Sort out and share the stories of four college students:
Student 1: I am a top student in the senior high school entrance examination. My parents are very successful people. My mother is a teacher, and I am the head of the school in the system. My father is also a teacher. Later I left the system and started my own business. I am very successful in this industry. My parents didn't neglect their children because of their own career, but they paid special attention to their children's education, mainly my father, who accompanied their children to practice martial arts, read classics and learn from them, gave them a lot of encouragement and affirmation, and kept up with their previous teachers. After children go to college, they are addicted to games. In his sophomore year, his father left his hometown to accompany him to Beijing. Later, the child graduated and went to graduate school, but there is still a big gap from Excellence.
The teasing teacher said that the biggest touch this child gave her was that she learned a lot about his growth experience and his parenting style through communication with his father. My feeling at that time was, why is there such a great way of raising?
Teasing the teacher said: This child's experience deeply touched my thinking about raising children. Raising children is really not as easy as imagined, and there is no one-size-fits-all method. Sometimes you will find that the final result of raising a child is futile. No matter what you do, he remains the same.
At that time, I had an idea that maybe the correct way to raise children is not to raise them deliberately, but to conform to their own growth trajectory. We just need to provide food, clothing, housing and transportation and a fairly harmonious family according to instinct.
This story also gave me a lot of thinking, how complicated and unique people are. No pains, no gains. If the seeds of soybeans grow, only soybeans will grow. But people are different. Although they all belong to human beings, everyone will be very different. There will be some similarities between genes and heredity, but there are countless cells that are different. These cells change all the time, so we often sigh: how did this person become like this? We look at a person with a fixed or linear growth thinking. Excellent people are always excellent, even better. If excellent people become poor, they will find it difficult to understand. How can thin plants grow in fertile soil?
I read a book called The Myth of Education many years ago, which really shocked me. For example, the most shocking point in the book is that parents' upbringing cannot determine the growth of children, and the socialization of children is not completed by parents.
The following part (in bold) is taken from a book review of a book club:
Judith Harris challenges the most popular parenting view: the "parenting hypothesis".
The subtitle of this book is: Can parenting style determine a child's personality development? The answer given by Harris is that parents will not have a lasting influence on their children's character, nor will they have an influence on their behavior after leaving home.
This runs counter to the view that children are replicas of their parents, parents are their best teachers, family education is more important than school education, and a child can tell what his parents are like behind them. I read the book with suspicion and shock, but after reading it, I felt justified.
What is the "breeding hypothesis" criticized by Harris? "Parenting hypothesis" refers to the view that besides genes, the main factor affecting children's development is parents' parenting style. At present, most parenting theories and books on the market are based on this assumption.
The most prominent assumption of parenting is that the child is a blank sheet of paper, and there is no difference between all babies at the moment of birth. The reason why there will be people with different personalities when they grow up is because of the upbringing of their parents. Parental rearing patterns in infancy have a nearly decisive influence on the formation of children's character.
One of the most extreme examples of implementing the parenting hypothesis theory is the experiment of behaviorist master John Watson. He once boasted, "Give me a dozen healthy babies and let me raise them in a specific world." I promise to choose one at random and train him to be the expert I want him to be. "Fortunately, he didn't really give him a group of such treasures. His greatest achievement was to make an orphan named Albert afraid of everything fluffy, including Santa Claus.
Maybe you will say that the above views are too extreme to agree with the baby's whiteboard theory. Take the baby as an example. Some babies are in high demand. Other children can get enough sleep in a few months. Your child has to get up three or four times a night when he is one year old. Well, since you don't agree with the baby's whiteboard theory, do you agree with the following parenting assumptions?
1. If parents are honest, friendly and considerate to their children, their children will be honest, friendly and considerate. That is, how parents do, how children learn, and children will completely imitate all the behaviors of their parents. Therefore, if the child's behavior is found to be problematic, it must be because the parents themselves have not done well.
2. If parents often beat and scold their children at home, then the children will be afraid in front of their parents, and when they grow up, they will feel insecure in interpersonal communication and be passive to others, such as Nuo Nuo. Therefore, parents should not beat and scold their children, but encourage them to become confident and optimistic.
If parents don't provide their children with a complete home, most of them will have a bad life when they grow up. -This is more common. Many couples whose feelings are broken are not divorced because of "children".
4. A lot of pain you are experiencing now, such as inferiority complex, fear of talking to others, and fear of expressing your thoughts, are all caused by the family you came from. It is because of the "authoritarian" atmosphere created by your parents at home that you should listen to your parents' opinions in everything and let them arrange your life. They are guilty. It's their fault.
I firmly believe that parents can cultivate and shape their children into what they expect through certain parenting methods.
……
Which views do you agree with listed above? Do you think parents have a vital, irreversible and absolute influence on children's socialization?
Harris strongly questioned this view. She thinks that the biggest influence of parents on their children is heredity. She doesn't believe that studying at home will affect children's future behavior norms. She thinks that what she learned at home has nothing to do with the outside world.
Although The Myth of Education is a challenge to the educational hypothesis, we should never think that it is unnecessary to discipline children because of the conclusion that "the greatest influence of parents on children comes from genetic inheritance" and "the influence of parents is far less than that of their peers". "Anyway, how I treat my child will not affect his character building. My words and deeds have no influence on him." If you think so, you are going to the other extreme.
Denying the parenting hypothesis does not mean denying the influence of parents on their children. The ideas in this book are more like a spell to solve the "parenting hypothesis", so that parents will no longer deeply blame themselves for their children's untimely behavior and somewhat maverick personality, and take all the responsibilities on themselves. Let parents no longer have the idea that they must shape their children into what they expect.
This book criticizes "using the parenting hypothesis as a weapon to accuse ordinary parents because their children have not grown up according to their parents' wishes." In this case, the parenting hypothesis may still hold true for a few particularly terrible families (such as child abuse).
What can parents do after knowing the above views? Here are some suggestions:
First of all, parents have the right to choose their children's peers, which is one of the ways they decide their children's future life. Although the influence of parents on children's friendship will decrease with the growth of children's age, at least in children's childhood, parents can decide who their children's companions are.
Secondly, if children have the lowest status in a group, they will be bullied by children with high status. Parents can take actions to change this situation, such as changing schools or moving.
Thirdly, parents will influence their children's behavior at home and provide them with knowledge and training so that they can cope with the outside world after leaving home. What kind of behavior children will keep in the end is not for parents to decide.
Finally, although parents can't decide how the outside world treats their children, they have great power to decide whether their children are happy at home.
Love your children because they are cute, not because you think they need love. Enjoy raising children and teach them everything you know. Relax, they will never show your concern for them. You can neither make them perfect nor destroy them. They belong to tomorrow.
Looking back on the story of the first student shared by the teacher, I have a deep understanding of the views in the myth of parenting.