Discussion keeps the world turning.
You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Feifei, together with Yushan and Steve Heatherly.
Coming up, this summer, when families are supposed to ditch books and have fun, parents end up as an unpaid teaching assistant.
Printing, monitoring, and planning their children's work themselves.
Teachers say they don't want to burden anyone.
Schools say they're following rules.
And parents say they just want their kids to keep up.
So why does the burden still land on the desk?
Is it the teachers dodging the rules?
Schools chasing rankings?
Or parents too afraid to say no?
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Summer holiday is supposed to mean a break from school, but for many Chinese families, it now seems to come with a new piece of equipment, a printer.
As schools increasingly send worksheets, reading materials, and other assignments on digital files, families are finding themselves
Printing hundreds of pages at home, monitoring online quote-unquote clock-ins, helping with projects that were supposed to be their children's work.
So why has so much of the school workload ended up at home, and where should we draw the line between supporting our children
And doing the schoolwork for them.
It's the time of summer holiday, Yushan and Steve.
I do got asked multiple times in recent months actually about, do you have a printer at home?
And I asked back, like, why do I need a printer at home?
Who asked you this?
A lot of my friends, all of them are parents.
And I asked them, why do I need a printer?
And they told me, well, for your kid.
Of course, for all the schoolwork, she needs a printer at home.
And apparently, it's all over China.
People need a printer somehow.
It's an essential equipment at home.
Yeah, this is mind-blowing for me when I first read about this.
As soon as the summer homework comes out, the first thing to get busy at home is the printer.
And this is one complaint from one parent, but...
Others just echoed with him or her immediately on social media as they were asking each other which printer to buy and where to get the ink and other supplies.
So this has become a trend.
And here's just one case that shows how extreme it can get.
Regarding what they're printing and how many they're printing as parents.
So one parent commented online that this summer, her child's daily summer practice arrived at 21 PDF files in the parent's WeChat group.
21.
And that's totaling nearly... That's for one student.
One kid, yeah.
200 pages.
Yeah, 200 pages.
So that covers math homework, English reading, Chinese poetry memorizing, science experiments with little projects indicating what you need to do, and new worksheets.
Kept appearing in the parents' group chat every few days.
So, okay, explain to me how this works.
So the parents of the kids in one class
Are all in a group chat together.
And the teacher is also in that group chat.
So whatever the teacher needs to communicate to the parents or attach a file or homework files or whatever, that file just goes in the group chat and everybody can download it and print it at home.
That was the biggest mind-blowing fact for me because decades ago, it used to be the teacher writing all the list of homework for this summer break or winter break on the blackboard, and it was transcribed by the student with a pen and a paper onto –
They're like a notebook or something and bring back home.
And then when I was a kid in our generation, it became a printed sheet of list of assignments you need to complete with homework printed out for you or workbook assigned to you.
And nowadays, apparently, that's what you described, Steve.
That's the file sent in WeChat groups.
So this sounds like, okay, what's the big deal?
Why is this a source of stress or anxiety for parents?
Because it is summer vacation time.
So parents are going places with their kids.
They're going away on their family trips.
But I don't know about you, but I don't take a printer with me when I go on vacation.
But that's what parents are talking about these days.
There was another parent online who left this comment.
The hotel lobby can print, but only five pages at a time.
Anything more costs 2 yuan per page.
My child had more than 20 pages of homework, so I ended up paying 40 yuan just to print it out.
So for some parents, bringing a printer with them on vacation has become a new solution.
And that includes...
Bringing them on to the high-speed trains and hooking them up on the train and printing on the train.
Okay, as a parent myself, I think this is kind of the extreme example of a parent.
It's not happening everywhere in China.
Because when it comes to school homework, the summer vacation is not as urgent as it sounds.
But I think it has still a lot of families are purchasing printers.
Printers do become home essential appliances currently in a lot of Chinese homes.
And I think that has also something to do with how homework works.
Was assigned, has been assigned in recent years.
Yeah, it's different now, right?
Yeah, it's different.
It's digital.
And also when it comes to these group chats, it's not only of group chats of the school that your children go to, it also is the group...
I was in...
I don't really remember three to four different group chats.
I know nobody in those group chats, but they just keep sharing reading materials, worksheets for different grades.
These are all parents from the same school you're
Not from the same school, not even from Beijing.
They're from all over China, but they share like very generously about these worksheets and reading materials.
And so for a parent who think, well, my kid needs something extra to do to improve her performance or his performance.
Then I would go to this group chat and downloading some of the files and print it out as sort of an extra work aside from the school homework for the children to do.
And I think that's sort of the two paralleled homework that most children in China is facing currently.
I was curious to see how things have gone this far these days, because shouldn't it be the schools who print out homework for the students and the students themselves doing their own homework instead of relying everything on the parents' side?
So I looked into this.
So this year, the 2026 Ministry of Education Directive
Had already released in July saying that, well, actually strictly prohibiting that the assigning of homework via mobile phones or requiring students to complete work on digital devices are not allowed.
That being said, a rule can draw the boundary on paper, but changing what actually happens inside families may be much harder.
As we see, there are still parents trying to print out those sources of information.
Pdf files some are homework some are just optional practices or exercises that are not mandatory as as it turns out
So is it really the school who's pushing things too far or is it like parents anxiety playing the devil's advocate
I mean
And yet there are so many angles to this story because there's the printer angle.
There's just the homework in general angle.
Then there's the parents involvement angle, too.
And also the requirements.
Yeah, that the kids, the things that they have to do.
It's not just like printed out PDF files like math questions or English questions or whatever.
Some of these things, you have to build a model.
You have to complete a science or art project.
Some have to prepare a creative presentation during the holidays.
There was one example from an online newspaper.
The Post said this.
This was from the mother.
Of a first year junior high school student because one of the school's social studies assignments for the summer vacation had them going to create a detailed file on an ancient artifact unearthed at an archaeological site.
And they had to include the information about it.
They had to include where it was found and its historical significance.
And then they had to put everything together into a proper looking archive.
I think it's quite a good project for the student to work on.
But the parents seem to have like a different opinion.
Well, I don't think it's the project itself.
I think it's the timing of the project.
I think it's the detail of the project that is the biggest issue here.
This is summer vacation time.
That sounds like what I just described.
Does that not sound like a school class trip in the maybe, I don't know, middle of October?
Maybe that was meant to be a little trip because the parents said it took them almost like three days or a couple of days to finish that one archived file as a wrap up for that little project.
And that may be just one among the many assignments that was given to her child as part of the summer holiday homework.
But she also said that, yeah, amid all the exhaustion of bringing her to the museum, doing research with her, like keep all the AI tools talking as if they've overworked.
In order to finish the job, she realized that her kids' understanding of the history and the local archaeological studies had really become so profound to the fact that she was learning along with her.
So I think this is what the school was asking from the first place.
I think in recent years, not only here in China, but internationally, there's parent-children sort of engagement has been encouraged.
In a lot of such school homework projects, but also extracurriculum projects, sort of having children and the parents learn together.
Have you seen stuff like this, Fei-Fei?
I have a pile of such tasks on my daughter's desk.
A pile suggests they are incomplete.
Some of them have been completed because my daughter I would you know in the beginning of a summer break we would sit down with my daughter asking her to have a sort of a timeline for different tasks that she has assigned from the teacher.
On what pace do you want to finish, for example, the math questions that you have?
Or what about the Chinese poetry?
What about the English learning?
And there are also reading materials.
Oh, it's like marking an online chart.
That's kind of done all over China in Changsha, in central China's Hunan province.
What do you mean an online chart?
That's something parents have been complaining about too, apart from all the different forms of homework their kids are doing.
That is, it's merely just a quick work from the parents.
It's a responsibility for them to...
Tick what their kid has done.
And by ticking, sometimes it's just to leave a mark there, meaning that, oh, my kid has recited this poem today.
Oh, my kid has recited 20 new English words today.
And sometimes that has to be attached with a photograph of, you know, your kid sweeping the floor or your kid doing some some chores around the house.
Household chores are also included in the school homework.
In some schools, yes.
Some kids are left with the homework of cooking.
You have to deliver the picture of you cooking four dishes in one step.
You've done that.
Here's your homework.
You've got to get a job at Meituan.
You're going to work 14 hours a day.
I feel like I have an opinion about this, but I don't know if I have the right to have an opinion about this.
This, Steve, I think is a very interesting question.
I just realized it might be a cultural difference.
When it comes to what should we do for the summer vacation, not only summer vacations, but winter vacation, any long period of breaks during school semesters.
I think for a lot of Chinese parents, well, at least for me, I think I can speak with confidence that such breaks, winter or summer, is a period for the children to...
To learn something more.
Outside of school and classrooms.
Outside of school classrooms and maybe learning something again to sort of revise what they've learned during the previous school semester and then learn something more, for example, about arts, sports, history, something they don't have time
To do during the school year, and that we think this is the golden period for the children to do that.
I'm not sure about you, Steve.
Do you think the summer breaks should be a time for more study, more learning?
We talk about the mental health of students sometimes, right?
The mental well-being of students and the importance of it.
So there are two sides to my opinion.
One side says this, that's ridiculous.
Give them a break.
They're in school studying all day, every day.
They're preparing for the gaokao from the very early elementary school days.
Give them a few weeks.
What is it, like six weeks or something like that that they're off?
Yeah.
Give them the six-week break.
That's one side of my opinion.
The other side is the more understanding side where you are in how many different group chats?
I can't remember.
And that means how many different parents are in there.
And that means everyone's aware, and the ticking of the chart, my kid did this, my kid did that, my kid did this.
Now imagine you're a parent looking at that chart
And if you follow Steve's first opinion, my first opinion, oh, it's vacation time.
Just let them go outside and play in the dirt.
While all the other kids in the classroom are reciting Chinese poetry from 2,000 years ago or whatever, improving their math skills, you're going to feel that pressure as a parent to not let your kid fall behind.
And you probably feel guilty now.
This is almost connected to the workplace topic.
You'll feel guilty and shameful because you'll feel like you're doing your kid a disservice if you're not giving them the opportunity to learn more.
Back to the printer side of the story.
So Fei-Fei, quick question.
What do you think is the expected ratio of your participation in the pile of undone or finished homework of your kids?
Well, I haven't thought about that before, but I think maybe 20-30%, definitely less than 50%.
That's healthy enough.
Because according to many of the cases that we've read through,
The parents, especially during summertime or like longer periods of vacations, they are the leading drive of kind of moving things around for their kids.
Even some are helping to put things together for their kids.
So, yeah, I don't know.
For the parents, I just feel like it's unfair.
Yeah, because it's...
So, Feifei, is summertime actually... Is it actually a much, much busier time for you as a parent than when your kid is in school?
Yeah, because she would be going to different camps, learning different skills, swimming, English, Chinese poetry.
And then also we want to take her on a vacation to another place outside of Beijing.
So we are doing a lot of planning throughout the month.
The two months actually and we're actually more busy but i do feel like learning can be fun
We are thinking about learning teaching the children about something more about history and arts but i think she enjoyed it
It's like another play time for her just with some elements of the history embedded in that process
So I think competitiveness on the other side, learning can be fun.
Maybe exploring more of the diverse homework things can help in this regard.
And we do hope to check in again on the homework side of the story in China and maybe globally.
But we have to wrap up for this edition of Roundtable.
