This article draws on a cultural-historical theorization of child development alongside the Chinese concept of learning in order to study children's development in the Hong Kong Australian community. In particular, it aims to understand in detail how a 9-year-old child develops a learning motive under highly structured family practices. The data analysed were selected from a larger set of data involving 80 hr of video observations generated from the recording of everyday practices in three Hong Kong immigrant families. The findings indicate that "encouragement" plays an important role in bridging the gap between parental demands and the child's wishes, which assists the child to appropriate family values, thus facilitating the development of a learning motive and learning itself.