Raising children is a chore for many people, including me. I thought it would be good to survive the child's infancy, but when the child's adolescence was over, I found that it was really just the starting point.
I have a book called "Life is a Practice", and some people joke that the life of having children is the real practice, and the rest is a false practice.
Maybe, maybe, it's true.
It seems that it is easier for the ancients to raise children, after all, a family can give birth to seven or eight, more is not rare, it is not a big deal to arrange some positions for children, such as the boss is a company commander, responsible for making money; the second is a platoon leader, put on a guard guard; the third is the squad leader, responsible for managing the old four to the eighth. Orderly look.
In ancient times, children were easy to raise, for many reasons, first of all, material conditions are the premise of everything, materials are not so rich today, and it is impossible to be rich.
A seemingly insignificant reason, but for today's people, it is very important, is the concept of parenting.
The parenting philosophy of the ancients is not very scientific, but at least it is very concise. Because of refinement, you can't pick his faults. There is nothing wrong with the five-thousand-word Tao Te Ching, and if it is expanded to 500,000 words, there will be typos, and there will be a bunch of angry youth to scare you.
Everything is concise and good.
When it comes to the concept of parenting, the first recommendation is Confucianism. Why Confucianism? To answer this question, let's first look at why Confucianism not only survived in the "Hundred Schools of Thought", but also carried forward and flourished, becoming orthodox for more than two thousand years.
Of course, the reasons are also very complicated, let's still simplify, make a comparison.
For example, the Fa and Mo families who used to be xianxue.
The characteristics of the Mo family are that they are particularly cruel to themselves, and the Mo family is very similar to a religious organization, with strict discipline and absolute asceticism.
The characteristics of the Fa are that they are particularly cruel to others, decisive in killing, and indestructible.
The result? Because they are too cruel to themselves, not many people are willing to join the Mo family, after all, no one is willing to live with themselves. Mozi's ideal country can only be an ideal country.
Because they are cruel to others, it is inevitable that the Fa family will set themselves on fire. The representative figure Han Feizi was killed by another representative figure, Li Si, and Shang Martin successfully changed the law, and finally died in the "Shang Martingale Transformation Method".
The most classic shot is that Shang Martin offended the conservative faction and was hunted down and killed, fled to a place, wanted to live in an inn, and the boss asked him: "Comrade, what about the ID card?" ”
Shang Martin is on the way to escape, who dares to bring an ID card? The boss did not let go and said, "This is the rule of Shang Jun (Shang Martin), and it must be strictly enforced!" ”
Shang Jun did not know how to feel?
The decline and fall of the Mo family seems to be excusable; the Fajia makes people feel a bit of a pity - in fact, it has not died, and the "Confucianism" of Emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty is, in the eyes of many people, that is, "external Confucianism and internal law", and the idea of rule of law is also an important main line of development of the entire feudal society.
The Dharma is a double-edged sword that can easily cut itself.
Confucianism seems to have avoided these drawbacks, and in history, Many Confucians have been killed by pits, but just like an army, they have been fighting around for more than two thousand years, and it is impossible to have no casualties.
Confucianism is so capable of fighting, in part, because it is neither cruel to itself nor to others, but focuses on personality cultivation. It attempts to use social indoctrination to achieve the effect of the Fa's "cruelty to people", and at the same time to achieve the Mo family's goal of "being cruel to oneself" with the cultivation of personality. Well, this sentence is very classic, you can take notes haha.
Therefore, Confucianism attaches the greatest importance to education, and almost all the great Confucians regard themselves as teachers; after the Tang and Song dynasties, when taking the exam, even the main examiner and the candidate had a "teacher-student" friendship.
To some extent, Confucianism can stand out from the "hundred schools", and the fundamental reason is that it attaches importance to education.
Referring to Confucianism as an "educator" doesn't seem to be a big problem (if there is a problem, you come to beat me up).
It is not so much that children were easy to raise in ancient times, but that Confucian educational ideas make children easy to raise.
Because, Confucian educational thought seems to be broad and profound, and once you study hard (if you can't drill it, you will work harder), in fact, there are two words:
One word is "nourishment"; the other word is "transformation".
Nurturing is the cultivation of upbringing; it is the cultivation of indoctrination.
Parenting, indoctrination, we are used to staring at "teaching", and the result is wrong. In fact, the focus is not on teaching, but on nurturing and chemicalizing.
The so-called cultivation is the cultivation of the environment. Parents are the mirrors of children, and children are the shadows of parents. What a family looks like, the child looks like.
"Dragons give birth to dragons, phoenixes give birth to phoenixes, and rats will punch holes" and the like will certainly be lashed out in the revolutionary era of "princes and princes, and Ning has a kind of hu", but in peacetime, you will find that this law is still the law.
Western science has found that there is a kind of cell in the human brain called mirror neurons. It can quietly "record" what people see and store them in the brain's hard disk.
Because it's a hard disk, not a memory, you can't detect these "videos" yourself. But one day, at some point, at some kind of encounter, they will jump out and influence your behavior.
For example, when you were a child, you saw your father beating his mother. One day when you grow up, you "suddenly don't know how to drop" and hit someone. You don't know why you can't control yourself.
To a large extent, it is the mirror neurons that do the trick. It teaches you one way to deal with it: solve the problem with your fists. And the root, the "video data" that you saw and stored at an early age.
Mirror neurons are only a footnote to confucianism from a scientific level. The meaning of this footnote is that you say 100 times, it is better to do 1 time, and you will never be able to beat the example.
To some extent, "raising" is "teaching" and cannot be separated.
"Transformation" is another way of education in addition to "raising". "Raising" is a macroscopic "teaching", and "transformation" is a real and concrete "teaching".
The so-called "transformation" is indoctrination, that is, infection, that is, cultural people, that is, spring wind and rain. The actors of "transformation" can be parents or teachers.
There are two principles of "transformation", first of all, we must "dissolve" the problem ourselves and fully digest it ourselves, so that it is possible to influence the child;
Secondly, there must be smooth communication and connection between you and your child, he can accept you, and you can influence him.
In order to achieve this goal, the West has pulled another word, called empathy. Empathy, that is, empathy, is the ability to feel the emotions of others.
You can feel his emotions, he can open his heart, and "transformation" becomes reality.
The key to "education" lies in the parents, and the key to "transformation" lies in the teacher. But many times, the most basic role is played by parents.
That's why I said: Raise or not teach, the father's fault.
Gao Jinguo, a senior editor with a high online name, is the author of 26 books such as "Good Parents Raise Good Children - 35 Educational Thinking Lessons for Parents", "Interesting Chinese History for Children (12 volumes)", "Stories of Teenagers Reading History (3 volumes)", "Life is a Practice", "The Layer of Window Paper of the Tang Dynasty", "Those Things in the State of Qi" and so on.