These two months are the time when I have worked hardest to learn and reinvent myself, and every day I reflect on what I am not doing well. How to change it.
This is completely different from my previous idea of pushing children to be self-motivated. I no longer set goals for my son and no longer push him to progress in his studies, but I try to give him more security and eliminate his fears.
This method was not something I came up with at once, but a psychological "little routine" that I realized based on the mindfulness and self-driven growth of this learning.
After all, if you want to awaken your child's self-motivation, you can't use brute force and force, you have to let your child want it, not parents forcing your child to want it.
It doesn't need to be adapted to local conditions, and it varies from person to person, so I try to set up a "recovery moment" to be a good "refueling and recharging" for my child when he is facing stress, frustration, self-doubt, or wanting to mess up.
Of course, soothing children is not limited to good food and drink, this is only the basics, but not the main thing.
The most important thing is to develop psychological accompaniment and children's emotional resilience, and turn short-term, mild stress into positive face and positive stress through acceptance training and transformation exercises.
It's not a bad thing to be stressed, turn it into motivation and eliminate the effects of fear and worry, and then you can embrace stress and use it as a beneficial signal.
Here's how I "routine" my children: when there is pressure, don't reject it, don't deny your true thoughts, and allow it to exist even if it's a negative emotion.
When you are stressed, or you feel that you are not good enough, or you are not focused enough in class and feel internal friction or unhappy, it just shows that the child is demanding of himself, which is a good thing.
However, if you get bored because you haven't done it for a while, and then affect your mood for the whole day, it is equivalent to labeling yourself indiscriminately, such as "I can't do it, my self-control is too poor, I want to mess up again".
The more I think about it, the more emotionally I have internal friction, and the more negative comments I will have about myself, and then I feel anxious, hopeless, and feel that I am like this, so I really don't want to work hard.
Let's talk about my previous practice, the more the child is rotten, the more bad the state, the more I advise: you can't do this. It doesn't matter if you run for a class, if you run all day, you won't be able to keep up in the future, but you have to think of a way not to go on like this.
At the same time, I was also anxious and anxious, as if I didn't listen well to a class, and the semester would be over, and I couldn't keep up with it.
So, for several days on end, I would stare at the same question and keep asking: How is the quality of the lectures? Still sleepy? You can't mess it up.
As everyone knows, when I emphasized the importance of paying attention to class concentration several times, I have put a lot of pressure on the child in disguise, which will only make him more irritable, more internal, and even more want to mess up.
Once it is really bad and not motivated, the child's internal friction becomes a dead cycle, and he denies himself more and more, feels more and more that he can't do it, and lives up to everyone's expectations.
At this time, it is a fool's dream to take the trouble to find ways to force out the child's internal drive and make the child motivated.
After understanding this underlying logic, I stopped nagging and overly caring, just listening, just helping my child to figure out the current situation and try to understand his feelings.
When he told me that he was in a bad state and a little absent-minded in his studies, I "routined" the child like this:
Accept the current state. No one can be engrossed all the time, it's normal to run away, when you run away, don't blame yourself and panic, try to pull your state back, and then reduce the impact of distraction.
After listening to my words, the child will not blame himself so much, his mood will gradually improve, the time between emos will become shorter and shorter, and his interest in learning will become stronger and stronger.
There's a famous saying in psychology: no one can make you blame yourself without your consent.
Yes, most of a child's anxiety and distress stems from their own irrational thoughts and beliefs. But no one can really break you, no one can deny you except yourself, only yourself.
In many cases, it's not that the child doesn't want to be motivated, but that he doesn't have the confidence that he can do it. To put it more bluntly, it is his own cranky thinking and denial of himself that destroys his own ambition.
The premise of letting children take the initiative to learn and let children have self-motivation is that children should have enough confidence to believe that they can do it, instead of doubting themselves and denying themselves from time to time, feeling guilty and self-blaming at every turn, and feeling that they are really vegetables.
From a psychological point of view, children who can manage their emotions and anxiety well can also learn to cope well. Getting enough sleep, exercising, and being tolerant of yourself are all prerequisites for cultivating self-motivation and positive self-feedback.
These days, I often use "VAVE" to talk to myself:
W is retroactive, whose life is this? Who is to blame?
A is to accompany, always remember that it is you who help the child, not to cause trouble and command;
V is the perspective, consider from the child's point of view, and look at the problem in front of him from the overall situation;
E is to explore anxiety and try to touch the anxiety and thoughts in the child's heart by asking questions.
Miraculously, when I do this, my child is getting better at dealing with emotions, adjusting faster and faster, and devoting more and more time to learning.
William James said: The things I agree to focus on constitute my experience.
When parents continue to grow, keep learning, and keep growing up, they can help the child believe that he is capable of doing everything well, that he is in good shape, that some may not be able to do it, but there must be some that can be done.
Isn't that just good enough parents and good enough children?