How I’m Helping A Quiet 10-Year-Old With Performance Anxiety In A Chinese Primary School
It’s 9:17 AM on a Tuesday in a third-grade classroom in Chengdu, the air conditioner hums just loud enough to drown out the traffic from the street three floors below, and half a dozen kids are waving their hands in the air, yelling for a chance to solve the final multiplication problem on the blackboard. Xiao Ming hunches lower over his desk, shoves his completed worksheet under his Chinese textbook, and fixes his eyes on the scuffed toe of his navy canvas school shoe. I’m leaning against the back wall volunteering that day, and I already saw his worksheet: every answer is correct, only two faint eraser marks where he adjusted his numbers.
After class, I wait by the door when everyone runs out for recess, pull a lemon lollipop I grabbed from the teacher’s office out of my pocket, and offer it to him. He takes it, twists it between his fingers, won’t meet my eye. I say, “You got that problem right, why didn’t you raise your hand?” He mumbles so quiet I almost can’t hear it: “What if I forget the steps when I’m standing up front? Everyone will laugh. My mom says if you can’t do something perfectly, you shouldn’t do it at all.”
I’ve been volunteering at this school for 18 months, working with kids who struggle with the unwritten rules of classroom performance here. Xiao Ming is top 4 in his class on every written test, never talks back, never gets in trouble, never draws attention to himself for anything. His teacher told me a month earlier, when the class did their 2-minute hobby presentations, he walked to the front of the room, stared at his shoes for three whole minutes, then burst into tears and ran back to his desk before he said a word. His dad pulled him aside after that and told him he’d disgraced the family by being so cowardly. That’s when I started checking in on him twice a week.
Most people I talk to assume this is just shyness, or that he doesn’t have enough confidence. But what I’ve seen with dozens of kids like this here is it’s not that they don’t know the material, or that they don’t want to participate. It’s that they’ve absorbed a very clear message from parents, teachers, and even peer groups that any mistake, any fumble, any moment of imperfection is permanent proof you’re not good enough. In a system that starts high-stakes testing as early as third grade, where class rankings are posted outside the office every semester, that message sticks hard.
What I don’t do is push him to “just get over it” or force him to stand up in front of the class to “overcome his fear”. That’s the most common mistake adults make, and it just makes the fear worse. Instead, we started with tiny, low-risk changes that anyone can copy, no big overhauls required. First, I worked with his classroom teacher to build in a 5-minute pre-check before any public participation. Before we go over problems as a class, I stop by Xiao Ming’s desk, whisper my question, and let him answer quietly first. If he gets it right, I ask if he’d be willing to share his answer with the whole class. If he says no, I just nod and walk away—no pushing, no guilt-tripping. At first, he said no every time. After three weeks, he said yes once. Now he says yes about 8 out of 10 times. He already knows he’s got the answer right, so there’s no risk of public failure, which takes all the pressure off.
Next, I met with his parents for 45 minutes after school one day, and instead of telling them they were too harsh on him, I asked them to try one small change: every Sunday at dinner, each person has to share one mistake they made that week, and what happened after. No fixing it, no scolding yourself, just saying what went wrong and that it turned out okay. His dad is an engineer, so the first week he talked about messing up a section of a bridge blueprint, how his team fixed it together, no one got fired. His mom, who works at a bank, talked about accidentally transferring money to the wrong account, how the bank helped her get it back. It’s been two months, and Xiao Ming actually started joining in, sharing small mistakes like forgetting his homework or tripping in the hallway.
Last week, his group did a presentation on their bean plant growing project, and Xiao Ming volunteered to go first before anyone else could ask. He stumbled over the word “germination” once, paused, laughed, and said “Sorry, I can’t say that word right today” then kept going. No one laughed at him—they just waited. After class he came over to me and said, “My dad messed up a client meeting last week, so I figured it was okay if I messed up a word.” That’s the small win we were looking for.
A common question I get from other teachers and expat parents here is whether this is a uniquely Chinese issue. It’s not—performance pressure is everywhere for kids these days. But it’s more visible here, because it starts so much younger, and the expectations around perfection are spoken out loud more often. One concrete thing any parent or teacher can do, no matter where you are, is shift your praise: instead of praising a kid for a perfect performance, praise them for the act of trying, even if it’s messy. Instead of “that was perfect, great job”, say “I really appreciated you sharing that with us, thank you”. It sounds small, but it changes how they see the risk of putting themselves out there.
It’s only been three months of working with Xiao Ming. He still won’t do the school speech competition his teacher invited him to, he still hunches over his desk when he’s unsure of an answer, he still prefers drawing dinosaurs in his notebook margins over talking to the whole class. We’re not trying to turn him into a class clown or a public speaking champion. The goal is just to help him feel like he doesn’t have to be perfect to deserve space in the room. Right now, he shows his dinosaur drawings to his deskmate now, which he never did before. That’s enough for today.
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