Why not bring up children?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Everyone knows how to bring up other people's children, - the saying goes.

Yulia Borisovna Gippenreiter, a well-known psychologist, professor at Moscow State University and author of popular books on parent-child relationships, refuted this opinion. She does not provide advice or guidance. She just turns the familiar world upside down and looks at what happens. We present you the text of the meeting between the psychologist and the parents.

A child is a complex creature

Parents' concerns center around how to raise a child. Alexei Nikolaevich Rudakov (professor of mathematics, husband of Yu. B. - Ed.) And I have also professionally engaged in this in recent years. But you can't be a professional in this business, at all. Because raising a child is a spiritual work and an art, I am not afraid to say this. Therefore, when I have a chance to meet with my parents, I do not want to lecture at all, and I myself do not like it when they teach me how to do it.

I think teaching is generally a bad noun, especially about how to raise a child. It is worth thinking about upbringing, thoughts about it need to be shared, they need to be discussed.

I propose to think together about this very difficult and honorable mission - to bring up children. I already know from experience and meetings, and the questions that they ask me that the case often rests on simple things. “How to make the child learn his homework, put away toys so that he can eat with a spoon, and not put his fingers on the plate, and how to get rid of his tantrums, disobedience, how to make sure that he is not rude, etc. etc."

There are no unequivocal answers to this. A child is a very complex creature, and a parent is even more so. When a child and a parent, and also grandmothers interact, it turns out a complex system in which thoughts, attitudes, emotions, habits are twisted. Moreover, the attitudes are sometimes wrong and harmful, there is no knowledge, understanding of each other.

How can you make your child want to learn? Yes, in no way, not to force. How can you not force to love. So let's talk about more general things first. There are cardinal principles, or cardinal knowledge, that I would like to share.

Without distinguishing between play and work

You need to start with the kind of person you want your child to grow up to. Of course, everyone has an answer in mind: happy and successful. What does successful mean? There is some uncertainty here. What is a successful person?

Nowadays, it is generally accepted that success is to have money. But the rich also cry, and a person can become successful in the material sense, but will he have a prosperous emotional life, that is, a good family, a good mood? Is not a fact. So "happiness" is very important: maybe a happy person who hasn't climbed very high socially or financially? Maybe. And then you have to think about which pedals you need to press in raising a child so that he grows up happy.

I would like to start from the end - with successful, happy adults. About half a century ago, such successful, happy adults were explored by the psychologist Maslow. As a result, several unexpected things came to light. Maslow began to research special people among his acquaintances, as well as biographies and literature. The peculiarity of his subjects was that they lived very well. In some intuitive sense, they got satisfaction out of life. Not just pleasure, because pleasure can be very primitive: getting drunk, going to bed is also a kind of pleasure. The satisfaction was of a different kind - the people studied were very fond of living and working in their chosen profession or field, they enjoyed life. Here I remember Pasternak's lines: "Alive, alive and only, alive and only, to the end." Maslow noted that according to this parameter, when a person who is actively living is striking, there is a whole range of other properties. These people are optimists. They are benevolent - when a person is alive, he is not angry or envious, they communicate very well, they, in general, do not have a very large circle of friends, but they are loyal, they are good friends, and they are good friends, communicate, they love deeply and they are deeply loved in family relationships or romantic relationships. When they work, they seem to be playing; they do not distinguish between work and play. Working, they play, they play, they work. They have very good self-esteem, not overestimated, they are not outstanding, they do not stand above other people, but they treat themselves with respect. Would you like to live like this? I would like. Would you like a child to grow up like that? Undoubtedly.

For fives - a ruble, for deuces - a whip

The good news is that babies are born with this potential. Children have a potential not only psychophysiological in the form of a certain mass of the brain. Children have vitality, creative power. I will remind you of Tolstoy's very often spoken words that a child from five years old to me takes one step, from one to five years old he walks a huge distance. And from birth to one year, the child crosses the abyss. The vital force drives the development of the child, but for some reason we take it for granted: he is already taking objects, he has already smiled, he is already making sounds, has already got up, has already walked, has already begun to speak.

If we draw a curve of human development, then at first it goes up steeply, then it slows down, and here we are - adults, does it stop somewhere? Maybe she even falls down.

To be alive is not to stop, much less to fall. In order for the life curve to grow up in adulthood, you need to support the child's vital forces at the very beginning. Give him the freedom to develop.

This is where the difficulty begins - what does freedom mean? An educational note immediately begins: “he does what he wants”. Therefore, there is no need to put the question like that. A child wants a lot, he climbs into all the cracks, to touch everything, to take everything in his mouth, his mouth is a very important organ of cognition. The child wants to climb everywhere, from everywhere, well, not to fall, but at least to test his strength, climb and get off, it can be awkward, break something, break something, throw something, get dirty in something, climb into puddle and so on. In these tests, in all these aspirations, he develops, they are necessary.

The saddest thing is that it can fade away. Curiosity fades if the child is told not to ask stupid questions: if you grow up, you will find out. You can also say: stop doing stupid things, you would be better …

Our participation in the development of the child, in the growth of his curiosity, can extinguish the child's desire for development. We give not what the child needs now. Maybe we demand something from him. When a child shows resistance, we extinguish it too. It is truly awful to extinguish a person's resistance.

Parents often ask how I feel about punishment. Punishment arises when I, a parent, want one thing, and the child wants another, and I want to push him through. If you do not do it according to my will, then I will punish you or feed you: for fives - a ruble, for deuces - a whip.

Children's self-development should be treated very carefully. Now the methods of early development, early reading, early preparation for school have begun to spread. But children must play before school! Those adults I spoke about at the beginning, Maslow called them self-actualizers - they play all their lives.

One of the self-actualizers (judging by his biography), Richard Feynman is a physicist and Nobel Prize winner. In my book I describe how Feynman's father, a simple work clothes merchant, raised the future laureate. He went for a walk with the child and asked: why do you think birds clean their feathers? Richard replies - they straighten their feathers after the flight. The father says - look, those who arrived and those who were sitting are straightening their feathers. Yes, says Feynman, my version is wrong. Thus, the father raised curiosity in his son. When Richard Feynman grew up a little bit, he entangled his house with wires, making electrical circuits, and made all kinds of bells, serial and parallel connections of light bulbs, and then he began to repair tape recorders in his district, at the age of 12. Already an adult physicist tells about his childhood: “I played all the time, I was very interested in everything around, for example, why water comes from the tap. I thought, along what curve, why there is a curve - I do not know, and I began to calculate it, it must have been calculated a long time ago, but what did it matter!"

When Feynman became a young scientist, he was working on the atomic bomb project, and now a period came when his head seemed empty. “I thought: I’m probably already exhausted,” the scientist recalled later. - At that moment, in the cafe where I was sitting, a student threw a plate to another, and it spins and sways on his finger, and the fact that it spins and at what speed was obvious because there was a drawing at the bottom of it … And I noticed that it spins 2 times faster than it sways. I wonder what the relationship is between rotation and wobble. I began to think, figured out something, shared it with a professor, a major physicist. He says: yes, an interesting consideration, but why do you need this? It’s just like that, out of interest, I answer. He shrugged. But this did not make an impression on me, I began to think and apply this rotation and vibration when working with atoms. As a result, Feynman made a major discovery, for which he received the Nobel Prize. It started with a plate that the student threw in a cafe. This reaction is a childish perception that the physicist retained. He did not slow down in his liveliness.

Let your child do it himself

Let's get back to our kids. How can we help them so as not to slow down their liveliness. After all, many talented teachers thought about this, for example, Maria Montessori. Montessori said: do not interfere, the child is doing something, let him do it, do not intercept anything from him, no action, not tying shoelaces, or climbing on a chair. Do not tell him, do not criticize, these amendments kill the desire to do something. Let the child do some work on his own. There should be great respect for the child, for his tests, for his efforts.

Our acquaintance mathematician led a circle with preschoolers and asked them a question: what is more in the world, quadrangles, squares or rectangles? It is clear that there are more quadrangles, fewer rectangles, and even fewer squares. Children 4-5 years old all said in unison that there are more squares. The teacher smirked, gave them time to think and left them alone. A year and a half later, at the age of 6, his son (he attended the circle) said: "Dad, we answered incorrectly then, there are more quadrangles." Questions are more important than answers. Do not rush to give answers, do not rush to do anything for the child.

No need to raise a child

Children and parents in learning, if we are talking about schools, suffer from a lack of motivation. Children do not want to learn and do not understand. Much is not understood, but learned. You know by yourself that when you read a book, you don't want to memorize it. It is important for us to grasp the essence, to live and experience in our own way. The school does not give this, the school requires to learn from now the paragraph.

You cannot understand physics or mathematics for a child, and rejection of the exact sciences often grows out of a child's misunderstanding. I watched a boy, who, while sitting in a bath, penetrated the secret of multiplication: “Oops! I realized that multiplication and addition are the same thing. Here are three cells and three cells under them, it's like I folded three and three, or I put three and two times! - for him it was a complete discovery.

What happens to children and parents when the child does not understand the problem? It begins: how can you not, read it again, you see the question, write down the question, you still need to write it down. Well, think for yourself - but he doesn't know how to think. If there is a misunderstanding and a situation of learning the text instead of penetrating into the essence, this is wrong, it is not interesting, self-esteem suffers from this, because mom and dad are angry, and I am a goon. As a result: I don’t want to do this, I’m not interested, I won’t.

How to help a child here? Observe where he doesn't understand and what he understands. We were told that it was very difficult to teach arithmetic in a school for adults in Uzbekistan, and when the students were selling watermelons, they put everything together correctly. This means that when a child does not understand something, one must proceed from his practical understandable things that are interesting to him. And there he will put everything down, he will understand everything. So you can help a child without teaching him, not in a school-like manner.

When it comes to schools, the educational methods are mechanical - a textbook and an exam. Motivation disappears not only from misunderstanding, but from “must”. A common misfortune for parents when aspiration is replaced by duty.

Life begins with desire, desire disappears - life disappears. One must be an ally in the desires of the child. Let me give you an example of the mother of a 12-year-old girl. The girl does not want to study and go to school, she does her homework with scandals only when her mother comes home from work. Mom went to a radical decision - left her alone. The girl lasted half a week. She couldn’t even stand it for a week. And my mother said: stop, I don’t come to your school affairs, I don’t check notebooks, it’s only your business. Passed, as she said, about a month, and the question was closed. But for a week my mother was distressed that she could not come up and ask.

It turns out, starting from the age when the child climbs onto the highchair, the child hears - and let me give you a lift. Further in school, the parents continue to control, and if not, they will criticize the child. If the children do not obey, then we will punish them, and if they obey, they will become boring and lack of initiative. An obedient child can graduate from school with a gold medal, but he is not interested in living. That happy, successful person whom we drew at the beginning will not work. Although mom or dad approached their educational functions very responsibly. Therefore, I sometimes say that there is no need to bring up a child.