Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Young FRANKenstein]

[anae]

I don't even know where to start with this topic. It just makes me crazy.

My husband says he was never told when to go to bed when he was very young. If he wanted to stay up and watch tv, he could. When he reached middle school, he could stay up all night if he had a book in his hand.

My BIL has two kids 8 and 6 and they don't go to bed until 12 or 1 am. He couldn't believe that our 9 month old and almost 3 year old go to bed at 8:00 everynight. They couldn't believe it and asked how we do it. Uh parenting? They said if they try to put the girls to bed earlier, they just bang on the door and cry. Crying is just the end of the world. His reaction to our disciplining our toddler almost caused a family fight, but that is another topic.

My SIL has a daughter who is 11. She is NOT ALLOWED to go to bed before midnight even if she has no homework to do. My husband will see her sign in on MSN Messenger and ask her what she is doing awake and she will say playing or watching tv. He thinks his sister is trying to train her to go without sleep. Fantastic.

We have five more neices and nephews who are older and so we know that they are in school and at hagwon and don't even get home unitl 12.

[Privateer]

[drkalbi]

It's training for the kids. What's the point of going to bed early, when in a few years, they will have to stay up late doing school work? The parents figure it's better to keep them up late now, so that they can do it when they go to school.

[Privateer]

[Cheonmunka]

There are nights, sometimes early on in the week, and maybe once a week, when my children and my family et al will go out about 10 to a restaurant or norae bang. We might not get home until 12 or 1. So, it could seem to others that it's normal that we let the kids up late and running around.
For as much as I tried to make earlier bedtimes the natural times my kids get sleepy enough that I can read them their bedtime story and they'll actually fall asleep (if it's too early they'll get back out of bed again) or, the time that I can tell 'em to get to bed and know that they'll fall asleep, is 10pm.
That's average I think in Korea.
Many of my wife's friends' kids' bedtimes are earlier.
Some may be later though I have never heard that.

I'd say that the kids you see running around Home Plus were the exceptions like above - the sometimes late outings. There are so many families in our overpopulated cities it could seem that every families' kids are out running the streets - when in fact it may be just a small sample.

PS: I like the post above. Babies sleeping seperated from parents is not the way.
I remember my (NZ) sister's little alarm box or microphone thing she put next to the cot of her prematurely born infant son when he slept in a room a good 40-50 feet away, and she could hear him breathing. She always prided herself on her skills but I think that's no way to treat a two-month-old baby, recently no more than a foetus.

I sometimes hate! Western concepts.

[Beej]

-Korean dads have told me that if kids didnt stay up until at least 11, then the kids would never see the dads because the dads didnt get home from work until very late.

-Love and marriage in Asia are very different than in the West. I can count on one hand the number of happily married couples i have known here throughout the years. Seems almost all of my married female coworkers constantly complained about their married lives.

- More than a few Korean women have told me about this next one: they got married, had sex with hubby for the first time on the honeymoon, got pregnant, and then their husbands never touched them again sexually. FOREVER. Maybe one of the most bizarre things I have ever heard.

- Set bedtimes for children made America great.

[VanIslander]

I ask my students "What time do you go to sleep?" and elementary school aged kids keep saying 10 as early and 12 or 1 as when usually they do. I recall one girl saying 8:30 and the others were shocked, shocked! "whaaa!" (no surprise that well-slept child was one of the brightest, quickest thinking consistently well mannered students I've ever had).

And when it comes to older students, in middle school, many say their hobby is "sleeping". What do you do on Sundays? "Sleep". They are deprived of a basic human need for growth and good development.

[Scotticus]

[lucas_p]

[Young FRANKenstein]

[stevemcgarrett]

Some genuinely interesting discussion here. Thanks.

In fairness to Korean fathers, I'd venture to say that there are at least as many Japanese salaryman who come home late, too.

The problem is an office culture that condones the afterhour karaoke bar gatherings, the private club gatherings, the drinking, and so on.

Let's face it: if more women were in positions of authority in Korean society, especially as office managers, this culture would likely go the way of the dinosaurs.

Dalliance, however, has it social customs to support it.

What I find so sad is the East Asian proclivity for quantity over quality in all matters of working and learning. Is spending five extra hours at the office really so productive, especially when one has to arrive at work early the next morning? Likewise, is spending the same amount of time reviewing material for class going to sink in any more, or enable the student to be more alert the next morning?

All modern societies have these tendencies (I've certainly known execs in the West who remain at the office late) but in Korea it seems to be taken to an extreme.

Perhaps, as one poster suggests, I am only seeing the same segment of the population repeating the same bad behavior but my gut feeling (for whatever that's worth) tells me that parents who are only too willing or demanding that their children stay up late cramming are going to be inclined to see nothing wrong with dragging them along to the mall or the market.

[Typhoon]

In my experience the "you can't leave until the boss leaves" thinking is not really around anymore. At Samsung (my only real experience in the business world to be honest) no body waited for the boss to leave or checked where he was. If people had things to do they went and did them. Guys would leave in the middle of they day if they had stuff to do, this is why a lot stayed late to finish work I think. The workers were just expected to get their work done.

Most guys stayed late because they had stuff to do. On Tuesday and Thursday there were inter-company sports with drinking afterwards (bosses didn't attend they were usually travelling back and forth from Goje-do to Daejeon to Seoul). On Monday and Wednesday there was drinking soju until you threw up with the company (again no bosses, just the boys most nights). Friday was the one day where most guys worked really late without drinking too much (surprising to me actually), so they could finish their work for that week. I used to go drinking with the bosses once a month and people had no problem telling them that they couldn't make it or that they were busy and the bosses didn't care. The "I can't leave until the boss leaves" seemed like a myth to me. I never saw it. Maybe men just use it as an excuse so they don't have to be home with their wife and kids??

[lucas_p]

I've actually stopped teaching detailed discussions about a child/uni student's family as a big chunk of the time it went something like this:

Me: "OK, describe your mother for me"
Them: "My mom is kind, a good cook, and she likes to watch dramas on TV."
Me: "Good, how about your father?"
Them: "Quiet, dirty(Don't know how they choose this word), ummm..."
Or just "........."

There are bum fathers everywhere, I know a few back home, but every father I know here in Korea is nearly completely out of the child's picture. Including my own in-laws.

And the mothers would rather ship them off to a hogwan on free Saturdays because they don't know what to do with them. They could just let them sleep then, I think.

[koreandefence]