The place where I teach is a mountain village elementary school, because some children's homes are far from the school, so they do not go home to eat at noon, and bring rice and vegetables to steam rice at the school. Every time I see a five- or six-year-old child in the preschool school holding a lunch box to collect rice, squatting on the playground with a lunch box to eat, and tiptoeing around the sink to wash the lunch box and the vegetable basin, I will sincerely praise it in my heart: The self-care ability of rural children is really good. Children of this age in the city are afraid that their parents will have to chase after them (in order to facilitate the schooling of rural children, the school has a preschool class attached).
Rural parents are busy with farm work, and most of them do not have time to pick up and drop off their children, so no matter whether it is rainy, windy or snowy, children have to walk several kilometers back and forth between school and home. Every time I see a five- or six-year-old preschool child staggering forward with a big school bag, there is always a little bit of inexplicable heartache, as if I saw my childhood.
The day before yesterday, a video on the short video platform of "parents go out to work, can not come to pick up children on vacation, children with sheets wrapped in quilts to carry home" video spread on the Internet, causing netizens to pay attention and heated discussion. The video was filmed in Daliangshan, Sichuan, a kindergarten had a winter vacation, most of the children were picked up by their parents to go home, but there were also a few children who did not have parents to pick them up, and they carried a lot of bed sheets and quilts and waddled out of the school door to go home.
The children in the video are also five or six years old, they are relatively short, the weather was relatively cold, they put on their hats, and the covers on their backs are so huge for them that from behind, they can only see the packages, and they can't see them.
Such a small child, usually going to school and going back and forth is better, but now that it is a holiday, the sheets and duvet covers that usually rest at school must be taken home, which is really difficult for children who are only a few years old. The teacher is also very uneasy, carefully help the children to wrap things with sheets, and then tie them on their backs, and do not forget to check whether the binding is strong, so as not to fall down halfway.
Most of these children who come home alone are left-behind children, their parents are working in other places, and their grandparents are busy and have no time to pick them up, so even if they are on winter vacation, they can only carry the covers home by themselves. Such situations are not uncommon in remote rural areas. In today's rural areas, young and middle-aged people basically go out to work, and almost all that remain in the village are old, weak, sick and disabled. According to data, the total number of "left-behind children" in rural areas of our country currently exceeds 58 million, and they either live with grandparents and grandparents, or are cared for by relatives or simply live in schools.
The picture of these children struggling to leave the campus with a cover on their backs also makes many netizens feel sad, some people feel empathy, feel that watching them is like seeing their own childhood, when they used to go to school, they walked dozens of kilometers with luggage, and they couldn't imagine that children now have to suffer like this.
Some netizens also said that such children have experienced wind and rain since childhood, and when they grow up, they are not afraid of any difficulties, which is the so-called "poor children have long been home.". But this view has also been refuted by some netizens, who believe that this is not a problem of being in charge, but a problem of survival, premature maturity is not good for children's mental health, and children who grow up in such an environment will have some inferiority after growing up.
The life and education situation of rural left-behind children is indeed worthy of attention, first, this group is relatively large, and second, it is a long-term left-behind, generation-skipping education, which will have some adverse impact on children's learning and life. I have a kid in my class who often can't finish my homework. So I found a time to follow him home, and I wanted to make a home visit and communicate with his parents. When I came to his house, I learned that he was a left-behind child who spent only a dozen days with his parents a year. He has been living with his grandparents, and now that his grandmother has passed away, his grandfather is not in good health, so after he goes home, he has to cook and cook by himself, and he also has to take care of his sick grandfather.
At present, many families of left-behind children are not short of money, what is missing is the love of parents, and what is missing is a warm family environment. Generation-skipping education is either too strict or too arrogant, and grandparents cannot replace the educational function of parents.
These kindergarten children who carry the covers home alone in the video before the article should also be left-behind children, and their young shoulders carry huge packages are sad and painful. We praise our strong understanding, but we still hope that there are fewer such children, and the age of the child should not bear the wind and rain too early.