to challenge anyone to better this example of the heights of pushy parenting?

[BonsoirAnna]

Yesterday I was chatting to another mother from DD's French-English bilingual school on the bus. She has two daughters, one in DD's year, who will soon be 5, and another one three years above, who is 7.

This mother told me that during the summer holidays her 7 year old, who has been having private Chinese lessons for the past year (in addition to having an American nanny to teach her English), is being sent to stay, alone, for a fortnight with a Chinese family in China in order to practise the language.

oooh yes please thedolly I can't be doing with going through it all again. I thought I would have noticed if the child in question had done this sort of thing before.

And erm a teenager would normally be dead keen to escape from normal fanily life and have an adventure, a 7 year old not so. I mean you still give them a story every night at that age and stuff don't you? i find your genuine question a bit odd.

How old are you lot?

Do you actually REMEMBER being 7?

Being upset over something... feeling tired, or frightened... above all, missing your Mum (or whoever it was who looked after you)

Imagine being the other side of the bloody globe with people you don't know and who you can't converse with properly. Imagine waking up in the middle of the night haing had a nightmare or something, in a strange bed

Brownie camp is all I would stretch to at this age, I'm afraid

Oh sorry wrong way around.

I would think that a teenager has more resources and experience to fall back on when put in an unfamiliar situation than a 7 yo, yes. Teenagers like their own company anyway a lot of the time, while 7yo are still, well, children.

OMG, I haven't thought about this for years, but British Airways put me on the wrong flight when I was 7 and travelling unaccompanied. I was meant to be going to (iirc) Berlin, but they accidentally lumped me together with a group of similarly white-blond children who were waiting for a flight to Stockholm.

I did smell a rat when I realised that all the other kids were talking swedish, but assumed it was all going to turn out okay. BA only realised the mistake when no-one turned up to pick me up in Stockholm and they checked my paperwork a bit more closely.

Blimey.

notnowbernard I agree.

I remember we went on a thing like anna mentioned earlier - a whole year visit to shropshire when I was about 8 - but that was with all school friends and teachers etc that i knew and was only a week. And was shropshire. And that felt pretty odd - there were quite a few girls crying and homesick at bedtime being comforted by teachers etc.

China by yourself for a fortnight at younger than that - just no.

FWIW I wouldn't do it - I don't even do sleepovers fgs and precisely for the whole waking up in the night and wanting mummy thing.

frogs poor you

I do think angsty teenagers spending time abroad with another family would have their own particular problems that wouldn't be experienced by a 7 year old.

I suppose the way I am looking at it is this - if I had the 7 year old child of a colleague (from wherever) to stay at my home for 2 weeks in the Summer hols I would do whatever was in my power to ensure that they had a lovely time.

I don't think the parent in question is being pushy as they appear to have nothing to gain from their actions.

Ahem, if you'd all bothered to do your homework as opposed to work on outdated hearsay, the requirement of putting on the list "at birth" was abolished years ago. Now, you need to register them no later than when they turn 9 and 3/4s I'm NEVER disorganised

And does anyone actually know that the family the girl is going to live with isn't bilingual? After all, if the host is a workplace colleague of the father, I'm guessing that he and his family most likely speak pretty good English - maybe even better than youse lot! - and she'll be in one of the major cities. Therefore, it's not like she'll be stuck in some backwater village Chairman-Mao style with no-one to converse with My guess is the household she'll be staying in will mirror her own in terms of social status and normal day-to-day family life.

And yes @ catinthehat2 - I'm glad I put the headmistress in her place. This was the same woman who deliberately placed me in the "bottom" set for all my subjects with no reasonable justification - though on closer examination, it transpired that she'd placed all the new black girls in the bottom sets for everything . My first term ended with me at the top for all my subjects and being immediately shifted up to the "top" sets. Stupid woman then "awarded" me the prize for "Most Improved". I told her to shove it up her backside there was no way I would accept a "prize" which did not reflect the reality of the situation - that I never should have been placed in the "bottom" set for any subject in the first place. That though is a whole other thread in itself!

Woman accompanied her 18 year old to interview at a Cambridge college, regaled the student helpers, while her son was actually being interviewed, with the info that he "was coming" to the college and her 15 year old "was going" to Oxford, so gosh, she'd have one at each, and how important active parenting was in achieving such for your kids. Said active parenting had involved coaching plus a weird (and expensive) outfit that claimed to coach your kids on what to say and how to behave in interview, rather than help with the subject area.

He didn't get in. She called the college admissions office repeatedly, insisting a mistake had been made and demanding justification, and finally threatened to send him anyway at the start of term. All this must have been REALLY good for his self-esteem.

Admissions said it was less rare than you'd imagine. A favourite line is apparently, "you know it's YOUR LOSS, right?!" They're too professional to reply that the place stood a thousand years without their kid and will probably just about survive in future.

There are times I feel insufficiently grateful for my own Mum.

So if the place she is staying is exactly the same as home, then really what on earth is the point? How will staying with a family who speak English help her Chinese (and why would it need to be helped in any case - she's not likely to be actually using it for some time presumably). Better for the whole family to move over, or for the child in question to have her visit a few years later when her Chinese has improved.

As to why the distance makes a distance? Well it will be a very very long journey, at least 14 hours, and possibly with a change of planes. Most trips within Europe on the other hand are a couple of hours. Most adults find long flights difficult, a small child on their own would I think find that pretty tough. Then it's all very well to say that you can ring or talk via the internet, but you have to think about the time difference - say six hours (Paris - Shanghai). That can make you feel very cut off.

To be fair a lot of people were sent to boarding school at 7, and many still are. It's nuts IMO, and I couldn't do it, but my mother and uncle and their cousins all were, and their parents all worked overseas (as in, Penang and Singapore) long before we had cheap and frequent flights.

If both parents were boarded at that age themselves, perhaps their attitudes are warped shaped by that?

I studied Chinese at university and went to Beijing on the compulsary year year abroad. My main concern for the lttle French girl would be the cultural differences. Chinese people can be very 'in your face' especially if you look different. I think it is unlikely that the little girl has the language skills to comunicate AT ALL with Chinese native speakers. I had a year of full time intensive language classes before I went to China and when I arrived I really struggled for more than two weeks. For all that China is depicted as the next super power it is still a developing country. Not all households have basic sanitation even in the big cities. Would it be acceptable to send the little girl to Kenya to learn Swahili or to South Africa to practice her Afrikaans?

Asana I hope you have proved your racist bitch of a headteacher wrong.

Do they do enhanced CRB checks in China??

LOL at why do some people think we all aspire to be as far up our own arses as they are up theirs. There are many forms of pushy parents and some are tolerable and understandable and some are plain barking and seem to have lost sight of what a childhood should be.

I think there's a big big problem also if someone learns the language but hasn't a clue about the culture.
In China they might get smacked by the nearest adult.
Where I'm from they will be politely ignored.
Forever.
And the person will never know why.

@ posie - both my parents worked as lawyers at the time, hence were unable to take weeks off on end to travel with me.

Frankly, it WAS rude of a headmistress who had only just met me to ask me if I thought my father was 'pushy'. I grew up in a country in West Africa where such a thing would have been unheard of and, yes, where parents do push their kids. Trust me, seeing the life of an average person in that country truly helped one to appreciate the myriad of opportunities presented by our parents.

And telling things as they are does not equal boasting in my book. The woman did have issues - no reasonable explanation was given as to why every new White and Asian pupil was placed in the top sets and all the new Africans placed in the bottom sets, regardless of our previous school reports. At the end of that term, all of the latter were moved to top sets and 3 of the former moved down. I have absolutely no hesitation in saying I was proud of my performance at the time, most of which was probably down to my 'pushy' parents. To then have the headmistress be ridiculously condescending was a slap in the face. Then again, one of the older girls in the school told me that the whole 'Africans automatically in the bottom set going on to receive the 'Most improved' prize' was a recurring theme at the school. Apparently, the headmistress thought such benevolence was great PR at Prize Day Humble, I can be. A pushover, I'm not

Whoa, I do not see the relevance of how you were treated at school, to be frank.
Why a child at six needs to travel alone is beyond me. Surely a few weeks with your parents would have been much better.

BonsoirAnna

Presumably this woman will also be putting her youngest on the plane to China when she turns 7!. I pity this 7 year old. What if this girl had dared say to her Mother that she'd rather stay at home?.
My guess is she would never have thought to do so let alone voice any opinion otherwise. What parents want she must do.

People do have high expectations of their children yes (no-one wants to think that their offspring may go onto become one of the biggest losers in town) but pushy is not good as such parents live vicariously through their children. These people never give their children the opportunity to become individuals in their own right or to even let their own children follow their chosen path; their lives are regimented to the nth degree.

My cousin's parents were both lawyers as well and he was sent away to board full time when he was 7.

Okay he got the finest education money can (and did) buy and he was very able at his studies. Went on from there to a "top" university and from there parachuted into a well paid merchant bank job.

What if he had not been so able though?. These people cannot cope with their children "failing" or the possibility of "failure".

As an adult his personal life is complicated given the fact that his daughter resides in South America and he now lives in Hong Kong.

I think you're all making a lot of assumptions.

I would imagine they have checked out the family. Who is honestly going to do less than that?

You can't say all 7 year olds would hate to be away from home for 2 weeks, miss their mum etc. This girl might not be like that.

If she doesn't want to go but can't tell her mum, that's another issue. But you're all assuming she is almost being forced to go into a horrible experience, which you have no evidence for imo.

What has Asana's schooling got to do with a 7 year old being sent to China for two weeks?