Author: Gang Xie, Ph.D. in Psychology, Temple University, USA, psychologist at Fremont United School District, California.
There is no "mental health" and "success" in vain
When I started my master's degree in psychology in 1993, many people were directly associated with "mental illness" as soon as they heard "psychology". Many children now do not reach the level of mental illness. But is not having mental illness equivalent to having "mental health"?
The World Health Organization defines mental health as a state of dealing with stress in life, working effectively at the potential of life, and contributing to society.
The first time I saw this definition, I thought, Isn't this also the definition of success? These are all factors that research shows are most relevant to "success and well-being"! Therefore, if you want to achieve the state of "mental health", you have excellent qualities and behavior habits such as self-motivation, responsibility, perseverance, anti-setback ability, love, etc. It's not just that there's no mental illness.
Peking University teacher Xu Kewen once shared that 30.4% of peking university freshmen, including undergraduate and graduate students, hate learning or think that learning is meaningless. Another 40.4% of students believe that life is meaningless, and the most extreme of them is to give up on themselves. Admission to Peking University is a "success" under our basic education!
Teacher Xu also shared that in the 1980s and 1990s, only 1 in 100 Chinese suffered from mental disorders, and this data had reached 17.5% by 2005. The incidence of anxiety disorders, which was about 1% to 2% in the 1980s, is now 13%. 20 years ago, the incidence of depression was 0.05%, now it is 6%, an increase of 120 times.
The situation is even worse in the U.S., where 21 percent of adolescents ages 9 to 17 have diagnosable mental health problems or symptoms of addiction. About 10.7 percent of U.S. teens had depression and 5.9 percent had severe anxiety symptoms, and suicide rose to become the second leading cause of death among teens in 2016.
Here's a picture of performance art on tour of college campuses in the United States: a thousand empty school bags, like falling stars, scattered on the lawn, representing about a thousand college students who commit suicide each year. In 2016, when I came to Beijing to open the "Applied Psychology Conference", the psychology minister of Beijing Normal University spoke: "In the era of rapid economic development, there are more and more problems that we can't solve with money! ”
My biggest feeling at work is that the problems may be different for families who come to the rescue because of their children's mental health, and the common thing is that they are basically at least three years late, and some are even twenty years late! Children are in their early thirties before they find me: many children can't handle any stress in life, can't work properly, and don't even respect their parents, let alone contribute to society, which is the opposite of the definition of "mental health"! In this case, then intervene and treat, it is really half the work!
There are two factors that affect a child's mental health, genetics and environment. Genes account for 40-50%, while the other 50%-60% come from the environment. Today, the focus of our discussion is on these 50-60% adjustable factors.
The starting line of children's mental health is a harmonious family relationship
Let's start with my own family.
My younger brother and sister, four and two years younger than me, unfortunately, both have serious mental health problems, both of whom are terminally ill adolescents, and who still need the care of others, and cannot cope with the stresses of life, let alone reach their personal potential. Summarizing the reasons for their situation is really a collection of all the findings of educational psychology over the past few decades.
Their basic psychological needs as they grow up are not met. A child's first basic need is a "sense of belonging." A harmonious family is the source of a child's strength. Every couple who can get along harmoniously not only have an emotional foundation, but also think from the perspective of others, be tolerant, patient, communicate, and manage emotions. We all have times when we are angry, and there is no difference between good and bad anger, but how to express it, there is a good or bad difference.
Children living in harmonious families are taking the most vivid "mental health" lessons every day, and they know how to deal with stress and how to resolve conflicts, which children observe and learn from in family life.
And my parents are small quarrels every day, big quarrels, the most noisy during the New Year's Festival.
Living in families with discordant parental relationships: Repeated exposure to conflicting, inconsistent demands increases a child's insecurity, weakens control over emotions and behaviors, and is more likely to produce feelings of fear, depression, and anger. Long-term conflict between parents, whether divorced or not, is positively correlated with the child's anxiety and problem behavior, and negatively associated with health. The longer a child is exposed to conflict, the more negative emotions there are, and the more behavioral responses there are, such as aggressive behaviors; the more fragile intimate relationships are in adulthood and more likely to divorce.
If there is really a starting line in life, the starting line of a child is really the relationship between parents.
My younger siblings and I have already lost at the starting line, and I vividly remember my brother falling ill at the age of 18, when my mother ran away from home because of years of conflict with my father, and I didn't know where to go for months. When I went to visit my brother in the hospital, he was hallucinating, shouting "Mom" outside the door, and asking me: "I just want the whole family to live together, is this too much?" ”
A poor relationship between husband and wife can also directly affect the interaction between parents and children.
I feel sorry for my sister. My dad preferred sons to daughters. My name Xie Gang is like a boy's name, because it was started before I was born, and after I was born, my father didn't bother to change it when he saw that he was a girl. When my sister was born, my father saw that she was a girl again, turned her head and left, not even sending food to my mother. So when my mother saw her, although she took care of her physically, she didn't have that connection, and she didn't have that kind of love.
We talk about the importance of the child's initial attachment to the mother. In the infancy of the child, you not only feed the child, every look you give the child, the words you say to him, and the hug are conveying to him that "you are important, the world is safe, I will always be by your side", so that the child will trust the world and be full of hope for the future.
And my sister is missing these. When my mother was pregnant with her brother, her sister, who was just over one year old, was sent back to her father's hometown for nearly two years, so her relationship with her mother has always been cold. She has always had a sense of distrust of the world around her, and when she finally works, she has always suspected that others are always saying bad things about her, and she has symptoms of schizophrenia.
Deprive children of a sense of autonomy and accomplishment
It is to deprive the foundation of "mental health"
My younger brother has a poor learning ability since childhood. If a child encounters a difficult problem, such as homework he can't do, the first reaction is likely to be to escape, so in elementary school, my brother said that he had a "headache" as soon as he did his homework, and my father liked boys very much, so as soon as he said "headache", my father asked me to do it for him. He has been avoiding this way, and there is no sense of accomplishment in his studies. There is no other thing to do well outside the classroom to experience self-confidence.
If a child can't find activities that make him feel a sense of accomplishment and autonomy in every way, his "mental health" has no foundation.
My sister, on the contrary, was born with a talent for art, and when she was in junior high school, she copied her own paintings without a teacher, similar to the works of art students I saw in my undergraduate, and she could teach herself without being taught. But her parents did not give her the opportunity to further her education, arranged for her to go to high school, and then went to work in the mall. Today, Teacher Yu Minhong is also saying that no matter what kind of work you do, as long as it is the work you like, you will definitely have a sense of accomplishment and happiness in life, but she does not, she can not use her own talent at work.
This was a huge missing piece in my sister's upbringing. By the time I started working in 2000 and finally had the conditions to support her in developing her hobby, she had been ill for six years and had been in and out of the hospital several times. Without strong guidance around me, I couldn't even stick to the design course for several months, and I couldn't know how big my "personal potential" was.
Therefore, children have their own innate ability and personality characteristics, and they need the acceptance and respect of their parents in order to establish a sense of achievement and autonomy. Otherwise, their mental health will have great hidden dangers.
Parents and children get along day in and day out
It is the imprint that ultimately leaves the child's memory
When I was working in elementary school in California myself, I had a 12-year-old kid come to our house, a classmate of my eldest son. My son had just finished practicing the piano, and I said let him play it too, and he said no, thinking it wasn't as good as my son. I was very surprised because I knew that he obviously played much better than my son. This kid wasn't modest, he really didn't think he was playing well enough. Why?
The child's father often beat his mother, and often beat him and criticized him, and the interaction between parents and children was always negative. So obviously very good children still feel that they are not good enough. No self-confidence. He would see himself this way, drawing conclusions from his relationship with his father.
For example, I came to the United States in 1996, and now it has been 21 years, and our family does not celebrate the Chinese New Year, why? Because as soon as I think of The New Year, I immediately think of my mom crying and my dad shouting. I am now slowly overcoming, this is the power of memory.
A particularly gifted student once told me that my sister and I would never touch the piano again in our lifetime. Because every time we see or think of the piano, we think of a sense of humiliation. Because their mother played the piano very well, every time the sisters practiced, they could immediately hear what was wrong, so they were always picking faults.
The student's deepest memory is one winter night, when her sister refused to practice under scolding and was driven to the cold courtyard by her mother, and her sister wore slippers and very thin clothes. And she knelt down in front of her mother and begged her to let her sister into the house. This is her deepest memory of the piano. Although the mother wants her daughter to improve from a good starting point and hopes that the child will persevere, the mother's way is not right. Blind criticism and punishment will only make the daughter associate "practicing" with negative emotions.
A large number of psychological proofs show that whether it is teacher-student or parent-child interaction, children can only accept it more effectively if the ratio of encouragement and correction is maintained at 4:1 to 5:1.
Children play the piano always have a good place, if you point out, children you see such a difficult song, you have been practicing for more than a week, I especially admire your perseverance. Children are more willing and motivated to continue to persevere.
There is a father who says he can't play the piano, but the two children in the family especially like to play the piano, why? Because as soon as they play the piano, the father leans next to them, looks at the child with both envy and admiration, and then says that you play really well, and the child likes to play the piano.
So we want to give our children as many positive memories as possible. Every day we tell the child's face, words, discipline, eyes, etc., will become the child's memory, become the child's mental health food.
How to let children learn to face challenges
Whether a child can succeed in the future and give full play to his or her potential is indispensable to his resilience and perseverance in the face of difficulties. But in the face of difficulties and challenges, what affects whether children choose to persevere or give up, whether they choose to fight or withdraw?
Research by Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, shows that three reasons determine whether a child is pessimistic or optimistic in the face of difficulties and challenges:
1. The causal analysis of daily life events by parents that children often hear and see during their growth. In other words, if the child is successful, the parent always comes down to the child's personal efforts or strengths, such as "Your communication skills are so good, I have been convinced by you!" Wait, the child will slowly form an optimistic way of explaining.
2. The way parents criticize when a child fails. If a child fails, the parents always put it down to the child's personal mistakes and label him with labels such as "You just have a bad memory!" "Girls are not good at math!" And so on, the child will slowly form a pessimistic way of explaining. I have been in contact with many parents at work, and when I saw my children make a mistake, I immediately exaggerated how bad the results would be in the future. For example, if a child just makes a mistake in a math problem, he immediately says, "If you build a house, will you get a wrong decimal point?" It's going to kill people! "It's important to develop good study habits, but it's an exaggeration! Will you dare to make mistakes again in the future?
3. There are negative events that occur repeatedly in early life. For example, close family members die when they are young, parents divorce, or vent negative emotions for a long time. Without proper guidance, the child will feel that no matter how hard he tries, bad results will always appear, personal efforts will not be useful, so he feels helpless, and it is easier to choose to give up when encountering difficulties in the future.
"Learning for future growth"
Or "Punish for past mistakes"
When a child performs well in all aspects, it is usually a good one. But after the children make mistakes, they are already extremely sad, afraid, disappointed, and frustrated, and our reactions will be particularly impressive to the children, and the effect of discipline will be completely different.
I remember that in the high school where I worked, several boys attacked a teacher on the Internet, and after being discovered by the school authorities, each student's parents were called to the school to talk and be punished by suspension. At that time, when these boys were called to the office together for a meeting, you could see that some of the parents could not hang up. You can imagine what they're going to do back home.
But there was a dad who was very calm. After the meeting, ask him, why did your reaction not be the same as other parents? He told me who hadn't made a mistake when he was younger. I talked to my child about it, and he didn't actually take this teacher's class at all, because the other students were talking about it, and he followed the blind coaxing, and as a result, what he said was more ugly and he was punished more severely. But the child remembers this very deeply, and he learns to think twice and not to follow the crowd.
So when a child fails, the parent's attitude determines what the child learns from this matter.
If we get angry, the child will think about how to rebel against us, argue with us, we will shift the goal, turn the focus into conflict with the child, and miss the opportunity to learn in mistakes.
True stocking is there is no upper limit to the bottom line
Many parents ask me, is it better for free-range children to be mentally healthy?
I said, that depends on how you look at stocking, the real free-range children are not saying that they are left alone, the real stocking, there is no upper limit to the bottom line. For example, I give you the freedom to choose independently, but I have a bottom line, such as I need you to be an honest person, a responsible person, a person who can persevere. With these bottom lines, I don't limit the upper limit, which is the real stocking. The psychological quality of the children raised in this way is stronger, because the children have a sense of autonomy and freedom, and have the right to choose.
Imagine that we have people watching you at all times in our own work, and when you are not doing well, someone will immediately find out, point it out to you, give you some criticism, in this case can you work more self-motivated? Is job satisfaction higher? No way.
Children also need such a degree of freedom, they can't control what time they go to school in the morning, and they can't control how much homework, so we try to let him have a choice in life to give the child more choices. For example, his hobbies, interests, etc., you should observe what the child really likes, and encourage him to try what can play to his strengths. Or that sentence, we have a bottom line, such as the child's health is very important, then there must be the same exercise, but what is the exercise? Children can choose for themselves.
Our pain often lies in the fact that we take too much responsibility for our children, who have no sense of autonomy and cannot learn to be responsible for themselves.
summary
Finally, let's return to the World Health Organization's definition of mental health: dealing with stress in life, reaching out to your potential, working effectively, and contributing to your community. What do they look like in life? It is the husband and wife relationship of mutual support and love, the parent-child relationship of mutual respect, these two things are there, and the child lays a solid foundation for mental health.
Albert Einstein once said: Education is something that you still keep after you have forgotten the knowledge taught in school. Looking back, how much more can we remember about the specific knowledge we learned in elementary, middle, high school, college, and even graduate school? What we ultimately remember is the mental health factors in this process that have the greatest impact on our self-concepts, stress reduction methods, and frustration resistance that have the greatest impact on us now, in the future, at work, and in life.
May our children reach their full potential, deal with the stresses in life, and grow up with character and behavior habits that cannot be measured by scores!