拔苗助长 bá miáo zhù zhǎng
Pull up the seedlings to help them grow — and kill the crop.
The short answer
拔苗助长 means to “help” seedlings grow by pulling them upward — eagerness that destroys what it means to nurture. It is the idiom for counterproductive help.
The story
Mencius tells of a man from Song, anxious that his seedlings were growing too slowly. So he went into the field and pulled each one a little higher, coming home exhausted and proud: “Today I helped the seedlings grow!” His son ran to the field and found them all withered.
Mencius told this to a disciple worried he wasn't making fast enough progress in goodness. Growth that is real — sprouts or virtue — has its own clock; forced growth is just rearranged death.
What it means today
Modern Chinese has no more useful idiom for parenting and education: cram schools for toddlers, résumés built in kindergarten, any help so eager it becomes harm. 拔苗助长 names the failure kindly but unmistakably.
It applies anywhere process matters: onboarding new employees, rushing recovery from injury, scaling a company faster than its foundations. The seedlings are not lazy. They are growing.
How to use it
Typical shape: 教育不能拔苗助长, “education must not pull up the seedlings”. A variant writing, 揠苗助长 (yà miáo zhù zhǎng), means the same thing with a bookier verb.
In use
2 examples孩子三岁就学编程，这不是拔苗助长吗？
Learning programming at three — isn't that pulling up the seedlings?
康复训练急不得，拔苗助长只会伤身体。
Recovery training can't be rushed — pulling up the seedlings only harms the body.
The characters
Explore individuallyIndividual character meanings do not always explain the meaning of the whole word.
This guide is original Dengdeng editorial content, offered under CC BY-SA 4.0. The linked dictionary entries adapt CC-CEDICT under the same license.