Chinese Man Takes His Young Kid On 1,800 Mile Hike Across Brutal Desert And Other Similar Extreme ‘Character Building’ Exercises
Not trusting routine child-rearing techniques which involve developing one’s character, this Chinese businessman makes his young son, who just turned 6, go with him on extreme outings and hikes. The little kid’s latest excursion is a grueling 1,800 mile hike across Lop Nur, a largely dried up salt lake in China, where temperatures regularly drop below freezing point.
He Liesheng, who prefers calling himself “Eagle Dad,” has been pushing his kid, He Yide, really hard, all in the name of building character and developing inner strength and stamina. According to him, there’s just one philosophy when it comes to raising his son.
“We think that not having adventures in life is the most dangerous thing.”
While adventures with your kids doesn’t sound all that bad, wait till you hear what Yide’s dad puts him through on regular basis. At a tender age of just 4, Yide was made to jog in the snow. While it may seem like a mildly difficult task to do wearing protective clothing, poor Yide on the other hand, had just a pair of white underpants. Yide ran, while crying, in the New York’s frigid subzero temperatures. While Yide managed to earn the name “Running Naked Boy” on the Chinese social media, his father states it was just the beginning of many more such “activities,” reported That’s Mag.
Barely a year later, Liesheng managed to train Yide to fly a plane and the kid made a 35-minute flight above Beijing Wildlife Park in an ultra-light aircraft. Needless to say, Yide shattered the previous Guinness Record for the world’s youngest pilot. Now the father is taking his 6-year-old son across the desert, a place where professional explorers have collapsed and died after fighting nature and the extremes it manages to lash out, reported China Daily.
Though these techniques seem overly harsh, Yide’s father justifies the same. Apparently, the kid was born premature, and had spent a couple of months in an incubator thereafter. Doctors expressed strong concern about the boy’s health, and even predicted Yide may suffer from physical defects as he grew up. Determined to minimize the possibilities of Yide growing up as a weakling, Liesheng personally developed a grueling training program for him that included all sorts of strenuous activities, which seemingly border on child abuse.
Yide was in the swimming pool merely 10 days after emerging from the incubator. As he was crossing six months, the toddler was undergoing physical training, sessions of which lasted for eight hours every day. At just two years, Yide was climbing mountains along with five miles of jogging. Apart from these activities, as is tradition, Yide is also practicing kung fu and kickboxing. Interestingly, despite his grueling schedule, Yide also manages to squeeze in bike-riding and skateboarding.
[Image Credit | That’s Mag]
