Kyōiku mama 教育ママ When maternal love leads to Obsession

Kyōiku mama 教育ママ a phenomenon that in Japan has increasingly taken on the appearance of a plague. Imbued with pride, expectation, inconvenience (which often lead to self-harm or suicide) and even worse envy.
The term Kyōiku mama means a mother who force her child to intense study sections in an overwhelming way, without giving to him/her time for anything else and without allowing him/her to do anything else. This is to the detriment of the social and physical development of the child who also suffers from an emotional point of view, reaching extreme cases of self-closure or even worse in self-harm and suicide.

Those who have a minimum knowledge of Japan know the strong stress to which the students who study are subjected, and we are not talking about universities or high schools, but of all degrees, up to touching the lowest levels of education such as elementary and in some cases before. This led, since 1950, to the creation of real preparatory schools (to be attended after regular school hours) to which the boys and girls had to, and let me emphasize the had to, attend to increase their scholastic skills and thus aspire to enter the best schools in the country.

The basic idea, which links the school system and the Japanese mentality, is that if you start well then you'll end well. So for them if you study a lot from an early age and manage to access the best schools, the best universities, then your future is assured in large and important companies (a logic that doesn't quite add up, but which is very much felt in Japanese society).

The study load is often overwhelming, students arrive to study in the preparatory schools, called juku 学習 塾, until late in the evening even until 10-11 then go home, eat and practically go to bed because in the early morning you they have to get up to go to school or to start club activities before class starts.
With this in mind, mothers act as "support" (according to their point of view) towards their children, following them step by step, preparing snacks and night dinners to help them in their studies, preventing them from participating in extra-curricular activities because time would be stolen from the studio in their view.

What is found in various studies, some of which originate from the Japanese ministry of education, is that this system is totally counterproductive (and I don't think it need scientific studies to understand it). There are cases of "rebellion" by students who refer to the school through bullying and vandalism to vent their frustration. The incredible thing is that these mothers appear to the eye of some of the other mothers as an example, they compare the results of their children with those of the children of Kyōiku mama, thus generating a sick circle of admiration and imitation, obviously at the expense of the boys and girls.

Things have not improved lately, on the contrary the social pressure on young students has increased and unfortunately it is recently the news that the number of suicides has risen considerably even among young people, even reaching the point of touching young people in elementary schools. . It is true that the phenomenon is complex, and several factors add up, including bullying, but the increasing pressure to be able to enter society through the front door and the best one has certainly not decreased, on the contrary.