women so they can take on full childcare responsibilities, and to promote that men must participate in child rearing, and to make additional laws that make assault a punishable crime regardless of severity of injury.
What does this mean - “children are your short hairs”?