Discussion keeps the world turning This is Roundtable You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Fei Fei, together with Steve Heatherly and Niu Honglin in the studio.
Coming up, across China, parents are finding themselves standing outside of their children's schools,
invests, directing traffic, managing crowds.
But with no training, no legal authority, and often no real choice,
what began as a voluntary initiative to protect kids has quietly become a mandatory duty.
Now, let's dive into the world of the voluntary trap.
As a parent, you 've just finished a full day of work,
but instead of going home, you now need to stand outside of your child's school in the cold, wearing a vest.
Trying to manage the traffic.
You have no training about this, there 's no legal authority,
and if you do n't show up, you worry your child might be treated differently in class.
And this is the reality for many parents across China,
where a school safety program that began as a voluntary initiative has turned into a mandatory duty.
The system was meant to protect children, but somehow along the way
it began to hurt the very family we 're supposed to support.
So today, let's talk about this system, the parent school guard system in China.
What exactly is that?
I have to say, it's not something that has been there for forever.
Because when I was a little girl, I used to go to school by bicycle.