Learning to appreciate children’s imperfections, recognize their children’s efforts, and affirm their children’s contributions is a required course for parents throughout their lives.
Parents’ long-term demands for perfection put endless pressure on their children, which finally overwhelmed him one day.
At the end of last year, when the mother was tutoring her child, the child suddenly twitched and fell to the ground. It took a few minutes for the child to return to normal.
Since then, the child has frequently fallen to the ground and twitched, up to dozens of times a day.
Later, the parents took the child to the doctor and he was diagnosed with dissociative (conversion) disorder.
The child will break down whenever he hears words like reading, writing, and holding a pen. Even when the doctor gave him a personality test, he cried bitterly because he was afraid that he would have to do homework again.
What is even more suffocating is that when the child was first hospitalized, the mother would occasionally check the child to recite the multiplication table.
The father even hopes that his child will recover immediately after receiving treatment and continue to study.
Even hospital medical staff feel that the pressure parents put on their children is too heavy.
Parents pursue “perfection” and constantly force their children to do their best, but they forget that every child has a limit to what he can bear.
Demanding perfection is the heaviest yoke on children.
The fastest way to ruin a child is to pursue perfection
Yu Minhong told a true story in the educational charity lecture of “Half Moon Talk”.
There was a child who scored 638 points in the college entrance examination, which was already a very high score among the college entrance examinations that year.
Although I can’t get into Peking University, there are still a lot of 985 colleges to choose from.
But when his parents saw that their child had missed out on Peking University, they kept criticizing him:
“You see, I usually tell you to be careful, tell you to be attentive, and tell you not to be careless.”
“The college entrance examination is only a lifetime opportunity, and the opportunity to enter Peking University is lost!”
“If you don’t listen to your parents, it’s over, you’ll lose this opportunity!”
Every sentence touches the heart.
Parents only see their own disappointment and unwillingness, but ignore this kind of denial and accusation, which will make their children feel like a complete loser.
Within a week, the child suffered from schizophrenia.
The pressure of studying did not break him down, but the accusations from his parents made him completely collapse.
The child really tried his best, and they held their sincerity carefully, hoping that their parents could see his efforts and seriousness.
However, parents only see the result of failure, but cannot see the scarred and exhausted child.
A friend also told me a heartbreaking story.
His neighbor’s son has excellent grades and is always in the top ten in grade.
But his parents are still dissatisfied and hope that their child will be in the top three of his grade.
Therefore, I would rather save my own money and enroll my children in various cram schools.
My son is very sensible when he sees how hard his parents are working.
Listen carefully in class at school, and attend cram school classes no matter what the weather.
But no matter how hard the child worked, he could not get into the top three grades.
Seeing her son’s failure, his mother began to scold him:
“You’re just a useless person who can’t stand up to the wall. You’ve wasted so much of my money!”
“Is there something wrong with your brain? I spent so much money on you but you still can’t pass the exam.”
Occasionally if he didn’t do well in an exam, his father would give him a severe beating to make him remember.
Originally a sunny and smiling boy, he became taciturn and very gloomy.
Gradually, he became violent and cruel.
As long as he was scolded or beaten at home, he would take it out on stray dogs and cats outside. From beating to killing, he would become more violent each time.
Behind the children’s absurd behavior reflects the sadness of family education.
Children are eager to become better than anyone else because they are very eager to be recognized by their parents and praised by people around them.
But many parents just try to force their children into a perfect mold and cut out anything that doesn’t fit the mold.
“The best way to ruin a man is to make him pursue perfection.”
Being too harsh on a child is equivalent to pushing him into an abyss.
Behind the “perfect” child is deep depression.
Seeing is the beginning of education.
The book “Mother’s Letter of Repentance” tells a true story.
There is a mother in South Korea who has always wanted to raise her children to be academic masters that everyone would envy. To this end, she has very strict requirements for her children.
Her son likes to play drums, but she said: “If I have time to learn to play drums, I might as well go to a cram school.”
When her son got first place in the school and came home happily with his report card, she would only frown and blame:
“Chinese language has improved, but why has mathematics regressed?
Do you know how expensive your cram school is?
With results like yours, you wouldn’t even be ranked in the middle of a prestigious school. “
When my daughter was in first grade, she often had stomachaches and vomiting. After going to the doctor, the doctor said that the child had neurogenic gastritis and enteritis.
Not only did the mother not believe it, she also mocked her daughter:
“You’re just pretending to be sick! What kind of neurological gastritis? You don’t want to go to school so you have to pretend to be sick?”
The mother only focused on her children’s performance rankings and turned a blind eye to their children’s mental and physical health, which broke the hearts of both children.
In the end, the son forced his mother into a corner and asked her to sign an application for suspension of school. The daughter collapsed and hid in her room and harmed herself.
Later, both children dropped out of school, hid in their rooms all day, and their temperaments became as cold as ice.
The mother was sick, and the two children sneered and said she was showing off.
The mother was in a car accident, and the child only called the father to inform him and never visited the hospital once.
The mother regretted it, but the child already regarded the mother as an enemy and had only infinite hatred for her.
Children, step by step towards perfection, are also emptying their hearts bit by bit.
Later, she began to learn to change.
She no longer forces her children to go to school or take first place in exams, but instead asks her children:
“Is there anything you want to do? Even if you don’t study or go to university, that’s fine.”
The daughter didn’t want to talk to her mother at first, but after repeatedly confirming that her mother wouldn’t scold her, she told her mother that she wanted to bake pastries.
My mother didn’t like this answer, but she still respected her child’s ideas, let her daughter learn baking, and took the initiative to share her daughter’s pastries with people around her.
Although my daughter did not actually study baking later, she found her own direction in the process.
My daughter took the initiative to return to school and eventually went to the United States to study psychology.
The son also solved the knot with his mother and was admitted to a pretty good art university. After graduation, he began to study for a graduate degree in philosophy.
Although the two children did not go to a prestigious school as she had hoped, nor did they have a high-paying job, they all lived seriously in the way they liked.
As a mother, she feels incredibly grateful.
The purpose of educating children is to make our children as good as possible.
But this is just a positive expectation that parents have for their children, a gentle guidance, not a necessity.
Accepting and seeing children are the nutrients children need most on their way to growth.
Excellence is an abstract concept and what parents expect from their children, but it cannot be used to judge a living person.
As parents, what we should pay more attention to is not excellence, but the children standing in front of us.
Truly wise parents allow their children to have flaws and accept their imperfections.
Sometimes, when we learn to take a step back, our children will give us different surprises.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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