The Family WhatsApp Group That Turned Every Report Card Into a Public Event

The group chat is called "Leung Family 🏠❤️." It has twenty-three members, spanning three generations and two continents (one uncle in Canada, who joined in 2020 and has since sent approximately four thousand forwarded articles about health supplements). It was created, originally, to coordinate my husband's parents' anniversary dinner. That was six years ago. The anniversary dinner happened once.

What the group chat actually is now is a performance space. And the main performance — the recurring event that everyone both dreads and participates in — is the Academic Update.

Someone started it years ago. A cousin's parent — I've never figured out exactly who — posted a photo of a test result with a red "98/100" circled at the top. The message was brief. Just the photo and a single proud emoji. Within the hour, another parent had posted their child's certificate from a piano competition. Then someone else posted an English essay with a merit sticker. Then a Primary 1 school report. Then, apparently to keep up, someone posted a photo of their toddler recognising letters on a worksheet.

This is now, without anyone having formally decided it, how the group works. Every exam season, the chat goes active. Report cards are photographed and uploaded — sometimes partially, just the good subjects; occasionally, heroically, the whole thing. Trophies, certificates, competition results, school newsletters featuring a particular child's name. The chat is an unbroken ribbon of evidence that the Leung family produces exceptionally capable children.

My children are not in the top half of this ribbon.

I want to say that I sat above this. That I scrolled through the updates with equanimity and secure self-knowledge. That I loved my children for who they were, not what they scored. I want to say all of this. I cannot say all of this.

What I actually did, for two years, was participate at reduced intensity. I posted the good results and omitted the mediocre ones. I posted the drama performance certificate but not the maths test where my daughter got 58%. I posted the award from the school sports day — participation category, not placing — without the accompanying annotation that she came eighth. I was not lying, exactly. I was curating. The way everyone in the chat was curating.

The thing is, my kids could see what I was posting. Chloe, who is old enough to understand social media and group chats, once asked me if I was going to post her history test. The test had a 71%. I said I'd think about it. She looked at me in a way that made me feel absolutely terrible, and then said "it's okay, Mum," which made me feel worse.

That was the conversation that changed things.

I don't know how to raise children who believe their value isn't in their marks if I am personally posting their marks for extended-family validation. These two things cannot coexist. Either the marks aren't the measure of the child, or they are. I couldn't keep performing one belief while acting on another.

I didn't leave the group. I didn't send a manifesto. I just stopped posting academic results. When results season came, I wished everyone else's kids well and stayed quiet about my own. My mother-in-law, with great tact, once sent me a private message asking if everything was okay. I said yes, our kids were doing fine, we just wanted to keep it private. She accepted this, to her enormous credit.

One cousin — mid-thirties, three kids, very active in the chat — messaged me separately to say she was also thinking about stepping back from the updates. Her eldest, she said quietly, was starting to find the pressure unbearable. The chat had reached him somehow; he knew the comparison was happening. We had a long private conversation that felt more honest than anything said in the group.

The group chat hasn't changed. The updates still flow every exam season, each one a small assertion that someone's child is keeping the family competitive. I still read them. I'm not immune to the comparison reflex; it still fires automatically when I see a cousin's child got into a particular secondary school.

But I've stopped feeding it with my own children's data. They are not content. They are not achievements to be displayed. They are Chloe and Marcus, who got 71% in history and 58% in maths and are slowly, imperfectly, turning into people, and I would like that process to happen somewhere other than a group chat with twenty-three members, one of whom has never sent anything except health supplement articles and still somehow has two hundred unread messages.