As the old saying goes, “If you don’t raise a child, it’s your father’s fault”, but it seems that there is a growing lack of “father’s education” in this era. The Chinese family is the embodiment of “woe is me”, when the child has an absent father, God will also give him an anxious mother. In fact, there are as many problems with children’s education as there are problems with couples’ conflicts.
Men avoid problems by working and women cover them up by taking care of their children. These cover-ups will fill the gap between the couple. It looks like the man becomes a workaholic and the mother indulges in her love for the children. Both people refuse to deal with the disagreement between the couple with a straightforward attitude, preferring to use the child to say things, because using the child to say things, more crowning – the child is more vulnerable, you can ignore me, but can not ignore the child.
Fallen in the era of the lack of fatherhood
As the old saying goes, “If you don’t teach, your father’s fault”, and this era seems to be increasingly lacking in “father’s education”. In primitive societies, fathers would take their children out hunting, and children were taken by their fathers to explore the world. Nowadays, this is not the case at all, as the father fails to become an important role in the family and becomes a shadow father in the family relationship. For moms and children dads are absent, and for dads the family is even reduced to a hotel.
A survey of fathers of young children aged 3-6 in Beijing found that 80% of fathers believe they are too busy working to have time to interact with their children. A survey of 1054 people in Tianjin showed that in more than half of the families, fathers were absent from their children’s education, and mothers were the absolute protagonists of their children’s education.
In 2008, researchers in China, Japan, Korea, and the United States found that even fathers in normal families were distant from their children. Chinese high school students chose their fathers as the sixth person to talk to, after same-sex friends, mothers, opposite-sex friends, siblings, and Internet friends, and high school students in the other three countries saw their fathers as only the fifth person to talk to.
Whether in terms of emotion, companionship, respect, intimacy, or problem solving, fathers provide little support for their children, suggesting that fathers are not taking their fair share of responsibility in their children’s development.
The anxious mother follows the shadow
”The Chinese family is a reflection of the fact that when a child has an absent father, God also gives him an anxious mother. When the husband becomes the invisible person in the family, either actively or passively, but now the instability of the marriage makes the mother less dependent on the marriage and less dependent on the husband, the mother will put her emotions on the children. The husband continues to be pushed outward. The mother believes that security is to be obtained from the child, which is, after all, the blood relation, the firm and safest. So the wife slowly pulls her affection and attention away from her husband and puts it on her children.
But the lone woman will inevitably fall into a sense of loneliness and insecurity, which in turn will unconsciously transform the home into her painful workplace, holding the child hostage with suffocating love and anxiety, creating an overdependence between child and mother. The child thus lives more in a mother’s world than in the father’s world. Problems with the couple’s emotions, parent-child relationship, and the child’s education begin to come crashing in one after another.
Out-of-control children
There are as many problems with children’s education as there are problems with conflicting couples. A husband who is alienated in the family is a man who can’t come home. Behind a man who can’t come home, there is bound to be a very lonely and isolated woman. It seems to be a parent-child problem, but in fact it is a problem of the couple’s emotions.
But the anxiety and needs of the mother that should be borne by the husband are projected onto the child. The child is repressed, struggling, tyrannical and disguised in a variety of emotions like a trapped animal.
The child who becomes the mother’s “substitute husband” will assume the role of an adult too early, and the family will become a small adult, and the ungrown part of the heart will be wrapped up tightly, manifesting itself in various other physical and mental illnesses; or the child will “always be the mother’s good boy” and The child will enter the state of refusing to grow up and being dependent, and will not be able to explore society and integrate into it.
But when the child starts to lose control, the “absent father, anxious mother, and out-of-control child” will bring the family system back to a pathological balance. Because the conflict of educating the children escalates into the main conflict of the family, it masks many problems and allows the marriage to be maintained. However, this is definitely not a dynamic, resilient and viable marriage. What this phenomenon hides is the family problem: when problems arise, there is no way for the couple to communicate and develop in a healthy way.
The man avoids the problem by working, and the woman covers it up by taking care of the children. These cover-ups can fill up the gap between the couple. It looks like the man becomes a workaholic and the mother indulges in her love for the children. Both people refuse to deal with the disagreement between the couple in a justifiable manner, preferring to use the child to say things, because using the child to say things, more crowning – the child is more vulnerable, you can ignore me, but can not ignore the child. But in fact, the most intolerable thing for everyone is that they are ignored and scorned by others.
The biggest crisis is the breakdown of the system of division of labor and cooperation between husband and wife as parents
From the female perspective it is easy to simply think: men do not even have the basic responsibility, directly relegating men to the animal level. Because men are not responsible, the role of the father is missing, so the children are not cared for will have various problems. Many mothers complain: do you men know how hard I work? Men will also say: I have a hard time raising a family too! Both sides complain that the other side can not stand in their own perspective, both feel that the other side does not understand them, so they are more reluctant to understand each other, and eventually fall into a vicious circle.
Let everyone look at the problem more peacefully, not simply deny and criticize, criticism can only bring backlash, even if the other party is really wrong, but also out of face to rebel. Therefore, we might as well think rationally: why is a man not able to perform the role of a father? Is it simply because the man is too busy at work? Of course not.
1, the problem of test-based education or industrial urbanization
In agricultural civilization, children have a lot of survival skills need to be inherited from their fathers, for example, carpentry is handed down from grandparents, and must obey the paternal education and management, which is the characteristic of agricultural society. But in the industrial and information society, children no longer need to go to their fathers to learn, they can get knowledge everywhere, and the role of fathers has been weakened.
In addition, exam-oriented education leads to no communication between the father and the child in the early years, before the child reaches adulthood, and the child spends all day studying while the mother takes care of the child’s living. Also, there is the Chinese family relationship. In Western countries, the husband-wife relationship is the first relationship, so the distance between husband and wife is equal for children. But China is different. The first relationship in China is the parent-child relationship, and the second relationship is the husband-wife relationship. In the parent-child relationship, obviously the mother is closer to the child, and the father-child relationship, which was already shaky, is squeezed a bit more. The father further retreats to the second line.
2, traditional ideas lead men away from children
In China’s traditional education, itself the father is not an important role, the man is the head of the family, the woman is the head of the family in the traditional Chinese sense. The patriarchal system is also a Chinese tradition, the patriarchal system is the relationship between the father and the child, not only blood, kinship, there is a forever insurmountable gulf, that is, the father is the son, that is, the relationship between the hierarchy, the king wants the minister to die the minister had to die, the father wants the son to die the son had to die, the father will unconsciously remind himself “to maintain the majesty” The father will unconsciously remind himself “to maintain the majesty”, “can not be too close to the child”, this is a gully that can not pass.
3, men are afraid to take on fatherhood
From a psychological point of view, men growing up must look forward to an important opportunity to get rid of the attachment to the mother, and this phase of getting rid of him is painful, anxious. So men in the subconscious for the birth and arrival of children is always “mixed”, once a man has a marriage and children, his childhood anxiety and the pain of separation will present, he will be a little afraid, worried about his wife has a child, he will face separation again.
The greater impact on the man is emotional, because the wife’s emotions will inevitably be transferred to the child, so the husband will have a sense of neglect, this sense of neglect and his childhood pain of separation from his mother will be linked, which is tantamount to amplifying his fears. Because every human heart is an overgrown child, those early traumas and painful fears that he suffered, so that he often switch between the role of adults and the role of children.
Man is a contradictory animal, he both craves love, women to give him the exclusive; he is also afraid that, get too much love, and will be bound, no more freedom. He wants both to get an heir to inherit the bloodline, but he is afraid that the child will be born and his love will be lost.
A systematic look at the problem and finding a way out for the Chinese family
These generations of Chinese men and women do not know how to deal with emotional problems, which is the biggest crisis of Chinese society. Men project their life’s anxieties onto their work, and women project their anxieties onto their children, both unable to handle their own state.
Children may have problems when fathers are absent, but it’s definitely not just a man’s problem. If you simply assume that it’s a man’s problem, it will only create hatred, isolation and resentment between men and women in society towards each other, and will only lead to greater isolation of children from their fathers.
The problem proper is that women need to go on to develop a life as a person apart from the family. The sky is the limit for a woman, and she is wasting her life if she positions herself solely in the role of a housewife.
A man who puts all his energy into his work is unable to deal with the central theme of how to deal with his emotions, how to deal with his vulnerability, how to challenge a woman instead of living like a little boy hiding from his mother. Parents, men and women have to think about what exactly we can do to restore some fun and harmony to our lives and families.