[Sportschosun reporter Jung An-ji] Hyun Young tearfully recalled regretting that she had once pushed her daughter too hard to study.
On the MBN program 'Dongchimi' aired on the 27th, Hyun Young shared her candid experience with raising children and education.
In the video, Hyun Young said, "While raising my first child, I pushed and taught her from the beginning because I thought, 'She's the eldest, so she should do well.'"
She recalled, "One day, while my child was solving workbooks, a pimple appeared on the crown of her head." She added, "Because of the excessive stress, she kept picking at the pimple with her hand while doing the workbooks, and it became a wound. It looked so bad that it seemed like alopecia areata."
Hyun Young said, "She was nine years old at the time." She continued, "Before that, I had been forcing her, saying, 'You need to study quickly.' But the moment I saw the top of her head, I thought, 'What am I doing to this child right now?'" She added, "I was so shocked that day that I cried. It suddenly hit me: 'What was I doing to my daughter?'"
After that, Hyun Young laid out a schedule chart for her daughter and told her to mark everything she did not want to do. Her daughter marked everything. In the end, Hyun Young made a bold decision. She said, "I felt so sorry that I had not realized my daughter was under so much stress that heat rash had broken out on her scalp. So I stopped everything."
Hyun Young said, "I just told her to play and go to school." She added, "Once I let her be, she started swimming after going to a neighborhood pool, and now, after overcoming academic stress, she has become Incheon’s representative swimmer and is finally running toward her dream."
She said, "After that, I never put any academic pressure on her again. In fact, she studies on her own and gets good grades. Everything I had forced on her backfired." She added, "I did not pressure my second child to study either, but sometimes my first child looks at her younger sibling’s room and asks, 'Is it really okay to raise her like that?'" drawing laughter.
anjee85@sportschosun.com
