Anyone been to Korea before? I'm shocked by the well behaved DC

[cjick]

I still can't get over the well behaved DC!

They're so impeccably behaved. What's their secret? I didn't see any children acting up or be irritating (as my own DC do) with constant questions and talking. All very well mannered and quiet on public transport

I suppose school expectations are just different from a young age

South Korea is an amazing place to visit if anyone is interested

There are a lot of children in orphanages as there is little support for single mothers and virtually no adoption due to the cost of education and the importance of the (father’s) ancestral family line.

An expat friend (social worker back home) volunteered in an orphanage said it was “Dickensian” with a long line of little children lining up to brush their teeth and wash their hands and faces at bedtime, and someone helping them dry their faces and hands after.

Generally parents are respected and their wishes followed, it’s more about the family and respect for elders than the wishes of the child.

Are they respected or feared though?

How do you respect someone when you grow up & realised that they hit you?

Why would you also want to carry this on with your own child?

South Korean here. I'm glad that you got a good impression of SK. Personally I'd say children in SK and UK don't behave differently. Children are children. There's no secret.

It seems to produce a lot of unhappy people. Resulting in surveys like this: Young South Koreans want to emigrate....

I spent a lot of time in Japan and it's similar there. It is drilled into you from when you are born that you do not make a nuisance of yourself in public.to others. You do not cause disruption or offence to others. When Japanese people tell their children off it is along the lines of "look at how you are making so and so feel" or "look at how you are causing a nuisance to others with your behaviour". Behind closed doors I found the children were just as naughty and lively as any other country 😉 I didn't come across anyone hitting their children but doesn't mean to say it doesn't happen?

This is really interesting. I teach in Thailand and my experience with Korean kids is quite mixed. At my old school two of the naughtiest boys were Korean and we had their parents in constantly (they were mortified!) I should clarify that they were naughty by the standards of a nice international school so nothing drastic at all, just not listening, being silly etc. To generalise, Asian kids in general are more respectful and quiet... getting them to banter with you, engage in discussion or even ask for help is challenging on the whole (this applies to Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean... my Indian students are much more likely to engage with the teacher though usually very respectfully).

Re the comments about smacking - teachers here are still allowed to smack children, though it would never happen in an international school. Whenever I ask my Thai students if they were hit when they attended Thai school, almost all say yes! Even the beautifully behaved ones that I can't imagine ever putting a foot wrong. A foreign teacher who smacked a kid in a Thai school was prosecuted, though, so it seems only Thais can hit Thai kids 🤷‍♀️

It's also totally permitted for Thai parents to hit their children. I discussed this with a class of older teens once and they had all been hit as children, mostly with a coat hanger. Most of them laugh about it. An 11 year old boy told me just today that at his old school, if they didn't swim laps fast enough the coach would call them out the pool and smack them with a stick.

If I witnessed that, in any country, I would be concerned. Children aren't meant to sit there quiet, not speaking, not having fun and not asking questions. When they are, there is something not right. In this case, the secret that you ask bout, is fear. The children comply out of fear of being beaten/hit/hurt. Very sad.

Oh yes of course its the schools 🙄🙄🙄. Couldn't possibly be the parenting.

My friend is married to a S Korean man and her MIL claims her children are extremely badly behaved. They're not, they're just being brought up the way most Irish kids are.

We are thinking of visiting South Korea in a few months time. Any tips ? I am mainly worried about food ( vegetarian and coeliac ) .
From watching various Korean dramas it seems that the academic pressure is huge, and yet not everyone can be top of the class, how do less academic children cope ? The Idol thing- very young teens seem to go to be trained up, I wonder what happens to those who then don’t achieve the hoped for success?

The beauty standards seem to apply to young men as well as women, a difference from the UK. It is sad that people feel under pressure to alter their beautiful mono lids and noses, and whiten their skin.

I read a stat that said 1 in 3 South Korean women has had plastic surgery.

I have noticed the general sense of 'it's not all about you'

So everything is how your behaviour reflects someone else, how you make someone else feel, and so on.

A rough translation would be 'it's too loud, your voice wasn't loud enough over that announcement. What did you say?'

^That would be very impolite, apparently. The correct thing to say would be 'I lost track of thought for a second, excuse me. That was my fault. What did you say please?'

But they do take good care of their elderly

South Korea has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, with the extreme pressures on beauty standards, education and work, and the lack of help and respect for women, you can see why.

Or as in the case of my American friend, she adopted 2 little girls from South Korea whose parents were single mothers/got pregnant by mistake. The girls are now in their early 20s. I don't think South Koreans generally adopt either and think it's true about the father's ancestral line but I think this is true through much of Asia/SE Asia.

The girls have returned to Korea a couple of times but don't speak Korean (apart from baby/toddler Korean) and I have no idea what they think about their birth mothers or ancestral families.

I did a uni module on autism and part of it was how it is perceived across cultures. In South Korea, family name and reputation is all, they'd prefer that a mother confess to being a "refrigerator mother", not being a good patent and take the blame for the child turning out as they have rather than ever admit there is any kind of inheritable condition. Not sure how true that is now but that's certainly what we researched - around five years ago.

That's what I wonder too. It doesn't seem like respect to me.

But they do take good care of their elderly

Do they?

www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/more-elderly-south-koreans-turn-to-crime-as-they-face-poverty-isolation-and

https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=3135455_

@MrJi - Autumn is a great time to visit Korea, as is spring. The winters are generally dry (lovely clear blue skies) but with a bitingly cold wind from the north.

Korean cuisine uses a lot of fresh vegetables, but strictly vegetarian restaurants were thin on the ground when I was there a few years ago.

Thanks jjimdak , it will probably be Winter when we go as we need to fit it around term times, but we like cold weather, so wouldn’t mind that. We ideally would have gone this week but dd2 didn’t want to miss any school as she has GCSEs. So it will be December if we go.
OP are you in a hotel ? I am wondering about an Airbnb but maybe a hotel is more sensible.

@Corrosive it doesn't seem like respect because you're looking at it from a Western perspective. In SE Asia not retaliating or talking back to your elders/superiors at work is considered being respectful. When hitting your children (and even lower ranking colleagues at work if kdramas are to be believed) is the norm, you won't think it's wrong. Bullying, both irl and online, is also a big problem in Korea.

Respect as equals and respect in terms of place in a hierarchy are two different things. If you believe that hitting is a justified way for somebody to enforce their position in a hierarchy, as long as they didn't do so out of place, then you probably wouldn't lose respect for that person.

That sounds a nice place to go!

Shades of the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster right there. "Stay and wait to be burned to death rescued". 😥

Shades of the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster right there. "Stay and wait to be burned to death rescued". 😥

And the Grenfell Tower fire.