Every weekday afternoon I sit in the parking lot of my daughter’s high school, waiting for her to finish. As anyone who has gone through this experience would agree, I am sure this is why they invented air conditioning in cars and mobile games.

But this is also when I get time to reflect. My parking lot musings, if you will. Today I am thinking about why I am here. Not literally, but on a more philosophical level. What do I hope to teach my children by dragging them thousands of miles away from their homeland and parachuting them into classrooms where because they don’t speak English very well, they can’t communicate and therefore have no friends. 

First off, I think about English. I am a great proponent of English, or any foreign language as a mean to broaden one’s horizon, both in an intellectual and personal networking sense. When I was a young mother and didn’t know any better, I thought teaching English to my preschoolers would make me one of “those” moms ― you know, the ones that swore playing English recordings of Shakespeare to their fetus would give them a head start in getting into the top universities. So I played it cool and shunned English classes even when they entered elementary school.

That is, until a wise American high-school teacher gave me a good scolding about how I was neglecting my parental duties. “Don’t think of English as a study course,” she said. “Just imagine how many more books she could read, how many more friends she could make if she had Korean AND English abilities.”

So enhancing my children’s English abilities is in itself a worthwhile goal.

But on the way to this quest for English-fluent children, I am also getting a good education in a different kind of parenting.

Now I am not saying the American parenting style is God’s gift to mankind. Far from it. Parents here also deal with the same kinds of agonizing conflicts about how best to raise their children as parents back in Korea go through. And similar problems exist. Here the meddling moms (which seems to be a universal phenomenon) are called “helicopter moms,” a reference to how they “hover” over their children.

But I do find a few aspects that offer some “Ummm …” moments.

One is the amount of involvement that is expected of parents. Helicopter parenting aside, American parents are physically asked to do more for their children.

Take the example of my afternoons spent in the parking lot. I am certainly not alone. The lot is full of parents reading, texting, sleeping, eating and sometimes even wandering from one car to another, engaging in idle chit-chat about their children. Since I know there is a substantially bigger percentage of working parents in the U.S., this baffles me to no end. But this is a subject for another study. (Possibly to be done in this parking lot!)

Also, at 5 p.m. every afternoon, I get emails from both my daughters’ middle and high schools. These emails tell me what homework each teacher has assigned that day. They also tell me what assignments are due in the coming week and month. And the emails also have my daughters’ grades for each subject, based on whether they handed in their assignments on time, what grades they got for the assignments they handed in and what scores they got for each quiz or test they took. The homework emails are updated every day; grade scores are updated at least two to three times a week. I can also email each teacher on the spot if I have any questions or comments about anything I see in the email.

So as long as I have a smartphone or an email account, there is absolutely no excuse for me not knowing how my children are doing in school. Talk about pressure!

In Korea, there is a running joke that in order to get into the best universities you need three things, a mother’s wealth of information about where to go for the best after-school tutoring, a father’s disinterest, since everything he does is basically interfering, and the grandparent’s money, to fund this all-important quest.

But much of the parental involvement seems limited to making sure the children get into the best hagwon, or private tutoring institutes, not so much about really getting involved in the children’s study.

We are indulged into thinking that as long as we get them in, and pay for it, that good grades will follow. And that is also why when that does not come about, instead of working with our children to figure out how to get better, we look for a different and better hagwon.

I had also bought into this vicious cycle, and have painful memories of searching in vain for that perfect hagwon and, as a working mom, blaming my child’s falling grades on my lack of knowledge about these things.

But I now realize life is not about instant fixes, especially when it comes to raising children. So we, as parents, need to take real responsibility, take charge of our own children, put in the time and stop blaming the hagwon or even the education system for what our children are learning. At least that is what I tell myself today as I wait in the parking lot. 

By Sohn Jie-ae

Sohn Jie-ae is a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California as well as a visiting professor at Ewha Womans University, and has served as president of Arirang TV and Radio. ― Ed.