The Best and Worst Childhood in the World

Opening: One Tuesday · Seoul, Tuesday

6:50 a.m. Jiho's alarm goes off. It is the second alarm. The first one went off at 6:40 and he turned it off. He went to bed at 12:20 last night. He is twelve years old.

7:10 a.m. Jiho sits down at the table. There is rice, soup, and three or four side dishes. None of it was made separately for a child. He eats what the adults eat. His mother is across from him, checking an academy consultation time on her phone.

7:50 a.m. Jiho walks to school across the apartment complex, alone. The four hundred meters between the front gate and the school is a designated child protection zone. The speed limit is thirty kilometers an hour, the crosswalks are painted yellow, and there is a speed camera. Two parents in yellow vests are standing at the corner. No adult walks with him. None has since he was eight.

8:40 a.m. to 3:20 p.m. School. Korean, math, social studies, science, English, physical education, music. Lunch is cooked in the school kitchen and it is free. A nutrition teacher planned the menu, and the month's menu was sent home in advance. There is a nurse's office with a nurse in it. One homeroom teacher runs the class all day, all year.

3:40 p.m. Jiho does not go home. Parked outside the school gate is a line of yellow vans, each with an academy's name on the side. He gets into one of them.

4:00 to 6:30 p.m. Math academy. Jiho is currently working through the first-year middle school curriculum. He is in sixth grade.

6:40 p.m. At the convenience store on the ground floor of the academy building he buys a rice triangle and a carton of milk. Three other children with the same academy backpack are at the counter.

7:00 to 9:30 p.m. English academy. Reading in English, and grammar. There is a level test every two months, and the results change which class he is in.

9:45 p.m. A different yellow van drops him at the entrance to his apartment building. A Seoul city ordinance limits late-night academy instruction to 10 p.m.

10:00 p.m. Dinner. This time it is a real dinner.

10:40 to 11:50 p.m. Academy homework. Eight pages of math problems, sixty English words.

12:10 a.m. Jiho lies in bed looking at his phone. His class group chat has 214 unread messages.

12:30 a.m. Lights out.

At 6:40 the next morning, the first alarm goes off.

Jiho is not the average

Something has to be said honestly, up front.

Jiho is not an average Korean sixth grader. A sixth grader circulating through two academies until half past nine is in the minority. In the 2024 national survey of children's and young people's rights, Korean elementary students sleep an average of 8.7 hours a night. Jiho's six and a half is more than two hours short of that.

But the fact that Jiho is an outlier is where this book starts.

Because his timetable is not the exception for his age. It is a preview of the next stage.

In the same survey, average sleep falls to 7.2 hours for middle school students and 6.0 hours for high school students. About six percent of high school students get the eight hours the survey treats as the recommended minimum, and roughly four in ten sleep less than six hours a night.

Which means the day Jiho is living now is the day most Korean children will be living within a few years. Jiho is not an exception. He is an early arrival.

This book traces why that arrival happens.

Two sets of facts

Western readers usually reach one of two conclusions about what they have just read. The first is admiration: no wonder the test scores are what they are. The second is alarm: this is close to abuse.

Neither is what this book is for. Because both of the following are true of the same country.

The first set.

Korean children place consistently near the top of international assessments in reading, mathematics, and science. More important than the average is the distribution. In the 2022 international assessment, 14.7 percent of Korean students failed to reach baseline proficiency in reading. The OECD average was 26 percent. Looked at the other way, 85 percent of Korean students reached baseline or above, against an OECD average of 74 percent. The average is not being propped up by a high ceiling. The floor is high.

Infant and maternal mortality are among the lowest in the world. Every child under six receives free national health screening and developmental screening. The area around every elementary school is a child protection zone established by law, and child pedestrian safety indicators have improved dramatically over two decades. School meals are free in most regions and cooked on the premises. Teachers are selected through a fiercely competitive appointment examination and hold civil service status with the pay and security that come with it. School budgets come from a national grant distributed by the central government, not from the neighborhood's property tax.

And this is a country where a twelve-year-old walking home alone at ten at night is a statistically reasonable thing to do.

The second set.

Those same children place repeatedly near the bottom of the developed world when international surveys ask them how satisfied they are with their own lives. In an OECD compilation of fifteen-year-olds surveyed in 2022, 26.1 percent of Korean children reported high life satisfaction, against an OECD average of 33.8. Only about six percent of high school students get the recommended amount of sleep. Academic stress appears every year among the top factors in national youth surveys, and in a 2022 survey 76.2 percent of thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds named study as their leading worry.

Total household spending on private education is a figure the government measures. The 2024 survey put it at 29.2 trillion won, a record for the fourth consecutive year. Over the same period the number of elementary, middle, and high school students fell to about 5.13 million, down eighty thousand from the year before. The number of students is falling and the total is rising.

And this country's total fertility rate was 0.72 in 2023. The level required to maintain a population is 2.1. No nation in the history of the statistic has reached that number.

One set looks like the report card of a well-designed public system. The other looks like a signal that something is grinding children down. Both come out of the same childhood.

Why both sets are hard to hold at once

Most writing about Korean childhood picks one of these two sets and explains the other away.

The admiring version treats the second set as the acceptable price of the first: the results are extraordinary, and extraordinary results cost something. The alarmed version treats the first set as illusory or not worth having: scores bought at that price are not an achievement.

Both are ways of avoiding the actual difficulty, which is that the two sets are not a trade-off between the same two things. They were produced by different mechanisms, at different times, by different institutions, and they can be separated.

That separation is the work of this book, and it is why the structure is what it is. Five parts describe a childhood age by age without grading it. The sixth part does the grading, and by then the reader has enough detail to check the sorting rather than take it on trust.

If the book succeeds, a reader finishes able to say which parts of the Korean result came from the public system, which came from the private race, and which came from neither.

What this book does

This book does not resolve that contradiction. It takes it apart.

The central claim is simple. There are two layers stacked on top of each other in a Korean childhood.

The lower layer was built by the public. Nearly free childcare. A single national curriculum. Teachers selected with difficulty and treated accordingly. Meals cooked in the school. National screening for infants and toddlers. Protection zones around schools. School funding unhooked from property tax. This layer is quiet, hard to see, and almost never covered by foreign press. And a substantial share of what Korean children achieve in international comparisons comes from it. The high floor in particular is not explicable by private education, which is stratified by income.

The upper layer was built by the market. Academies, grade-ahead study, level tests, English kindergartens, school districts, shuttle buses at ten at night. This layer is loud, expensive, and it is very nearly all of what foreign coverage means when it says "Korean education." It is also what takes a child's sleep, play, and slack.

English-language reporting usually collapses these two layers into one. That is how you end up with both "Korea scores well, so let's do what Korea does" and "Korean children are miserable, so there is nothing to learn here." Both conclusions are looking at the wrong layer.

This book follows the child's age. From birth to thirteen, one year at a time, it asks what actually happens in a Korean household at that age, where it came from, what it achieves, and what it takes. Then, in Part VI, it pulls the two layers apart and grades each one separately.

There are things an American family can take. There really are. And there are things it should not take under any circumstances. They look tangled together. They are not. Untangling them is the point of this book.

Jiho's Tuesday comes back in Part IV and Part V. By then, every line of that timetable will have a reason attached to it.

Part I. Birth and the First Two Years · 1. Taegyo: The Pregnancy as Education

In the parenting section of a large Seoul bookstore, one shelf holds prenatal music albums and prenatal storybooks. The storybooks are meant to be read aloud to the fetus. It says so on the cover. Classical music plays in obstetric waiting rooms because it is said to be good for the baby. The pregnancy courses at department store culture centers are called prenatal yoga, prenatal art, prenatal travel. A photograph of a husband reading a book against his wife's belly is among the most common images in Korean pregnancy advertising.

Here is what an evening might look like for a woman twenty weeks along. Nine o'clock, she sits on the sofa with her husband. They read a picture book aloud. She puts a hand on her belly and describes the day. Thirty minutes of classical music. She writes in the prenatal journal.

To find the American equivalent of this scene you would have to assemble it from parts. Talking to the fetus, playing music, keeping a pregnancy journal — all of these exist in the United States. What is different is that in Korea they are gathered under a single name, and the name means education.

Where it came from

Taegyo (태교) is not a recent invention. The word goes back to Joseon-era texts. Taegyo Singi, written in the early nineteenth century, prescribes the pregnant woman's state of mind, what she should look at, what she should listen to, what she should eat, and how she should sit and stand.

In that framework the fetus is already a person. Korea's long use of a counting age that made a newborn one year old — that is, that counted the ten months in the womb as time already lived — belongs to the same view.

Underneath it is a Neo-Confucian idea of the person. A human being is not something that begins learning after birth; it is something already being formed, and the forming starts in the womb. Which means the pregnant woman's conduct is not a private matter but a matter of the next generation. That is why the list of requirements in the traditional texts runs so long.

In the late twentieth century this old frame was revived commercially. Research on prenatal auditory stimulation and brain development reached the popular press, and traditional taegyo acquired the appearance of science. A prenatal music market appeared. Products appeared. Obstetric clinics began running prenatal programs.

Today taegyo in Korea is at once a tradition and an industry. And that is the first instance of a form that repeats through this book. Old customs in Korea do not disappear. They get commercialized.

What it accomplishes

Taegyo does three real things.

It gives shape to an anxious ten months. A first pregnancy is a long sequence of things you cannot control. Your body does what it does, the outcome is unknown, and often no one tells you what to do. Taegyo gives you something to do. Having something to do lowers anxiety on its own.

It pulls the partner in. This is the most underrated function.

Men are often said to have trouble making a pregnancy feel real, and that unreality carries forward into how work is divided after the birth. Speaking to a fetus every evening is practice at being a father before there is a baby.

And when it is a shared ritual with a fixed time, the person who does not participate is visible. That matters. Imbalance in childrearing labor is usually discovered after the birth; taegyo makes it visible ten months earlier.

It pulls in the extended family. Grandparents who advise on taegyo and ask about it are treating the pregnancy as a family event. The count of "adults who know this child," which Part VI treats as one of the things worth taking, starts here.

What it takes

The cost is clear, and it runs in only one direction.

Taegyo makes the mother's mental state a variable that determines the child's outcome. And that variable gets applied retroactively.

If something later proves difficult with the child — slow development, sensitivity, illness — the culture has a circuit ready for tracing it back to what happened during the pregnancy. Korean mothers' online communities are full of posts confessing guilt over an argument during pregnancy, over crying at a sad drama, over the stress of a move.

Some scientific misunderstanding is mixed in.

There is research suggesting that severe, chronic stress during pregnancy may be associated with fetal development. But that research is about sustained, serious stress, not about the emotions of a particular afternoon. Popular taegyo discourse does not make the distinction. Without it, every individual event starts to look like a risk factor.

And the arrow always points at one person. Taegyo does not treat the father's mental state as a variable. It does not treat working hours or housing insecurity as variables. The object of management is the pregnant woman.

The moment a recommendation becomes an obligation, taegyo stops being care and becomes surveillance.

The structure worth noticing

Set the content of taegyo aside for a moment and look at its shape, because the shape is what recurs.

A practice exists that is genuinely good for the person doing it. Rest, calm, reading, music, avoiding stress — a pregnant woman who does these things is better off, and no one needs a tradition to justify recommending them.

Then a second claim attaches: that doing them shapes the child.

That second claim is where the structure turns. Once a mother's state of mind is understood to form the child, every later difficulty acquires a possible origin in those ten months. A child who is anxious, or slow to talk, or difficult — the question what was I doing while I carried him becomes available, and it is available only to her.

Nothing in the tradition requires anyone to say it out loud. The availability is enough.

This is the first appearance in this book of a pattern that shows up in almost every part of it: a practice with real benefits, carrying an attribution that assigns any bad outcome to a woman's conduct. Chapter 5 has the postpartum version. Chapter 8 has the feeding version. Chapter 36 has the version where the child is nine and the currency is information rather than diet.

The practices differ. The arrow points the same way each time.