Originally Posted by JonLaw
Originally Posted by Tallulah
Here's the difference: normal kids do a lot of stuff they don't want to do or find difficult at school. They're asked to strive and figure things out, to progress and learn new things, then they go home and are asked to do a bit of physical activity, help around the house with boring tasks. Hothoused kids do this and then go on to a cram school to do more hard academic stuff because more is better. Our kids go to a normal school and sit around doing essentially nothing, so why is it automatically the same as the hothoused kids if we decide it's good for them to get a fraction of the same experience as a normal child gets? Why do our kids get thrown under the bus? Very few of our children get anywhere close to appropriate schooling during school time and have to get it afterschool, so why is it OK for most kids to do appropriate work, but not OK for ours?

Well, because you already lose the entire 8 hours at school.

So, in order to get appropriate childhood experience, you need more hours in the day in order to replace these lost 8 hours of boredom and mindless sitting.

Since you don't have more hours in the day, you have to remove necessary childhood experiences in order to provide other necessary childhood experiences.

People see the other necessary childhood experiences being removed and they get upset because you *are* removing necessary childhood experiences that normally happen outside of school hours.

Which is why the second guessing. (it's the ciiiiiircle of liiiiife)

If you thought there was no value in those non-assessed childhood experiences, you'd be totally unconflicted and you'd be a hothouser.

And kinda OT, but isn't interesting how much easier and clearer the conversation was when we were using the term with strong racial/cultural connotations. Maybe it's easier to condemn or "other" people if you use tiger mom, but people have to examine themselves more carefully when using the term hothousing? And by the way, I'm very appreciative of people for switching so easily and agreeably. Every little bit makes a difference, right?