Chinese parents are paying thousands of yuan to send their children to rural “hardship camps” where they chop wood, feed pigs, and dig potatoes to learn the value of the lifestyle their families provide them.

The increasingly popular summer programmes, held largely in the southwestern provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan, promise to give city children a taste of rural life while cutting them off from mobile phones and the internet.

Children are made to wake up early and carry out tasks modelled on the daily work of farmers, including digging and selling potatoes, peeling bark, chopping firewood, and feeding livestock.

Some camps charge more than 4,000 yuan (£430) for 10 days, while longer programmes lasting up to a month can cost more than 10,000 yuan (£1,070).

The camps operate under strict rules.

Children can earn points through their work and use them to obtain daily necessities, but those who fail to complete assigned tasks may have to survive on potatoes for their meals.

Organisers say the aim is to teach children how difficult it can be to earn money and encourage them to appreciate the lives their families have provided.

“We aimed to provide them with a better life but may have inadvertently spoiled them. Perhaps facing difficulty is essential for children to appreciate their comfortable lives,” one social media user wrote beneath a video promoting the camps.

Videos circulating online show some children in tears and begging to be allowed home. Others have said they would rather return to their schoolwork, declaring: “I can do anything as long as it is not farm work.”

Some programmes also require children to write letters to their parents. Camp staff have said the videos and letters often move parents, who then recommend the experience to others.

A man surnamed Gao from Sichuan said he sent his daughter, who had just started secondary school, to one of the camps and was surprised to discover that she enjoyed the farm work despite repeatedly complaining about it, reported the *South China Morning Post. *

A mother from Shanghai, who enrolled her seven-year-old daughter on a 10-day programme, said some of her child's old habits, including laziness and picky eating, remained unchanged. Still, she was pleased that her daughter had “stepped outside her comfort zone and experienced a different lifestyle”.

Other parents have also reported mixed results, with some claiming children who had previously been glued to their phones changed after attending the camps, while others said poor sleeping and eating habits quickly returned, reported South Korean outlet Maeil Business.

The programmes have prompted debate online over whether forcing children to endure intense physical labour is an effective form of education.

Education experts have warned that short periods of compulsory labour may not produce lasting behavioural change, arguing that a child's apparent remorse or improved behaviour in harsh conditions could simply be a temporary response to stress.

“Many children only receive education in city classrooms. Excessive labour could negatively impact their physical and mental development,” another social media user commented.

Another social media user and entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand, who lived in China for eight years, says that the camps “actually answer a uniquely Chinese phenomenon: the parents and grandparents' generation that built modern China grew up in incredible poverty and hardship”.

“As they see it – which is probably correct – they worked their way to prosperity precisely because of this, because hardship gave them grit and made them tough. However, they now face the paradox of their own success: the comfortable lives they worked so hard to give their children might be the very thing that destroys that very success – the kids being too soft and weak to sustain it.”