Every January I set academic expectations for my kids. This year I tried something different.

Every January, on the first weekend of the new year, I had what I called The Conversation. My husband would occasionally join; more often it was me and the children at the kitchen table with a blank piece of paper. The paper would fill with goals. Academic goals, specifically: the score to aim for in Chinese, the reading level to reach by June, the ABRSM grade to complete. The goals were numerical. They were mine, mostly, dressed in inclusive language.

My daughter, who is eleven and therefore no longer pretending about certain things, told me last January that she didn't like The Conversation. "You make a list of things we have to do," she said, "and then at the end of the year you check if we did them. And if we didn't, you're disappointed even if nothing bad happened."

I had two reactions to this. The first was mild defensiveness. The second was the recognition that she had described exactly what I did, accurately, and that it was worth taking seriously.

The goals I was setting were outcomes. They measured results, not process. They measured the child I wanted against the child I had, and the gap was always something to be closed. My daughter experienced this as a year-long performance review for a job she hadn't applied for.

She wasn't wrong.

This January I tried something different. I am not going to claim it was a masterclass in enlightened parenting. It was a messy, uncertain experiment that produced results I'm still not sure how to evaluate.

Instead of coming to the table with the blank paper and a pen, I came with questions. Open ones, without numerical answers. What did you find interesting this year? What was hard? Is there anything you want to learn this year that we haven't made room for? What do you wish was different about school?

My daughter answered these questions differently than she'd ever engaged with the goal-setting. She told me she wanted to try photography. She told me she found maths frustrating not because it was too hard but because it moved too fast and she never had time to properly understand something before the next thing started. She told me she wished she had more evenings without homework, which was not news, but she said it in a context where I was asking rather than directing, and it landed differently.

My son told me he wanted to get better at Minecraft redstone engineering, which he described with a level of detail and technical vocabulary that I found both alarming and impressive. He also told me, unprompted, that he thought his Chinese could be better and he wanted to practise more regularly. He said this himself. He decided this himself. I said "okay, what would help?" and we talked about how to make the practice work.

The conversation went on for forty minutes, which was longer than any of the goal-setting sessions had run. At the end, we had not produced a list with numerical targets. We had produced a rough sense of what each person in the family wanted from the year, including me — I told them what I was working on at work and what I wanted more of personally, which seemed fair since I'd been asking them.

What I've noticed in the weeks since: my son has been doing Chinese character practice without being asked. Not every day. Some days. More than before. Because the motivation came from him, I don't have to manage it, and he doesn't have to resist it.

My daughter asked about photography classes. We found one. She starts next week.

Neither of these things came from my January target list. They came from a conversation where I asked what they wanted rather than telling them what they needed.

This is not a revolutionary parenting insight. Every thoughtful parent knows, in theory, that intrinsic motivation beats external pressure. But knowing it and doing it are different things, especially in Hong Kong, especially in January, when the new year feels like a runway and every ambitious parent around you is making their list.

The list felt productive. This felt productive in a different, quieter way. I'm giving it a year.