Is raising a child a gardener or a carpenter?

Sister Xia/Wen

I chatted with a friend recently. She talked about a mother she knew. From the moment the child was born, she designed her future academic and career plans and ran wildly on the road of chicken baby.

From buying a school district with a heavy mortgage, to changing jobs and moving home near the school; From taking her children around to take the entrance examination of prestigious schools to actively taking part in the "selection examination" of off-campus training courses ... As for herself, she also reported various parenting courses, and the whole person exudes a contradictory atmosphere of research, chicken blood and anxiety.

Once, she said to her friend with emotion: I feel tired, too, but people have said that parents are the starting line for children. I don't work hard. Isn't it a drag on my baby I don't want my children to be worthless in the future. It's all because my mother doesn't work hard.

In fact, this mother is the epitome of many parents who are tortured by educational anxiety in China.

What snacks should children eat and what interest remedial classes should they attend; As an adult, control the career planning of children and the choice of life partners.

The ultimate goal of such parents is to force their children to grow up to be their "ideal models".

As long as the child's growth and changes slightly deviate from the predetermined track, parents will be worried that their details will not be done well, thus affecting the child's life.

Can the details of parental rearing really affect a child's life? Is there a universally applicable formula for raising children?

Recently, I read a classic psychological book "Gardener and Carpenter" about the concept of upbringing.

Alison, the author of this book? Gopnik is an internationally recognized authoritative expert on children's learning and development, and he is also the first psychologist who deeply analyzes philosophical issues from the perspective of children's consciousness.

In this book, she uses a lot of classic and creative experiments and studies to help you understand the learning rules behind children's behaviors, and draws the following conclusions:

Compared with the figurative and modular parenting style, the ecological environment created by parents with unconditional love is the most powerful guarantee for children's growth.

In my opinion, the word parents should not point to a goal, such as shaping children into certain types of adults.

For example, taking care of children is like taking care of a garden. Parents should be like gardeners, not carpenters.

As a carpenter, his way of working is to mold the materials into the final product, which should meet the initial expectations. Therefore, accuracy and control are the allies of carpenters.

What a gardener should do-create a protected cultivation space for plants, work hard and be prepared to accept unexpected results-maybe flowers are not the color he originally imagined, and even varieties are not what he thought.

But this uncertainty is also the gardener's happiness and sense of accomplishment.

No plant can be guaranteed to be the highest, the most beautiful or the most lasting. Each plant has its own weaknesses and growth difficulties, but at the same time it has its own beauty and advantages, and it can also adapt to the changeable weather and seasonal environment.

The gardener's job is to create fertile soil, protect the whole ecosystem, and then accept all possible results.

The same is true of raising children.

Good parents may not necessarily turn their children into smart, happy or successful adults, but they can create a new generation of strong, adaptable and resilient people to better cope with the inevitable and unpredictable changes they will face in the future.

We don't want to create a specific child, but accept, respect and appreciate the child's true colors, and provide a loving and safe space so that every child full of infinite possibilities can thrive.

The word education appeared in the late 20th century. With the development of industrial economy, middle-class parents often have to have years of study and work experience before they can have children.

Therefore, after having children, they will naturally apply the patterns they have learned in their studies and work to raising children.

They set clear goals for their children, believing that they can train their children better and better according to their parents' expectations.

From the perspective of evolution, children's unique human abilities, such as learning, invention, creation, tradition, culture and morality, all germinate in the parent-child relationship.

Parents provide a safe environment for the next generation, so that children can freely put forward their own ideas and accept that they will take unexpected actions. This is the picture revealed by evolutionary biology, and it is also the conclusion drawn by the children's development laboratory through empirical research.

It must be admitted that the influence of parents or other caregivers on children is far-reaching and necessary.

However, this is not the same as the traditional parenting theory. The latter claims that every difference in parents' behavior will affect their children's future personality in a directional way.

However, according to her mastery of related research in various disciplines, Gopnik came to a conclusion that would shock many people:

There is no reliable research evidence that there is a long-term, stable and predictable relationship between parents' parenting details, their adult personality and other development achievements.

In other words, can children eat a little junk food properly or should they always "eat healthily"? Should children have fun or do their homework as soon as they get home? Should the child be hugged and comforted immediately when crying? Should children be forced to change their introverted personality?

These parenting details, which make many anxious parents pay careful attention to, can't determine their children's future.

Chaos is the main theme of children's childhood, but it is valuable.

Affected by natural selection and random mutation, human beings will give birth to children with different characteristics. Their personalities, abilities, strengths, weaknesses, intelligence and skills are all different and unpredictable.

For children, if there is a safe and protected environment for them to explore actively, actively and freely in childhood, they can cultivate their ability to adapt to the environment and solve difficulties and prepare for adulthood.

The child's brain is developing, which will produce more nerve connections and be more flexible. One-year-old children have twice as many neural connections as adults. Therefore, there are more possibilities for their intellectual development, and they are more likely to change with the changes in the environment.

And the main providers of this environment are their parents. Parents' unconditional love will make children's exploration move from "disorder" to "order" and have a brand-new adult ability-a brand-new "control system".

The longer children are allowed to "waste" their childhood, the more likely they are to develop their abilities and adapt to unpredictable changes in the future.

Therefore, the most important job for parents is to make good use of this childhood and make their children more diverse.

According to the latest research in anthropology, the most important change in human evolution is not learning to hunt, but the relationship between mother and child, that is, the skills of raising children.

Human children are particularly suitable for learning from others, while adults are particularly suitable for caring for and educating children. These facts have played a very important role in the success of human evolution.

Compared with other animals, human childhood is much longer, and with the evolution of human beings, childhood has become longer and longer, which is closely related to larger brain, higher intelligence, stronger flexibility and stronger learning ability.

In other words, in this long childhood, adults have invested a lot of time and energy to take care of their children. Correspondingly, children can also have larger relative brain capacity, stronger learning ability and adaptability to the environment than any other creature.

Childhood is for learning, but children's learning is far more than just listening to what their parents say or doing what their parents want them to do.

Children will learn the culture and skills of the previous generation, but they will not copy them completely, otherwise human beings will never make progress. Children's initial small differences in social learning will expand rapidly, and eventually they will evolve into huge differences in this person's thoughts and life in adulthood.

As parents, we should allow these differences to exist and develop, instead of deliberately "carefully" cultivating children according to a model. Only in this way can children survive better when the environment changes.

Every child is a natural learning expert and a visionary parent. He will not let his children enter the adult learning mode too early, and will not set limits for his children with the adult thinking mode.

Parents should get out of the traditional misunderstanding of parenting. Raising children is not a formula. The specific parenting model is not the key to solve the challenges brought by environmental changes. Good parent-child relationship between parents and children is the only magic weapon to face challenges.

Children are natural learners, but this kind of learning is rarely achieved through deliberate teaching.

The relationship between a child and his caregivers is very suitable for cultural learning.

Children will not be passively shaped by others, they will actively interpret and understand other people's information, and combine this information with their own experience in a complicated way, and then gradually understand the physical environment of the world, the psychological characteristics and social attributes of people around them.

The first common form is imitation, that is, "learning while watching", which is also the most effective form of causal learning for infants.

Children's imitation is also selective. They don't imitate any behavior, but imitate the behavior that leads to interesting results. They will approach their goals and intentions by adjusting their behavior and considering statistical data and probability factors.

For parents, this means that you don't want to order your children to do what we say, but what we do. In the process of doing it, parents can consciously slow down and exaggerate their actions, so that children can see more clearly and learn through observation and imitation.

The second way is familiar to parents. They talk to their children, read to them, and let them "learn while listening", which will also be beneficial to the parent-child relationship between you.

In families that talk to children more, children are more willing to talk and have a larger vocabulary.

The latest research shows that children who always ask "why" don't simply attract their parents' attention, but really want answers, good explanations and learn from them.

For children, they are very sensitive to whether their questions are fully answered.

When children don't get a clear answer, they will ask another question or repeat it until they get an effective answer, then they will agree, and then use the next question to elaborate, distinguish or ask more details.

Therefore, parents should ask their children more "why", handle their children's "why" and try to give them a "best answer" that can reveal the causal relationship, so as to help them understand the world from a deeper and broader perspective.

In addition, if the source of information is different and the content is completely opposite, then the child will choose a caregiver who trusts her more. In other words, the attachment pattern determines who children trust more.

Therefore, the foundation of a stable and safe love is more important than the details of speaking and teaching methods.

The third way is to learn while playing. Children naturally like to play, which most parents will agree with, and vaguely feel that encouraging play is a good parenting skill.

Biologists have also come to the conclusion through research, emphasizing five characteristics of play:

Play is not work.

Have a good time.

Play is voluntary.

Play is different from other basic desires, such as the need for food, water or warmth.

The game has a special structure, a pattern of repetition and change.

Playing is not only a child's nature, but also of great significance to the shaping of children's brains, which can help children develop their brains better.

Experiments show that babies are born to be "scientists" because when they see evidence contrary to their own theories, they will be attracted to do experiments, which are carried out in the form of play.

In addition, babies will develop their hypothetical or counterfactual thinking ability through the unique game mode of human beings-"pretending", that is, the ability to think about other ways that the world may exist, which is the core of human beings' powerful learning ability.

Children who love to pretend are better at trying to figure out other people's ideas, easier to understand others, and their minds will develop more perfectly. /kloc-the period from 0/8 months to 5 years old is an important period for developing this ability.

Since play is so important, what adults should do is-don't interfere with them, and don't always try to make children feel the meaning.

For example, adults can guide children to discover the secrets of toys, but don't always teach them how to play with toys, which will hinder children from discovering all other possibilities that toys can provide.

Let children play spontaneously, casually and independently, which is helpful to children's learning ability.

By school-age children, their learning style is learning and practicing, and their evolutionary goal has changed from "exploratory learning" to "mastery learning". They need to practice and master special skills in their own culture, especially social skills. Schools and families are important learning places.

At this stage, the task of adults is to take care of them and provide them with a safe environment.

By puberty, children will no longer experience exploring the world in a safe environment, but try to leave the protected environment and really take action on their own.

What adults can do at this time is to unify a more abstract and socialized environment for adolescent children, instead of preventing them from participating in the stressful and busy experiments of adult life.

Raising children is the most basic, profound and precious part of human engineering.

The correct educational idea is not to cultivate grass into a towering tree, but to follow its growth law, provide it with a good ecological environment as much as possible, and cultivate grass into a beautiful and healthy grass.

Being a parent is the art of finding balance in a series of contradictions.

When we no longer regard children as parents' accessories, no longer worry about comparing children with "other people's children", no longer regard parent-child relationship as a tool to seek benefits, and expect to get the return from children in the future, but give them unconditional love and establish a beautiful relationship of mutual respect and trust with them, then many parent-child problems that have plagued us for a long time may be solved.

The essence of education is not to fill the basket, but to light the lamp. This is probably the biggest responsibility that parents can do.

Above.

"A suggestion"

Gardeners and carpenters

Alison gopnik

Translated by Liu Jiajie Zhao Yukun.

Zhejiang People Publishing House

author

Sister Xia

Senior TV person, variety artist

Love all gossip and always be curious about the world.

Cat slaves, gourmets and shoppers.