The Internet is bustling every day, and the hot searches of gossip entertainment are one after another, but there are not many that are really meaningful.
The other day, I inadvertently glimpsed an inconspicuous topic, and when I clicked open, I couldn't help but get my eyes moist.
That topic was #Left-behind children shouting at the monitor mom#. In the video, a child less than two years old looks up at the surveillance and calls out to his mother over and over again, and the sound is broken.
It turned out that because the couple went out to work, the children were placed in their hometown and taken by their grandmother.
On weekdays, the couple will chat with the child through monitoring, and over time, the child will think that his parents are there, and from time to time he will call his mother to the camera.
Rural left-behind children are a topic worth pondering, the lack of materials, the poverty of education, the lack of parent-child relationship, etc., each single is heavy enough.
Director Jiang Nengjie has made a number of documentaries about rural left-behind children, one of which has a rating of 8.8 in a certain petal, and it took 6 years before and after the production cycle -
Village small children
The film focuses on the village of Guang'an in Yidushui Town, Xinning County, Hunan Province.
Guang'an Village is located in the middle of nowhere and at a high altitude, backed by the Yuechengling Mountains. There are more than 1,700 people in the village, nearly 900 people go out to work, and those who stay at home are basically old, weak, sick and disabled.
There is a school in the village, called Guangming Primary School, which was once abolished because of the danger of the school building, so that the village leaders had to open a temporary school in the houses.
It was not until 2009 that the original school building was demolished and rebuilt.
There are 22 children attending temporary schools, of whom only a few have parents at home, and the remaining 17 parents work outside.
These children, all innocent and cute, have endured too many things that should not be borne by their age.
Jiang Yunjie, a lively and beautiful little girl, was only 6 years old in 2009, and she must have been a little princess in the palm of her hand when she put it in someone else's home.
But at a young age, she and her grandmother are dependent on each other, and the whole person seems to be extremely sensible, like a little adult.
On weekdays, she would feed the chickens and help her grandmother share the housework.
When the house leaked, she would scoop it, and grandma would cook, and she would help burn the fire, sometimes accidentally burning her own hands.
When asked if she wanted to think of her parents, she did not laugh like the other children, but calmly with a little bitterness, saying that she "I don't want to, there is a photo at home."
Two years later, Jiang Yunjie was 8 years old.
Faced with questions such as "do you want to think of your father's side" and "others have money to buy snacks, do you want to", her answer is still: no.
Because, if you go to your father's place, your grandmother is at home alone, your grandmother is not in good health, your parents have to earn money to see your grandmother, and there is no money at home, so you can spend less and spend less.
Such a sense of understanding, how not to make people feel painful.
At the same age as Jiang Yunjie, there is a little boy named Jiang Heng, and he also has his younger brother Jiang Xin, who is three years younger.
The two brothers were taken by their grandparents, and their parents went to Guangdong to work.
Compared with Jiang Yunjie, Jiang Heng is much more naughty, he likes to play with his younger brother all day long, does not do homework, and tries to deceive the teacher.
Their parents once brought the brothers to Guangdong, but because of their work, they could not take care of them, so they could only lock them at home, and finally they would rather stay in their hometown than be with their parents.
Over time, their impressions of their parents began to grow unfamiliar.
When asked what your parents look like, Jiang Heng thought about it and smiled and said: Round.
This scene is very funny, but after laughing, it is heartbreaking.
Like Jiang Heng, among these left-behind children, there are not a few who are estranged from their parents and feel that their parents do not love themselves, and it is difficult not to have a profound impact on the character of children in this kind of child's growth.
But in order to survive, what can parents do?
Later, Jiang Heng's grandparents were sent to the hospital, and Jiang Heng's parents took leave to come back to visit, but after the grandparents were discharged from the hospital, they still had to go back to work, and they did not even go home for the New Year.
In this way, when Jiang Heng and Jiang Xin grow up a little, they can only "mature" early and help their grandparents do farm work.
A slightly older left-behind child than Jiang Heng and Jiang Yunjie is Fan Weiyuan, who in 2009 was in her third year of junior high school.
In contrast, her situation is more complicated, she and her brother Fan Weiyu also live in the countryside with her grandmother, her mother died in childbirth after giving birth to her brother, and her father was sentenced to prison for robbery in Guangdong.
In order to share the pressure of her grandmother, from the beginning of the beginning, Fan Weiyuan worked odd jobs in the summer to earn tuition.
For her, college and dreams are out of reach, and the future she can think of is to work after graduation, because no matter how cheap the university is, she can't afford it.
After the fall of 2009, grandma died, and Fan Weiyuan and her brother began to live with grandma.
Happily, when the time came to 2011, Fan Weiyuan did not give up her studies, because she was admitted to a high school where she could attend for free.
But for not going to college, she still didn't think well.
Because, after her father was released from prison, she didn't care about their family at all, and there was a younger brother in the family, and she couldn't just take care of herself. In her words—I don't think it's interesting to read.
At this time, her younger brother Fan Weiyu was 9 years old.
Just like Jiang Yunjie when he was 6 years old, Fan Weiyu also said a heart-wrenching and helpless "mature" remark at this time:
The financial conditions at home are not good, I don't want to learn how, I want to live...
The words of the sisters and brothers may be too childish and arrogant, but we, as bystanders, are not qualified to criticize them harshly.
In the cruel and barren living environment, children can be so determined, it is already a great courage, how can you blame their "narrow perspective" and "short-sighted"?
In fact, in addition to the visible material scarcity and the lack of growing parental affection, these rural children are facing a shortage of educational resources.
Here, there are few teachers, low salaries, and large mobility.
There was only one substitute teacher in the whole Guangming Primary School, and the salary was only six or seven hundred a month, but later it really couldn't stand it and was transferred to other schools.
Under the difficulties of various real lives, it is undoubtedly ignorant and arrogant to ask these children to have patterns and foresight.
Some things are just "common sense" in the eyes of many people, but for these children, they are very strange to exist.
For example, where is the capital of China?
I don't know.
Where did the 2008 Olympics take place?
The same is not known.
When asked what you want to do when you grow up, their answers are surprisingly consistent:
Part-time work, because part-time work is rich.
Netizens often joke that "poverty limits my imagination", in front of these rural children, poverty is a real and heavy pressure, restricting not only imagination, but the entire life.
Material scarcity can lead to malnutrition; without the company of parents, the parent-child relationship will be problematic, and even an extreme personality may be formed.
Although the elderly and parents love their children, they cannot understand the scientific parenting methods, and they are flawless to take care of these, and strive to make money, so that children can eat and wear warmly, and it is not easy to pull them up.
It can be said that all of the above, coupled with the shortage of educational resources, makes these rural children unable to obtain a fair starting point in life.
The same is to enter the university, their heartache and blood and tears, is unimaginable to many people.
The ending subtitles of the film show that Fan Weiyuan, who was hesitant to go to college, eventually continued to go to college in Guilin through social assistance, loan applications, and part-time jobs.
I sincerely hope that she can have a good future.
In recent years, with the progress of children's policies and the results of poverty alleviation, the number of left-behind children in rural areas has decreased, and the situation in rural areas has also been improved to a certain extent.
But even so, the plight of rural children is still very serious, and the problems mentioned earlier still exist. The growth and education of rural children still need more attention.
In the past two days, I noticed such a project on Tencent Public Welfare: The Healthy Children's Paradise Program.
Jointly initiated by the Health and Sports Development Center of the China Working Committee on Caring for the Next Generation, the Amway Charity Foundation, the Shenzhen One Foundation Charity Foundation, and the Tencent Charity Foundation, the project aims to provide early development material packages, nutrition and health and parenting courses for rural families, and regularly hold collective parent-child activities to help young children develop early.
In the countryside, scientific parenting is a very luxurious and distant thing. The data shows that more than 17.43 million children in China are at risk of early development.
This includes providing parent-child play spaces for rural families, helping rural parents (carers) to establish parenting awareness, master parenting methods and skills through a series of parenting courses such as high-quality parent-child interaction, parent-child games, picture book reading, etc.
In this way, it can not only improve the inseparable parenting environment in the early stages of children's growth, but also promote the development of children in language communication, fine movements, gross movements, problem solving, cognitive development, social emotions and other aspects.
At the very least, through such scientific interventions, changing the parenting environment and parenting methods, so that the potential of rural children can be developed, they can have a fairer starting point, and there are more possibilities for future life.
Perhaps, our capabilities are limited.
But think about it, the money for a cup of milk tea can provide rural children with an age-appropriate high-quality picture book, a bad movie ticket money, you can let a rural child get a physical indicator screening service, why not enjoy it?
Good is small, good is great. I think that even if we only contribute a little bit of strength, it will make the lives of these lovely children more warm and hopeful.