Showing off your child's achievements regardless, are parents that desperate to be praised?

Just after returning home from the parent-teacher conference, my Facebook was flooded with posts from parents in my class showing off their children’s academic achievements. Not only did they show off their children’s achievements, but they also compared them, even posting online the full names, dates of birth, and report cards of the entire class, including my child.

The comments comparing one student’s score to another, praising and extolling each other made me feel like I was about to explode. I texted a few parents to suggest that they should only show off their own child’s score, not post the whole class like that, it would be an invasion of privacy and make the child a target for comparison.

What's worse is that I received uncooperative attitudes, some people even unfriended me and blocked me on Facebook.

This is not the first time, almost every semester, every school year these parents show off their children's scores and awards on social media, making me feel overwhelmed.

Many parents show off their children's achievements without their consent. (Illustration: Vietnamnet)

Every parent has the right to be proud of their children, especially when the child is obedient and studies well, it is the pride of the family. Posting pictures and achievements of children on social networks as a way to preserve memories and encouragement from parents for their children is not a problem. However, many people post regardless of whether their children's sports competitions, English, semester exam scores, or even their high scores on tests are "reported" in detail on social networks, posting a few statuses a day to show off.

Below those posts are a series of congratulatory comments and compliments from friends about their children's good work, forcing the parents to "humbly" share how hard they worked and tried to raise their children like that.

There are cases where children do not agree but parents ignore them, and post on Facebook to get compliments. My child came home from school and told me that a classmate was teased by the whole class when his mother posted on the internet her report card with all 9s and 10s along with some slightly excessive compliments.

This student is a good student but not the best in school or class as her parents shared. There are many other students in the class who are better and more outstanding. After being teased and having to stay home from school for two days because of shame, her mother finally took down the post.

This case also shows that high scores do not completely reflect a child's academic ability, and posting achievements on social networks must have the child's consent.

The praise parents receive after each achievement post comes at the expense of their children’s privacy and pressure. Many parents forget that their children are old enough to have their privacy respected, including the use of their personal photos and even their achievement records.

Children are very shy and do not want their parents to post their achievements on social networks. They even create groups to boycott and oppose parents posting their children's achievements as a feat. This shows that children's awareness and need for privacy is increasing. Parents should respect this instead of being selfish and only thinking about themselves.

More importantly, along with the achievement tables, personal information of the children such as name, year of birth, home address, school are also made public. This can easily lead to bad people taking advantage of it for illegal purposes.

Praise for parents, pressure for children.

Posts boasting about achievements on social networks create a negative impression on other parents. When they constantly see other people's report cards while their own child has low scores, it will be difficult to avoid scolding and blaming their child.

Besides, this also affects children a lot, because these types of posts make the pressure of studying even heavier, leading to consequences of chasing after scores, distorting the goals and nature of education .

Even the children of parents who post to show off their achievements are under pressure because if their results in the following exams are not as high as expected, it will upset their parents, and they will have nothing left to "offer" on Facebook for their friends to praise. This does not bring any benefit to the children's learning process at all.

Praise is one of the educational measures used to motivate and encourage children's learning spirit. However, do not post to show off your achievements regardless because of the desire to live a virtual life and be praised and praised by netizens.

To deal with the overload of posts showing off achievements, avoid affecting my own psychology and putting more pressure on my child, I decided to stay away from social media for a few days.

At the same time, to encourage my child after a hard semester, my husband and I took him camping on the weekend. Seeing him excited about the trip, I knew that next semester he would try harder and put in more effort because he received the trust and proper recognition from his parents.

Dinh Thi Hoa (Parent)

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