Parents should provide emotional guidance and education to their children. This is the foundation for the intimate relationship between parents and children throughout their lives.
What is emotional guidance?
The essence of emotional guidance is to allow children to express their emotions freely and easily without any repression or denial.
So parents should:
1. Pay close attention to any emotions that children want to express, and regard the most difficult moments for children to discipline as a good opportunity to understand them.
2. Enrich children's emotional vocabulary by listening to their children's voices and retelling them.
3. Mobilize the child's internal initiative, rather than relying on external rewards to correct behavior.
At the same time, parents should avoid the following methods:
1. Control the child or let the child go;
For example, if the child is making a big fuss at home, control parents will forcibly stop the child's behavior by orders, threats or tantrums, which is called controlling the child; some parents will only shake their heads helplessly in the face of this situation and let the child turn the world upside down. This is letting the child go. Neither is desirable. From a long-term perspective, whether it is threats and punishments or letting go, it will not make children a responsible person.
2. Ignore and deny the child's feelings;
For example, if the child is hungry, parents tell their children that they are not hungry, how can they be hungry after eating? The child fell and cried out in pain. The parents told the child that it didn’t hurt and should be brave. The result of doing this is disrespect for the child, which will make the child feel that his parents do not understand him. So they no longer rely on or expect their parents to help them, which will lead to their children not knowing how to put themselves in their shoes when they grow up.
3. Use external incentives as rewards or negative consequences as punishments;
This is a common method for most parents to control their children. However, there are some problems. This makes the child's motivation to do something is because he wants to get a reward or is afraid of getting a punishment, and ignores the motivation to do the thing itself. Let children study hard because of the fun and importance of learning, not because their parents will take them to the amusement park after studying well; letting children not make big fuss in public is because they need to respect others, not only because parents will punish them if they do so.
Educating children requires long-term and slow guidance. There are many immediate educational skills and behavioral methods promoted by so-called "education experts" that are ineffective in the long run.
Finally, share a sentence from Katherine Walls, chairman of the International Family and Children Network: "Do you want your child to follow your advice out of fear of you, or do you listen to your advice out of love and respect for you?"
#Family Education ##Parent-child Education
