Why do the poor like to place their hopes on their children?

There is a common understanding in the crypto world.
If you have ten million yuan, you will definitely buy Bitcoin and store it in a cold wallet, earning a few points of stable appreciation each year, and you won't panic if it drops.
But if you only have five thousand yuan, you definitely won't buy Bitcoin.
You would leverage a hundred times and go all-in on a newly launched low-quality coin.
It's not because people with only five thousand yuan are stupid, but because ten percent of five thousand yuan is five hundred yuan.
What can five hundred yuan do?
This five hundred yuan's return makes no difference to his desperate current life; this is called liquidity lock-in.
So he has to gamble on a low-probability coin because that’s the only bet with enough odds—big enough to turn his life around.
Uninstall the trading app and look at reality.
An middle-aged person working on an assembly line screwing in screws or delivering food for over ten hours a day, with their body irreversibly aging, has cash flow just enough to cover caloric expenditure and rent.
What is the only asset with theoretically unlimited explosive returns they might encounter in their lifetime?
Only a gene lottery. Look at the underlying asset allocation logic.
The wealthy diversify their assets—real estate, trusts, overseas accounts, life insurance; their children’s education is just one defensive sector. Even if the child is a failure, the trust can support them for three generations to enjoy luxury.
The poor have no choice; their balance sheet only has one long-term investment, which cannot be diversified and must be concentrated.
Once you give all your remaining food to this one stock, you develop a terrifying sunk cost. That explains why, at the bottom, sometimes the exploitative investment in future generations becomes crazier.
Whether it’s those who empty six wallets to buy a house or families who eat pickles but still pay thousands for piano lessons for their children—this isn’t great maternal or paternal love; it’s like adding margin before a margin call in finance. Because the core position is too heavy, they can only keep adding.
As long as the child scores ten points higher on exams, it’s like seeing a big green candle on a low-quality coin’s chart—dopamine floods in.
The fantasy kicks in immediately, believing Tsinghua or Peking University is just around the corner, and social mobility is within reach. This is actually a selfish risk transfer.
Big funds have stop-loss lines; retail investors don’t. Retail logic is to break even.
Many people can’t understand why bottom-tier parents are so eager to control their children.
From choosing majors to finding jobs to marriage, they must interfere heavily.
From another perspective, if you bought a speculative stock with your entire net worth, could you resist watching the market every day?
Could you resist checking the intraday chart? The child is just that intraday chart.
Tonight, if you come home half an hour late, it’s because you must call to check the market movement.
If you play with a poorly performing classmate, it’s because you must cut off any bad news.
The essence of this controlling desire is extreme insecurity caused by extreme scarcity.
The poor have too few things they can control.
The boss can fire them at any time, the landlord can raise rent at any time, the city management can seize their stall at any time.
The only thing they can control and have legitimate authority over is their children.
Placing hope in children is the anesthetic for the poor.
As long as the children are still in school, this blind box remains unopened.
Unopened, there is always hope.
This hope period lasting over ten years is enough to sustain them through their current miserable life.
It’s a psychological delay settlement.
They bundle their current incompetence and failures and postpone facing them until twenty years later.
Some rural surveys in several provinces found that the poorer the area, the higher the fees for private schools, and parents sell everything to send their children there.
The management inside is extremely militarized, even bathroom use is tightly scheduled.
Retail investors desperately need to see progress bars.
This anti-human militarized management gives bottom-tier parents an illusion—they think this suffering itself is valuable.
As long as the child endures hardship, this investment is appreciating.
They can’t understand so-called quality education or the expansion of cognitive dimensions.
Because in their life experience, gaining any survival resource always involves great physical pain and torture.
Manual labor is painful, farming is painful, so studying must also be painful.
If it’s not painful, they think the books are wasted.
They rigidly transplant their muscle memory of suffering onto the next generation, believing it’s the key to climbing the social ladder.
But the blind box will eventually be opened.
Why are so many families experiencing conflicts now?
The trump card is revealed—initially, passing college was success; later, only passing a top-tier university counted; now, after a master’s degree, they find they can only deliver food or stay at home as full-time children.
The low-leverage low-quality coin eventually fails.
The most devastated aren’t the children—they’re the retail investors who sold everything to put in deposits.
They can’t accept the fact that their core assets, concentrated for twenty years, are now worth so little they can’t even cover basic maintenance costs.
They don’t want to admit the entire market has fallen; they only think their stock is unworthy.
Admitting the market is down means admitting that all the suffering and sunk costs they’ve invested are worthless.
That destroys their last pillar of faith to keep going, so they prefer to blame their children—why aren’t you studying harder? Why not take the civil service exam? Why not get a government job?
What is the civil service exam?
It’s the retail investor’s last pathological hope for risk-free, stable returns after experiencing a major bear market, trying to hedge their failed risk investment with the iron rice bowl of the system.
The poor don’t like to place hope on their children; they have no choice.
You walk into a casino with only two coins in your pocket, you can’t sit at the Texas Hold’em table, you can’t play baccarat in the private room, you can only play slot machines.
Insert the coin, pull the lever, and watch the spinning symbols on the screen.
In fact, the backend code of slot machines has long been fixed to control payout rates, with probabilities so low they’re infuriating, but the person sitting in front of the machine doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know.
They only know to pull the lever, listen to the sound effects, and feel hopeful.