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First of all, let’s talk about what “chicken baby” is?

"Chickening up" refers to the behavior of parents giving their children a boost, constantly arranging studies and activities for their children, and forcing their children to work hard.

This article is a bit long, so let me make a few conclusions before I start the text:

1. The domestic middle class, barely able to maintain their family's middle-class status, is no longer able to leave enough social resources for their offspring;

2. This will make it difficult for the offspring to maintain their social class, thus causing anxiety among parents;

3. This anxiety forces parents to take some measures to force their offspring to grow in order to ensure that their offspring maintain their middle-class status.

Let's imagine a scenario:

There was a small town test-taker who came from a prestigious university. After graduating from a 985 master's degree program, he and his significant other settled down in a second-tier city. His significant other was an alumnus of the same school.

The two worked hard 996 hours a day and risked their lives for money. With a family net income of hundreds of thousands a year, they finally paid off almost the down payment of their mortgage in their city when they were middle-aged.

Although this house is neither in the school district nor in the city center.

At this time, perhaps most young people would think that this academic couple is very happy now, as they no longer have to worry about the housing issue.

However, the reality is that if most families were in the above situation, they would also be unhappy.

The mountain of housing prices has exhausted almost all of this family's energy and resources. After middle age, there are still several mountains waiting for education, medical care, and elderly care!!!

On the surface, this top-notch working class family has successfully settled down in the city and paid the down payment and mortgage.

But from another perspective, the house also consumed almost all of the family's savings when they were young.

This not only brought instability to the family life after middle age, but also prevented the couple from leaving any accumulation for their offspring.

Moreover, when the couple faces equally heavy challenges in the future, such as education, medical care, and retirement, it will become even more difficult for them to cope because of the instability of the workplace and their personal health considerations that make it difficult to maintain high-intensity work.

Therefore, the life of this family after middle age can basically be described as chaos.

All of this will be seen by the couple's children.

In the eyes of their children, neighbors describe their parents as top academic engineers from 985 universities, high-paid white-collar workers, pillars of the country, and chosen ones of heaven.

However, in his childhood memory, he was basically raised by his grandparents.

His parents go out to work early and come back late every day, looking tired. Except for doing housework, browsing their phones and chatting late at night, they basically spend all their time dealing with work.

Moreover, the children do not think that their parents are as rich as the neighbors say. Overall, they are still frugal, but there are many places where they spend money.

The most an innocent child can do is witness these phenomena, and he doesn't know why.

However, when he grew up, he could describe it in words. His parents basically spent most of their lives in a very unhappy state.

His teacher often said in class that life would be better after attending a prestigious school, but looking at the situation of his parents, that didn't seem to be the case.

This high-pressure family environment will in turn affect the growth of children, often causing them to have certain psychological problems when they grow up.

Let’s return to the perspective of this academically gifted couple.

Even when enjoying their own world, this couple of top students are still anxious. Although they no longer have to worry about the house, other mountains still weigh on them:

When my child went to kindergarten, there were too few kindergartens in the new city and not enough places. It took a lot of effort to find a decent kindergarten, but the tuition was still very expensive, so I had to grit my teeth and continue to pay for it.

Then, when the children go to elementary school, junior high school, and high school, the pressure of academic performance forces them to invest more resources in their education.

The child’s parents spent a lot of money and energy, the child was made unhappy, the parent-child relationship was very stiff, but the child’s academic performance still did not improve.

The couple gradually discovered that their child was not as talented as themselves and was unlikely to be able to get into the school they had originally been able to get into.

It seems that this couple has no other choice. The family can only afford a house in the suburbs of the new city, and they can only choose a decent elementary and junior high school. The competition to get into a good school is too fierce.

In comparison, although I was born in a small city, I attended the best school in the city, and the teaching quality is actually higher than that of my children's school.

One day, this couple who got up early and went to bed late every day were lying in bed chatting in the middle of the night. The husband persuaded his wife:

Just accept your fate. The child has tried his best. He has been studying until late at night since elementary school. He has already worked very hard.
We both graduated from prestigious universities and are indeed gifted, but we don't have the money to buy a house in a school district, so we can only let our children go to a similar school.
If the genes are not passed on and the educational conditions are not improved, we can only blame ourselves for not working hard enough.

But at this time, the wife turned around and advised her husband:

I also know that the child has tried his best, but aren’t the reasons why we live so hard just so that the child can live better than us?
Our family has left nothing for our children except this old and dilapidated house, and our parents are old and in poor health.
If a child does not do well in school, cannot get into a prestigious school, and cannot stay in a big city, won't he have to go back to a small city or county town again in the future?
Then what are we gaining by working like slaves for most of our lives?

After listening to his wife's advice, the husband suddenly felt like he was having a myocardial infarction, and then he patted his wife's shoulder helplessly:

Well, I'll have to let the child suffer!

The above example is most likely the general situation of middle-class families in China. Even in families with top-level working people like the one above, chaos is still the norm.

In the above hypothetical example, there are a few points worth noting:

1. Why is it that this couple, who graduated from prestigious universities and have a bright future in the eyes of outsiders, but as top-level workers, cannot accumulate many social resources to leave for their children, and also make their lives extremely hard and have a very low sense of happiness?

2. Why can’t this couple send their children to better schools in first- and second-tier cities, but are forced to choose some places that are just okay but may not have as good teaching quality as the top-ranked schools in their own small city?

3. This couple has obviously discovered their child’s ceiling, so why don’t they accept their fate and decide to make their child suffer further?

Of course, everyone can give their own answers to these questions.

However, below, we will try to draw some universal conclusions.

In fact, the "chicken baby" is not a characteristic of all families in China. If we try to summarize the "chicken baby" families, we will find that they have the following characteristics:

1. Family conditions and social status are in the middle class of a private ownership society, which is what we commonly call the middle class.

2. The family is a typical working class family that relies on employment for labor remuneration and is greatly affected by the midlife crisis.

3. Parents were once the beneficiaries of the exam-oriented education, which has greatly changed their social status, and they have a blind worship of it.

4. Parents have a single growth path and have never thought about ways to make a living other than work. They regard exam-oriented education as the only path of development.

5. The social resources that families leave to their offspring are extremely limited, and the offspring receive almost no help from their parents.

Children are mainly born in middle-class families, while top- and bottom-class families generally do not adopt the method of pushing their children forward.

For people at the bottom of society, parents have to devote all their efforts to supporting their families, leaving them with no time to take care of the growth of their offspring.
Lower-class families can only let their offspring explore freely in a free-range model, and they have no way of pushing their children too hard.

For people in the upper class, the family has enough social resources to allow their offspring to grow up relying on these resources.
For upper-class families, there is no need to resort to such extreme methods as pushing their children to grow up.

The middle-class families are caught in between the two.

On the one hand, middle-class families in various cities have no worries about making a living, and parents have some time and energy to care about their children's growth.

On the other hand, middle-class families do not have enough social resources to support their children's growth and ensure that their children can continue to maintain the class their parents belong to.

Among them, the most relevant points to this topic are two:

One is how middle-class parents in our country achieve and maintain their middle class status.

The other is how much social resources a middle-class family can leave for future generations.

Our further analysis later will start from these two points.

In fact, the concept of the middle class does not exist. It is a concept invented by the bourgeoisie in order to divide and disintegrate the cohesion of the proletariat.

There are only two groups in the capitalist world, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat!!!

The difference between the two is that the bourgeoisie accumulates capital by hiring others to work and occupying the means of production.

The proletariat uses the means of production of the bourgeoisie and earns wages through hired labor, which is commonly known as "working."

Therefore, the middle class is essentially part of the proletariat.

The middle class is no different from the proletariat except that they are paid more.

Middle-class people also need to earn income by working, accumulate capital, and endure exploitation and oppression from capitalists.

In a society where capital is supreme, the bourgeoisie who own a large amount of capital can easily accumulate a large amount of capital.

In contrast, the proletariat can only earn money slowly by working, and the surplus value is taken away by the capitalists.

At the same time, the circulation of commodities will allow you to return your hard-earned money to the capitalists while consuming.

This will lead to an increasingly serious gap between the rich and the poor, which is an objective law and cannot be eliminated in capitalist society.

This problem of the gap between the rich and the poor would be fine if it occurred in an incremental society. The capitalists would only share the increased resources in society, and the proletariat would only be able to get a piece of the pie.

However, if we are in a stock society, under the objective conditions of a widening gap between the rich and the poor, capitalists will intentionally or unintentionally seize the resources occupied by the proletariat.

Even more, capitalists will use their advantage of discourse power to deliberately set rules, allowing the proletariat to produce more capital while harvesting the proletariat’s social resources, including but not limited to: high housing prices, 996, krypton gold mobile games, light luxury brands, etc.

Affected by this, the proletariat in the stock society is forced to compete for increasingly scarce social resources within the group.

In order to obtain sufficient resources, the proletariat can only further accumulate its own hard conditions to enhance its competitiveness and form internal circulation.

As time goes by, workers will have higher quality and stronger comprehensive abilities, but their circumstances will become worse and worse, and they will occupy fewer and fewer social resources.

As a result, even families with top-level workers can only barely maintain their middle-class status as they occupy less and less social resources.

As a top worker, you will also face many problems such as difficulty in buying a house, rampant overtime, serious mid-life crisis, and insufficient salary.

In a capitalist society, capital can be inherited!!!

Because capitalists can leave a large amount of resources to their children, whether it is capital accumulation, means of production, or interpersonal relationships.

Therefore, the children of capitalists, unless they are super spendthrifts, are likely to be capitalists.

Similarly, children of the proletariat are likely to remain proletarians.

So, can the children of the middle class still be middle class???

The middle class is essentially a part of the proletariat and is naturally opposed to the bourgeoisie capitalists.

In capitalist society, there is a natural gap in becoming the bourgeoisie.

Capitalists will also deliberately create obstacles to prevent additional people from sharing the bourgeoisie's pie.

Therefore, unless you are hit by a pie in the face by God, or unless you stand out in today's highly monopolized and dangerous entrepreneurial environment, you cannot become a capitalist.

However, as part of the proletariat, there are no obvious obstacles to circulation within the proletariat.

There is no inherent difficulty for people from the lower classes to join the middle class.

If you have a certain talent for learning, are willing to be a small town test-taker, and are willing to work 996 for the capitalists, the capitalists will give you a little more compensation and award you the title of middle-class.

Likewise, there is no inherent difficulty for the middle class to slide down to the bottom of the social ladder.

If you don't study well enough, don't work hard enough as a dog for the capitalists, and can't work anymore when you get too old, the capitalists will mock you for not working hard and deprive you of your middle-class title.

This will make the middle class extremely vulnerable!!!

The decisive factors that determine whether a person becomes middle class are not under his or her own control.

For example, a smart mind allows you to get into a prestigious school through hard study. This is a talent, and it depends on whether God gives it to you.

For example, a high-paying job depends on whether the capitalist is willing to give it to you. If the capitalist is stingy and the labor-intensive industry is working 996 and you are paid 3,000 yuan a month, there is nothing you can do.

Similarly, even if you graduated from a prestigious university, if you are too old and can no longer work, you are likely to be eliminated from the workplace. This means that you will lose your source of income and instantly fall from the middle class status.

So for the middle class, the conditions for becoming middle class mainly come from a combination of God's favor and the charity of capitalists, and personal efforts are a secondary factor.

At the same time, the involutionary environment of the stock society has made the social resources occupied by the proletariat less and less. Even if you have worked very hard, it is very likely that as a top-roller, you still cannot obtain enough resources, making it more difficult to become a middle class.

Therefore, in today's stock society, if the proletariat wants to maintain their middle-class status, they actually have to pay a lot:

You need to study hard, graduate from a prestigious university, work overtime tirelessly, and sacrifice almost all of your life and social time;

You have to worry about whether you can handle the intensity of the work when you are older, and whether you will be kicked out of the workplace, otherwise you will lose your income and your middle-class status will no longer exist;

You also have to worry about the burden of housing prices, education, medical care and pension all the time. If you are not careful, the mountains will come down and crush your middle-class status in an instant.

At the same time, you who work hard to maintain your middle-class status are threatened by an involutionary society and several huge obstacles, and it is highly likely that you will not have many resources left for your children.

By the time your children grow up, it is possible that you may not have paid off your 30-year mortgage yet, and your savings may have been consumed by several huge mountains.

As a middle-class person, like most other proletarians, you can only tell your children with empty hands to achieve their dreams with their own hands.

As a result, if your child wants to maintain his parents' middle-class status, he will most likely have to retrace your path.

This requires your child to be like you, with good talent, studying hard, getting into a good university, and working 996 hours a day...

Only in this way can your children continue to maintain their middle-class status.

In fact, as a parent, you will see all of this.

But is there anything you can do to help your child?

All you get in return for your lifelong efforts is just a place to gain a foothold in a city.

The social resources you have earned by working 996 hours a day are all sealed up in the mountains of housing prices, education, medical care, and pension.

In terms of social resource reserves, you have left nothing for your children.

It seems that the only thing you can provide for your children is the experience of getting into a good university. Your academic qualifications are your advantage over other proletarians.

In the absence of other experience, in order to allow children to maintain their middle-class status, one would naturally hope that their children would be like you, relying on education to make a breakthrough and follow the same path as you.

At least you have proved that this path is feasible to become middle class.

However, your children may not be as lucky as you:

Maybe your child is just average in talent, and even if he works very hard, he still can't reach the first-class score line, and still can't be admitted to graduate school;

Maybe your child is physically weak and cannot endure the hardship of studying and the 996 working hours of capital as much as you do;

It is possible that your children will face a more inward-looking environment in the future. Even if they are admitted to Tsinghua University or Peking University, they still cannot afford to buy a house and cannot escape the rampant overtime work.

In an involutionary society, you can only barely gain a foothold in a certain city, and you have no ability to obtain sufficient educational resources for your children. It is likely that your children can only be enrolled in a decent school.

You are anxious because you know that some of these situations are bound to happen in the future.

You know you shouldn't put too much pressure on your children. You probably had an unhappy childhood yourself, and you don't want the same for your children.

But you think that if you don't push your child, the consequences will be more serious.

People do things with a purpose, and the reason why most people can tolerate a life with low happiness is because they have hope.

The hopes mentioned here, in most cases, are either to pave the way for a happy life for oneself and one's family, or to pave the way for one's children.

If your children are unable to maintain their middle-class status and fall out of the middle class.

This means that all the sacrifices you and your significant other have made in your 996, low-happiness life for most of your life have gone to waste;

This also means that your children will have to live the life of the lower-class proletariat again, which is even more difficult.

Therefore, slipping out of the middle-class status is unacceptable for middle-class families!

Because this not only negates your lifelong sacrifices and efforts, but will also cause your children to fall out of the middle class, making their future life even more difficult.

From your own perspective, you are not convinced by your lifelong meaningless efforts;

Considering from the perspective of your child, you are very afraid that your child will have to live a lower-class life after falling from the middle class.

Finally, you reluctantly reach a consensus with your significant other:

The children can only suffer!!!

Affected by China's era of great involution, the social resources controlled by the country's middle and lower-class proletariat are becoming increasingly scarce.

In order to compete for the already limited social resources, the proletariat can only be forced to increase internal competition in order to obtain more social resources in exchange for the hope of a decent and happy life.

As a result, the threshold for becoming a middle class in China is increasing day by day, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the middle class.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to live a decent and happy life as a middle class in China.

As a result, everyone in China, from the top tier earners whose annual salary reaches the average level of all online platforms to ordinary workers who earn a few thousand yuan a month, will inevitably feel anxious, and this anxiety has led to the current impetuous and utilitarian social atmosphere in the country.

Under such influence, middle-class workers, on the one hand, feel that it is difficult for them to advance to the middle class and maintain their status;

On the other hand, middle-class workers are worried about whether they can maintain their middle-class status.

Middle-class families in China have almost no way to provide resource support to their children and grandchildren.

When a family has to take out all the savings of six wallets and work 996 to buy a house and a car, and still has to face many huge challenges such as education, medical care and retirement, the family can be sure that it will no longer be able to leave anything for future generations.

This means that no matter how difficult it was for their parents to enter and maintain the middle class, their children have to start from scratch.

The natives of big cities who don't have much inheritance and have to start from scratch will have a deep understanding of this.

The above content reflects the decline of class, or more accurately, the natural flow within the proletariat.

Now, my parents have tried their best to stay in the city, bought expensive houses, and become middle-class people by virtue of their excellent academic qualifications, 996 hard work, and by promoting the culture of struggle and comparison.

However, if their children do not do the same as their parents, they will most likely become the bottom of society.

For parents, they definitely don’t want to see a situation where they work hard all their lives only to have their children return to their original starting point.

However, as middle-class parents, they are helpless as they are unable to leave enough resources for their offspring.

Middle-class families in China can only place their hopes entirely on their offspring, setting strict requirements on their offspring’s education, hoping that their offspring will surpass their parents in comprehensive quality.

Only in this way will their offspring have the opportunity, through their own efforts, to maintain the middle-class status that their parents have worked hard to build throughout their lives, and prevent their children from falling back to the bottom of society.

As for middle-class families in China, it is still possible for them to save resources and provide for the education of their offspring.

Therefore, middle-class families regard the education and training of their offspring as the only way to consolidate the middle class and prevent the parents' lifelong sacrifices from going to waste.

This is exactly the reason why many middle-class families in China have strict requirements on their offspring, leading to the phenomenon of "chicken baby"!!!

So, what are the pros and cons of the "chicken baby" phenomenon?

I personally think that the phenomenon of raising children under the influence of force in society does more harm than good.

To be frank, there is basically no obvious benefit to raising a child with a baby!

The phenomenon of "pushing children to school" will not significantly improve the overall quality of children.

The purpose of pushing children to succeed is often to obtain some quantitative indicators, such as grades, awards, certain places, etc.

In the exam-oriented education, the intensification of internal circulation will gradually cause education to lose its educational attributes and highlight its screening attributes.

In this process of multiple screenings, what the children who are pushed forward really master is only the skills of screening and winning, rather than the improvement of their overall abilities.

For children preparing for exams, they will not take the initiative to learn knowledge other than exams. They only need to focus on the knowledge in textbooks that is related to exam results.

Similarly, their purpose of acquiring knowledge is not to broaden their horizons and enhance their overall abilities, but to improve their test scores.

This will inevitably lead to poor learning initiative among these children, making them accustomed to relying on passive input to acquire knowledge and lacking the ability and motivation to actively acquire knowledge.

Children brought up in this way will only focus on grades, rely on memorization and tutoring, be unwilling to think proactively, and lack the ability to study independently and practice.

Moreover, in the long-term involutionary screening competition, those who are overeducated will gradually lose their optimistic attitude.

Over-emphasizing quantitative indicators will also cause children to lose their development potential in other areas.

Inferiority complex, depression, social phobia, and lack of imagination will become the losses suffered by those who push their children too hard, and may even become psychological problems that they will need a lifetime to heal.

In fact, this problem is also reflected in the test takers in many small towns.

So let me ask, for these "chicken kids" who input knowledge through "feeding"-style tutoring, pay little attention to expanding their knowledge, lack self-study ability, do not focus on practice, have their development potential overdrawn, and have psychological problems of varying degrees, has their overall quality improved or declined???

Not only the children themselves, but also their parents will bring a series of negative impacts to their children.

We have all heard the saying, "Parents are the best teachers for their children."

A stable and happy family environment will have various positive influences on children's growth.

Why is it that a considerable proportion of students at prestigious domestic universities such as Tsinghua University and Peking University come from families within the system?

On the one hand, families within the system have a natural advantage in terms of connections in education, medical care, and other areas;

On the other hand, a career within the system can provide a relatively stable family environment with a high sense of happiness, allowing children to thrive.

On the contrary, the quick-success-oriented educational method, the parents' anxious mood, and the chaotic work and life rhythm of parents leaving home early and returning late will inevitably leave children with lifelong psychological trauma.

If children see their parents working day and night and pushing themselves to be strong, the children will most likely be very afraid of their life when they grow up.

Children who grow up in this kind of environment will lose their sense of security and lack empathy. The pushy attitude will also cause children to develop a serious resistance to their parents, and their relationship with their parents will become somewhat stiff.

But in reality, we shouldn’t blame parents who push their children too hard.

Raising children too fast is not the behavior of individual families, but a universal social problem.

Parents who push their children too hard are actually well aware of the harm of this behavior.

You know, many parents who push their children to succeed are winners of exam-oriented education, and they know much more clearly about the rationality and irrationality of exam-oriented education than most spectators who just like to watch the fun.

However, despite knowing that this is extremely harmful, middle-class parents in China are forced to save family resources and have unanimously adopted this kind of pressure to raise their children.

This shows that the phenomenon of raising children too young is a last resort for middle-class families.

Or to put it this way, there is something wrong with the social environment, forcing middle-class families to adopt the path of raising their children like a tyrant!!!

The real root of the behavior of raising children too much comes from the survival dilemma of the proletariat caused by the gap between the rich and the poor in the capitalist world.

Due to the exploitation of workers and the plunder of resources by capital, it has become very difficult for the majority of workers to even advance to and maintain their middle class status!!!

Normally, a healthy society should follow a spindle-shaped social structure.

In the spindle-shaped structure, middle-class families make up the vast majority, while the number of lower- and upper-class families is very small.

Similarly, in a spindle-shaped structure, it is not difficult for middle-class families to maintain their middle-class status. At least in a spindle-shaped structure, it is not the case that top workers from prestigious schools have difficulty buying houses, and have to rely on working 996 hours a day and raising their children to maintain their middle-class status, as is the case in today's society.

However, under the conditions of uneven distribution, exploitation of the proletariat and plunder of resources by the bourgeoisie, and lack of restraint, the social structure has taken on a highly steep pyramid structure.

Under such a social structure, the number of middle-class people is too small and the number of people at the bottom is too large, so becoming middle-class requires fierce internal competition.

However, the small number of the bourgeoisie at the top controls a large amount of social resources and their status is unbreakable.

The social resources occupied by the proletariat are constantly plundered and snatched by the bourgeoisie, and are becoming less and less.

This means that the proletariat lives a life with extremely low sense of happiness, while even the middle class needs fierce internal competition to obtain social status.

Naturally, when parents can barely improve and maintain their own middle-class status, middle-class parents are unable to leave enough resources for their offspring to continue to maintain their middle-class status.

In order to maintain the hard-earned middle-class status, they have no choice but to make their children suffer.

In the future, if this uneven distribution problem is not resolved, the situation will further deteriorate.

At this time, society will even move from the stage of raising children to the stage of "no children to raise"!!!

For the lower-class people, the lower-class workers have no time to care about the growth of their offspring, and their offspring will most likely repeat their parents' hard life.

Even if you are promoted to the middle class, what does it matter? You still can't escape the 996 work schedule, you still can't afford a house that costs tens of thousands per square meter, and if you don't push your children to grow up, they will still have to go back to the bottom.

Once they experience it themselves, people at the bottom of society will feel deeply the hardships of life and give up raising offspring.

Similarly, for the middle class, raising children too young is actually the last attempt made by top workers to maintain their middle-class status.

When the last struggle of pushing children to grow up is still unable to obtain sufficient resources to help future generations maintain their middle-class status and cannot reverse the outcome of class decline.

The middle class cannot accept that their lifelong hard work, sacrificing their sense of happiness in life and even their health, only to get nothing in return and have their children start all over again from the bottom.

Therefore, middle-class families will also give up the desire to have children and simply invest the large amount of resources needed to raise their children into themselves so that they can live a happier life.

As a result, the fertility rate began to plummet, the overtime culture was resisted, and the culture of lying down began to rise.

In this way, the proletariat vents its dissatisfaction in an extremely negative and self-harming way.

As for the rest of the story, it is still being written in the real world today, to be continued...$CTK $AUCTION #新币挖矿