By Jane Sonnenschein · June 9, 2026

“Montessori once said that when it comes to children, what we need more than constant testing is observation.”

It took me many years to slowly understand this. A parent’s real foresight may have little to do with how highly educated they are or how many resources they have. Sometimes, it simply means being able to see what kind of person your child is, and what kind of path may suit her, before she has spent years struggling in the wrong direction.

A few days ago, when I wrote an essay about China’s national college entrance exam, I mentioned something that has stayed in my mind ever since: a parent’s perspective can eventually become the road beneath a child’s feet.

That sentence can easily sound as though only wealthy, well-connected, highly educated parents are capable of giving their children real support, while ordinary families can do little more than worry.

But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I became.

Of course money and resources matter. There is no point pretending otherwise.

A family with enough money can afford to let a child try different things and fail. They can hire tutors, change schools, and create opportunities that many ordinary families would never even consider. That is certainly one kind of support.

But foresight does not belong only to wealthy families, professors, PhDs, or intellectuals.

Sometimes very ordinary parents see their child’s path surprisingly early.

When I was young, I lived in an old neighborhood where everyone lived close together. People more or less knew how the children next door were doing at school, how their parents were raising them, and what plans each family had for the future.

It was a different time. People did not simply close their doors and live separate lives the way many do now.

In summer, people sat in stairwells, outside their doors, or along the corridors to escape the heat and chat. Adults talked about which child was doing well at school, which one was not academically inclined, and what their parents planned to do about it. None of this was much of a secret.

The girl who lived next door to us was two years older than me. She was tall and attractive, but she was not particularly strong in academic subjects.

If she had simply forced herself to compete through academics alone, I do not know whether she would eventually have made it into university. Getting into a standard bachelor’s program would probably have been very difficult.

But her mother realized this quite early. She did not wait until the final year of high school to panic, and she did not keep forcing her daughter to compete on a track that clearly did not suit her.

The girl later studied in the arts, in an area related to music and dance. She went through teacher training and eventually became a teacher.

For my mother’s generation, teaching was already considered a stable profession. Teachers had school holidays, and a music teacher did not carry the same daily pressure over academic results and university admissions as teachers of core academic subjects. It was seen as a respectable and secure life.

Later she married and had children. Her husband was also someone both families approved of, and their parents helped care for the children. From my mother’s point of view, she had built the kind of stable life that many parents of her generation hoped their daughters would have.

There was another girl who lived across from us. She was around my age, and she was not good at academic subjects either.

She was short and dark-skinned, and physically she was not especially suited to dance.

If her parents had simply said, “Then study art,” that would not necessarily have solved anything. The arts are not one single path. Dance, music, painting and calligraphy all require different physical qualities, interests and kinds of training.

Her mother eventually chose painting for her.

To be completely honest, in my childhood memory, I do not think she necessarily drew better than I did.

I had always had good handwriting. I was fairly good at Chinese calligraphy, and I was not bad at drawing either. I simply was never seriously trained in that direction.

But her mother saw a different problem: if her daughter was struggling academically, they needed to find another route early enough for it to have a chance of working.

Painting, if it is trained mainly as a route into art school rather than as a path toward becoming a great artist, can improve a great deal through long-term practice, technical training and repetition. It does not depend entirely on some mysterious artistic gift.

So she began studying painting in high school, later entered an arts program, and eventually became a teacher as well.

Neither of these mothers was a professor or an education expert.

One came from an ordinary factory-worker family. The other family was just as ordinary.

They had no sophisticated educational theories and no impressive network of resources.

But they did one thing right: they accepted early that their daughters were not doing well academically, and within the limits of their actual circumstances, they helped them find paths that were more likely to work.

That is what I mean by foresight.

Foresight does not necessarily mean taking your child around the world, buying endless courses, or being able to explain beautiful theories about education.

Sometimes foresight simply means refusing to fool yourself.

If your child genuinely struggles with academic subjects, you cannot keep telling yourself that pushing a little harder will solve everything.

If a child’s physical condition does not suit a certain direction, you cannot ignore reality simply because she happens to like it at that moment.

If she does not have extraordinary natural talent in something but could still reach the level required for an exam through training, then it makes sense to begin early rather than discovering in the final year that there is no longer enough time.

None of this sounds very romantic.

But it is practical.

Recently I saw people discussing why so many parents are anxious about their children. One argument was that parents without money cannot provide a safety net, so they have no choice but to push their children academically.

There is some truth in that.

Ordinary families do not have endless room for trial and error. If a child does poorly at school, her parents may genuinely fear that she will have nowhere to go later. That anxiety is not fake.

But I still cannot help wondering: not having money does not mean there is only one road available.

In fact, precisely because ordinary families cannot easily afford failed experiments, they may need to observe their children earlier, make judgments earlier, and start preparing earlier.

If parents only realize in the final year of high school that their child simply cannot keep up academically, changing direction at that point will of course be difficult.

But if they begin noticing a child’s weaknesses and possibilities in middle school or during the first year of high school, even an ordinary family may still have options.

I am not saying every child should study art, nor am I saying that the arts are an easy route.

Arts admissions in China are fiercely competitive now. Training costs money, and nobody gets into a good program simply by drawing a few pictures or learning a few dance steps.

My point is that parents should not blindly copy the path another family chose. They should try, as early as possible, to see the child who is actually in front of them.

Some children are suited to an academic path. Then let them study seriously.

Some are not particularly academic but are good with their hands, have a strong sense of aesthetics, athletic ability, communication skills, or an interest in technology. Then perhaps their parents should start looking early at what other paths might exist.

And sometimes a child is not lazy at all. She is simply suffering badly on a particular path. At the very least, parents should stop and ask: is this only a temporary difficulty, or is this path genuinely a poor fit for her?

That is not giving up on a child.

In some ways, it is harder than simply pushing harder.

Because pushing is sometimes the easier thing for parents to do.

They can say, “Try harder. Keep going. Everyone else can do it, so why can’t you?” And then they can feel as though they have fulfilled their responsibility.

Stopping to really observe your child is harder.

It means accepting that she may not be the person you imagined her to be. It may mean accepting that she is not suited to the most respectable or familiar path. Then you have to begin looking again.

That takes more courage.

Many parents resist this, not necessarily because they do not love their children, but because they are afraid themselves.

They are afraid that admitting their child is not academically inclined means admitting that the child has no future.

They are afraid that if they stop forcing her down the most familiar road, they will have no idea where else to guide her.

They are also afraid of what other people will say: Why is your child no longer focused on academics? Why is she studying that instead?

But a child’s life is not something she will eventually live for the neighbors or for relatives to judge.

If she spends years being pushed along a road that never suited her in the first place, she is the one who will ultimately suffer.

My mother sometimes looks back now and says that I was such a good student as a child, one of those children other parents in our neighborhood would point to as an example. Yet my life later took me so far away and became so difficult in ways none of us had expected.

Sometimes she even says, “If I had known, maybe I should never have let you go so far away.”

I know there is regret behind that sentence.

From her point of view, those girls who were not as good at school as I was eventually became teachers, married, had children, and stayed close enough for their parents to help with childcare. Their lives looked stable.

I did well at school and travelled much farther, but I also went through storms she had never imagined.

It is understandable that she cannot quite make sense of it.

Life has never been something a school report can fully explain.

A child who gets excellent grades when she is young will not necessarily have a smooth life later.

And a child who is only average academically does not necessarily have a bad future waiting for her.

Sometimes the direction a person eventually takes depends not only on her own abilities, but also on whether her parents helped her notice a more suitable path at a critical moment.

When I was young, there were many things I wanted to try.

I especially wanted to dance. Maybe it was not because I had any exceptional talent for dance. Maybe I was simply a little girl who wanted to feel lighter, prettier and more confident.

But the adults looked at my body. I was short, my legs were thick, and I did not have the right build. So the answer came quickly: you are not suited to dance.

They probably meant no harm.

But I still remember, many years later, what it felt like to be dismissed that way.

On the other hand, because I had good handwriting, people assumed I should learn calligraphy.

That is often how adults think: the strengths a child has already shown are worth developing, while the things she wants to move toward but is not yet good at are quickly closed off.

But children do not only need to be directed toward what they already do well.

Sometimes they also need someone to ask: Why do you want to learn this? Do you simply like it, or are you hoping it will help you become more confident? If you cannot pursue it professionally, could you still try it as a hobby?

A parent with foresight will not make every judgment correctly.

But at least they will not close an entire door with one sentence: “You are not suited to this.”

Of course reality still matters.

If a child genuinely does not have the physical conditions needed for professional dance, parents cannot pretend otherwise.

If a child is genuinely unable to keep up academically, motivational slogans about how perseverance always leads to success will not solve the problem either.

The difficult part is seeing reality without destroying the possibilities that still exist inside a child.

That brings me back to the girl across from us who learned to paint.

She may not have shown any extraordinary artistic talent at the beginning. But her mother did not let her keep running into the same wall academically, nor did she blindly send her toward dance when that did not suit her either.

Within the limits of reality, she chose a direction that could be trained for, prepared for, and that suited her daughter reasonably well.

That is the foresight ordinary people can have.

It is not about predicting that your child will definitely succeed.

It is about helping her avoid an obviously unsuitable path before too much time has been lost.

It is not about turning your child into a genius. It is about accepting that she is ordinary, and then helping her find a better place for herself within that ordinary life.

It is not about how highly educated the parents are.

It is about whether they truly observe their child.

So when I recently saw someone talking about a professor’s child who never liked studying, later opened a restaurant and built a successful business, some people in the comments reacted bitterly. They said, in effect, “If my family had those kinds of resources, of course I would not be anxious either.”

I understand where that bitterness comes from.

Differences in resources are real. A child from a wealthy family may fail once and still have another way out. For an ordinary family, one wrong turn can feel as though the whole family may not be able to afford it.

But I still do not think every problem can be reduced to, “I do not have enough money.”

Money can solve many things, but not every wealthy parent understands their child, and not every ordinary parent has no choice but to push a child relentlessly.

I have seen mothers from ordinary working-class families recognize early that their daughters were struggling academically, help them move toward the arts, and eventually watch them build stable lives.

That was not elite education.

It was not sophisticated planning by highly educated parents.

It was simply ordinary parents seeing reality clearly within the limits they had.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that one of the biggest differences between parents is not simply how much money they have, but whether they have the courage to admit what their child is actually like.

Some parents can see clearly that their child is suffering, yet still place their own fear on her shoulders.

Some already know their child is not suited to a certain path, but still expect her to fulfil the family’s dream of moving up the social ladder.

They say, “I am anxious because I do not have money. I push my child because I cannot give her a safety net.”

But if a child genuinely does not suit the conventional academic path, if studying makes her miserable every day, if she is already close to breaking under the pressure, shouldn’t the parents also ask themselves: can I change my own way of thinking first, instead of placing the entire burden of changing the family’s future on my child?

Many parents expect their children to fight their way through an enormous crowd and somehow create a new life for the whole family. Yet they are unwilling to face one fact: this road may be even harder for the child than it would have been for them.

If adults already know how difficult it is to change the course of a life, why do they imagine that an immature child can definitely do it for the whole family, as long as she is pushed hard enough?

That may sound harsh, but I think it needs to be said.

A child is not her parents’ second startup project.

Nor is she their final bet on turning life around.

Of course she needs to work hard. She will eventually have to take responsibility for her own life.

But parents cannot simply wrap all their own helplessness and anxiety in the words, “I only want what is best for you.”

Truly wanting what is best for a child does not mean always pushing her toward the hottest, most crowded and most socially approved road.

It means being willing to see her limitations early, while also seeing what is still possible.

If she struggles academically, it means not simply calling her stupid, but asking whether another path exists.

If she loves something, it means neither dismissing it immediately nor indulging it blindly, but helping her look honestly at the real conditions.

If the family has limited resources, it means planning earlier instead of only becoming more anxious.

If the child is ordinary, it means not despairing, but helping her build a stable life within that ordinariness.

That may be the most meaningful support ordinary parents can give their children.

It may not look impressive.

It may never appear on anyone’s résumé.

But years later, it may become the steadier road beneath that child’s feet.

When I look back now at the lives of those two girls from my old neighborhood, of course I do not imagine they have perfect lives.

They probably have their own worries, and their own pressures around marriage, work and family.

But at least at some important turning points while they were growing up, their parents did not force them relentlessly in a direction that clearly did not suit them. They helped them turn earlier.

That alone mattered.

A child does not always have to reach the highest possible place for us to say that her parents truly supported her.

Sometimes it is enough that she takes fewer unnecessary detours, spends less of her strength struggling in places that do not suit her, and eventually finds a position in life where she can stand a little more steadily.

That, too, can be a gift created by a parent’s perspective.

So I increasingly believe that foresight does not belong only to highly educated families, nor can it only be bought with money.

Sometimes it appears in very ordinary moments.

It appears when a mother realizes that her daughter is struggling academically and is willing to look for another possibility early.

It appears when a father knows that a certain road does not suit his child and does not force her down it to the very end.

It appears when parents are willing to admit, “My child may not be the person I imagined her to be.”

And when they are willing to begin with the child’s actual circumstances, rather than their own pride and anxiety.

Ordinary parents have it hard.

They may not have much money, many resources, or endless room for trial and error.

But that is exactly why they need to see their child clearly as early as possible.

Because the fewer resources a family has, the less it can afford to let a child spend years exhausting herself on a road that never suited her in the first place.

What a child truly needs may not be parents who can send her to the highest possible place.

Sometimes she simply needs them to crouch down a little earlier, look carefully at where she is standing, see where she might be able to go, and help her find a way to walk there more steadily.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 普通父母最大的远见，是早一点看清孩子适合什么

German version: Die größte Weitsicht ganz normaler Eltern besteht darin, früh zu erkennen, was zum eigenen Kind passt