Last month, I was sitting in a car at Everland’s Safari World when my daughter completely lost it — in the best possible way. A giraffe had wandered right up to the vehicle, close enough to see its eyelashes, and she grabbed my arm and screamed so hard I thought she’d burst something. She’s seven by Korean age, six the way the rest of the world counts. She thought that giraffe was the greatest thing she’d ever seen in her entire life.
That’s the part nobody tells you about raising a kid in Korea.
Everyone wants to talk about the pressure, the education fever, the hagwons (학원, private academies). And yeah, we’ll get to all of that. But if you ask me what it actually feels like to be a Korean dad in 2026, it starts with a screaming six-year-old and a very confused giraffe.
The Baseline: Both Parents Work, Kids Are Busy
Let me paint you the standard picture of a Korean family with a young child, because mine isn’t unusual.
My wife and I both work. That’s not a choice we made — it’s just how things are for most Korean couples our age. Housing costs in the Seoul metro area are not forgiving, and one income doesn’t stretch the way it used to. So our daughter goes to kindergarten during the day, comes home in the late afternoon, and fills the gaps with academies.
Right now she’s doing three: an English academy, a broadcast dance academy (think K-pop choreography classes for kids), and an art academy. That’s a fairly light load for a Korean kindergartner, honestly. We’re not running her ragged — not yet, anyway.
Here’s the thing foreigners often misunderstand: Korean parents don’t send their kids to hagwons purely because they’re obsessed with grades. Some of it, sure. But a big part of it is simply logistics. When both parents are at work until 6 or 7pm, someone needs to watch the kid. The academy is a structured, safe place where something useful is also happening. It’s childcare with a curriculum.
The Part That’s Hard to Explain
Here’s the thing that always catches non-Koreans off guard when I explain it to them.
My daughter’s favorite things in the world, in rough order: Roblox, YouTube, kids cafes, and amusement parks. She is not a child who sits down voluntarily to study. She would rather build something in Roblox for four hours than look at a worksheet for five minutes. I respect this about her, deeply.
But when she starts elementary school next year, things will shift. Not because I suddenly become a different kind of parent — but because the social structure forces it.
Here’s the thing: if you don’t send your kid to hagwons in Korea, they don’t just fall behind academically. They lose their social life. Because their friends are all at the academies. Afternoons in Korea don’t happen on playgrounds or at each other’s houses — they happen in hagwon waiting rooms, in the fifteen minutes between classes, in the group chats formed between kids who go to the same English academy on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Pull your kid out of that circuit, and they’re not free. They’re just alone.
It’s one of those things that sounds absurd until you’re inside the system, and then it makes a strange, exhausting kind of sense.
We’re still figuring out where we land on all this. For now, three academies feels right. Ask me again in two years.
What We Actually Do on Weekends
Okay, enough about the hard stuff. This is the part I actually enjoy talking about.
Weekends in our house are for going places. We do a mix of camping, amusement parks, and kids cafes (키즈카페, indoor play spaces specifically designed for children, usually with climbing structures, ball pits, trampolines, and a cafe area for parents). Recently we’ve been on a bit of an adventure streak — we hit an aquarium a few weeks ago, and then the Safari World at Everland, which is where the giraffe incident happened.
I’m not someone who particularly loves crowds or waiting in lines. Left to my own devices, I’d probably spend a Saturday at home, working on a side project, gaming a little, sleeping in. But here’s what I’ve learned about myself as a dad: the second I see my daughter’s face when she spots something that amazes her, every bit of that preference disappears.
She sees a giraffe up close and she grabs my arm and screams. She goes down a slide at a kids cafe and immediately sprints back to the ladder to do it again. She spots a character at the theme park and pulls me toward it with a strength I didn’t know a six-year-old possessed.
That’s why I go. Not because I’m a naturally outdoorsy, let’s-make-memories kind of person. But because her reaction to the world right now — completely unguarded, absolutely electric — is genuinely one of the best things I’ve ever gotten to witness.
What Does It Actually Cost?
People always want to know the money part, so here it is honestly.
Right now, with a kindergartner, the costs are manageable. Three academies plus kindergarten is a real line item in the monthly budget, but it’s not crushing us. Toys get expensive — my daughter has developed opinions about specific Roblox merchandise, which is its own financial adventure — but overall, this phase is okay.
The expensive phase, every Korean parent will tell you, comes later. Elementary school is when the hagwon schedule expands. Middle school is when the math academy and the English academy and the science academy all feel non-optional, all at the same time. High school is when you’re looking at costs that make your eyes water.
We’re not there yet. We have a few more years of relatively manageable chaos before it escalates. I’m aware of what’s coming. I’m choosing not to think about it too hard on a Sunday afternoon at the aquarium.
One thing we did decide early: no English kindergarten (영어유치원, English-immersion preschool programs). These are popular in Korea among parents who want to give their kids a head start in English — and the price tag is genuinely staggering. In Gyeonggi Province, where we live, these programs average around ₩1.23 million a month. The national average is about ₩1.74 million, and the priciest ones in Seoul run well over ₩2.5 million. Annualized, that lands somewhere between ₩14 and ₩16 million a year — roughly double the average yearly tuition at a four-year Korean university. For preschool. We opted for a regular kindergarten plus an English academy instead: similar language exposure, a fraction of the price.
Whether that was the right call, I genuinely don’t know yet. Ask me in fifteen years.
The Honest Summary
Raising a kid in Korea is a mix of things that don’t always fit neatly together.
There’s a system here that can feel relentless — the hagwons, the social pressure, the sense that the conveyor belt starts early and doesn’t stop. I’m not going to pretend that part doesn’t exist, because it does, and we feel it.
But there’s also a giraffe through a car window, and a kid who grabs your arm and screams. There’s a slide she’ll go down seventeen times in a row. There’s a camping trip where she falls asleep in a sleeping bag before 9pm and wakes up asking what’s for breakfast.
The exhausting parts are real. So is the good stuff.
That’s what it’s actually like.
Have a kid in Korea, or raising one from abroad? I’d love to hear how your experience compares — drop a comment below.
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