Thanks to my husband’s business travel, I was on WeChat a year before we moved to China. I thought I understood how it worked and was prepared to make it the cornerstone of my life in Beijing. However, nothing prepared me for the WeChat groups between parents and the schools. There’s an all-school group, one for each set of grades, and one for our children’s individual classes.
It’s important to note that in the case of our school and most international ones, the WeChat groups are not official school communication channels, but simply a place for parents to help one another and learn how to get more information from the staff representative. We use Seesaw and other apps to talk to educators, and teachers or staff are not encouraged to be friends with parents on WeChat. Based on conversations with parents, most international school maintain similar boundaries.
Herein lies just one difference between local and international schools, and is why this article in Caixin Global took me by surprise. Its title “Trending in China: The ‘Tyranny’ of Parent Teacher Social Media Chat Groups” immediately made me think of the parent peer pressure prevalent in many parent groups, no matter which social media platform we’re on.
The issues in the Caixin Global article, however, are much different:
Teacher-parent WeChat groups are popular across China and originally were set up to facilitate communication between parents and teachers, but more recently they have taken on the reputation of being “flattering groups” in which parents try and curry favor with teachers or become sites of petty quarrels and fights.
Thankfully, I haven’t seen much of that. Sometimes the messages come so fast and furious, however, that I get caught up in the “excitement” and feel pressure to engage in ways that I find too stressful. I have a few hard and fast rules for myself to reduce that feeling.
Only individual classroom groups are pinned to the top.
This is key. My kids’ classroom groups are the only places where we can stay on topic, ask a question, and get a direct answer with no drama. It helps that we can be very specific in these classroom groups, so there’s little elaboration needed for any questions we have.
Search for answers in the all-school group but don’t engage within it.
This lesson is hard to learn. I want to know everything that’s happening in school, right? Turns out, I really don’t. Through the main group, I often feel pressure to be more involved in our child’s day-to-day learning than I would consider normal, especially after rebounding from e-learning last spring. However, our kids are still in ECE and Lower Primary, and we’re much laxer on homework than most, so I just need to step back and make sure anything I’m considering is still based on our family values versus external pressure from other parents. So if I have a question, I search for the terms in the all-school group but don’t read anything else.
It’s okay not to answer every alert on your phone.
There’s no need to voice your opinion on every topic.
I’m all for creating a more sustainable cafeteria, for instance, but for nearly a week the conversation in our all-school group was entirely centered around the cafeteria food. My standards for cafeteria food are pretty low, thanks to attending school in the ’80s, but for all the effort spent on trying to combine hot meals with social distancing measures at schools, the parents could, quite frankly, just make their kids’ lunches themselves (and I say this as someone who hates making lunches but does it for my one child who doesn’t like school lunch).
Don’t take your stress out on your screen either.
It’s okay to delete yourself from groups that are stressing you out.
When the WeChat group is not the official communication from the school, it’s simple. Just check your email or official apps and ask questions there. Immediately using WeChat to ask a question of the parents that would be better answered directly with a teacher is not productive, and we only do it for two reasons: either we’re just used to using WeChat for everything and don’t remember to switch over to another app, or we want to get “backup” from other parents that our problem is also their problem.
School is stressful enough. Don’t add social media peer pressure to your stress level just because it’s in a WeChat group.
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Images: Unsplash, Cindy M Jenkins
