What will happen to children who have experienced the epidemic?

This article is reprinted with permission under the public name "Noise"

Cai Chaoyang, educator

The full text is about 1900 words, and it takes about 4 minutes to read

The child will generate his worldview based on the facts of this present moment.

Anything, once it happens, has consequences. This is not subject to the will of man. Where there is a cause, there must be an effect, and where there is an action, there must be a consequence. However, sometimes, in a more imminent period of time, these consequences are not clearly seen.

The epidemic has been three years, good or bad, warm and cold at first. Originally, the children's lives were the most regular, going to school in the morning and returning home in the evening, but now they are disrupted. Not only that, the normal order of life before the epidemic, not just school education, has been changed. So, some of these recurrent emergencies, children are experiencing, what kind of psychological consequences will this cause them?

For example, the panic caused by the virus itself, the uneasiness caused by emergencies, and the constant stagnation of the home. Another example is the long online course. And so on, it's something unconventional. So, how will children in these situations differ in their perception of the world?

In terms of home isolation, children spend a long time in a more enclosed space, which really has a big impact, they need outdoor space for running and playing, and they also need enough communities of children of the same age. These contents are necessary for the individual growth of children. At present, many times, it can only be put into practice.

From the perspective of education and children's psychological growth, I think these situations have not been paid enough attention at present. Because people have done their best to cope with work and daily life, who cares about their children's mental health? And this is actually very important, it will affect the child's basic judgment of the world.

I asked a lot of friends in the control area, although there are many inconveniences, I basically think that in a large range, the probability of material scarcity will not be very large. So in addition to caring about food and vegetables, in addition to competing with onions, we must also care about the children's spiritual world.

For children, their inner world, and the judgment of the world that occurs based on life, is the cornerstone of children's understanding of the world. Now that everything has changed, how can they build new understandings, and what will be the basic elements of these new understandings?

We will discuss it only from the perspective of education and child psychology. Because minors are a special group, they are extremely malleable. Adults have an established worldview, and in the face of special circumstances, they will make adjustments according to their own reason. The child is different, and he will generate his worldview based on the facts of this present situation. What I want to discuss is, what kind of after-effects will these facts that have already happened have? This is also the most fundamental reason why in this period, there is a greater need for a good education.

For example, for example, before we often said that the matter of hoarding grain is basically impossible for post-80s parents. But the old people of the previous generation may have the memory of hoarding grain. This kind of memory is the facts that happened in those years, and these facts have been deeply engraved into their way of life and way of thinking, and cannot be changed. And now that we have such a perception, how can we help children so as not to cause post-traumatic sequelae?

For example, in times of scarcity, in order to save some water bills, someone would put two bricks in the water tank of the flush toilet to save a little water. This kind of move seems almost ridiculous to us now. There are also elderly people who like to open the faucet a little bit at home, and drop a drop of water into the bucket, because of such water consumption, the water meter will not go, which plays a role in saving water bills.

But these behaviors, in the eyes of contemporary young people or middle-aged people, may be completely incomprehensible. We advise our parents not to do this, but they can't always change it. Why? Because this is determined by their facts at the time, their real encounters have shaped their perceptions and prejudgments. The root of this memory is scarcity. And this shaping has gone deep into the depths of their minds. Broadly speaking, this is also a kind of PTSD.

Back to our current generation of children. What are the facts they see and shape their worldview?

Of course, I also believe that children have strong vitality and strong self-correction ability. But some effects, once formed, are difficult to eliminate.

A few days ago, a picture was circulated on the Internet, teaching people how to eat tree bark. Of course, it is not raw, it is said to be picked, crushed into a powder, and then cooked to eat. This is naturally also a paragraph, but there is a picture book, called "The Cat of the Hungry Mountain", a rich man, poor and extravagant, has a golden mountain and silver mountain, once the famine comes, poor enough to only have money, and money can not be eaten, so he guards the golden mountain and silver mountain, and is on the verge of starvation. This picture book is really immediacy and creepy.

We need to think that the impact of adult society on children is all-encompassing. The real workings of this society affect them; what adult society thinks and thinks will also affect them. Ultimately, the real world in which we are involved, working, continues to shape children.

Of course, I don't know how to carry out psychological intervention, in fact, there should be more professional experts to do some professional guidance. All I can do is to give some advice on individual cases. For example, in online classes, children do not listen carefully, and parents use yelling instead of management, which is obviously the wrong method and strategy.

From the level of educators, the most important thing is to give children a stable life as much as possible in an unstable situation. Because children need a sense of certainty, that sense of certainty brings a sense of order. With this sense of certainty, children are able to grow up physically and mentally healthy.

Of course, a generation has a generation's destiny. Our post-70s generation just caught up with the reform and opening up, all the way up, this life experience has led me to be an optimist all the time, always feel that the world must be getting better day by day. But the extraordinary state of the epidemic will also change children's expectations and judgments about the future. So, how will children be affected? How should we parents and educators face it? This is a new topic at the moment.