You're tuned in to Roundtable, I'm Steve, today with Feifei and Yuxuan.
Coming up, remember when a red envelope felt like magic?
Not for the cash per se, but for the luck?
Well, somewhere along the way, that magic got replaced by a calculator.
With campaigns now capping the cash, we're asking if we can save the hongbao from the monetary arms race.
After that, what if your child's hatred of broccoli started way before they took their first bite of solid food?
New research reveals that the battle for the dinner plate might be won or lost in the womb.
Is picky eating a genuine biological survival mechanism or a side effect of modern convenience?
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And now, Every new year, a flash of red lands in a child's hands.
A quiet calculation begins at that very moment, not in the child's mind, but in the adult's minds.
The red envelope, or the hongbao, is meant to symbolize a blessing or some luck or some love.
Yet somehow each year, it edges closer to a subtle competition.
This time around the debate felt louder.
In some regions, local initiatives were encouraging families to cap lucky money at modest amounts, hoping to cool what many call a growing monetary arms race.
But the real tension isn't just about how thick the envelope is.
It's about ownership.
Many parents are seeing Hongbao as a part of a reciprocal New Year ritual among adults.
Legally, though, under China's civil code, that money belongs to the kids.
So it's not just about holiday spending.
It's about rights, and respect and what we're teaching our children about ownership and financial literacy.
And as red envelopes changed hands this year...
Can we bring back the meaning of luck and love and prosperity?
Or...
Click, click, click, click goes the calculator.
Have we gone too far in that direction now?
But I guess this is quite cultural, isn't it?
Not specifically to China.
In Korea, I saw they have this culture too about the envelopes at New Year's time.
But for those who don't know, let's talk about hongbao a little bit.
What is it and what's going on with it?
So hongbao also can be called red envelope or lucky money.
They're basically cash gifts, literally cash gifts that wrapped up in a red envelope, that given out to younger generations by older generations during, for example, holiday season, like the spring festival period.
It meant to be giving the meaning of passing on luck and blessing to the children and it's supposed to be a gesture of you know, giving out good fortune.
And then gradually, I think, especially comparing when I was a child, when I was the receiver of this red envelope, to now as a giver of this red envelope, the thickness of that envelope is definitely growing.
And when you have a lot of children in your family, not only the smaller family but extended family, you need to give out not only to your own children.
You probably need to give out to, for example, the children of your cousins.
Is this specific to the New Year time or does this happen multiple times a year?
I think it's only the New Year time, correct?
This specific giving of the red envelopes.
Yeah, that's why it's also called Ya Sui Qian in Chinese.
This goes back a long, long, long, long, long way in Chinese history, right?
Yeah, because the origins of these red envelopes can be traced back to the Han Dynasty, which is in 206 BCE to 220 CE, when amulet, like items in the shapes of coins, were worn for good luck, and then later on, giving children money during celebrations became an established custom during the song and when dynasty with just ancient China, and it is, of course, as you said, passing on blessings and good luck, and it is also a good wish from the like, the older generation, to the kids in the family.
So That is evidence as to why this is so deeply rooted.
I mean, it's been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years that this practice has continued on in China.
And that's why it's such a major part of the holiday and an expected part of the holiday, too.
But there was something that happened not so long ago where a video of a man he was handing out 100 yuan packets.
That's about 14 dollars.
To 23 nieces and nephews.
This went viral on Douyin.
That's a social media platform here.
And the clip showed children.
They were gathered at his home and it was the first day of the new year.
And they were exchanging greetings and receiving their packets, which is, you know, part of the custom.
That video, by the way, was from Guangdong.
And so far it sounds like, you know, part of a normal celebration day, right?
But a 100 yuan hongbao.
Compared with the common expectation of 200 to 500, if not even more than that, was rather humble.
And that video got a lot of attention.
Hmm.
Yes, simply because I think on Postler, for example, talking about lucky money, talking about this red envelope on Baos, has drawn more than 2 billion views and nearly 12 million discussions with, of course, some videos capture children's excitement receiving the money, discovering how much they got in these envelopes.
And then I think the big contrast over there is about the anxiety when it comes to the givers of this money.
Because, for example, we were talking about that gentleman in Guangdong province.
He gave out 100 yuan per packet, 23 yuan.
Exactly.
But it wasn't about the number of the nieces and nephews.
It was about the amount, which is lower than the typical amount.
So the anxiety and this is why this is an issue I guess these or has become an issue these days in China is because about social expectations and the fact that they have risen because incomes have risen.
And now people are expecting more and more when compared to the past.
And the thing is that the protagonist in this story, Chen himself, on the other hand, do not feel it's by any chance the downgrading of the New Year wishes for the kids.
He said that in southern China's Guangdong province, red envelopes are just primarily gesture of good fortune rather than a measure of generosity.
And it's not about the amount of money, it's about to the gesture and the wish that give them through also with the red envelope.
Yeah, I think it's also with the local culture.
I think in some southern provinces like Guangdong you are not supposed to be wrapping very much money in that envelope.
But in some other areas, for example in my hometown, in northeastern regions of China, we're definitely wrapping more than 200 or 500 yuan per packet.
How much would the average packet contain?
Well, it depends on the closeness of the family members that you are giving out.
For really close ones, it can go up to more than 1000 yuan per red envelope.
Per person.
Yeah, per person.
So if you have a large family of you, have a lot of brothers and sisters, i mean this can be very very, very expensive.
Yeah, yeah.
And also, when it comes to the older generation, doesn't mean especially after you start your own career, you start to work, you get married, have fam, your own family, so you will no longer be the receiver of these envelopes yes, even from your grandma.
We should talk about that, because if you're if for people who aren't familiar with this, so when you're a kid, You just you're super excited when this holiday comes because you're like, oh yeah, it's money time.
And you get all these red envelopes and you keep growing up and you keep growing up.
And then eventually you pass over from being the receiver into being the giver.
And that's a very difficult emotional time to deal with.
Because you don't get any more money.
You got to give it now.
What age is that?
Or does it depend on age or your financial independent-ness, if that's a word?
I think it's about your financial independence.
When you are making money by yourself, then I think you suddenly just switch to the position of you can be independent, able to give out money, yeah and then, but still you are.
If you are the kid of the family, your maybe your grandparents or your uncles and uh aunties, they may still give you that money.
And, as we mentioned that before some, because there is another tradition of visiting different relatives during the chinese new year, which means that you are go to a round of visiting And then go to different families, several families.
And after that round of visiting, you can get up to even 10,000 yuan.
I mean, yeah, it can get very expensive and you can make a lot of money during this time as well.
Now.
So this video got a lot of attention and the protagonist in the story, as you said, which is a real story, by the way
You know, he's saying it's the thought that counts.
It's not about the financial amount.
But you know people now are feeling really nervous about this because they don't want to seem like they're being cheap.
Right.
But they also don't want to give out too much because that's a financial burden for them.
So in Guangdong, the area that we were talking about, which is which is down south.
They've come out with the Guangdong model.
So this is a chart that explains to people the appropriate amount that they should be giving to it.
What does the chart say?
Well, the chart says well, depending on the closeness of your family.
For example, 100 yuan for close family members, 50 for extended relatives, 20 for cousins, 10 for even more distant kin, 5 for your neighbors.
Oh, you even give money to your neighbors?
I think in Guangdong, they give out more red envelopes than us.
That festive vibe during that New Year's holidays and you can just go to visit any family in your neighborhood, no matter if it's your family or just neighbors.
And the elderlies will always give out red packets when you're visiting.
Okay.
So that's kind of a good idea to put a model like that out there, because it kind of takes the pressure off of people right.
If everybody's talking about it.
The local governments got involved too, and authorities kind of set the tone here.
So what happened and where did it happen?
In southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, officials have moved to formalize And on February the 10th, Long An County issued a proposal titled Small Lucky Money, Big Heartfelt Intentions, which urged residents just to agree in advance on maximum red envelope amounts and to favor symbolic sums over showy ones.
And the document emphasized that the holidays value lies in reunion, not spending.
Reminding people what this is supposed to be about.
Yeah.
And also Baisi, another city in Guangxi as well, they also released a very similar initiative.
They recommended caps of no more than 20 yuan on these red envelopes and also discouraging the expansion of gifting circles.
So it also proposed alternatives such as handwritten couplets or storytelling suggesting that younger family members can reciprocate with time and help rather than cash.
The kids are like, I don't think so.
I don't like this.
I don't want to hear your story.
Where's that cash?
Now well, speaking of cash and the kids, there's another issue to talk about, and that's who owns the lucky money.
What is this debate all about?
Well, there is a discussion well more of a debate, as Steve said, erupt online after a 12-year-old boy refused to hand over his 20000 yuan in the Chinese New Year red envelope money to his mother.
And he argued that this money was given to him, so he should keep it.
Well, the mother requested the money because she argued that the cash was essentially a reciprocal exchange from gifts given to other children, meaning that the mother also gave out money to other children.
And, as a reciprocal gesture, the other family members give money to her children so that she should be the one to manage these 20000 yuan.
That's exactly the answer that I got when I refused to hand over my... Wait, are you 12 years old?
Is this your story?
Back then, I think so.
Probably, you know, that's exactly the same.
And I was thinking I was telling my parents that it's finally my like control to how to manage this amount of money.
And it's belonged to me because, quote unquote, i earned it because i went to these different families, door to door, giving out greetings yeah, and then my dad said do you know how much money we spent on this red envelopes as well?
So did you get to keep the money in the end?
No i, i realized that that kind of makes sense.
Uh, i just did the conversion rate quickly.
Uh, this is about uh, almost four thousand dollars.
No no no, would that be right?
Twenty thousand yuan?
Yeah, almost four thousand dollars, maybe three more than three thousand for a twelve-year-old.
Yeah, i can understand the mother as a parent.
Of course, when you are talking about this amount of money um, they should be very careful of not just overspending all of them in one go um but, on the other hand Well, legally speaking, what's the deal?
Because mom is obviously going to say, hey, give me that.
And the kid is going to say, I don't think so.
Now, hopefully they don't go to court, but...
What would the court say if they went there?
According to a lawyer based in Shandong, he is called Dong Keqiang.
He said, from a legal perspective, this lucky money is supposed to belong to the minor, to the boy himself.
And because under China's civil code, when elders give lucky money to younger family members, it constitutes as a formal gift contract for So no matter how much money the parents give out to other family members, these are two separate legal acts and cannot offset each other.
So what you give is your gift.
It's supposed to be the mother's responsibility.
And what the child gets is his or her gift.
It's supposed to be theirs.
How do you handle this?
Did you end up in court?
No.
Just voluntarily gave up the money.
I ended up just handing over my money.
You gave it back.
I think that was better for your future.
And I think it's a good opportunity for the parent to teach the children about how to manage their own money.
Okay.
Yeah, because, you know, for my family, we sort of put the money in her bank account.
Oh, that's also my parents say, we will keep that money for you in the future.
And you forgot about that.
Yeah, it never got back to me.
But we do have a bank account for my daughter and she didn't get to withdraw the money from that bank account but she get to pay, for example, her own health insurance every year from that bank account, or sometimes her own.
She got a phone, she got a mobile number.
Now she sometimes pay her own phone bills with that money as well and she's slowly learning about how much, because for children of about 10 years old they're not really clear about how much money is 10 000 sure?
So it takes them time to learn about the price tags for a lot of things they buy and how much money they're getting.
So I think this is a good option.
But for my smaller one, who is two, by the way, I just... Oh, don't even tell them.
Yeah, they don't know.
He doesn't even know what day of the week it is.
It's his money, his lucky money in the morning, my bracelet in the evening.
Okay.
That's a secret.
Mommy needs a new pair of shoes.
I mean, yeah, I can understand why it would be a really debatable issue.
It's kind of an interesting kind of cross section of spring festival society, isn't it, these days?
Because I get it.
I get why the tradition... is still so deeply rooted.
I get why people feel financial pressure.
I get why maybe expectations have risen.
But I also get why it's going to be hard to reverse those expectations.
So I think it's got to be a family to family basis.
And I love what they did by putting out that chart saying hey, just follow this guide if you find it confusing.
And then you can use that guide as an excuse right for next year, when we have this exact same discussion in 12 months time.
It's an interesting one.
You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Steve.
Today with you, Shen and Feifei.
Coming up.
If you've ever felt like a short order cook trying to please a tiny food critic in your home, you are not alone.
Looking for passion?
How about fiery debate?
Want to hear about current events in China from different perspectives?
Then tune in to Roundtable. where East meets West, and understanding is the goal.
It's roundtable time.
I'm Steve today with Fei-Fei and Yuxuan.
And for many parents the dinner table feels less like a place for family bonding and more like a place for high-stakes negotiations.
We've all seen it.
The toddler who suddenly decides that anything green is poison.
Or the child who will only eat chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs.
But what if the roots of these food battles were planted long before your child ever sat in that high chair?
New research suggests that a child's palate begins to form while they are still in the womb, influenced by the very flavors that the mom consumes during pregnancy.
So we'll look at the nutritional neuroscience a little bit behind picky eating and explore why some kids are so resistant to new flavors and see if we can find a solution or two for you parents who are dealing with some picky eating kids right now.
But yeah, it does go back to the womb, doesn't it?
That's a lot earlier than people think.
Yeah, that's very surprising that flavor preference begin in the womb as the fetus swallows Amniotic fluid, you know the protective liquid surrounding the baby and which is flavored by the mother's diet.
I didn't know that.
Interesting.
Yeah.
And the taste buds began forming around eight weeks of gestation and are functionally active by about 13 to 15 weeks.
So by the third trimester a fetus can swallow up to 500 to 1000 millimeter of that liquid per day, meaning that they have repeated exposure to the flavor compounds dissolved in that fluid.
So that means Infants whose mother drank carrot juice, for example, during pregnancy showed a distinct preference for carrot-flavored cereal later on.
Because they were exposed to that flavor again and again and again.
They did another study and they did an ultrasound and the mom had eaten something sweet and they saw the baby smile.
And the mom ate something bitter and they saw the baby frown.
So yeah, you can make your baby happy or unhappy, I guess, by what you're eating during your pregnancy.
There's a role in breast milk as well, just like the amniotic fluid that you mentioned, Feifei.
It's kind of a flavor bridge for babies.
It can carry aromatic compounds of the foods as the mother is eating.
These compounds, they appear in the breast milk within one to six hours after a meal.
So even that gets passed on to influence what your baby likes and what your baby doesn't like as well.
Oh, that reminds me the reason why my two-year-old just loves mandarins and oranges, because I eat them all the time.
All the time.
That's the reason why.
Now there's something else at play here too, and it's a biological reason why kids are naturally wary of new foods.
It's called evolutionary neophobia, Yushan.
What's that all about?
Many children go through a phase called food neophobia, which is a developmental fear of trying anything new or unfamiliar, and this likely evolved as a survival mechanism to keep mobile toddlers from eating poisonous plants or berries when they started exploring on their own.
So it is the natural instinct.
And neophobia typically begins around 18 to 24 months, right when children become independently mobile and can peak between ages two and six.
And from an evolutionary standpoint, this timing is not Yeah, this is how they are programmed.
This is how we are programmed as human beings to enjoy sweeter things.
The scientists say Kids and babies.
They'll enjoy sweeter things, because sweeter things in nature tend to be on the safe side, like fruits and berries and things like that.
And kids don't like bitter stuff because the poison plants or the poison berries in nature tend to be on the bitter side.
So it's an evolutionary safeguard, if you will.
And also, young children typically have around eight thousand to ten thousand taste buds, while adults average closer to five thousand, so meaning that children's um receptors to these different tastes, for example bitter, are more sensitive.
I've actually heard about something really similar from a cook before saying that when you're cooking for children, you're supposed to make them a little bit of sweeter to your taste, Because that's the right amount for the children.
Think about that.
They have double the taste buds we do.
They are experiencing flavors a whole lot more intensely than we are.
So if they're pre-programmed to not like bitter when they taste bitter, can you imagine how intense that is?
They will have a strong reaction.
Exactly.
Fitting the mouth.
There's even a gag reflex that babies have or kids have to it.
All right.
Well, let's talk about this then.
What are some of the don'ts when it comes to feeding?
Because I want to talk about modern day parents.
Now we know why babies and kids are so picky.
But what do we do as parents?
Because it's a real battle for some parents trying to get their kids to to eat.
So what are some mistakes that parents are making?
Well, I think first of all it's giving them a lot of pressure, for example, sort of giving them these signs that if you don't eat certain food you'll get a punishment, sort of linking food to a very negative emotions out there.
And that will trigger something the psychologists refer to as reactance.
That means when children resist perceived threats to their autonomy.
So when these younger children exhibit reactance, meaning that the more pressure we give them, the stronger resistance we receive
Because you're creating a negative emotional connotation with that food.
Eat your peas, eat your broccoli, or no video games for you.
Now, the child associates broccoli with a punishment.
And that's why they're drawing a connection.
I don't like this anymore.
Or there's zero chance I'm going to like this in the future.
What's another one?
They say don't prepare separate meals for your kids.
That's also a mistake.
They will think there was going to be an alternative when I just be this kind of picky or I just choose not to eat these kind of things.
So special meal for picky child reinforces the idea that They don't have to try what the rest of the family is eating.
And then this prevents them from seeing the family meal as a shared experience and slows down their progress in trying new things.
And also there are research on family style meal shows children are more likely to try new foods when they see trusted adults eating them without pressure.
Yeah, because you know when i think a lot of well for children, they learn from the adults around them.
Yeah, so when you they see you are enjoying your food, they will sort of link that food to pleasure, to very positive emotions and feelings.
And they are more willing to try the new foods, even that may look a little intimidated to them in the first place.
I think that's how people just started to accumulate or cultivate a habit of eating that specific or certain style of food.
Right, because in in china there are so many different regions, so many different style of cuisines, and then it can be so different.
For example, here in beijing people are just so getting used to eating lamb, while in my region people just don't like that smell of lamb.
But is it because people are different?
No, I don't think so.
It's just because when they're a child, they have a lot of lamb.
And the people around them like that.
And they just develop that kind of idea of this is tasty.
I do think it's a bit more global in terms of a food culture difference as well.
Because I think, maybe I'm wrong, it's just my living experiences here in Asia.
But from what I've seen...
Babies, even young children, are exposed to a lot more different types of flavors than Western kids tend to be.
I know that's a grand sweeping statement, but I kind of feel like it's true.
Because a lot of the Korean foods and Chinese foods are a lot of sours, a lot of bitters, a lot of different temperatures, heat right.
Even that.
And the babies are exposed to them at a very young age.
I think there's an opportunity to get used to those types of flavors at a younger age than perhaps in the West.
And even we are talking about picky eaters.
They are not like totally not eating one category of food.
They're probably just... don't like broccoli, that one thing.
And then there are so many other vegetables that they can pick.
And maybe parents will also find other ways to like shred the broccoli into meat or something.
Make the children eat without even noticing it.
So they have a lot of other choices.
But the thing is that maybe in other area on the planet they just have a very fixed way of cooking and then they're just easy to realize that I don't like that.
And also there is a thing that I noticed when it comes to parenting.
You know, raising a small children is that when you are really curated a diet for him or her, that you're planning very carefully about what's putting in their bowl or plate, you will see this power struggle on the dinner table.
While when it compares to, for example, you're really nonchalant about what you're eating.
You're just giving out a portion of what you are eating on the dinner table.
The children are less likely to be a picky eater.
And I think that can be.
Another issue is that you don't need to spend as much time and energy thinking about I need to design a special menu for her or him.
And it takes them a while to.
This is what they say.
It can take anywhere from 8 to 15 exposures for a child to move from hating a food to accepting it.
So keep shoving that broccoli in their face.
They'll like it eventually.
