For thousands of yuan, Chinese parents are buying their children a taste of hardship: hauling bricks, labouring in fields and clearing dung from cowsheds. But psychologists warn that pushing them too far can backfire.
SHANGHAI: “You spent money on a plane ticket just to make me do this work,” the young boy wailed, pointing at the camera.
“Do you think I'll give in?"
Sent by his parents from Shanghai to the mountains of Guizhou, the boy cried and complained - but he did the work: chopping firewood, hauling bricks and pulling out weeds from the fields.
The clip was one of many that flooded Chinese social media this summer, showing children labouring on farms and, between sobs, telling the camera what they had endured.
“I'm too tired, I can't hold on,” another child lamented in a separate video, before tearfully appealing: “Mum, I was wrong. I want to go home and study.”
These are China's “chi ku”, or “eat bitterness”, hardship camps. Advertised for children aged six to 16, the programmes are held largely in southwestern provinces like Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou, and promise to toughen up a generation that parents fear has gone soft.
The concept isn’t new. Similar programmes have operated since the early 2000s but this summer, demand surged.
As clips of crying campers spread, comments came in from parents, asking how to enrol their children.
Typically run as privately organised, commercial study tours rather than official school-affiliated programmes, hardship camps charge anywhere from 5,000 yuan (US$700) for ten days to more than 10,000 yuan for a month - and places are limited, snapped up by eager parents hoping to register their children.
Young participants have been seen picking tea leaves, cooking over earthen stoves, hoeing fields under the summer sun, hauling bricks, clearing dung from cowsheds and trekking mountain paths with bags of rice on their backs.
A DOSE OF HARDSHIP
Tong Lu, the mother of an eight-year-old boy, is in the business herself.
Her company, Haoshi Study Tours, runs a six-day hardship camp in the mountains of Lishui in Zhejiang.
The camps take place during the height of summer in one of the province’s hottest areas: temperatures this July exceeded 35 degrees Celsius.
The programme, called “Swapped Lives”, sends children aged nine to 12 to live and work alongside farming families in local villages.
Life has been “too smooth” for children in China these days, Tong told CNA, adding that many cannot “take any hardship” and fail to grasp why it matters to “stick with things”.
“These days, kids … all end up a bit soft,” she said.
“They are well-fed and well-clothed. Parents pay to send them to all sorts of enrichment classes (and) almost every family has a car,” she added.
At the camp, tasks are designed to show children how much work can go into something they might otherwise take for granted.
For instance, children gather firewood and cart it back to camp in baskets to cook their meals over an earthen stove. They can spend three to four hours gathering, bundling and carrying the wood, then cooking - for a meal finished in just ten minutes.
Tea leaves they pick, sometimes for up to 30 minutes a day, can be exchanged for supplies - mainly food items such as milk and “eight-treasure congee”, a sweet mixed-grain porridge - donated to poor families.
Carrying cow dung is capped at 10 to 20 minutes. The chore gives children a taste of real farm work, said the camp's programme designer Zhang Hao - and the dung itself is put to use, composted as fertiliser or fed into biogas digesters for fuel.
The broader point is for children to grasp where food comes from, how it is grown - and the amount of effort it takes to reach their plates, Zhang added.
For many, however, the shock begins when they first arrive and see their rooms.
The rooms are in the village itself, with six to eight children in a room, sleeping on wooden bunk beds. Clean but bare, they are a world away from the hotels many of them know from family holidays.
“They'll say, 'What? We're staying here? I want to go home.' Most kids react like that,” said Liu Baoshun, a study tour instructor, who has led four camps with the company over the past three years.
Many children also feel homesick on the first few nights, Liu said, and often cry when phoning home.
Those who beg to go home are coaxed to wait, he said. By morning, most carry on.
Other low points also include the smell of the cowshed and heat during the school walk.
On “walk to school” day, children carry a kilogram of rice along a 5km mountain route taken by village pupils. The walk takes around one and a half hours, and ends at an abandoned village primary school.
Children who get exhausted mid-task may rest, carry less or split the work into trips, said Liu, adding that they take breaks.
“But (they) still have to finish the job.”
At the end, they eat plain rice from tin boxes outside the abandoned classroom - a stark departure from the 10-dish spreads many are used to at home.
Liu recalled one rebellious camper who clashed with teachers in the early days but changed over the course of the camp. By the time of the school walk, the boy was volunteering for more: "Teacher, I want to carry extra rice."
One activity is planned before camp officially begins. Parents are asked to write their children secret letters.
On the second-to-last night, following days of labour, the letters are distributed and many children often “bawl their eyes out” after reading letters from their parents, Zhang said.
This encourages children to return home feeling appreciative and willing to express their feelings, Zhang added.
"Some kids go home and just say, 'Mum, I love you, thank you' … That’s what parents really care about more,” he said.
Tong, the company’s director, has defended the demanding nature of the camp.
“If the programme isn’t that tough, it doesn’t deliver the experience it’s meant to,” she said.
But organisers stop short of promising lasting transformation.
Children “do want to change” after going through the experience, Tong said - but some “slip back to their old ways a few days after they get home”.
“We’re not a military camp,” said Zhang. “You can’t send a child here for five or six days and (expect) them to turn into a completely different person.”
Liu was more blunt about how long any changes might last.
“The effects definitely won't last,” Liu said.
“We always tell parents honestly it's just a few days.”
DOES HARDSHIP BUILD RESILIENCE?
But when hardship is severe or prolonged - and support is short, the experience at a hardship camp could overwhelm a child’s ability to cope rather than strengthen it, experts told CNA.
“A resilient child is not necessarily one who can endure the most hardship,” said Setoh Peipei, head of psychology at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore.
What builds resilience is not “suffering for the sake of suffering” - but opportunities to navigate manageable challenges with appropriate support, she said.
Children do need friction, she added. To learn to ride a bike, a child needs discomfort and even failure - “falling down, getting back up, adjusting their technique”.
But she draws a line between challenges that build “useful skills” and “suffering intended to break or punish” a child. And that distinction matters when a child feels exhausted, Setoh said.
A child who feels trapped and learns that expressing distress or asking for help will “simply result in being told to endure more” may learn to endure, rather than how to cope with difficulty, she said.
“Distress from a younger child cannot automatically be interpreted as evidence that the programme is ‘working’ better,” she added.
A week at a gruelling hardship camp can also have lasting effects, Setoh said.
If a child experiences severe fear or helplessness, feels that adults will not respond to their distress, or perceives the camp as punishment, the effects can later surface as anxiety, fear of making mistakes or difficulty trusting others.
How children end up at these camps can matter too.
One camp interviewed by local media advised hesitant parents to call it a rural study trip and "trick" their child into going.
"If a child is told that they are going on an enjoyable rural trip but is instead placed in a highly controlled and punitive environment, the lesson may not be 'I should appreciate my parents'," Setoh said.
"It may be 'I cannot trust my parents'."
Age of participants matters greatly too, Setoh noted.
A 15-year-old, for example, may better understand why they are at a hardship camp and that it will end, while younger participants depend more heavily on having trusted adults around to feel safe, she added.
Not every child hates the experience.
A Chengdu father surnamed Gao, who sent his reluctant Secondary 1 daughter to a camp, told local media that while she complained about the farm work, she also enjoyed it.
"She almost likes it," he said.
The same hardship, noted Desiree Qin Baolian, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Michigan State University, can leave one child stronger and another traumatised.
"We can put children in challenging situations," she said. "However, the container needs to be warm and supportive."
Whether a child's new obedience after camp reflects growth or fear is the question parents should ask, Qin said.
"Short term obedience and long term growth and health is very different."
Fear-driven obedience also “does not last long” and plants “seeds of fear and distrust” in a child, Qin said
Over time, she said, such children may come to feel they "cannot trust adults and others around them to help them".
When a child feels loved and cared for, by contrast, "it's like having sunlight", she said - a feeling that carries them "through many dark moments in life".
She also shifts some of the focus from children to their parents.
Parents naturally want their children to “grow up strong, be resilient, and (able to) deal with anything in life”, Qin said, adding that she has experienced the same feelings herself, as a mother of two.
“A lot of times … (parents) do not know how to work with their own anxiety, they project it on their children,” Qin said.
Her advice is for parents to first manage their own anxieties and resist the urge to tightly control their children’s experiences.
Giving children room to encounter difficulties, make mistakes and work out how to respond is itself part of building resilience, she added.
“When children feel free to explore, free to make mistakes, then they can truly learn and grow,” she said.
“That is the real resilience.”