Stick to it and

You will feel a lot.

Positive maternal love is a process of gradual separation

In the compound where I lived as a child, there was a boy named Xiao Si. There are three girls in Xiaosi's family, and he is the only boy. His mother dotes on him very much. His mother is illiterate. In my impression, she is a little timid. She seems to talk to people very little. She just buys food and cooks every day. I heard that his mother suddenly became very strong after the fourth grade grew up and began to talk about marriage. First, she disagreed with the two objects that Xiao Si talked about. When Xiao Si didn't listen to her, she hanged herself by drinking medicine, which was very fierce.

Later, Xiao Si finally compromised and married a girl in his mother's eye. His mother's love for his daughter-in-law soon changed from death to death. In addition to provoking the relationship between Xiao Si and his wife, he often finds various excuses to detain Xiao Si here and prevent him from going back to his home. Xiao Si insisted on going back, so his mother often found a reason to follow him and stayed at Xiao Si's house at night. At that time, Xiao Si lived in a small bungalow with only a small kang, and his mother slept on a small kang with her son and daughter-in-law. After the birth of Xiao Si's child, his mother found out all kinds of reasons not to let Xiao Si be with his daughter-in-law.

One day, when the child was more than two years old, Xiao Si disappeared, leaving only a six-word note for his daughter-in-law: "I'm leaving, so keep the change." Twenty years have passed, and Xiao Si has never appeared again. No one knows whether he is dead or alive. His mother died a few years after he disappeared. It's hard to imagine what she would have thought before she died. Every time I think of Grade Four, our childhood playmate, his innocent and naughty appearance as a child, and his decisive departure at the age of 25, I am extremely disappointed, sighing that maternal love may be a palace or a prison.

I don't want to make a humanistic and ethical analysis of the mother of Grade Four here. I just want to use this extreme story to draw a common and very important but often neglected parenting rule: the affection between mother and child should be long and full, but the participation in children's life must decrease. Strong maternal love is not a permanent possession of children, but a decent exit.

The first task of maternal love is to be intimate with children and care for their growth; The second task is to separate from children and promote their independence. A mother-child encounter is the deepest fate in life, and deep affection only becomes true in this drifting away. If the mother does it in the wrong order, she is doing something unnatural, which not only makes the child's childhood barren, but also suffocates the child's adult life.

Mothers should not expand their functions

Once, the mother of a junior high school student asked me for advice. Her confusion was that she felt more and more unfamiliar with her son who had already entered junior high school. As soon as her son came home, she closed the door of her room. She wanted to know more about her son. She didn't knock at the door when she entered his room. In fact, she made a surprise attack to inspect the post. My son was very unhappy about this. He protested several times, but his mother didn't listen. My son posted a "No admittance" on the door of his room.

It hurts to be a mother. She feels that she is trying to love her children, but she has become a "idle person" in her son's eyes, and she feels lost in her heart. She said, I'll knock on the door at his request before entering, but I'm still worried. In case the child really doesn't know anything about what to do, how can I help him and educate him in the future?

Parents who hold this way of thinking are used to expanding their functions and are not used to adjusting their behavior boundaries with their children's growth. Children in kindergarten really need their parents to come and take care of them from time to time when they are alone in a room, but does a junior high school student need such care? As can be seen from the mother's words, her worry is just what the child "in case" does. What might this "in case" be? Playing games? Chatting with female classmates? Go to pornographic websites? Masturbation? No matter what, which one needs to be suddenly pushed in to solve?

Parents who like to cross the border always show great concern for their children and care about everything. In fact, he has no children in his eyes, but he just expresses his distrust and disrespect for them in disguise. Although they are all under the banner of "care" and "education", they are always boring. Children will not experience love and education from them, but will only experience being violated.

Self-respecting parents don't deliberately try to get hold of their children, and they are also ashamed to face their children's embarrassment. He wants to protect the child's face and refuses to lower his self-cultivation. Such a state of mind naturally creates a reasonable distance between parents and children and begins to separate appropriately.

the so-called "separation" is not to give up caring for children slowly, but to adjust the way of caring slowly. No mother will know exactly when she should "separate" from her child, just as she will not find out when her child is taller than her. Growth and change are accompanied by children every day, and separation is always accompanied.

From the time the child leaves the mother's body, the whole growth process is a constant separation: eating alone from the RU room, walking independently from the arms, going out alone from the guardianship, making money from supporting oneself, developing oneself from domination, and forming another family from the family-parents quit from the role of the first intimate person, giving way to the child's partner and his own child, becoming "outsiders" from "parties", and finally, parents complete their life journey.

We can even understand that growth and separation are the primary and secondary descriptions of the same thing. Growth refers to the change of children, and separation refers to the adjustment of the role importance of parents around this change. Parents' participation in their children's lives is gradually decreasing, and the scope of their roles is gradually narrowing, so as to make room for their children's lives. In a sound mother-child relationship, this is a very normal psychological adjustment.

For example, when my daughter was young, almost all dads were jealous when they were holding their lovely daughters, thinking about which young boy would dare to take my daughter and break his legs in the future! But when my daughter is slim and graceful after 2 years, and she is holding hands with a young man, the father who is left out in the cold will be full of joy, glad that her daughter has grown up and has her own life, and someone can love her instead of herself, so she can worry less.

Philosopher Fromm is one of the best thinkers to analyze the relationship between mother and child. He thinks: "The real essence of maternal love is to care about the growth of children, that is, to hope that children will be separated from themselves. This reflects the fundamental difference between maternal love and sexual AI. In sex, two people who are originally separated become one; In maternal love, two people who are one are separated into two. A mother must tolerate separation, and she must hope and support her children to be separated from her.

It is at this stage that maternal love becomes a very difficult task, which requires selflessness, giving everything and asking for nothing but the happiness of the loved one.

It is also at this stage that many mothers fail to fulfill the task of maternal love. Narcissism, domineering and possessiveness make women become a mother who loves their children only when they are young. It is actually easy to love young children. The test of whether a mother really has the ability to love depends on whether she is willing to separate and continue to love after separation.

love children or control them?

Parents who don't know how to separate should try to keep control of their children even if they are adults and married. They often like to do everything in detail while complaining about their children's incompetence. Such a parent, his subconscious mind does not want his child to be independent, he wants to make himself appear important in his child's life, so he will intentionally or unintentionally create the child's sense of insignificance. Rather than saying that he loves children very much, he loves the kind of comprehensive control over children. This control brings him a sense of accomplishment and strength, which makes him satisfied with himself.

A young mother told me that her parents have always been very strict with her. For example, since she was a child, she loved reading and reading classical novels and history books, but she was often looked down upon and blocked by her parents. They want her to read only textbooks and think it useless to read "casual books" Now that she is married and has children, her father will criticize her for picking up a novel and reading it during the holiday. Why not read a professional book? What is the use of reading novels? The reader said that although she knew that her parents loved her, the feeling of getting along with her parents was "I feel like living in hell"!

people who are not arranged may find it hard to imagine the pain of being over-arranged. I once received a letter from a reader, the writer was also a young woman, and the final signature was "a desperate man". In her letter, she stated the pain caused by her mother's endless arrangement, and sent me a letter she had written to her mother, asking me if I should send it to her mother. The letter reads like this:

Since I was a child, you always rushed ahead of me in everything. You did all the things that I should do by myself or learn to do, but you always criticized me, saying that my self-care ability was poor, and even told others that I couldn't do this well and that I wouldn't do it. This led me to have no confidence in what I did. As a result, I really couldn't do anything well, so you have more reason to rush ahead of me. You have been treating me in such an extremely cruel and even cruel way. How can I not feel inferior? How can you take care of yourself? How can you learn to deal with others? Why do you always rush in front of me?

There are only two consequences: either, I finally couldn't bear it one day and committed suicide. Or, in the future, when you are old, you will die before me, leaving me alone, unable to cook, buy clothes, bargain, deal with people and protect myself ... and finally die tragically. In a word, you are driving me to the wall! (In the original letter, the girl used more than twenty exclamation points here! )

If parents stubbornly occupy their children's life space, their children's world can only be narrow or even incomplete. In fact, the mother who was reduced to a "idle person" in front should be thankful, because her child is still young, and will resist, and dare to openly reject the violation of his freedom by his parents, which shows that the "self" in the child is still relatively strong and his world is relatively complete.

And this girl dared to summon up the courage to write such a letter out of the instinct of self-help, so I approve of her sending this letter to her mother. If the child is completely numb to the control of the parents and loses the guard of the "self" boundary, the injury may be fatal.

Overflowing maternal love is the same as flooding

I once heard a psychologist talk about a young woman who just became a mother who committed suicide. He called this woman Xiao Zhou. Xiao Zhou's job is stable, her husband is decent, her family is well-off, her parents are also very kind to her, and she just had a healthy and lovely child. No one can figure out why she committed suicide.

finally, everyone attributed it to postpartum depression, that is, it is a purely physiological problem. But psychologists don't think so. He indirectly knows a friend of Xiao Zhou's and knows the details of her family life. His judgment is that postpartum depression is only the last straw to crush the camel. Fundamentally, Xiao Zhou died of parents' over-arrangement.

Xiao Zhou has a pair of parents who are very fond of arranging things. Needless to say, when she was in college, she wanted to apply for a school far from home, but her parents didn't agree, forcing her to apply for a university in another city, which is only two hours' train ride from home. In the choice of major, Xiao Zhou was very interested in psychology at that time. His parents said to study finance. We have a way to find someone to arrange a job for you.

Xiao Zhou was very reluctant at that time, so her parents gave her ideological work by carrot and stick, and finally forced Xiao Zhou to submit. Xiao Zhou didn't want to go home on weekends after going to college, so her mother went to her daughter's school by train once a week. Besides bringing a big bag of food, she also brought her washed clothes and sheets, and then brought a big bag of dirty clothes home. After graduation, my father gave me a job, and the object was determined with the help of my parents. All the furniture in the new house, even a wastebasket, was bought by my mother, and there was no room for Xiao Zhou to intervene himself.

after she got married, although there were all kinds of pots and pans at home, she hardly had a party, and she ate at her parents' house. Two years later, when the baby was born, the mother took care of everything for the baby as an experienced person. No matter what Xiao Zhou does, his mother will say, look at you, you are all thumbs. I'll do it. Xiao Zhou often looks at her mother dressing, changing diapers and taking a bath like an outsider. The only thing she can do is breastfeeding, and there is almost no room for the rest.

Xiao Zhou has been having a bad sleep. After having a baby, she has to get up several times in the middle of the night to feed her. Mother thinks that her daughter is too hard, so she won't let Xiao Zhou breastfeed her baby at night, and instead she will get up several times in the evening to feed her baby. After the full moon, just take the baby to his room and say that I will take care of the child in the future anyway, and let him get used to sleeping with his grandmother from now on. After a hundred days, Xiao Zhou is about to go to work, and her mother wants Xiao Zhou to wean her child and go to work wholeheartedly. Xiao Zhou has completely become a bystander and outsider in front of his children. Just the day before going to work, the young man who just became a mother opened the window and jumped off a tall building.

I can't bear to condemn Xiao Zhou's parents. I just want to use this sad example to remind parents that the flood of maternal love, like the flood, is not the energy flowing in the river bed, but the destructive power and disaster. Parents who really love their children will not indulge their feelings blindly, but know how to restrain themselves at the right time. A lack of self-satisfaction may be a better love for children.

When I was a child, I read a story. One day, a county magistrate was handling a case at the yamen, and two women knelt in the class, with an ignorant child in the middle. Both women claimed that the child was their own, that they were their own mothers, and that the other was a fake. The county magistrate thought for a moment and said to the two women, since no one can tell who the child really belongs to, tell you what, you two grab it, and whoever gets it will have it. The two women jumped at the child at the same time, and the child immediately burst into tears like a pig.

How can a child stand being torn by two adults? If it is snatched, it will break the child's arm or leg and even kill the child. A woman quickly showed reluctance and let go, and the woman who got the child showed a victorious smile on her face. When the county magistrate looked at the two men, he was astounded and immediately concluded that the child had let go of the woman first and asked the chief to take down the woman who had grabbed the child. All of them agreed and admired this.

A mother who never lets go can't say that she doesn't love her children, but she loves the latter more than possessiveness.

There was a media report that a mother slept with her son until he was 19 years old. Even after the child went to college in another city, the mother resigned and rented a house near the university to accompany her son, on the grounds that his son could not live without her. There are many criticisms about this mother, and some people even speculate on the Internet whether this mother has incest tendency, or at least "spiritual incest".

I don't quite believe in incest. On this issue, I agree with the psychologist Adler's view on similar issues: Oedipus complex is an artificial product caused by educational mistakes. We don't need to assume that incest instinct is inherited, and we don't need to imagine that the origin of this abnormal condition has anything to do with sex. So I would rather believe that this mother's behavior is due to ignorance in education and selfishness in human nature. Moreover, this ignorance has nothing to do with academic qualifications. In the context of contemporary life, it is the result of the degradation of natural nature.

Nowadays, an increasingly obvious social problem is that parents refuse to get close to their children when they are young, and throw them to the elderly or nannies on the grounds that they want to earn more money and create better living conditions for their children. Or superstitious about some kind of cold parenting classics, such as "frustration education" and "children can't hold more"