Kyoiku Mama: The Japanese Word for Education Mother, a Mother Who Relentlessly Drives Her Child to Study
Modern world and middle-class cases
Extremes are being lived in today’s world, as well as in education. I’m not sure if this is the case everywhere, but in the country where I live, parents force themselves to to afford the high costs of education of their children.
The child has to be sent to the highest level school, which is mostly private. If the family's financial situation is not sufficient, they take loans, get into debt, and still send their children to those schools.
But this is not sufficient at all. Because he has to be the best pianist or tennis player the child is sent on social development courses. But this is not enough too, finally, private lessons are arranged in order to gain admission to the best schools by performing well on high school or university entrance exams.
Of course, this may not be the case in Scandinavian countries such as Denmark and Norway, but I believe that parenting does not take its natural course as it had in the past in the majority of the world.
A special word expresses the extremes of parenting, especially in motherhood in Japanese culture, which is well-known for hard working. Work is such an indispensible trait of Japanese character that there is even a special word in Japanese meaning to die from work.
Also in motherhood, there is such a word that expressing extremes.
Kyoiku mama
Kyoiku mama is a mother who brutally forces her child to study. It is also expressed as Education Mother in English.
This concept exists mostly in the middle-class, because it is important for those mothers to raise their children's status socially and not to lose existing status. This kind of awareness in the other classes such as working class is not so intense, but the middle class has this anxiety.
From Wikipedia:
In the post-World War II era in Japan, the mother was the creator of a new child-centered world stamped with middle-class values. The mother was linked with the success of the child's education. A woman was expected to be a "good wife, wise mother" and became the single most important figure in raising the child to become a successful future adult. Mothers needed to put their efforts into raising and teaching their children. Through self-cultivation and rearing of the children, the woman was crucial to a family's ability to claim a place in the so-called middle stratum.
I am also the mother of an 11 year old boy. I know that education is vital for him. We must do everything we can to ensure that it can survive in a competitive world. But we must keep him psychologically strong, and this is one of the most important pillars of our preparation for the future.
Mother is a loving person above every other duty or trait. As mothers, when we withdraw our compassion from our children, we are doing the worst thing possible. Instead, we must give them all the love we have. They need their mother’s love and compassion more than anything.