"Annoyed, my son is too good to rub." Yesterday I came home from work and let him do his own homework before cooking, and when he finished cooking, he was still watching TV. After eating I stared at him and wrote, taking me angry. He would mess with this, he would play with that, and he couldn't control it at all. Someone else wrote it in 30 minutes, and he wrote it for two hours. ”
Just arrived at the company in the morning, I heard my colleague Liu Jie spitting out her son's homework. Every day when I came home to watch my child write his homework, it was like fighting with her son, and she was exhausted, more tired than the day's shift.
I couldn't help but ask Sister Liu: "Wasn't your son very well-behaved when he was a child?" ”
"Yeah, it's been like this since I was in elementary school with homework. You don't know, when you were a kid that was called an obedient..."
Sister Liu turned her head and began to talk about the funny things about her son when he was a child, but I was a little distracted.
Indeed, looking around at the friends, most of them are like this. Before elementary school, children were both smart and cute, and their parents kept posting in the circle of friends every day, as if if they didn't show it, others wouldn't know that he had a child at home. After elementary school, the frequency of parents sending circles of friends slowly becomes less, on the contrary, the number of complaining children begins to increase.
If you think about it, children's procrastination, playfulness, and lack of self-discipline are all manifestations of lack of self-control. The reason for all this is actually that parents neglect to cultivate their children's self-control in the process of children's growth.
Self-control is a person's ability to control his own behavior habits in the face of external temptations.
So, is this ability genetically inherited, or is it cultivated in the process of children's growth?
The Marshmallow Experiment was a psychological experiment conducted by Dr. Walter Mischel of Stanford University in kindergarten from 1966 to the early 1970s, and was probably the earliest exploration of self-control.
"In an experiment, the child can choose to get the same reward immediately (sometimes a marshmallow, or a cookie, chocolate, etc.) or choose to wait for a while for the experimenter to return to the room (usually 15 minutes) and get the same two rewards.
In later studies, the researchers found that children who could endure favored rewards for longer generally had better life performance, such as better SAT scores, educational achievement, body mass index, and other indicators. ”
A modern study published in Psychological Science found that the persistence of young children in the face of marshmallows is related to their later achievements. However, whether young children can persist in front of marshmallows is closely related to their family background and education.
That is to say, children's self-control ability is not genetic inheritance, but is slowly formed under the influence of the environment and the education received.
Since it is cultivated the day after tomorrow, more children like Liu Jie's son, who procrastinate, play greedily, and are not self-disciplined, can certainly be slowly improved through acquired cultivation.
Modern brain science has found that the "prefrontal cortex" is a brain region associated with self-control, while the "prefrontal cortex" is basically developed at 3-4 years of age. Therefore, smart parents can start to pay attention to and guide the development of children's self-control at the age of 3-4, and avoid the situation of "not writing homework, motherly kindness and filial piety, writing homework, chicken flying dog jumping" after primary school.
When it comes to developing children's self-control, these four methods can be tried.
Exercise: Self-control is directly related to personal willpower. Exercise is a process of constantly challenging oneself. Long-term adherence to exercise, while strengthening the body, can exercise willpower very well. A person with strong willpower can naturally have better self-control in the face of external temptations.
Mindfulness Meditation to Cultivate Positive Emotions: Negative emotions tend to have a great detrimental effect on children's physical and mental development. Under negative emotions, people often lose control of themselves, and do things that people regret such as verbally hurting people or even beating people with their hands. Under positive emotions, self-control increases significantly, and people can think rationally and make choices that are most beneficial to them.
Challenge yourself in stages and adapt slowly: Xueba's grades in all subjects are very good, but everyone has preferences, and he can't like all subjects. The point is that even if he doesn't like it, he can control himself and do his homework. Usually, children can do some similar challenges, such as homework that they don't like (or standing and watching TV, eating without talking, etc.), insist on learning for 5 minutes, challenge 10 minutes after adaptation, and then slowly improve after adaptation. Through phased challenges, improve self-control ability and strengthen the ability to adapt to subjects that you don't like.
Replace bad habits with good habits: Bad behavior habits, such as watching TV, playing games, etc., can make children feel great pleasure. If you want to change, you can try to replace your original habits with beneficial behavior habits. Behavioral habits such as sports, reading, watching plays, and watching movies can also make people feel happy. As long as the child's interest point is found, the original bad habit can be replaced with a new beneficial good habit. So as to achieve the purpose of improving children's behavior habits and enhancing children's self-control.
The improvement of self-control is not an overnight thing, children need to persist, and we parents must also insist. I hope this article can help you, if you think it is helpful, help to like it.
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