The country encourages having two children, but schools suppress having two children

The child abuse incident at Ctrip Parent-child Park has triggered a discussion: Why is there a shortage of childcare centers for children under 3 years old in China? Before answering this question, I would like to share a travel experience during the National Day holiday this year. During the National Day holiday, our family of four went to a nationally famous amusement park in Zhuhai. This amusement park sells parent-child discount packages for 880 yuan/set. Each package includes 2 adults and 1 child. This package gives me a bit of a dilemma: if all four people go in to play, they have to spend an additional 488 yuan to buy a ticket. In order to save some money, I decided to rest in the hotel and let my wife and two kids go in and play together. Unexpectedly, they were stopped by the ticket inspector at the entrance of the amusement park. The ticket inspector said that the parent-child package includes tickets for \”two adults and one child\”. Only two adults can bring one child, but one adult cannot bring two children. In desperation, I had to pay for a single ticket. Not just amusement park tickets. The hotel we stayed in that night had only two beds in the family room, one large and one small. It was said to be configured according to \”two large and one small\”, which did not take into account the situation of the two children at all. I had no choice but to let my eldest son sleep in the small bed, while my wife and I squeezed the younger son into the big bed. In other words, in the consciousness of amusement park and hotel managers, the normal form of a family is a family of three, and there is no situation where a family has two or more children. However, it\’s hard to blame amusement park and hotel managers because this is a reflection of social consciousness. The one-child policy that has lasted for thirty years has made social infrastructure, especially software infrastructure, adjusted to only match the one-child policy. Chinese society is becoming more and more two-child-oriented, but people\’s minds and consciousness are still stuck in the one-child era. This is the root cause of many current social conflicts. For example, helping children with homework. If there is only one child in the family, parents can barely accompany them throughout the whole process and check, correct, and revise their homework afterwards. Even if it\’s just one child, it drives the parents crazy, but if there are two, only those who have experienced it will understand the style. Another example is picking up children from school. In many places, primary schools finish at 4pm or even 3pm, but parents usually don’t get off work until after 5 or 6pm. If there is only one child at home, it is feasible to arrange for someone (often an elderly person) to pick up the child at 3pm. But if you have two children and they don’t go to school in the same place, for example, one goes to kindergarten and the other goes to elementary school, it will be a headache to pick them up. If it is a child, the teacher can call the parents at any time. If it is a child, the teacher can constantly bring parents to the school to participate in various activities. But what about two children? The one-child social structure of the past two to three decades has shifted the burden of education from schools to families. At that time, parents had time and energy to educate their only child. Schools and teachers are more willing to reduce their workload. But now, the population policy has changed, the family structure has changed, and education has not kept up. Parents can only bite the bullet and shoulder the increasingly heavy educational burden. Going back to the Ctrip Parent-Child Park incident, it is difficult to find childcare institutions in China that accept children under the age of three. Why have all the nurseries that were opened by many units decades ago disappeared? fundamentalThe reason is that the one-child policy has led to a sharp decline in the number of births, which has reduced the demand for child care. When most children were only children, many families could find one or two elderly people among the four to help take care of their grandchildren. But as second children become more common, grandparents who have already worked hard to take care of a child once before are less willing to continue taking care of the second or even third grandchild. What\’s more, when the second and third grandchildren are born, the old people are getting older and their energy seems to be insufficient. At this time, the disadvantages of not having a nursery gradually became apparent. At present, although the number of child care institutions is gradually increasing, the service awareness and service level are still immature. The management of child care institutions is still in a three-no-thing zone and is not within the scope of the education department at all. In this sense, although this child abuse incident at Ctrip Parent-child Park is a case of one company, it highlights the major shortcomings of an era-society has become two-child, but education services are far from keeping up.