“Use your hips! Arms outstretched, but not stiff!” On a Saturday morning in March, ballet instructor ­Zhang ­Peiya guides her students at Lin Hsiu-wei’s Dance Garden.

While ­Zhang may give her instructions in a gentle tone, when it comes to correcting mistakes she is very strict. “I’ve told you before, when finishing a move, lift your chin and breathe up.” She reminds the class over and over that dancing needs to be coordinated with breathing: “Inhale like you’re drinking pearl milk tea. The more you inhale, the taller you’ll stand.”

The class of five are, on average, third graders. In each of the hour-long sessions, they put away their pre-session rowdiness and focus on getting each movement right. Their bodies refuse to listen sometimes, though, and balance and muscle strength can be problems.

Getting up on her points, this little princess inches closer to realizing her dreams. The photo shows a student in a ballet summer camp at Taipei’s Yongle Elementary School.

As Taiwanese have had fewer children, each child they do have is increasingly doted on. Wanting to do all they can to cultivate their children, many parents strive to expose their children to a variety of extracurriculars, hoping to find one that interests them.

According to statistics from a 2010 Ministry of Health and Welfare study of the well-being of children and adolescents in Taiwan, families with children under 12 years old devote as much as 32% of their household expenditures to education and extracurricular lessons, with after-school care the second highest, at 22%.

The MOHW report also revealed that nearly half of all Taiwanese children have never attended an extracurricular program. Of those that have, the most common choices are English, Chinese abacus and mental arithmetic, and drawing. Of the more sports-related extracurriculars, the favorites are swimming, rollerskating/rollerblading, and dance.

While there are no formal statistics on children’s dance classes, anecdotally the most common is ballet. Virtually every little girl in the developed world dreams at some point of becoming a beautiful ballerina, and donning a pink tutu is enough to make them feel that dream is coming true.

Under the instruction of ballet teacher Zhang Peiya, students at Lin Hsiu-wei’s Dance Garden work on their posture, striving for elegance.

“One, two, three, four... slowly lift your chin, hold, hips and back straight, chin tucked in, stomach in... five, six, seven, eight....” The ballet club at Tai­pei’s Fu­lin Elementary School is having its first lesson for the semester. In a classroom surrounded by mirrored walls, the teacher counts time, leading 20 little girls in pink tutus as they go over their warm-ups.

The girls sit on the floor, cross-legged, and then lean forward until their foreheads touch the floor. Then they slowly straighten their backs, gradually going from fully bent over to sitting upright again. When one of the girls gets her posture wrong, the teacher walks over and helps her adjust. Throughout the 130-square-meter classroom, the only sounds are ballet music and the voice of the teacher giving instructions.

Huang Qi teaches ballet for ballet clubs at Fu­lin Elementary and Zhi­shan Elementary. Like all dancers, she looks much younger than her 50 years. ­Huang began her life in dance studying traditional Chinese styles with the Lan Yang Dancers when she was in elementary school. In ninth grade, she began formally studying ballet, and since then it has been a major part of her life. She even had the opportunity to study Russian ballet at the Scuola di Balletto in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

“A lot of ballet is in the ankles and toes, so both need to be strong. And as ballet demands balance, without a strong back a dancer won’t be able to stay steady, and they definitely won’t be able to balance on a single foot,” says ­Huang, noting the fundamental difference between ballet and other forms of dance.

Each different move in ballet has its own unique name, like the “plié,” where the knees are turned outward and bent as the dancer lowers their torso. ­Huang explains that ballet movements demand precision, and specialist terminology helps dancers know exactly how far to take the movement. “Ultimately, though, too much is preferable to too little.”

Because ballet requires such harsh precision, ­Huang says, many formal ballet schools around the world have rules against teaching children at too young an age, because they simply don’t have the physical control yet. For example, many growing children find it tremendously difficult to turn their feet out at a 180-degree angle, nor are they able to properly straighten their knees, clench their buttocks, or straighten their backs.

However, an after-school program and a formal ballet school are two different things, each with their own different goals and levels of rigor. The children, too, have their own different motivations—intriguingly, very few girls in such classes say they actually want to become professional ballerinas when they grow up.

Second-grader ­Huang Si­han, for example, started studying ballet at kindergarten, and explains that she “wants to be pretty” and “doesn’t want to get fat.” Fellow second-grader He Xin­ling, meanwhile, says she “wants to be more flexible,” while Wu ­Tingyi explains that when she dances ballet she “can be pretty like a swan.”

Once they start studying ballet, though, many children realize there’s a price to be paid for “being pretty.” “Doing stretches and the splits hurts sometimes,” says ­Huang Si­han. But as long as the joy they get from dancing is greater than the pain they go through along the way, they’ll stick with it.

The biggest reason parents let their children join ballet clubs is because the children find it so enjoyable, and they want their children to enjoy their childhoods. ­Huang Si­han’s mother explains, “I just want Si­han to enjoy herself while she dances!”

Wu ­Tingyi’s mother, meanwhile, hopes for more than just happiness—the jumping and stretching is a good way to work up a sweat and work muscles, making it pretty good exercise too.

Generally speaking, formal after-school ballet classes are a little stricter than school clubs. The first things to go, explains ­Zhang ­Peiya, are the fancy tutus. “We have to be able to see the lines and muscles on the students as they’re practicing, so no tutus in practices.” Such changes can leave some of the youngsters feeling like their dreams are being crushed.

“In the past, more than half of the students aspired to go on to more professional classes, but these days it’s not so cut and dry,” says ­Zhang. To the many parents looking at ballet as a leisure activity or exercise, ­Zhang responds, “You absolutely cannot think of ballet like that. Ballet is a profession, and parents and children alike should approach it with a professional attitude.”

Self-discipline is the key to such an attitude, and the process of studying ballet can help children develop this.

Zhang tells the children that they need to get to every class early and do their warm-ups. She makes this requirement clear, and warns the children that she doesn’t want to have to repeat herself. ­Zhang explains that because of such rigor, dancers, particularly ballet dancers, tend to be more confident and self-disciplined.

Ballet is largely a ­women’s world, and children’s ballet is no exception. But whether or not the aspiring princesses and princes in these classes go on to become professional dancers, that first time slipping on their ballet shoes will be a memory that will stay with them for life.