To think this is cruel and genuinely unfathomable?

[StormCloud52]

An acquaintance of mine has a three year old child. My acquaintance is Chinese but has lived in Britain for a long time.

Today, she shared a story that her DD had had her last playtime with her little friends for a while. When people have asked why, she’s said that her DD is going to China for a year to learn the language. I assumed acquaintance was also going, but no. It is then filled with people commenting that she’ll miss DD but it’s a wonderful, selfless gift acquaintance is giving her daughter. Acquaintance agrees she’ll miss DD.

Her most recent post is them at the airport. AIBU to thinking this is barking mad? It had made me feel so sad for the little girl. Surely she’ll be confused and distressed? AIBU?

grandparents, aunties, uncles all being close by/actively involved is not the same as being sent halfway across the world from your mother at 3

I worked with someone from Fiji who did similar. Her and hubby went to visit family and left their 18 months old with grandma but brought the 5 yr old back .

bizarre. i've not said your racist or not to have an opinion.

i'm observing that when there are such vast differences in child rearing across cultures, many MANY parents cannot understand the other.

That doesn't make it the right thing to do for that child though.
As for pearl clutching I'll clutch all I want with this one.

And what is your experience of Chinese culture?

That's true. But we don't know what kind of interaction or relationship the child has already had with the people she'll be with. Maybe they've had regular frequent conversations via FaceTime etc? Maybe they're always chatting on the phone? Maybe there have been other visits/letters/meetings... I'm just trying to say that what seems right to us isn't necessarily so and it's not fair to judge when we don't know all the circumstances.

what a stupid thing to say.

honour killings are also part of some cultures. Does that mean we can’t judge them?

OP of course it’s awful. This happened to my mum for the same reasons at the same age and it affected her greatly.

a child of that age needs their mum

None, and that's not relevant.

Children across the world spend a certain amount of time being raised by grandparents. It’s normal in many cultures.

Going by this thread, you would think there's entire continents of traumatised people vs the blissfully happy perfectly adjusted Brits...

It was considered the normal, responsible thing for British parents in Raj India — white children weren’t thought to be able to grow up healthily in the climate so were sent ‘home’ (which was months away by paddle-steamer). Kipling was five and his sister three when they were sent to England to live in a boarding house run by a couple who ‘boarded’ children of parents based in India. They didn’t see either parent for six years.

hiw can you comment on the post and say it’s absurd when you know nothing about Chinese culture.?
surely you and the one being absurd!
@MummytoE

There’s a passage in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Pigs in Heaven, which is set partly on a Cherokee reservation, where there’s a reference to staff in a non-reservation hospital seeing it as a sign of neglect that a Cherokee child was often brought in by someone other than a parent. The bit I remember is someone Cherokee saying to a non-Cherokee ‘You think of us as having extended families, but we think of you as having ‘contracted’ families.’

Just because something is the done thing in particular cultures it doesn’t mean it’s not harmful! Plenty of examples to point to…

Given our mental health record, why are we so confident that our uber attachment style nuclear family centred society isn't harmful?

Six years not one.
At a boarding house run by a stranger not a family member’s home.
What your point?

My wider point was that just because certain cultures accept something as the norm, it doesn’t mean it’s not harmful. Think female circumcision etc.

Specifically in this case, I can’t imagine sending a three year old abroad for a year without its parents is beneficial! Yes it’s good to know your wider family but not at this cost.

Im sure there are plenty of harmful things in our society but seeing your parents daily at age three is probably not one of them (except obviously in the case of child abuse etc).

Nor does it mean that norms in other cultures are harmful.
Your ability (or lack of) to imagine something is not evidence for or against harm.

Of course you can. But be prepared for people from those cultures to defend themselves and tell you, you are not right. Coming from a culture where this style of parenting is not uncommon, I am offended by the accusation that we are neglectful or harming our children with this parenting style. We are not savages. We love our children and our families and want the very best for them.

This is what I can’t get over. Our children, societally speaking, are not in a great place and far too many have grown up to be dysfunctional adults.

YABU. without info of the context she’s going to live in, I think it’s very hard to judge. I was sent away by my parents for 6 months at a time to live with my aunt and grandparents until I was 5 or so to learn a foreign language. I’m very thankful for the decision and having roots in more than one place. This happened from being 3 months old when my mum went back to work.

You don't need to know a culture inside out to know that it's absurd and cruel. Do you agree with every other practice across the world in cultures you are not a part of?

Ah yes. The Great British Parent, who thinks incredibly highly of themselves, with absolutely no reason to. Who dumps their children in childcare, or in front of a multitude of screens, shovels them full of UPFs, buys them lots of plastic tat, and indulges their every whim. All while failing to teach them any of the practical, social, emotional, psychological or intellectual skills they require to become healthy balanced people, fully functional adults, and positive contributors to society. I despair.

If you admittedly don't know much about it, how can you possibly know it is "absurd and cruel"?

Sigh. Kipling and his sister are just examples of how middle class British norms have changed. Had their parents kept them in India, they would have been generally considered irresponsible.

But again, part of the reason this was within the Overton window of total normality was that another norm that’s changed totally since is middle-class children seeing very little of the parents with whom they lived. Kipling again (just as I’ve been reading his autobiography) says that he and his sister spent all their time in Bombay with their Portuguese ayah and their Indian manservant, who would remind them to speak English to their parents when they were summoned to see them at teatime. Their primary bonds were far more likely to be with servants. That is ‘wrong’ to us, but the Raj parents who sent their children away were acting with the best intentions and on the best advice, just as much as someone today worrying about formula or BLW.