The best education is when the whole family sits together and eats many, many meals

Parenting,

There are many ways to express love,

There are parental choices

Meet the material needs of children,

Spend more time nurturing your child...

But in the eyes of the child,

Love is family sitting around

Have a happy dinner.

Education is sometimes as simple as that.

In a class, when I came to expressing "love", one of my 6-year-old students said that love is a family eating many, many meals together. In fact, because her parents were busy at work, she hadn't eaten with them for a long time.

Hearing the description of the child, my heart was suddenly very sad. Yes, when parents refuse to accompany their children to dinner for various reasons, what is the meaning of work?

American educator Sally Lewis wrote in her work Awakening Children's Talents: "Two years ago, someone studied what factors contributed to children's high scores on the learning ability test. IQ, social conditions, and economic status are all less important than a more subtle factor, that is, all children who score high regularly eat dinner with their parents. ”

At the end of the day, the scattered families of the day reunite to face a table of delicious food, a festive time every day of daily life, the perfect time to create a relaxed, equal and pleasant atmosphere for conversation.

At the dinner table, everyone talks about their experiences, observations and impressions of the day. Tell me about a book you're reading or a movie you've seen, the news that happened today or a funny joke... The topic at the dinner table may come from a newspaper report, or an incident at work, or a conversation you have with a friend. The conversation is a display of life vision and way of thinking, from the content and way of work told by parents and mothers, children will naturally learn some social and professional things.

Most of the problems encountered by parents do not need to avoid children, such as letting children understand the economic situation at home, investment plans, and discuss family travel plans... As a member of the family, it is necessary for the child to understand all aspects of the family, so he will understand his responsibilities and responsibilities for the family from an early age, and under this premise, he will help himself grow and make choices.

Table conversations

Is the best education for the soul

Since a few years ago, I was very surprised to learn that many Chinese families now rarely eat dinner together! The pace of life is accelerating, and the pressure of survival and development makes it a luxury for a family to gather at the dinner table.

It seems that social life is more important than family dinner, and official socializing is more important than family dinner.

Sometimes I think about it, one day when life comes to an end, I remember the real happiness in my life, that is, I was promoted to a higher position, signed a bill, and made a sum of money... Or the warm details of being with family and children, the ordinary but warm minutes and seconds?

Former U.S. Ambassador to China Bobby Hung said: "My final goal is to be a competent father, otherwise everything else is meaningless." ”

If Chinese men see family happiness as a success, or even the most important success, in life, perhaps the problem of their children's education is not a problem.

Our family is a family used to having dinner together. I once wrote in a book: "People who love each other are going to eat together, to eat many, many meals." "In the children's novel 'Slow Down and Grow Up', many interesting details and stories come out of my own table.

I remember many small anecdotes about our family. For example, when eating, Qiu Qiu took a bite and put her mouth on the bare arm of her father, who was sitting next to her, and gasped hard.

"What are you doing?" Qiu Dad asked.

"Ah, so spicy, I'm going to pass the spicy on to your arm." Qiu Qiu continued to breathe.

Qiu Dad slapped his arm with his other hand and shouted, "So hot! So spicy! He picked up a ballpoint pen and drew a sticking tongue on the other side of his arm, indicating that it was too hot to stand, and the tongue was desperately gasping for breath.

Once there was a kelp silk on the dinner table, dark green in color, cut into neat strips. Qiu Qiu said, Wow, this is like film film. She took a chopstick of kelp and put it in her mouth, and after chewing and swallowing, she suddenly opened her mouth to me and asked, "What do you see in my mouth?" ”

I wondered, "What do you see?" Not the tongue, teeth, mouth. ”

She closed her mouth in disappointment and complained: "This film is so strange that it can't be released." ”

None of these conversations are trivial. When I say, "Dinner table conversation is the best spiritual education," but that doesn't mean we have to implement "educational meaning" in every conversation. Family dialogue is a kind of spiritual care, focusing on the atmosphere.

Conversation becomes teaching

No matter how short it is, it is too long

There have also been cases of failure in my conversations.

At the beginning of the sixth grade of elementary school, Qiu Qiu decided to go abroad to study at university, but she did not like to learn English so much. I was worried about her language skills after going abroad, always nagging when she had time:

"You have to look at English, you have to look at English..."

One day, when I said, "You have to look at English!" ”

Qiu Qiu replied to me fiercely: "I was thinking that I should read English, but when you said this, I never wanted to read it again!" ”

Alas, sometimes the mothers' bitter words of instruction are really like witches' incantations, always letting the situation go in the opposite direction of hope. This is the way it is, and man instinctively resists what others force him to do, even if it is what he wants to do.

The family is a warm and relaxing place

The fewer admonitions the better

If every sentence has a hidden educational purpose, always trying to pass on some truth to the child's ears, this kind of conversation must be daunting.

That kind of incessant nagging, you don't do a good job here, you make mistakes there; don't allow this, don't allow that; you should do this, you shouldn't do that... This is not talk, it is preaching and admonishing. This kind of conversation not only does not bring the mind closer and better understanding, but only pushes the child farther and farther away, making him bored, tired and numb.

There is accusation in the discipline, and the first instinct of man in the face of accusation is defense, like a hedgehog erecting their thorns. At this time, it is difficult for the child to really understand the meaning of the accusation.

No amount of conversation is too much

Teaching is too short to be long

One thing we must remember is that children's emotional experiences are consistent with those of adults. If the numerous educational admonitions make you impatient and disgusted, so do the children.

A pleasant relationship is the best education in itself. If our understanding of the word education can be more broad and relaxed, if we can believe that children do not need education all the time, if we can think that companionship is more important than education, or that companionship is the best education, how good it is!

There is no spiritual closeness

How to exert the influence of education

When I was a child, my mother paid a huge price to be able to take care of our siblings around the clock: she gave up her job as a vehicle dispatcher and became a refueler. The reason is that the vehicle dispatcher has to be on duty, while the refueler is only available on call.

She could have sat in her office more decently and worked, and she wouldn't have had to be woken up in the middle of the night by a car horn that asked her to refuel, but she needed to take care of her three children and needed more free time to stay at home and do a job called "mother." I would say that it was indeed a heavy burden, and she sacrificed a lot for it.

I was deeply influenced by my mother. From an early age she told us everything: the history of her family, her own suffering, the stories of her grandparents and uncles, her girlfriends in all walks of life, the family's financial situation, her family plans, her hopes for us... As I grew up, she was fully involved in my upbringing and pulled me into her life.

In that era when there were no television sets, we would often gather many people on winter nights: neighbors, mother's girlfriends, drivers or repairmen of the auto transport team... They all listened to my mother tell stories at my house. "Plum Blossom Party," "Green Corpse," "A Pair of Embroidered Shoes," or the forbidden books "The Second Handshake" and "Song of Youth" are all told in this way. My childhood was haunted by the fires of winter, the popularity of the people, the sound of my mother telling stories, the irresistible drowsiness that gradually came... Many nights, I fell asleep in the resistance to this drowsiness.

Until now, lengthy conversations have been the pattern of interaction between my mother and me. How can people's hearts get closer without talking? How can we exert educational influence without spiritual closeness? We can only be influenced by those we love.

My mother never deliberately tried to educate me, but everything I said at home actually constituted an educational opportunity for a child. As the famous language educator Margaret Mick put it: "Conversation constitutes the earliest memory of our childhood... From the conversations we heard as children, we inherited the way we spoke our feelings, the values we thought were important, the truths we believed were. ”