In early December 2021, in my hometown of Shenyang, a circle of friends looking for a 9-year-old boy Jin Boyang quickly burst into WeChat, causing great concern on the whole network, and countless netizens were anxiously waiting for the good news of the child's safe return.
At the end of 2021, Shenyang searched for Jin Boyang throughout the whole process
However, after two days of searching, the unfortunate news finally came that in the waters of the Hun River, rescue workers found the body of a 9-year-old boy who had accidentally lost the land, and had salvaged it ashore, which was confirmed by the family to be their lost child Yangyang
Netizens will have a lot of questions: why the child will choose to run away from home, Yangyangdi mother explained: Because the recent academic performance is not ideal, the mother criticized a few words, and told him that if you do not study well, what else can you do, you can only pick up garbage, you can not do anything. After that, Yang Yang never came back after going downstairs, and the mother did not expect that the child would run away from home.
On January 9, 2022, Zhang Shengcai, a sophomore high school student at a middle school in Nanchong City, Sichuan Province, was addicted to mobile phone games and complained that his mother confiscated his mobile phone and ran away from home.
In recent years, the phenomenon of young people running away from home on the mainland has become increasingly serious, which has aroused the attention of families, schools, society, and other quarters, and has become a social problem that cannot be ignored. Many parents will also be surprised, why in today's society with such developed material conditions, children who should enjoy a carefree childhood will be so worried, what causes them to act excessively, and how can we prevent such tragedies from happening again? Today, I would like to talk about my views and hope to help parents and friends who have similar experiences.
Why do children run away from home
In psychology, the classification of adolescents running away from home in foreign countries can be roughly divided into two categories: escape type and escape type. The former refers to teenagers using home to calm themselves by leaving home to escape family or personal problems; the latter refers to teenagers leaving home in search of excitement, joy or new experiences. Although the classification is not exactly the same, it can be roughly divided into four types: game type, escape type, yearning type, resistance type and coercion type. The escape type is similar to the escape type, the yearning type is similar to the escape type, the game type is mainly out of greedy curiosity, blindly following the crowd, and the resistance type protests to parents and teachers or dissatisfaction with catharsis, or even a kind of retaliation, and the forced type may leave due to oppression by external forces.
No matter what kind of home away from home it is, its nature is a psychological crisis. This is first of all because there are triggers for running away from home, such as academic failure, parental abuse, misunderstanding and loss of love. The immature psychology of adolescents encounters a difficulty that they cannot solve on their own, which induces the behavior of running away from home. A large number of research results also show that the families of young people who run away from home have some common phenomena, such as poor family parenting methods, poor family economic level; parent-child relationship discord and other reasons, so the reasons that affect children's running away from home are sometimes not one, and children running away from home are caused by the joint action of family, society, school, personal and other factors. The following situations are relatively common, if you have the following situations in your home, you must pay attention to them
1. The contradiction between a greater sense of learning pressure and a low self-confidence
Now children learn a lot of pressure, a large number of cases of running away from home teenagers show that they have a certain degree of learning troubles, parents often have great expectations of them, after learning setbacks, the father's scolding, the teacher's lack of attention, the classmates treat each other, so that they can hardly see the eyes of encouragement, can not hear the words of praise, the lower evaluation of others greatly affects their self, children often feel that they are very useless, always think that their academic performance how to work hard is useless, This psychological condition of lack of self-confidence can lead to adolescents and children being unable to bravely face the difficulties of learning, escape from reality, and even run away from home.
2. The contradiction between the child's desire to be understood and the parent's numbness and alienation
There are often some parent-child relationship problems between children who run away from home and their parents, many of which have some special types of families, such as backbone families (families with three generations of grandchildren), single-parent families (parents divorced, or one parent dies, one parent is raised alone), left-behind children (also known as generation-skipping family), these situations will lead to lack of communication awareness among family members, neglect of care for children, so that children's feelings for the family are not deep, and the need for belonging is not well met. The strict requirements and improper education methods of some parents make their children unwilling and dare not confide in them. Forbidding them to participate in all activities unrelated to reading further aroused rebellious psychology. Corporal punishment and scolding seriously hurt their self-esteem and worsened the parent-child relationship. They are eager to be understood and cared for, but often because of the estrangement of parent-child relationships and can not meet the needs of the spirit, they will produce sadness, alienation, and even choose to run away from home.
3. The child's heart longs for friendship but is lonely in real life
Teenagers are eager to maintain friendship with their peers, and in the case of estrangement between parents and children, they are more willing to interact with their peers and eager to establish sincere friendships. However, some children are unable to obtain the friendship they yearn for because of physical defects, family conditions and other factors or the strict criteria of their parents for choosing friends, and lack the important support system of friends. Due to the competition and pressure of learning, parental control, etc., adolescents rarely have the opportunity to communicate with their friends, and they are emotionally lonely. The weakening of support among friends has often caused adolescents to react negatively in the face of setbacks, or even leave school and home alone
4. The contradiction between the yearning for something new and a limited level of cognition and control
Young people who run away from home often have some unreasonable perceptions of social phenomena and have weak self-control. For example, blind worship, imitation of novels, television, images depicted on the Internet, and the strong impulses and emotions experienced from these places make them rich in fantasies, blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy. They think that they have a sense of justice, morality, are impulsive, advocate the use of force to solve problems, identify with the behavior of characters in the illusory world, and regard violations and immoral behaviors as heroic and uninhibited or righteous acts. They cannot feel the joy of success in learning, and online games or virtual worlds provide a situation that provokes a pleasant inner experience that they have longed for for a long time, and the easily available happiness makes him constantly have a strong impulse to indulge in the pursuit of pleasure, even if he knows its harm, he still can't control it. Today's society is in a period of transition, diversified values, orientations have brought a huge impact on their thinking, in the face of a large number of bad social information is likely to blindly follow, misguided, resulting in running away from home
5. The contradiction between the rise of self-awareness in adolescence and the lower coping ability
As children enter puberty, self-awareness also gradually rises, and they are often reluctant to be controlled by others, even their own parents, eager to be able to handle everything independently. With the increase of self-awareness, adolescents are extremely eager to act in an adult way, to be appreciated by others, but not recognized by adults, and in the face of various difficulties, they often have strong emotional reactions. The rapid changes in the physiology of adolescents make them have a strong sense of adulthood, which in turn produces a strong sense of independence, often unwilling to listen to the opinions of adults and act according to their own ideas, but compared with adults, their cognitive ability is not comprehensive enough, their behavior is not mature enough, and they are emotionally exposed, volatile and impulsive, showing a clear two-sidedness. In the face of many new and complex problems, often due to the one-sided cognition, emotional impulses, insufficient psychological preparation for setbacks and positive coping ability but unwilling to find adult help and the above reactions, negative coping methods further affect the mental health of adolescents, and even lead to extreme behaviors such as running away from home.
How to prevent your child from running away from home
1. Parents should strive to create a good parent-child relationship
On the issue of running away from home, many times it seems to be the child's problem, in fact, parents also have a great responsibility, some parents in the name of being responsible for their children, impose their subjective ideas on the child, even if there is communication with the child, but when the two sides are inconsistent, the parents will impose the implementation, and some parents because of their own various reasons, usually rarely ask about the child's situation, once the child has a problem, they will blame, the emotions are out of control, the mouth is not covered, and even the child punches and kicks. The quality of the parent-child relationship determines the success or failure of education, and once the parent-child relationship has problems, it will not have an effect on any way of educating the child. Parents, as the child's first teacher, are also the people who have the deepest influence on them, as adults, we must have the determination to learn to control emotions.
2. Encourage your child to make more helpful friends of the same age
Although many parents can get along with their children in the form of friends, but parents are parents after all, which is essentially a kind of affiliation, so children prefer to have children of the same age to accompany themselves, and some troubles are more empathetic as children of the same age. Therefore, as parents, we should encourage our children to make more friends of the same age and spend more time with beneficial children of the same age. When the child has an object to talk to, the distress in the heart is relieved, which will greatly reduce the behavior of running away from home.
3. Increase your child's ability to resist setbacks and be independent
Some children are too dependent on their parents in life, even the most basic dressing, washing, eating and cleaning toys, parents have to do for them, they will not take care of themselves at all, psychologically and in life are inseparable from their parents. At the point of educating their children to be independent, parents must make great efforts to let their children complete the trivial matters of life by themselves and exercise their ability to take care of their lives. Cultivate children to have their own and have opinions, and cannot listen to the opinions of others, so that when children encounter problems, they will have their own unique insights and make better judgments. Encourage children to contact the new world and environment, parents should also set a good example, encounter difficulties do not complain, think more about solutions, and actively cope.