Parenting: Parenting is the Best Gift for Children

I went to a friend's house for dinner, and I saw her second-grade daughter say loudly at the table, "Mom, you're so stupid, your fried food is awful, I don't want to eat it! I was surprised that a child could talk to her mom like that. I was even more surprised that my friend didn't get angry and said, "Which dish? Which dish are you talking about?"

 When I saw my child's bossy behavior, I couldn't help it, so I told her that children should not be indulged while she was washing the dishes, but she said that she didn't want to do that, and that she would teach her according to what was written in the book, because there is a parenting book that says, "When parents are criticized by their children, they should not feel ashamed or even angry because they feel that they are not respected, which will lead to unpleasant emotions between parents and children. It is important to understand that the child is expressing his or her feelings, and parents should listen patiently and treat the situation with tolerance, without showing anger, or else it will cause fear and anxiety in the child. I couldn't help but laugh and cry, and asked my friend where her common sense had gone, and how she could accept such specious theories so wholeheartedly.

The first thing that children need to know is that they should not hurt others with their words, and they should not use the excuse that they are "straight talkers who don't know how to polish their words" as an excuse to hurt others. What my friend's daughter said was not an expression of a child's feelings, but rather a serious injury to someone else's self-esteem, something she should not say even to her classmates, let alone her own mother. Children should treat their parents with respect, not friendship; only with respect can they listen to their parents' teachings. In a family, the parents are the masters and the children are the followers. The concept of master-slave is present even in the lower animals, which have the concept of domain. In a circus, the trainer must enter the arena first, and then the animals are brought in, so the animals listen to the trainer because they come first and then they come last, and the guest is the one who has to give way to the master. If the child thinks that the parents are peers, it is no wonder that the child does not listen to what the parents say.

Secondly, children are not so fragile that they collapse when their parents get angry. Freud's so-called childhood trauma actually refers to serious injuries such as sexual assault or abuse. Generally speaking, parental teachings will not leave a personality imprint; on the contrary, if they do not teach him and coddle him, he will suffer a great deal when he goes out into the society later on; therefore, parents should be clear about rewards and punishments, and corrections should be made in a timely manner. When a very young child does something wrong, he can accept being punished, but what he cannot accept is being wrongly accused, and frustration is not bad for the child, sometimes it is the training of character. Life is full of setbacks, and children must know how to turn crises into opportunities and turn adversity around. Parents can't follow their children all their lives and protect them forever, but if they can take every opportunity to train their children to be indomitable and motivated, it may help them even more in their life journey.

Thirdly, not all positive feedback is good for children. Children need encouragement, but they need to be warned when they are wrong. A child must learn how to treat others from daily life, this learning is an implicit learning, this memory is stored directly in the synapses of the neural connections, even if he has amnesia in the future, his personality traits, habits have not been lost. A child's sense of security does not come from the omnipresent care of his parents, but from their ability to give him timely guidance when he needs it.

It is really sad to see that children nowadays have no manners, they don't greet elders in the elevator, they don't give up their seats on the bus, and they don't talk to their parents in a big or small way. Parenting is the best gift parents can give to their children, education and demeanor is the key to open the door to social occasions, and "trust the book is better than no book", there are a lot of "parenting" books, the quality of which is a cause for concern, parents do not have to be afraid to hold a book every day to read as a "teaching war manual". Parenting is not about stir-frying according to recipes, because every child is different and cannot be taught according to books. Please believe in your own common sense, and if your child is happy, and so are others, then you are doing the right thing.

Text/Professor Hong Lan