Modern Parental Expectations
Revised Concept
Modern parental expectations, especially the kiasuism in modern Singaporean parenting, has been a persistent social issue throughout the years. While many are beginning to understand that academic and extra-curricular success should not be part of a child’s identity, parents are still imposing their expectations of all-rounded success onto their children.
With our visuals and videos, we seek to advocate a greater awareness of the stress parents bring upon their children with undue expectations, through a predominantly pathos approach. We seek to invoke a certain degree of empathy toward the child’s situation so as to let our viewers be aware of the harm they might potentially cause to their own children.
The rising affluence of many Asian societies, including Singapore, has led to a transition in the approach of parenting. Middle-class parents seek to give their children a greater edge. This transition has resulted in children confronting immense, distressing pressure.
Our visual exploration aims to relate our message “Your Expectation is Your Child’s Entanglement” to parents in our society. The ropes represented in our visuals are indexical signs to signify the restraint parental expectation brings to children. Also, they serve to mirror the shoe laces, showing that parents are tying their children down with stress and expectations.
Cultivation Theory plays a huge role in this social issue — parents are influenced by media exposure to believe that every child must do well academically in order to achieve in life. We beg to differ. This belief is an epistemological stereotype that is distorted and erroneous. It is in our interest to address this concern.
We are confident that our visual exploration possesses social value that impacts our society — parents should be aware of the pressure they are placing on their children and learn to alter their parenting approach.
We decided to highlight our social issue through a deliberate approach, focusing on the connotation that is implied by the ropes.
Contextually, our group portrays this immense pressure by showing the hands of a father pulling the ropes that are tied around his daughter towards him. This acts as a visual metaphor to compare with the real problem. This implies that the father is exerting his force on his daughter to follow his instructions — learning the violin.
The focus of the arrangement of signs is assisted by Gestalt’s Law of Continuation, as our eye movement follow the ropes from the father’s hands (left) to the daughter’s hands (right). This sequential relationship is also a syntagm, allowing our audience to understand our intended message through their own perception.
Technically, hard lighting was used to create a vignette and to cast long shadows, creating a sense of depth in the visual. The lighting highlights the relationship between both father and daughter, signified by the haul of the ropes. In addition, the colours in our visuals are desaturated, intending to produce tension, constriction and unease.
As such, our visual approach concentrates on the oppression and subjection of stress by Singaporean parents.
We see the parent’s hand on the girl’s shoulder, symbolising supervision and reassurance. The passivity of the parent here contrasts the previous visuals where they have been actively entangling their child. We infer that she is a student through the indexical sign of the school uniform.
The hand in the frame, though assuring, can also be a weight on the girl’s shoulder. This visual metaphor is included to convey that expectations may sometimes be a burden instead of an encouragement. While the cultural inference that children with computers are often associated with playing computer games, the nature of the use of the computer here is implied to be for work.
The top-down angle of the shot represents the idea of supervision and surveillance. It is therefore implied that the parent has an over-arching control over the girl.
As we continue the trend from the previous visual, the objects that represent the activities the girl has to go through are intertwined with her. However, in this image, the parent has receded from engaging actively in the entanglement, suggesting the paradigm shift of the parent as the initiator of entanglement to the child’s self-entanglement.
Finally, the complete absence of the parent in this image is particularly interesting because it has worked against our cognitive habituation of the participative parent in the first three visuals.
The parent, though physically absent in the visual, still influences in the form of the rope, indicating the parent’s power to restrict through his/her expectations.
The vignette applied serves to isolate the girl as the object of interest in this image. The visual concentration is a sign for a panopticon, symbolising the surveillance and scrutiny she is under. Even beyond the supervision of the parent, the girl’s reluctance to free herself is a result of panopticism.
The disarray of materials around the girl is a visual metaphor for the frustration and confusion she is feeling, while her entanglement suggests her impotence at addressing it.
The condensed code beyond the composition of these elements suggests that the panopticism of the parent at home may in fact be a microcosm of our society in general. The cultural values that our society emphasises on may be the true culprit of the modern parental expectations. To eradicate this phenomenon will therefore require the modification of societal mindset.
