Thoughts after listening to children’s mental health lecture

What I mistakenly thought before was that "children are pretentious and ignorant" are essentially signs that children's psychological needs are not being met, and there is no one-size-fits-all educational formula. Psychiatric pathological intervention and relationship adjustment in the family system must be combined with the situation of your own child, and any one you believe in can easily go astray.

Speaking of which, I went there just last minute. A while ago, my third-grade kid suddenly complained of stomachache every morning and refused to go to campus. The internal medicine and gastroenterology departments of the hospital checked and found nothing. I was so angry that I slapped his butt twice on the spot and scolded him for pretending to be sick and skipping homework. I turned around and saw the lecture notice posted on the community bulletin board, so I signed up with the mentality of being a dead horse.

The two experts who came that day were quite interesting. They were not the kind of people who read PPT. One is Dr. Li from the psychiatry department of the Children's Hospital, who speaks straightforwardly, and the other, Mr. Zhang, who has been doing family counseling for 12 years, speaks softly and softly. The two of them did not agree with each other beforehand. When parents ask questions, they often give completely different ideas. However, there was no quarrel at the scene. Instead, those of us listening came to our senses: It turns out that there is no standard answer to this matter.

I was particularly impressed. In the middle of the lecture, a mother in a windbreaker stood up with her hands raised. She started crying before she could say anything, saying that her fourth-grade girl had slashed her arm three times last week. She took away her child’s cell phone, stopped all interest classes, and scolded and hit her. The child now refused to even leave the door. Dr. Li’s first sentence asked: “Have you ever taken your children for anxiety screening? Has ADHD or bipolar disorder been ruled out? ”He said that he had treated too many children like this, and the parents blamed the game, the school, and the child's ignorance. It was not until he found out that the cortisol level in the child's body was twice as high as that of an adult who stayed up late and worked overtime that he realized that the child's cry of "uncomfortable" was not just pretending, but that he really couldn't bear it physically. “Just like you can't force a cripple to run a marathon, you can't force a child whose prefrontal cortex development is slower than that of his peers to sit quietly and listen to lectures for 40 minutes. If you can't do it, you just can't do it. It's not a matter of attitude. ”

Teacher Zhang waited for Dr. Li to finish speaking before answering. She first handed a tissue to the crying mother and asked: "Is your relationship with your lover not so good recently? ”The mother was stunned for two seconds and cried even harder. She said that she and her husband had been in a cold war for half a year and were discussing divorce, but she kept silent for fear of affecting the children. “Many times, a child's symptoms are a 'barometer' for the entire family. If both of you suppress it, the child will be keenly aware of the low pressure in the family. She will think, 'If I were better, my parents would not separate.' ”Teacher Zhang said that she has encountered many parents who rush to label their children as "mentally ill" when they hear that they have emotional problems, and then turn around and send their children to the doctor to take medicine. When they should argue and fight, they should keep silent. In the end, the children's problems will only get worse.

I was sitting down and my face felt hot. Wasn’t it me? A while ago, my company laid off employees, and I sighed at home every day, opening and closing my mouth and saying, "If you don't study hard, you will be bullied like me." The last time my child got an 89 in math, I threw the paper in his face in front of his classmates. Then he started biting his nails, and the bites on his ten fingers were bloody. I even bought some bitter nail polish to apply to him. Now that I think about it, it's really stupid. Dr. Li said that nail biting is a typical compensatory behavior for anxiety. Children cannot find an outlet to release stress, so they use pain to comfort themselves. ； Teacher Zhang added that if you talk about your anxiety every day, you are actually passing on the pressure you have to bear to your child. He is so young, and of course he can only bite himself if he cannot bear it.

Hey, don’t tell me, when I was watching short videos, I always came up with things like “Three tricks to get rid of the rebellious phase” and “Do this and your child will never be upset again.” After listening to the lecture, I realized that they were all about cutting leeks. The two teachers finally said that no one's method is panacea: If the child has already suffered from self-mutilation, long-term insomnia, and refuses to socialize for half a month, don't hesitate to go to a psychiatrist in a regular hospital for investigation. When intervention is needed, don't insist on saying, "Our family only has an education problem."” ； If your child only gets angry occasionally, refuses to go to school, and talks back to his parents, don't rush to scold him. Check to see if you have been making a bad face at home recently, and if you haven't spoken nonsense to him in a long time.

When I came back, I tried the "five-minute nonsense chatting method" mentioned by Dr. Li. I picked him up after school every day and just chatted without mentioning homework. On the first day, I asked him if he had done anything stupid today. He said, "Xiao Ming, our classmate, farted in class and knocked all the pens off his deskmate." He happily took a picture of the car seat. ； On the third day, he took the initiative to tell me that he refused to go to school because his classmates joked that he looked like a four-eyed frog for wearing glasses, and he was afraid of being teased when he went to school. I asked him about it for half a month and he refused to tell me. It turned out that I was asked to put down my pretense of being a parent and chat with him about some useless gossip.

When the show was over, I saw the mother in a windbreaker clutching the contact information of two experts and crumpled medical records in her pocket. The wind blew her hair up. She finally stopped crying and had a little smile on her lips. I also walked home clutching the messy notebook I remembered. The camphor trees on the roadside had fallen leaves all over the floor. Suddenly, I wasn't as anxious as before. It turns out that you don’t have to force yourself to be a perfect mother, and you don’t have to force your child to be a perfect child. Being able to squat down and hear what he didn’t say is better than anything else.