The essence of education is the self-cultivation of parents from the “Waldorf Education” WeChat platform on October 2. Love and freedom are the only answers. “We imagine what our children should be like, and then we imagine how to deal with them” is a very scary view of parenting. So what is the right view of parenting? –Actually, I would like to say that parent-child relationship is more important than education method! We’ve all heard that “character determines destiny”, but what determines character? From a psychological point of view, the parent-child relationship we encounter in our childhood will be internalized into the child’s heart as an internal relationship pattern, and this set of internal relationship patterns will form our character and determine our destiny. The mother-infant attachment relationship lays the foundation of a child’s life. The relationship patterns of childhood correspond inextricably to our career, marriage, and parent-child relationships today. To say so as if life is deterministic, in fact the parent-child relationship determines the beginning of our lives. Children need to be seen. Let’s talk about children’s “presence”. Presence must be created in a relationship. If a baby smiles at its mother and she doesn’t respond, the baby is dumbfounded. He will wonder, “Do I exist, does mom exist, what is wrong with the world?” If the infant’s various responses are not responded to by the mother, the infant will live with the feeling that the whole world is in pieces. So, what are the usual responses and what are the consequences of each? The first one is to repeat the words related to emotions in each other’s words. For example, if your baby says to you, “Mommy, this puppy is so cute!” Then the mother can respond by saying, “Mommy saw it, it’s so cute!” This is repeating what he said. Repeating the emotion expressed by the other person or the emotion you feel, acknowledging it, will make each other happy. The second type of response is irrelevant. For example, a child says, “Mom, I just saw a dog, it’s so cute!” Some mothers will say, “Did you do your homework?” If the child often gets irrelevant reactions in his initial communication with his mother, then as he grows up, he will feel that communicating with others is a stupid thing to do and become indifferent. Of course, he may also be very intelligent and think clearly when he is self-absorbed in his own world, but he finds it boring to talk to others. The third kind is emotional reversal. “Mom, this puppy is so cute.” “It was just reported in the newspaper that a man died of rabies!” With counter-emotional words like these, the child will feel his or her energy being screwed back alive. When we become adults, we won’t remember this anger, but it stays hidden inside and is later expressed through emotional reversal. The fourth one, is not wanting to respond. I don’t know if you’ve had any nightmares, such as falling into a pit or encountering other dangers, you’ll call out for “mommy”, but she doesn’t respond. This makes the child feel like “I’m going to die and my mom won’t come to save me”. If you want to exist in your own world for a while and don’t want to respond to your child, you can tell your child: “I know you want to interact with mommy, and your request is good, but for mommy’s own reasons, mommy wants to be by herself for a while, and it’s not your fault. Will you be okay if mommy is with you in half an hour?” Control is the worst education The following is an analysis of some children’s behavioral habits from a psychological point of view: Children eat fingers, should we stop them? First of all, why do children eat fingers, some studies have found that the fetus in the womb when the fetus has begun to eat fingers. Babies find it a feat to hold their hands up and then still be able to put them in their mouths, he will be very joyful, just like discovering a new land. The child’s tool for exploring the world until the age of 1 is the mouth, and he will put everything in his mouth to try it out. Some parents are very nervous, but in fact, children are very, very careful and in full awareness, as long as they are not disturbed, there will be no problem. We just need to ensure that the surrounding environment is safe and sanitary, and let the children explore as freely as possible. If the child after the age of 1, it still want to eat fingers, then what to do? The answer is still: do not act, let him eat. It could be because the oral period has not yet explored enough, it could be that by eating fingers to make up for the lack of breast milk. Whatever the reason, we can only deeply allow rather than stop. Some children just act later than others, and that’s because your child has unique characteristics, don’t correct him into an assembly line product, one size fits all, all the things a child needs is for us to take care of, not to change. How to make children avoid danger? Our intellect will only develop if we have experienced it. One of the things my dad did well for me was that he rarely taught me in a conclusion scare way. When I was a child, I worked with him on nails and planed wood, and these seemingly dangerous actions became fun memories of my childhood. A child is naturally in the midst of awareness, so he won’t hurt himself in any way. For example, if a child loves to play with knives, we can touch the knife with him, slowly touch it, slowly reach the critical state of injury, and let the child experience the feeling himself. The child who has experienced the knife, when he is tangled in the rope will look for a sharp object similar to a knife to cut the rope, this is the intellectual development. Children who have only learned the conclusion that “knives are dangerous” are not capable of saving themselves. If we only learn some conclusions, we are not developing intellectually, we are developing fear and conditioning. I have seen many “post-00s” children who are so tall that they are afraid to go down the stairs. The mother is in a constant state of anxiety, and the child feels that exploring new worlds is a scary thing, that it is dangerous to feel new things, and that the child learns fear and control from an early age. Control is the same as killing spiritual life. If you control him to eat, he feels that eating is painful, and if you want to control him to study, he feels that studying is painful. If I control you, your will ceases to exist; all that exists is my will. Where your desire to control reaches, the child will feel endless pain throughout his life. Should I set rules for my child? Many parents ask me: should I make rules for my child? I want to say that the law says that the subject of a contract is an equal person with civil capacity to make a contract. The child is not an independent actor, how can he or she make a contract with you? How to set a quid pro quo with you to perform? This is an unreasonable treaty. The point of rules is to preserve the feelings of both parties. A mother asked me if her child could brush her teeth and she had to help her brush them together. I asked her how you feel about brushing with your child, and she said it’s all fun and games. If a child learns that following the rules is equal to being difficult, how can he consciously follow the rule in the future? If the rule makes the child happy, this is a good result. This is how rules are created, both people’s feelings are taken care of, this time the rule equals comfort, and when there is no supervision, he will still be willing to follow the rule. What if my child has bad habits? Every well behaved child is terrible, they have been following their parents’ rules all their lives, they think they are good children and that others must love them. When they encounter a huge setback, no one loves them even if they are well behaved, the logic of being well behaved is shattered to the point of collapse, and something terrible happens. I have a friend who wants to get a divorce, he said that everything I did in the past was arranged by my parents, I want to do something that my parents didn’t arrange, and that is to get a divorce, he actually either has no feelings left, or because he has been suppressed for too long. Any control will meet with backlash, no matter how right it is. Behind every stubborn bad habit is the painful cry of a lack of love. If your child has some bad habits, you can tell him, “Baby, you are my child no matter what, and I know that your life has its own developmental patterns that I am not capable of understanding, but I can be there and see.” Every soul is born into the world with a mission, a mission that does not need any urging, but only love and freedom, which he will experience naturally. What kind of love should parents give to their children? Only the child himself knows what is best for him. How many of us are living in anxiety, just because the reality is different from what we imagine. Why do we need to trust? Let’s look at this parable: In times of drought, the little tree curls up its leaves to protect itself. Gardener A sees the appearance and understands the essence, and replenishes the water in time; Gardener B does not care about anything, and the little tree survives until the rainy season; Gardener C learns a lot and thinks it is healthy and right to stretch the leaves, so he goes out of his way to break the leaves apart one by one – with predictable results. We can educate without knowing, we don’t need to be psychologists to have children, but we need to keep a humble heart that you never know better than your child what is best for him.