This article is being shared publicly for all readers because both the question and the answer concern the education and lifelong development of your children — and the quality of this exchange is exceptional.
Master Chi hopes you will take fifteen minutes to read this article carefully from beginning to end, especially the three most important pieces of counsel for your child’s future.
The article is brief, but the change it can bring to you and your child’s life is profound. Do not miss it.
Student Question:
Hello, Master Chi. I have chosen to address you as “Teacher” rather than “Master” because your writing has been a companion to both my husband and me for years — every word a gem, benefiting us immensely. From the bottom of my heart, I call you Teacher.
Over these years, my husband and I built everything from scratch, supporting one another, slowly working our way from nothing to an asset level of A9. As our income has steadily grown, so has our anxiety — because our horizons have expanded, and through your writing we have glimpsed a different world of education. This has led us to reflect on our own approach to raising our child. It seems we have only ensured material abundance, and we have been swept along by the prevailing culture of intense “exam-drilling” that surrounds us. We know this falls far short of what true elite education looks like, but we don’t know where to begin to change things.
We have fortunately joined your knowledge community, and we wonder if we might have the honor of receiving your guidance. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what truly good education looks like, and where we as parents should begin. Like most parents, we hope our child excels academically — but more than that, we hope our child becomes the kind of sunny, independent, and whole young person you write about. If you could offer your thoughts, we would be deeply grateful. Thank you.
Master Chi’s Response:
Hello, dear Becky and your husband. First, thank you both for your trust.
Second, allow me to get straight to the point and commend you: you have grasped the core insight that character far outweighs grades in raising a child. On this point alone, you are already a hundred times ahead of 99% of parents out there.
Grades are fleeting — they become completely irrelevant once a child turns eighteen, a short-lived trick with a short expiry date. Character (素养) is the true core strength that stays with a child for life.
Consider the children who achieve both academic and life success: very few are products of frantic, pressure-driven drilling by their parents. Almost all are children of excellent innate character who slowly awakened and matured during their middle school years, recognized the importance of knowledge, and then surged forward of their own accord.
This is precisely why, looking back on our own school days, so many seemingly hardworking students ended up with mediocre results, while many who worked smart consistently took top honors. The potential gap between being forced to grind through problem sets and choosing to learn on one’s own terms is immense.
What’s interesting is that cultivating excellent character is actually quite simple — it doesn’t require you or your husband to be accomplished parenting experts. Just one phrase is enough: “Love and trust are the finest nourishment.”
Remember: the most powerful words for a child are never the lengthy, self-important lectures parents believe carry deep meaning. Volumes of grand pronouncements will never match the force of a few small, warm, loving words.
So today I want to offer you, and all the readers who are family here, three sentences. I hope you will return to them often and use them freely as you raise your children.
First: “Child, life being difficult is normal — doing your best is enough.”
When I consult on children’s destiny charts (命盘), parents often complain to me that their child rarely communicates with them, and that as the child grows older they become even less willing to seek parental guidance — leaving parents full of worry but unable to help.
Without exception, these parents have almost certainly, at some point, lectured their child: “This isn’t that hard — you must get it done.” And so, after each failure, the child has endured layer upon layer of parental criticism and blame.
Tell me: if someone in your life is permanently associated in your mind with the word blame — no matter how close your relationship — wouldn’t you gradually choose to keep your distance? The parent-child bond is exactly the same.
Master Chi has witnessed more than once parents who are themselves thoroughly mediocre, berating their children like scolding a dog — either explosively furious, or dripping with sarcasm. They believe they are educating their child. In reality, they are grinding their child’s confidence and trust to dust, piece by piece.
The result? These children grow up broadly lacking courage and optimism.
The highest-caliber parents, by contrast, are almost never seen making hysterical demands of their children. Their guidance is always threefold: helping the child work through the difficult points of a problem, showing them how to handle it, and cheering them on with encouragement.
Is it not immediately obvious which type of parent makes the greater difference?
“Child, life being difficult is normal — doing your best is enough.”
Please repeat this sentence silently with Master Chi three times. Don’t skip it — three complete repetitions.
Second: “I don’t care what other people’s children are doing — you are already wonderful.”
Many parents are not drilling their child at all — they are drilling their own need to save face and manage their anxiety.
Because they are people who have spent their whole lives feeling like they’ve lost — people who have never really received recognition or praise — their only recourse is to pin their hopes on their child to win back what they never had.
The most disheartening thing about these parents is this: no matter how excellent their child is, as long as someone else’s child is doing better, they will never offer a single word of warmth or praise.
“Oh — didn’t so-and-so in the next class score higher than you? Don’t get smug. Stay humble.”
Our culture has countless brilliant and beautiful qualities. But there is one that does tremendous harm: the belief that you are only truly good if you have beaten someone else. The result is that many people whose lives are actually quite good today still live in relentless anxiety and dread — and in three words: they brought it on themselves.
Master Chi urges these parents: keep that competitive drive by all means — but please direct it only toward yourselves. Do not use it to poison the next generation. I am sincerely asking you.
It hardly needs to be said: these parents are still stuck on the shallow level of “whatever everyone else is doing, my child does too.” They have never realized that every child — in talent and in their destiny framework (格局) alike — is a completely unique existence.
Master Chi knows this intimately from experience reading children’s destiny charts. The higher a parent’s own caliber, the more they care about their own child’s path of growth: how their interests and aspirations should develop, which road is best, what to be mindful of in matters of romance, how to position for prosperity in career and wealth fortune (财运). But parents of lower caliber tend to fixate on how other people’s children are developing, constantly asking me how other children grow up, what their marriages, careers, lives, and ambitions look like.
Honestly — does it matter? As long as a child walks their own unique, one-of-a-kind path of development, isn’t that enough? Isn’t that already wonderful?
“I don’t care what other people’s children are doing — you are already wonderful.”
Please repeat this sentence silently with Master Chi three times. Don’t skip it — three complete repetitions.
Third: “Mom and Dad love you very much, so all we want is for you to be happy and to grow.”
Even among children, there is a type who radiates sunshine and ease. Even if this kind of child doesn’t achieve great things in life, they will certainly live well and happily — because that sunshine and ease becomes the strength that helps them meet every challenge life brings, and it becomes the gravity that draws others to their side and makes people want to help them.
Where does this strength come from? Naturally, it comes from parents who are equally optimistic, healthy, and forward-looking — without question.
And it is precisely these parents who have always been generous in expressing genuine love and tender affection toward their children.
In this kind of family atmosphere, children almost universally and openly return that warmth to their parents in kind — because during those early, crucial years when a child’s understanding of the world is being formed, they learn: “Returning love to those who love you is the most natural thing in the world.”
This one small quality of character can smooth away immeasurable rough terrain in a child’s future.
Consider the flip side: why do girls from single-parent homes statistically suffer a higher rate of unhappy marriages? Because love is something they are sensitive to and starved of — they cannot tell the difference between genuine love and being used.
And why do boys raised by domineering, overbearing parents so often turn out meek and ineffectual? Because to make life bearable, they grew up in the habit of appeasing their parents.
All these patterns, traced to their roots through a destiny chart, will always yield an answer.
Similarly: why do some children, after growing up, achieve nothing — and not only that, don’t even want to pursue the basic ability to stand on their own two feet, choosing instead to live as parasites on their families?
It isn’t that they don’t like money. It isn’t that they don’t like being recognized. It isn’t that they don’t like achievement.
It is purely this: children who lack security are the least willing to invest effort, because they are afraid of coming away with nothing in the end. And that cold, dark family home of origin is the root cause — the one that planted this thorn in their heart.
As parents, do not make this foolish mistake. Let your child clearly know your love for them. Let your child understand, without doubt, that you are their retreat and their backing.
“Mom and Dad love you very much, so all we want is for you to be happy and to grow.”
Please repeat this sentence silently with Master Chi three times. Don’t skip it — three complete repetitions.
Closing:
A child’s growth is, in truth, extremely simple. Like a small sapling, they will grow according to how you water and tend them.
Sadly, most parents have degraded what should be a carefully studied art of nurturing people into a crude technique of exam-drilling — attempting to force-feed their way to raising the next generation.
It is a pity. A parent’s short-sightedness inevitably becomes an obstacle in the child’s path. This is the price paid when the parents’ influence in a child’s destiny is weakened and compromised.