I've always been attracted to the little stories in "Positive Discipline", and today, I read another story and thought it was interesting to share with you.
Jim and Betty each had three children and restructured into a new family. The youngest of the six children is six years old and the oldest is 14 years old. Obviously, there are many aspects of the new family to make new adjustments. Betty had a job outside. She loves this new home, so she can't wait to meet her family after work, but one thing that bothers her is that the first thing that comes home is full of garbage.
Reading this, I thought that the garbage on the floor must refer to empty bottles, toys, slippers, clothes, snacks, etc., you think of six children, each child to build a little, is not the house into a garbage dump.
Seeing this, Betty was at first nagging and cleaning up. Over time, Betty was very irritable, and she was a fire in her stomach for both the child and herself.
There was a problem to be solved, and Betty finally put it on the agenda of their weekly night family meetings.
Betty first admitted that it was her own problem. Betty wins the first step because the children obviously don't think there's anything wrong with messing up the house, and then she asks the children if they are willing to help her on this issue, which is the second step to winning the child's cooperation.
Finally, they proposed a "safe storage box" plan, they put a large cardboard box in the garage, stipulating that anyone can throw what they see in the common room, such as the living room, the game hall, the kitchen, put into this safe storage box, they also stipulate that it must be a week before they can take out what has been thrown into it.
How is the plan going? For example, 12-year-old David's sneakers were missing, he looked around, and later remembered the "safety deposit box" and found that the shoes were inside the box. David had to go to school in his stinky tennis shoes, and by the next day the tennis shoes were gone, he had no other shoes to wear, and the other children insisted that it would be a week before they could get them out. David went to his mother, who wisely told him to follow the rules, and finally his two siblings helped him figure out how to wear the slippers in his bedroom. There was no better way, David had to wear slippers to school for three days, and since that week he had never forgotten to pack his shoes.
Several other children have also seen this situation, whether the child wears slippers to school or goes to school on a cold day without a coat, Jim and Betty let the children take care of their own problems and decide to forget what others think.
This program is very effective, and it works because:
★ The problem was raised at the family meeting and the children came up with solutions.
★ Mom and Dad are not held responsible when there is a problem implementing the family-wide decision.
★ Because parents stay out of the way, children enforce the rules.
★ The rules apply to everyone in the family, including mom and dad.
Seeing this story, I felt emotionally: Chinese education and American education are really different. Chinese mothers are like hens protecting chicken babies, when they encounter problems, they put their children under their wings to protect them, send raincoats to school on rainy days, and send cotton jackets to schools in winter, and it is even more unlikely that they will let their children wear slippers and mix in school for three days. If the child wears slippers on the first day, the teacher will call his mother and ask him to deliver shoes to the child.
The result of this is that the child does not know what he is going to do and what the responsibility is. I remember one day I asked my classmates a question, why did I forget to ask this question, but I remember the question: What did you decide to do? One of the girls' answers hurt me, she said, "I'm going to listen to my teacher and my mother later." "This is a serious, motivated, clean, obedient girl, and her answer makes me feel so much responsibility for a moment, and feel that if I do something wrong or say the wrong thing, the consequences will be so serious. So Chinese mothers feel tired, China's primary school class teachers feel tired, no wonder let Chinese mothers have three children, most of the words are too tired, can afford to be born, can not afford to raise, do not give birth. Let everyone go to be the primary school class teacher, and nine times out of ten they will say no, inappropriate and inappropriate.
However, in the story of Betty's family that we just told, she had six children. And that's not all, Jane Nelson, author of Positive Discipline, is a mother of seven, a grandmother and maternal grandmother of 22, a great-grandmother of two, and now a college counselor and consultant for many prestigious parenting and parenting magazines.
How do American moms do it? What I think is that they have cultivated their children's problem-solving ability in daily life, and when children encounter problems, they know how to do it and what to do, and then they apply the problem-solving skills they have learned in life to learning, and they can also solve problems in learning.
It is much better for everyone in the family to be able to take responsibility than for the mother alone. If all the children in a class can solve problems, then the class teacher will focus on teaching.
I think about it, China's educational environment and the United States are inevitably different, we still put education in the general environment to make sense, a good book of methods applied to practice, the process and results must be different from the book described in the book.
But we can't say that we give up the courage to practice for foreign or other reasons, the ancients all said that "there is a golden house in the book, and there is a beautiful jade in the book", isn't the purpose of our reading to find ways and paths?
A good method does not have to be equal to reading a book in vain.
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