A Letter to Hong Kong Parents (From Someone Who Watched You for 12 Years)

Dear Hong Kong Parent,

I sat across from you for twelve years. You were nervous — almost always. You had prepared — almost always. You loved your child ferociously, with a completeness that was sometimes heartbreaking to watch.

I want to tell you some things I couldn't say then. Some things I should have said, and didn't, because saying them wasn't my job and wasn't what you'd come for.

About the preparation

You worked so hard. I know you did. The classes, the flashcards, the coaching, the WhatsApp research at midnight. The reading about which questions we ask and what the scoring rubric looks like. The practice sessions at home with your child, who cooperated because she loves you and because children want to please the people they love.

I want to tell you: the preparation was often the problem, not the solution.

Not the content preparation — that was fine. Knowing colours and numbers is fine. The problem was the preparation of the stakes. The months of communicating to your child, through the intensity of your attention and your anxiety, that this day was enormously important. That she needed to perform. That something was at risk.

Your child absorbed that message. She walked into my room carrying it. I could see it in her body.

About what I was actually looking for

I was looking for a child who was ready to enter a group environment and function there. Ready means: socially basic, curious enough to engage with novel things, stable enough to not fall apart when things were unexpected, verbal enough to communicate her needs and interests.

I was not looking for a child who had been trained to produce correct answers on command. I was not looking for a child who had been coached to make eye contact and smile at the right moments. I was not looking for a performance.

When I saw performance — and I always saw performance — I scored it down. Not out of cruelty. Because performance is the opposite of readiness. A child who is performing is a child who has learned that being herself is insufficient. That is not a good start to school.

About the school

You needed your child to get into the best school. I understand. I am a parent too, now, and I understand the way the system creates a gravity that pulls everyone toward the top. I understand that the reasoning feels airtight: best school leads to best primary, leads to best secondary, leads to best university, leads to best future.

The reasoning has a flaw, and the flaw is this: the correlation weakens at every step. By the time you get to "leads to best future," you are extrapolating from a chain of associations that has more gaps than links.

What I observed, over twelve years, is that the family environment predicted outcomes far more reliably than the school. Not income, not education level — though both matter — but the quality of the relationships. Whether the home was a place of genuine curiosity. Whether adults in the family treated learning as something they themselves did, for pleasure, because the world is interesting.

The family you are is what your child will carry into adulthood. The school is infrastructure. Infrastructure matters. It is not destiny.

About what you were carrying

I want to say something about the weight you were carrying in those waiting rooms.

The anxiety about your child's future. The comparison with the parents next to you who seemed calmer, more prepared, more certain. The accumulated months of social pressure — the questions from your mother, your in-laws, your colleagues about which school you were applying to and why. The knowledge that in Hong Kong, these things are tracked and judged and that your choices mark you as a parent.

That was too much. It was too much for you, and you were carrying it anyway, because you are a devoted parent in a high-pressure city and there is no other way to be.

But I want you to know: the anxiety was not helping your child. It was transmitting to her. It was the thing in the room that was working against everything you were trying to do.

About what I wish I had said

I wish I had said: your child is fine. She is exactly where she should be developmentally. The thing that will matter most in her life is not this school, not this application, not this day. It is whether she grows up knowing that she is loved as herself, not as a performance. Whether she grows up with a relationship with her own mind — her own curiosity, her own questions, her own sense of what she finds interesting.

I wish I had said: the thing you most need to do right now is relax. Not the forced, performative relaxation of someone trying to appear calm. Genuine settling. The kind that comes from actually believing that your child is going to be okay.

Because she is. Almost all of them are. The children who aren't are almost never the ones who didn't get into the right school.

About what I know now

I left the job when my own child hit application age. I could not be an honest advocate for a system I was participating in while simultaneously trying to protect my own child from its effects. The conflict was too direct.

What I know now is what I suspected for years and could never say from my position: the system asks families to optimise for the wrong things, and the families who believe most completely in the optimisation are often the ones who pay the highest price.

Your child does not need the best school as much as she needs you — present, curious, calm, genuinely interested in who she is becoming. She does not need the performance you have been preparing as much as she needs the parent you are when you're not performing.

You are enough for her. You have always been enough.

Start from that.

With honesty and genuine care,

Ms. Poon Former Head of Admissions, Kowloon