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Wellness Wednesday for May 14, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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We homeschool our kid but this might be fraying our nerves too much.

The public schools here are generally terrible, and the private schools are either religious or hippie-woo garbage that I don't want to waste time at.

There are a handful of Immersion schools, however. Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.

We're white but my thinking is

  1. Chinese Immersion School will be full of kids of more upwardly mobile Chinese immigrants
  2. Their children will be better behaved and not a toxic/criminal influence on my kids, the way median white kids in my community would be
  3. Their children will be smarter and be a positive influence on my kids
  4. The school will probably have better academics and not that much on the liberal arts/woo shit because of the Chinese parents
  5. The rest of the white kids there are sent there because their parents all know this too
  6. To the extent that learning foreign languages is useful, Chinese is probably the least useless one out of the rest of those

Yes this is racist. But also... accurate? Thoughts?

Your #5 makes me think that you might've stumbled on some serious alpha here. You might be getting private-school quality peers for your children at discounted prices (assuming that immersion language school is cheaper than full-on private school).

I think you, and most other reasonable folks can see as plain as day how the demographics of your child's friends will influence educational and, consequently, life outcomes, so there's nothing racist about that.

As an east asian myself, the only caution is that a lot of Chinese families treat education as an arms race and a zero-sum game. And in certain ways, they are correct, there are only so many spots at top colleges/companies/positions of power. But I feel like this optimizes for some local minima, and one can get swept up in this whole competition for an unclear objective.