"We have to stop defining success in terms of what a child achieves at age eighteen, like going to a good college, and that mindset ruins a child's ability to succeed in their twenties, forties, and fifties."
How to define success
Let's start by asking ourselves how to define success.
We often make a mistake: we look at the child in front of us and think, how successful is he?
Parents who do this tend to focus too much on two things: happiness or grades.
If you only focus on the child's immediate happiness and have no requirements for the child, then such happiness is also short-lived and fleeting. If you only care about your child's achievements, you only see your child's achievements, not the child himself.
We should not look at the child in front of us, but imagine the child growing up to be 35 years old, if parents begin to consider what qualities are needed for the success of 35-year-old adults, children's education will be much easier, and parents will also know more about how to choose different education methods.
We should prepare our children for future development and success, and cultivate people who have the stamina to succeed at the age of 35, 40, and 50. By taking the long-term goal, our understanding of successful childhoods and adolescents broadens.
What kind of person is successful and happy at the age of 35, 40, and 50? That doesn't depend on what you have, it depends on what kind of person you are.
Successful adults look like this
Have a sense of value and purpose
Can repair the world, with compassion, love and kindness
Hard work, tenacity
Care for others and cherish relationships with family, friends and society
Perseverance (Towards long-term goals, stick to your passion, even after failure, you can still persevere in the effort. ）
Creative and innovative
There is social intelligence and emotional intelligence to promote leadership and collaboration
Can listen to constructive criticism and have a lifelong spirit of learning
toughness
If we see life as a sprint, we will do everything possible to reach the end and not plan for the future. Once we fall, we lose, so we can't afford to lose a little bit.
But if we see life as a marathon, then our goals are set for the longer term. If people around you can cooperate with each other and encourage each other, you can go further. If you hit a wall and fall, you get up and keep running, looking for a better path.
Of course, success also includes a good education and a career to make ends meet, but I believe that all of these qualities greatly enhance a person's ability to survive in society and find meaning and satisfaction in what he or she does.
We must stop defining success in terms of what children accomplish at age eighteen, such as going to good college, which destroys a child's ability to succeed in their twenties, thirties, or fifties.
Resilience is the ability to come out of adversity and get up again after falling from failure and go forward.
The hormone of nervousness evolved over tens of thousands of years to help primitive humans cope with the "tiger is coming" situation. However, there is no hormone designed in the human brain to cope with situations such as the "SAT test".
If we think that any exam, any activity, any moment of the child may affect the child's life, then we have become the tiger in the child's life, and the child and the parent will live in this tension and anxiety every day.
High demands
What are the high demands on children? Is it grades, performances, prestigious schools, or awards?
The definition of high demand is that parents can know what kind of person their children are, and parents expect their children to show their good nature and good qualities. The focus is not on their external achievements, but on expecting them as a person to have a high overall quality in all aspects of their inner qualities.
Children will grow up because of their parents' expectations. If parents have high expectations for their children, children will often work hard for them. But here we must emphasize clearly, high requirements do not refer to external achievements, not all A, nor awards and sports honors, but to have understanding, respect, honesty, kindness, responsibility and other good qualities that parents want their children to have.
perfectionism
Why is perfectionism bad?
Because perfectionists will:
Inferiority
Afraid to take B, afraid of imperfection
Fear of parental disappointment
Lack of creativity
Fear of criticism and suggestion
Perfectionism is the graveyard of creativity.
Perfectionism makes children feel inferior. This kind of child is afraid of failure, afraid of not meeting the requirements of parents. Such children tend to avoid uncertainty and therefore do not think about innovation. Children will be afraid to try new things, afraid of innovation, afraid of all the unknown. And truly accomplished people feel very lucky to have the opportunity to do what they do.
If the child is afraid of disappointing the parents, there must be emotional problems.
If parents are afraid that their children will fail now, then children will often fail more miserably when they grow up, because children have not learned how to face failure correctly when they are young.
What is unconditional trust
It's that kids aren't the products we show off.
The child is not pursuing to please us, we just love the child unconditionally, not the achievements he has achieved.
No one can be good at everything.
Nurturing successful people
If you define success as going to Harvard, then you turn your child's growth process into the process of making a curriculum vitae for elite school applications.
If you define success as who your children will become at the age of thirty-five, what your grandchildren will be, their success, their security, their happiness, their creativity, then I believe we are talking about good topics, to the heart of the matter.
Suicide rates among Asian college students are skyrocketing, with Asian girls having the highest suicide rates in college. Perfectionism seems to be high in Asians. Because perfectionism makes people feel inferior.
I don't want any child to suffer so much. I am very excited and honored to be invited to give this talk because you will go out and spread my educational ideas and tell everyone what true success is, so that you can save lives.
Please spread such educational concepts through social networks to form a social atmosphere, so that parents do not talk about which university their children go to and what their test scores are when they start greeting, but talk about what kind of person the child is, is the child looking for his own interests, and sharing the parent-child relationship.
If we all talk about such topics, children can grow up well.
Parents' goals
Let your child make mistakes
Praise effort rather than results
Build shining points and encourage uniqueness
The short-term goal of parents is to cultivate their children's eagerness to learn.
If parents put too much pressure on their children, and children no longer like to learn, the child's future path will be farther away from success. People's success is often due to a constant love of learning.
The medium-term goal of parents is to find a direction that matches their children's interests and promote a love of learning.
It is not a famous school, but the direction that children really love and the passion to work hard for it.
Parents' long-term goal is to develop a healthy adult.
Telling children what is wrong doesn't help them, but it's useful to show them what's right.
If you respect your child's self-reliance, your child will be closer to you. If you say to your child, I want you to be independent, I want you to be free, but independence and freedom require your efforts to win. If you say this, the child's self-image will be great, he will feel that he is in control of his own behavior, knowing that you support his self-reliance, and the child will spend a lifetime with the parents as an independent self.
Control the child and the child will stay away from you. Give the child independence, the child will spread his wings, fly everywhere, land back to the parents' nest, and the child will return many times in his life. Loving the child as a person, not the achievements they have made, is the greatest strength given to the child in his life.
"Dear God, please give me grace and calm to accept the unchangeable, give me the courage to change what I can change, and give me the wisdom to distinguish them from each other."
As a parent, there are also limits, and children sometimes make parents mad. At this time, parents need to remind themselves that what they do is to love their children, give themselves time to think about who they really are, what their beautiful nature and qualities are, the things that children have touched you, those beautiful and intimate times...
How to know who the child really is
That would change how you view high-yielding time with your child.
If parents mistakenly think that the high production time with their children is to find ways and rack their brains to figure out how to make their children achieve the greatest achievements, such as achievements and awards, then parents will never know who their children really are.
The high-yield time for parents and children is dinner, hugging and intimacy with children, and talking and chatting with children to understand what children are thinking. This is the most effective parent-child time, which will stimulate the child's internal drive and achieve better achievements.
Conversely, focusing on a child's short-term achievements may excite them for a while, but they will soon lose motivation for passion. Parents need to let their children discover themselves, clarify their minds, and encourage them to contribute to this society and the world, so as to cultivate a successful child.
The best gift you can give to your child is to take care of yourself. When you take care of yourself, you are leading by example how a resilient person, a happy, loving person, a loving person, a powerful person with meaning in life lives.
If our entire lives are child-centered, we will eclipse, lack of interest and pursuit in the lives of adults in their forties and fifties, and children will not be full of hopes and hopes for their future.