The Daechi Moms in Seoul: the Power and Peril of Parental Lemming Behavior

I’m in Seoul right now and I’m a mom. But from what I gather, I’m not a Seoul mom. Seoul moms are… hard to describe. At least in a fair way. You can describe anyone in a judgey way. Understanding is much harder.

Mom in Seoul

I had observed that I was different from the moms I saw at my kids’ schools in Seoul. For starters, I waved goodbye and walked away when I dropped them off, whereas I noticed that many others lingered. I later learned they tended to get coffee together. I joined one time, out of curiosity, but became disinterested in the continuous information exchange about what the kids were all doing in and out of school.

I didn’t call the teachers on their mobile phones all the time; I didn’t even know that I could! What all they talked about I have no idea. I also employed a full-time helper to mind my three children while I worked for my US entity, whereas most of the other moms seemed willingly in or forced into early retirement in service of their single child.

After confirming these broad differences, I stopped trying to figure out what all the other ones were. Then the Daechi mom parody by Lee Sooji hit YouTube, laying bare a veritable treasure trove of others.

Daechi Moms

Daechi is a neighborhood in the affluent Gangnam district of Seoul, known for its abundance of educational resources. Approximately 1,000 non-school educational centers known as hakwon are located there. I had heard that families moved into Daechi and a handful of other popular districts when their children reached school age. I remember speaking to a few other moms about their anxiety on not doing so, and I suppose they found me unsympathetic. But Korea has a standardized curriculum, and the school quality is not so different from area to area, so I failed to see why not moving was experienced as a parental shortcoming. That said, 1,000 hakwons is a lot! Daechi must be a wonderland of choice for afterschool enrichment and homework help. (Sidenote: Every time I hear Daechi I think of Doechii, a top shelf rapper of the moment. That should tell you where my head is.)

I watched the Daechi mom sketch and woooah! So many questions: Why is the Daechi mom sending her two-year-old to math tutoring? (Note: four years old Korean is two or three years old everywhere else.) Why does she keep mixing bad English into her Korean? There are potty training consultants? What’s the deal with the five dollars in the envelope that the Daechi mom gives the tutor she decides not to hire? Why’s she wearing only her long johns under her Moncler coat??

Parodies require that you deeply understand what you’re talking about. The comedian Lee Sooji (who is apparently also my neighbor) knows her stuff cold. I watched her sketch more than five times to understand all its viral insights, and I think I’m maybe about halfway there. Even so, what is abundantly clear to me is this grounding fact: On a cultural level, a great many things are categorized as “pilsoo” - essential - in Korea. This has some consequences.

Pilsootem

In my experience, the “pilsoo” tag is a powerful marketing lever to get people to buy all kinds of things by making them feel unknowledgeable. There’s an unspoken ‘oh you don’t even know this?’ attitude that preys on people’s insecurities around technical knowledge.

This particular weakness isn’t just Korean. There are people vulnerable to this type of sell everywhere - people who, when buying an iPhone, might get talked into getting the pilsoo AirPods and Apple Watch at the same time. Maybe even an iPad or Macbook!

In Korea, this is a widespread phenomenon. There’s even a special term for things that are designated pilsoo: “pilsootem,” a mashup of “pilsoo” and the English word ‘item.’ Going hiking? You’ll find an array of specialized clothing and walking sticks labeled pilsootem, or designated as pilsootem by live attendants. Buying a refrigerator? Good luck! The more technical or academic the subject matter, the more vulnerable the buyer.

Especially when the matter relates to raising one’s child. It all comes to a head with Korean parents trying to educate their only child to compete in the world. In that world, a tremendous number of items and services are deemed to be pilsoo and parents of young children are Open. For. Business. So much so, that in Korea, parents of pre-kindergarteners spend more per kid for tutoring (340k KRW monthly) than parents of high school students do (320k KRW monthly) (2024, Ministry of Education and Bureau of Statistics).

Daechi Pilsoo

What ever is in the basket of pilsoo services for the Daechi mom? There is training for some essential life skills such as pooping in the potty, academic subjects like math, and extracurricular ones like jaegi kicking, kite flying, and similar traditional games made world famous by Squid Game Seasons 1 and 2. Of course, potty training happens in due time, and research has established that the math brain grows in later, but the Daechi mom is eager to use the services available to her and her peer group. Even if the teacher seems barely qualified, as the quack she interviews for the folk games turns out to be.

The reality Lee cleverly lays bare is that the emperor has no clothes. None of this is pilsoo, not by a long shot. Nobody needs to do all this stuff. Moreover, nobody needs to drive a Porsche Cayenne. Nobody needs to wear a Moncler Parnaiba puffer. Nobody needs a Chanel Gabrielle handbag. And yet they are all pilsoo part and parcel of the Daechi mom’s daily life. Why?

Therein lies the next thing one must understand about Koreans on a cultural level: A fierce competitive streak that manifests as a tremendous fear of being left behind. Or, in the opposite, a tremendous desire to gain the slightest of perceived edges, even at enormous marginal cost.

Collectivism a la Korean

When I was a kid in American public school, I learned that “Asian cultures” were “collectivist.” There wasn’t much depth or detail to this lesson, just that the “East” was “collectivist,” and the “West” was “individualist.” I also learned somewhere along the way, though not in this “East vs. West” framing, that in Japan, “the nail that sticks up gets hammered.” I suppose if there were a Korean collectivist expression like that, it would be “those unable to keep up get left behind.”

Just as the Japanese collectivist expression emphasizes a kind of sameness that stamps out any creativity and uniqueness, the Korean one risks a kind of sameness that in today’s brand-driven society leads to buying a lot of stuff. And indeed, Koreans are the world’s biggest luxury spenders, making up a whopping 10% of the topline of labels like Burberry, Moncler, and Prada.

Koreans are clearly doing a fine job keeping up with luxury pilsootem. But the urge to do so is competitive. An individualistic drive to get ahead, but which is collectively practiced! Aspirational lemmingism? A doozy of an East-West mashup if I ever saw one.

Consequences

When you try keep up with the proverbial Joneses (or the Kim Lee Parks, as it were), you end up spending beyond your means. The average household in Korea has a debt load that is approximately twice its income. Korea has a debt to GDP ratio that is second highest in the world (highest is Canada). Clearly nobody would say that this part of the phenomenon is pilsoo, but it is inevitable if everyone follows the luxury pilsoo urge straight off a fiscal cliff.

Also tragic is that much of the pilsoo spending is well-meaning, or perhaps can be characterized as well-meaning. Who wouldn’t want their kid to have all the nice things that the other kids in their neighborhood get? Any parent who loves their child can empathize with the impulse to generously provide. But I wonder: Shouldn’t we be asking the question of whether what we are providing is indeed pilsoo? Perhaps that is the biggest difference between me and the Seoul mom.

This might be easy for me to ask; even though I’m ethnically Korean, I’m an outsider here. I’m looking at Daechi mom through my skeptical American lens, leaning on my ed school cred. And as friends and advisors have noted, I have somewhat of an iconoclastic streak. As I contemplate Lee Sooji’s Daechi mom, I question whether she has any independently held beliefs that drive her individual choices, or whether her collectivist M.O. is simply parental fast followership that vendors of all kinds can exploit to the detriment of household finances everywhere.

Sympathy for Parents

That’s a judgment, and a cutting one at that. Actually, I have deep sympathy for parental lemming behavior. Becoming a parent was the most abrupt step into a knowledge void I have ever experienced. One minute I was pregnant, the next, I was holding a slippery crying micro person in my arms, whom I didn’t even know how to feed or bathe, but for whom I would be responsible every minute of the foreseeable future. The awesome feeling was indescribable in every way.

That wasn’t all. The little person proceeded to develop at an astonishing pace, making any kind of parental mastery of her as a subject, impossible. And yet her father and I, as the solidly type A people we are, were determined to do a great job raising her. You can see the danger in mixing such inexperience with such aspirations. I am not at all confident that had I raised my first daughter in Daechi rather than in Palo Alto, I wouldn’t have spent all my money on tutors and consultants too.

Non-pilsoo Children

In the end, normal pre-k children naturally develop and grow at their own pace, absorb knowledge from their surroundings, and interact with the stimuli they encounter. The thing for parents to do is to nurture these small humans’ feelings and curiosity, accept them for the burgeoning personalities they are, and set reasonable boundaries. These are hard to do well, for any parent ever. But they are free.

In the end, the parental pilsoo spending exemplified by the Daechi mom creates a culture where people feel they cannot afford to have children. Women don’t look at the Daechi mom and think, “I want that life of servitude to my child.” Dads with one child don’t look at her and say, “I want to make enough money to pilsoo spend on another one.” I have heard this again and again: “It’s too expensive to raise a child.”

But does it have to be? Korea has the world’s lowest birthrate; Daechi mom makes it easy to see why.