Children’s mental health experience

The core of children's mental health has never been "correcting children's problem behaviors". It is for adults to first let go of their obsession with "standardized parenting", catch children's emotional signals first, and then talk about solving problems.

Last month, I met a 7-year-old boy. His mother's hands were shaking when she dragged him in. She said that the child was "hyperactive, rebellious, and always antagonizes adults." He would only tear up good homework after writing two lines, and he had already torn up three homework books. I looked through his assessment form and found that his attention score was indeed slightly below average, but far from the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. What’s interesting is that regarding this case, counselors with different orientations on the site gave completely different ideas: Seniors with a psychoanalytic orientation felt that the child’s aggression had been suppressed for a long time, and tearing paper was the only outlet. ； Behaviorist colleagues suggest using positive reinforcement, giving rewards after completing a homework assignment, and gradually replacing the behavior of tearing paper. ； The humanistic supervisor only asked one sentence: “How long does he have to do homework every day when he goes home? ”

I first did a two-week intervention with a colleague who was behaviorally oriented, and gave him a token reward. If he wrote a good page of homework, he would get a small stamp, and if he saved 10, he could exchange it for the model airplane accessories he wanted. The results were particularly good in the first week, and he really didn't tear up any homework. However, when he came on Monday of the third week, he not only tore up his homework, but also cut up the seal book he had saved before. Later, after a detailed chat with his mother, I found out that she saw that her child had been doing well recently and added three extra extracurricular papers. The child had been sitting in school for 6 hours and didn't even have time to play for 10 minutes when he got home. Tearing up his homework was the only way he could think of to resist without being beaten by adults. Later, we spent two weeks doing work for my mother, stopped all extra homework, and left 20 minutes a day for him to go downstairs and run wild with the children. The problem of tearing homework never appeared again.

In fact, there are a lot of controversies about child rearing nowadays. Take the most controversial issue of "whether to provide children with emotional management training". One group believes that children should be taught to identify emotions, express reasonably, not lose their temper from an early age, and develop high emotional intelligence from an early age.； The other group believes that children's emotions should be revealed naturally, and forcing them to "stop crying and be sensible" suppresses their nature and is prone to psychological problems. I met a 5-year-old girl before. Every time her grandma saw her crying, she would say, "I won't let you cry anymore." After that, she never cried in front of adults again. Instead, she always secretly bit her own arm, and blood oozed from the deep teeth marks. Do you want to blame grandma? She also felt that "children will become spoiled if they cry too much", and she was really doing her best for the child, but she didn't know that the amygdala of children before the age of 3 is not fully developed, and they cannot control their emotions like adults. If you don't let them cry, those emotions will only turn inward to attack themselves.

To be honest, the longer I work in this field, the more I feel that 80% of children’s psychological intervention work is actually for parents. When many parents bring their children here, the first thing they say is "Please help me take care of him." It seems that the child is a malfunctioning electrical appliance that can be restored to factory settings by bringing it in for repair. A father used to argue with me and said, "No one cared about mental health when we were young, so why don't we grow up to be this big?" ”I didn't argue with him, but turned around and asked him if he could run around the streets after school, climb trees, dig bird's nests, fish in rivers, and finish his homework in half an hour when he was a child. He was stunned for a moment and said nothing. Times have changed. Nowadays, children have to learn rules when they go to kindergarten at the age of 3. They start taking rankings in elementary school. They have to hold back even when they go downstairs to play. They have few emotional outlets. If we put our adult anxieties on them, it will be strange if there are no problems.

Not long ago, when a 10-year-old girl finished her intervention, she secretly gave me a painting. The painting showed her and her mother squatting on the roadside watching ants carrying rice, with the words "This is my happiest day" written next to it. You see, in fact, children really don’t want much. Many times what we think of as “problem behavior” is just them shouting, “I can’t handle it anymore, can you wait for me?” There is no perfect parenting formula. If you are willing to squat down and see the world in his eyes from his height, it will be more useful than any amount of great principles you preach and no amount of training you do.