China education: restraining order against ‘tiger dad’ who beat kids aged 5 and 7 and forced them to study university subjects
- Father berated and physically abused two small children in attempts to get them to study secondary and university level subjects
- The children’s mother sought court intervention and was granted a restraining order against the father to protect the children
A woman in China has sought a restraining order against her husband whom she alleged forces their children aged five and seven to attempt secondary and university level study by beating and verbally abusing them.
In a judgment released on WeChat on Tuesday, the People’s Intermediate Court of Nanjing, Jiangsu, eastern China, said it had issued a three-month restraining order for the woman, her seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter and prohibited the father from threatening, beating or harassing them.
Tiger parenting as it is called in China involves strict parental supervision of a child’s activities and obsessive monitoring of their education and can often be excessive, however while disputes between parents over their children’s education are common in China, rarely do they appear before the courts.
It is common that mainland parents will let their children learn academic subjects in advance as they believe their children can gain advantages compared with their peers who don’t learn ahead of schedule.
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The woman’s son is a primary school student while her daughter is still in kindergarten. But the woman, surnamed Zheng, said her husband, surnamed Mao, who holds a PhD degree, often teaches them secondary school and university subjects, such as wen yan wen, a literary language used in ancient China and taught to secondary students, and university-level mathematics, according to the court.
He reportedly required them to study until late in the evening every day and would verbally abuse them and beat them when overseeing their studies, said Zheng.
Mao rejected the offer of mediation from police, the local women’s association and his children’s teachers, claiming that disciplining children was a “private matter”.
He refused to attend hearings after Zheng applied for the restraining order.
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The court said its investigations showed that Mao’s approach to educating his children through the use of abuse and beating was inappropriate and had caused psychological harm to his children.
“Although he has not caused serious physical injury to the children, his actions have psychologically harmed them through long-term abuse, which is also a form of domestic violence,” the court said.
“This outdated approach to education will badly affect the children’s mental health. Out of fear that his children will lose the education game at the starting line, he teaches them a lot of knowledge in a way he deems correct. However, his deeds did not support the juvenile’s mental and intellectual development. It is like pulling up seedlings to help them grow,” said the court.
This tiger dad incident became one of most viewed news items on the search engine Baidu on Wednesday.
“He is insane. At the age of seven or five, many children don’t know how to read Chinese characters,” wrote one person on the platform.
