Why this topic? At the center of it is the fact that in this day and age, there are more and more "helicopter parents".
What does it mean to be a helicopter parent? This is the words of a child, the child said: parents like a helicopter hovering above my head, parents always cover, this child any problem, parents will appear, what difficulties to help you clear the obstacles, this is called a helicopter parents.
And the emergence of helicopter parents is becoming more and more common, almost a global trend.
Intensive education by "helicopter parents"
Two professors at Yale University did a long study, two professors of economics, on why more and more families are using this kind of intensive education. Intensive education is all about staring and being there every day and putting a lot of effort into helping your kids with all kinds of problems.
In fact, the reason comes from the development of the economy. In a country, if the country's income level gap is relatively large, a person who has gone to a very good university, the input-output ratio of education, the person who has gone to a very good university has a very high income, the person who has not gone to university has a very low income, the wider the gap between these two, the parents will be the more anxious about this matter of education, the more resources are invested in education, and it is easy to go into this helicopter hovering state. The most typical countries are China and the U.S. Parents in the U.S. are actually very anxious.
If the income gap is not big, for example, like Japan, although Japan is also an East Asian country and also advocates basic education, but Japanese parents are allowing their children not to go to college, to go home and inherit the family's fish store, sushi store, or to be a directing traffic officer on the side of the road. This is because they do not have much income disparity, and the difference between those who earn even more and those who earn less is not much. Scandinavian countries have even less pressure on education, so we need to understand why helicopter parents are becoming more common in the first place.
What is one of the problems that comes with more helicopter parents?
The child's sense of value is not as easily established. The reason for this is that the child feels that what I do is of no use anyway, and that you all do everything for me, and that you all cover for me when there are all kinds of problems. So, he even grew up and got into trouble, the first reaction is: find my father, find my mother, all by them to solve the problem.
If a child doesn't know how to face and solve social problems on his own, the self-confidence he shows is a kind of external strength. You look sunny and confident, but it's actually an external strength. Because it hasn't experienced things, he hasn't solved problems, he doesn't know what the logic of this problem solving is.
So, here is a book to recommend to you, which is very interesting, called How to Develop Social Competence in Children.
The child's ability to develop these social skills, such as his ability to interact and deal with other people, to cooperate, to compromise, to negotiate, is something that is developed. If you try to keep solving these problems for him until you send him to college and then let go of him, he's not going to suddenly emerge with these abilities.
These abilities are there from kindergarten, or even before kindergarten, at a much younger age. He's going to have tons of difficulties working together, tons of problems with the kids around him just throughout the day, like: like fighting over a toy, fighting over a swing set, etc., and that's when he's going to have to be able to work it out.
If he can't solve it, then he'll have to wait until he's older before society can teach him the lessons he needs to learn slowly, and that's a big price to pay.
Two Important Points of Adler
There are two important points in Adler's Inferiority and Transcendence:
The first one is about how to overcome inferiority in the most effective way: to make your values and the values of the whole society become one. So many people overcome low self-esteem the wrong way, and Adler argues that people rely on low self-esteem as motivation to propel us forward in this life.
If a person says, "I have low self-esteem because I'm poor, what do I do in the future if I don't want to have low self-esteem? I want to be richer than all of you, and he will work hard to become a richer person than everyone else. Then, this person will grow up to be a workaholic, he is very tired, he goes around eating with people to grab the bill, and he even fights with people in order to grab the bill. His direction of overcoming his low self-esteem is skewed.
There is another kind of person who says: I have low self-esteem because you guys bullied me, when I grow up I want to be a bully, then his sense of low self-esteem turns into a way of compensating for his sense of low self-esteem, that is, it turns into bullying others. You will find that there are many people in our society who take pleasure in bullying others, and with a little bit of power in their hands, they can make others surround you in circles, and he will feel very happy, and this is all a manifestation of unhealthy psychology.
There are even some people who will cause a split personality in order to overcome the feeling of inferiority, and he can create a false assumption about himself, and then produce all kinds of mental illnesses.
After Adler talks about so many wrong ways, he says that there is only one way to get a healthy psychology and values, and the way to overcome low self-esteem is to integrate your values with those of society.
That is to say, your value depends on how much you can contribute to society, on how much you can add to the group, to the welfare of others. At this point, you will find that it doesn't matter whether you make money or not, whether you work in a big city or a small city, whether you work as a civil servant or start a business, you will be able to feel your own value, and that value is linked to the community.
This is the first very important point of view in Inferiority and Transcendence.
Adler's second very important point is the idea that the most important ingredient in the education one receives as a child is cooperation. Because we grew up in such an era, no one can solve problems alone in this era, everyone needs to cooperate with others, and only with a strong ability to cooperate, you can create value.
Learning to recognize and appreciate the emotions of others
So the core of today's talk is: how to let children build a set of problem-solving skills, the ability to work with others. One of the first things you need to learn in order to build this set is to enable your child to learn to observe and empathize with the feelings of others.
Psychologists did an interesting test, they took a lot of portraits, a lot of sketches of people's expressions, and then went out to schools and showed them to all kinds of kids, and asked them, "What expression do you see on this person's face?
Some of the expressions were very obvious, laughing, crying, and some of the expressions were not so obvious, but there was actually a clear tendency to test the children, and what they found was that a lot of the children could easily recognize what was happy, unhappy, ecstatic, confident. But there were some children who couldn't recognize the expressions of these people, and the picture was of a sad, sad person, but the child would say: he's fine, he's happy, he's smiling, and like that there was a lot of this kind of recognition bias.
After looking at how these children behaved, first by testing their recognition of other people's expressions, and then by asking their teachers how they behaved at school, there was a very strong focus on the fact that children who did not or could not accurately recognize other people's expressions had a great deal of interpersonal problems at school.
When we were kids and we met someone who hit you and hurt you, he was okay with it, he didn't feel like he hurt you, he didn't feel like you were hurting, he was insensitive to the fact that you were hurting, and that was the biggest problem.
Why do we have so many children who don't have feelings for other people's feelings? We should reflect on this matter, in fact, reflect on our education to understand.
Many of our parents have no reaction to their children's feelings. When a child falls, the parents come over and say, "It doesn't hurt", "Get up, be brave, it doesn't hurt!" It's really possible that you can teach your child to be brave with this approach. When the child falls down later and wants to cry, he looks around and sees that no one cares about him, gets up, and is very brave, and the father is very proud and says, "Look at him, he's very brave.
But this will come at a price, and the price is likely to be that the child will demand that everyone else do the same. He won't be able to appreciate that other people hurt when they fall, and he won't even feel hurt when he hits them.
So, after puberty, this kind of child will make you so angry that the mother is so angry that she is crying in the kitchen, and the son is standing next to her and asks: What's wrong? The reason he doesn't even realize he's pissing his mom off like this is because he can't experience the emotions of others. And a person's inability to experience the emotions of others is the result of being trained from childhood.
We can certainly teach our children what it means to be brave, but here's the thing: when he falls, when he falls, someone has to care about him, someone has to ask: Did you fall? Where does it hurt? Tell dad if he needs to go to the hospital? You need to make your child feel that someone cares about him so that he can learn to care about others. The first trick to learning to interact with others is to be able to learn to recognize and appreciate the feelings of others.
Teaching children to recognize emotions in interaction
We've just talked about ignoring children's emotions, for example: a child says, "I'm hungry". The mom says, "How can you be hungry when you've just eaten? Adults think that the child just ate a meal will not be hungry, but it is very likely that the child just did not eat enough, or the child went out to run around, physical exertion is too much, he is feeling hungry, but in the mother's opinion, you should not be hungry, this is ignoring his emotions.
When I was a kid, I used to say, "I've been having back pain lately, and my mom's reaction was, "Where's the kid's waist, the kid shouldn't even have a waist. So many children's emotions are neglected, and when he grows up, he slowly neglects other people's emotions.
In addition to the process of interpersonal interaction, to help children to establish this emotional exploration, understanding, description, to reflect the emotions of others, there is an opportunity to watch cartoons.
Nowadays, many parents let their children watch cartoons, and then throw them on the TV and leave them alone. Throwing the child to the TV, the child with the TV will not learn anything, the child learns things by feedback. When an adult plays with a child and the child says something funny, the adult laughs and the child understands that it is funny, or he says something and the adult frowns and the child realizes that it is inappropriate. He is learning in the midst of interaction.
Why can't you learn by throwing your child at the TV?
The TV doesn't interact with the child. The bald guy on TV hits Bear, and the child does the same, but he doesn't react. The people on TV don't react to him, and no one in life reacts to him, so the child has no idea what the action means.
If you throw a child at the TV for a long time, you'll find that the child looks dull, looks a bit wooden. Because he doesn't know how to interact emotionally with other people.
So, even if we let the child watch cartoons, we should preferably accompany him to watch a piece of time, when watching cartoons with him you can ask him more, look at Bald Eagle's head was smashed out of a bag, how does he feel? What is the reaction of Baldbearer at this moment? If he said this about Xiong Da, will Xiong Da be happy? How would Xiong Da feel? This is called emotion.
So you have to help the child to recognize these emotions, let the child guess, analyze, let the child chat, this is when the child can learn that people have emotions, others have feelings. If a child doesn't have others in his eyes, he will have no reaction at all to the hurt caused by others.
On one occasion, I accompanied my son to a taekwondo class where the older and younger classes played together and went crazy.
One of my son's friends was running so fast that he knocked one of his classmates on his butt, and the kid fell to the ground. The child's grandmother immediately ran over to help the child, and looked very nervous, but the older child had already run away and didn't care.
My son came over to the grandmother and bowed and said, "I'm sorry, my friend knocked your child down, he shouldn't have done that, I apologize. My son came to apologize on behalf of his friend, I was watching and felt relieved. He was able to sense that the behavior was inappropriate, he was able to know that it caused harm to someone else, and he felt the adult's concern and the child's horror, so he went over and apologized on behalf of the person.
This is how it is able to recognize the feelings of others. It's trained, and this definitely doesn't come out of nowhere, it must come through a lot of interaction between parent and child.
Teaching children to "conjugate"
In addition to learning to recognize emotions, the next step is for children to learn a very important type of vocabulary: conjugation.
When a child starts to talk around the age of two, we need to teach him or her a lot of conjunctions, and what is a conjunction? For example, "yes" and "no." This thing is and isn't. Let your child interact with you using "yes" and "no."
What other words are there? What do "and" and "or" mean, who and who are what, who or who? What does it mean for him to be able to distinguish between "and" and "or"? There are choices. There are many cases where "and" is used, and many cases where "or" is used.
There's also this one called "some" and that one called "all", which is a matter of different categorizations.
This one is called "because" and that one is called "so", and there is a connection between the two, so help him to use such conjunctions in his sentences.
There's also "before" and "after". What was the situation before this happened? What was it like after this happened? Let him describe before and after, now and then, all of these words are conjunctions.
One game you can play with your child during this process is solitaire. You make up a beginning, and then you ask him to say what happens afterward, and when he's done, he says, what character comes next, what does the character do, and then what happens.
This kind of interactive game of solitaire will enable the child to recognize the relationship between actions and results, we want him to feel that what he does has a result, and what he does is optional, there are "and", "or", he can choose different directions, and then he can choose to go in different directions. He can choose a different direction and then produce different results.
When the child is just learning to speak, we need to go and do a lot of practice with the child, and never just teach the child to say nouns and verbs, because nouns and verbs are best taught, and we need to get the child to learn these conjugations, in addition to the emotional vocabulary that we have talked about in the last lecture.
Giving children the power of "if"
When children are a little older, around 4-6 years old, there are some advanced vocabulary, such as "If", if something happens, then what will happen? What about?
This is about getting the child to imagine something that hasn't happened.
What would happen if you fell off the swing today and accidentally bumped into this rock? This is about getting him to extrapolate. He'd know that if he was unlucky enough to break his head, it would hurt more.
What does it mean to be "appropriate"? What does it mean to be "unsuitable"? That's pretty hard, a lot of people grow up not knowing what it means to be appropriate and what it means to be inappropriate, and we need to help our kids to feel appropriate, is this appropriate? Is this appropriate? Is that appropriate? At what level does it feel inappropriate to you? Explore such boundaries with him.
Another example: words like "might" and "maybe".
Include more complex story solitaire, create your family's fairy tale a little richer, or even ask him about different options when you tell him about Cinderella, or the Crystal Slipper, or Journey to the West, or any of those stories. If we just tell Journey to the West from beginning to end, it's the same for whoever you're listening to.
Why should parents accompany? When parents are with their children, they can ask them, "Can Piggy have other choices at this time? If you were the Monkey King, how would you feel? Why is the Monkey King angry? Why did the Monkey King leave his master? What made him so angry? Can you feel it?
You see, this is all an opportunity to practice, and in the process of practicing, the child slowly enriches his emotions, learns about choices, learns that there are a large number of different initiatives that can be used to prepare him for problem solving in the future, and all of this is at the language level.
Five steps to emotional guidance
How can we teach children to solve problems on their own in real life?
Let's start with a case study, for example:
A little brother comes to your house and snatches a toy with your child. The kid grabs the toy and starts getting angry and arguing, then cries. Adults need to get involved and ask what's going on and what do we normally do as parents?
A large number of parents will tell their son, you need to learn to share, your brother is a guest, you need to show your host friendliness to your brother, you need to share your toys with your brother. The child says: I'm not giving it! This is my toy! You would say: don't want to give it to him, no! You have to share! Then you step in and take this thing and give it to your brother.
May I ask, after this set of educational methods is done, has the child learned to share this thing? The answer is: yes.
The child learns that "sharing" means taking something away from me and giving it to someone else, so I hate sharing! In the child's view, "sharing" becomes a very bad word, because sharing brings unpleasantness, sharing brings coercion, that is, you are stronger than me, and then grabbed over to him. This is a wrong education.
So, you have to know that the child has a special interesting thing, no matter you do to him right, wrong, is education, he is learning from you, you use such a wrong way to demonstrate the "share" this behavior, then he learned a wrong "share". You have modeled the behavior of "sharing" in such a wrong way, so he has learned a wrong way of "sharing. The wrong kind of sharing is when I'm not happy, but I have to give it to him, so I hate sharing.
Let's look at how to solve the problem. The right way to develop a child's social skills is to:
When parents come over, the first thing to do is to ask what's going on, what's the situation, and who can tell me what's going on. Ask questions first, get the facts. Then the child says, "I want his car and he won't give it to me." The other says, "It's my car, why should I give it to him?"
The parent figures out that it's because of this issue. Then you have to ask them how they feel so they can relate to their feelings. "I'm sad." "Are you?" "I'm angry. I don't want to give it to him, on what grounds?" To allow their feelings to be expressed.
The third step you have to ask: "Do we all want to have fun today, so let's think about it, can anyone come up with a way that we can all have fun?" We are together to have fun, so what should we do if we have an unpleasant situation like this? Let's think of a way to be happy, because our purpose today is to be happy. Let's have a competition to see who can come up with a way to make us all happy, and call on all of us to put our heads together.
Children especially love to participate in such challenges, and as long as there is such a challenge, they will compete to be the first to come up with a solution. The older brother said, "I'll give it to him to play with, but he has to give it back to me." That's a great move. Or "I'll give it to him to play with and he has to give it back to me when he leaves, he can't take it with him." "OK." "I'll give it to him to play with, but he has to give that to me." "OK? Will you?" You ask them like this.
Then, have them come up with a variety of solutions, and we all talk it over and agree, "You give it to him, he gives it to you, and you promise to give it back to him when you leave. There, confirmed."
Ask how they feel now, how they're feeling now. "Are you happy?" Happy! "Are you?" Happy too. "Well, you're both happy!" Finally, ask your child, "Do you know what this behavior you just did is called? That behavior is called sharing, and you have learned it."
This is actually connected to the "emotional guidance" we talked about in the previous lesson.
We create an opportunity for the child to do the right thing by asking questions, by validating the child's feelings, by engaging the child in a brainstorming session, and then when they do the right thing, they have to be emotionally guided and praised and said why is this praiseworthy, and what is this thing called? The child learns. Simply, through a few experiences like this, the child will be able to learn many ways to solve problems.
So every time a problem arises, it is actually the most effective opportunity for us to educate our children. But in the process of dealing with it, because the parents are in a hurry, the parents usually want to hold it in a hurry, especially afraid that they can't hold it.
Don't forget that holding and not being able to hold is actually an opportunity for the child to grow. We rush to hold just so we can be quieter, just so we can go talk or go eat and ignore them. But in reality, you're missing the opportunity to learn.
Motivating children to feel valued
I used to teach a course called Reproducible Leadership, and I also taught a book there called High Performance Coaching.
There is a great similarity between the two, high performance coaching is for adults, for your employees, subordinates, you will find that "tell useless", you tell him, you should do. There is no use.
We often find in life to give others advice, in other people's ears is to be criticized, and even other people will feel that you stand to talk not waist pain. If you are a very authoritative leader, you said, he may not dare to refute, he wrote down. But when he goes back to do it, he realizes that he can't do it.
What is the reason? When a person has no intrinsic motivation to solve a problem, even if it is a correct method, it will encounter difficulties. I didn't come up with this idea on my own, and when I run into difficulties, my first reaction is: this is not the right way, or I'll come back to you, is there another way? Is there another resource? Help me out. He didn't establish his own responsibility to solve the problem.
It's the same thing with children, so if we understand the role that High Performance Coaching plays in adults, we can understand the role that we play in children with the same methods that we use to develop their social skills.
The asking has to be much more than informing, and there are two very important purposes here:
The first purpose: to help the child understand the current state of the self. When they're in a fight together, their minds are scrambled, they are not paying attention to where they are at the moment, so you need to ask them: what are you doing? What kind of feeling? How do you want to feel? Help him clarify this status quo, people can only be rational to know what they should do.
The second purpose: to establish self-responsibility, which means: who are the people who are going to have fun here this afternoon? It's the two of you. So you're now going to have to work out how you're going to have a good time, and that's called establishing self-responsibility.
It's only by asking questions that you can get these two issues out of the way. But on the other hand, if the parent is the "helicopter", the parent is hovering in the air, like a god, reaching out and saying listen to me on this, listen to me on that, or you two are not going to have any fun, you're going to end up having a bad party. In the end, the party will end badly, and the child will slowly feel a sense of helplessness, and the child's sense of helplessness is: every time we can't have fun anyway, every time we can't solve the problem anyway, I just have to make my dad angry, and it's all over. That's what happens in a lot of families.
So if each of our parents can see this situation of their child being in trouble as an educational opportunity, you will have more patience to ask questions, and you will learn the methods of high performance coaching, which is the GROW model. Start by asking about the goal: what do you want; then ask about the status quo; then ask what are the options available; and finally ask: what are you going to do about it. This is a set of tools for adults. If you want to go deeper, you can listen to the book I've talked about, High Performance Coaching.
When confronting a child, we start by asking what's going on, then, acknowledging their emotions, asking them what they want to happen, and then inviting them to come along and figure it out. Praising them right after they get it right, and saying why, and taking the opportunity to solidify the behavior, is how you develop social skills in a child.
Review of this section
You see, it must be very labor-saving if you do it the right way.
In the process of educating children, whenever you get the method wrong, you will feel pain.
If the method is right, you will feel that every minute is wonderful, because the child itself is an object that constantly surprises us, he is full of vitality, he is constantly growing, constantly changing, he is much more vigorous than our vitality.
So as long as you are really open to the role of being an educator. You are able to recognize that you are your child's most important and only guide in this society, in this world. You'll be able to take that responsibility and allow your child to face these problems on their own and be able to solve them.
Imagine the child solving the problems himself by playing and by interacting with the children. Will his level of self-esteem rise? Does his self-confidence rise? Does he build his own sense of worth? When he feels that he has value and that he can solve problems, this pillar of his sense of value is established.
We have spent three lectures on how to help children build a sense of value. A child with a sense of value will be more willing to contribute to society, more willing to do many innovative things, and more willing to have leadership.
I hope this talk has been helpful, thank you.