There are too many parents who focus on their child’s studies, when in fact that is mostly a school thing. There are many parents who are blindly busy with what they should be doing at school, such as helping their child with homework, checking their child’s homework, supervising their child, etc. But in the end, it’s a lot of work and half the effort. I think many of us parents are not doing our jobs, we are “planting other people’s land, but not our own field”, not doing what we should do. As parents, our task is to cultivate our children’s self-esteem, self-confidence, responsibility, initiative, interest in learning and good habits. These are the six core spiritual software for a child’s growth, and if these are not handled properly, the child is destined to have problems. The first software to be embedded in a child’s life is “self-esteem”. When a child starts to respect himself or herself as an equal to others, the child’s main personality is established. Self-esteem is the backbone of a child’s spiritual personality. If a child has not built up his self-esteem, he will not care how others look at him, he will not know how to look at others, he will not study the rules of behavior of people by heart, and he will not seek respect and recognition from others, and thus he will not be motivated. It is pointless to educate your child through criticism at this point. Because he does not care what you think, your criticism will not work on him. A child without self-esteem does not take the initiative to participate in group activities, does not respect others, does not respect himself, and has no desire to excel in the group. It should be said that self-esteem is the fire of a child’s life and the origin of his or her growth. If self-esteem is not built up, it is the same as the child’s life fire is not ignited, therefore, he will not have the motivation to grow. The best way to build a child’s self-esteem is to respect the child and treat him or her as a full equal. When a parent respects a child, he begins to respect himself, and in turn he respects others. This is how his “humanization” process starts. The second important way to build a child’s self-esteem is to love the child unconditionally. When a parent loves a child unconditionally, the child’s self-worth rises, he begins to feel good about himself, and is motivated to seek better. The second software is to build the child’s “self-confidence”. Developing self-confidence in a child cannot be a lifelong task for parents, at least until the child is 25 years old. Before the child leaves the parent, the parent must care for the child’s self-confidence as if it were an eye. Self-confidence is a dynamic process, a constant process of building. That is, a person cannot have self-confidence once and for all forever, he must develop his self-confidence every moment. Self-confidence is a subjective state of mind when a person goes to work. With self-confidence he can play their abilities and even mobilize their potential to do things successfully. If we use an analogy, self-confidence is equivalent to the pre-programming of a computer into the main computing program. If a child does not have self-confidence, when he faces a problem, his brain enters a subsystem and starts a program to explain why I didn’t do the problem and why I can’t do it. When he has self-confidence, he can enter the main computing program, and his brain will focus on the method of solving the problem, and after a period of thinking, he can always do the problem. Therefore, self-confidence is the core of a child’s mental program to be able to do things (i.e., learning) and to do things right. Admittedly, self-confidence is not as simple as holding one’s chest up as we all understand it. It is a mental process that people use to do things: a confident elementary school student, when he faces a test question, his brain will go deep inside the question to run, to find the cause-and-effect relationship between the conditions and the results, to do the question right; if a child without self-confidence, see the question will immediately stay on the surface of the question, feel the pressure and anxiety brought about by the problem, and then will think: how this question is so difficult? Why did the teacher give such a question? What will my mother say if I can’t do it? As a result, after 20 minutes, he didn’t do the problem at all, but was thinking about something else and feeling the pain. Finally he concluded: You see I am not good at math, I still can not! The third mental software is “responsibility” Responsibility is a subjective state of mind that arises when a child is aware of his or her interrelationship with other people. Responsibility arises when one’s actions are causally linked to the suffering and happiness of others, and one values this link. A child who talks in class and affects other students would not talk in class if he were responsible. Responsibility is divided into internal responsibility and external responsibility. External responsibility is for example to others, to family, and to society. What we want to talk about is the child’s responsibility to himself. Too many of our parents fail to establish responsibility in their children’s minds, fail to make them responsible for their own actions, and then have us watch and enforce it. In this way, it is the same as the child’s responsibility for life being taken on by the parents. The parents become the police, the child becomes the thief, and we are constantly behind the scenes supervising. If the child establishes responsibility for himself or herself, our parental supervision function can be relieved. Responsibility is not established, a child is categorically not going to be motivated! The child will become passive, the parents push him to move a little. The fourth spiritual software is the “spirit of initiative”. If the child wants to grow and learn by himself, it is too easy to educate him. According to Soviet educator Sukhomlinsky, “learning” is a kind of mental work, and the characteristic of mental work is that “the worker must be in an ‘active state’ in order to learn well.” Without the spirit of initiative, children cannot learn well. In the market economy, if we do not cultivate the active and enterprising spirit in our children, it is absolutely impossible for them to succeed in life in the future. Without the spirit of initiative, it means that a child has no interest in life, no interest in life, no interest in self, no interest in everything, the whole person is depressed, then it is impossible for the child to develop and grow spiritually. The fifth spiritual software is “interest in learning.” When I was in college, I read the book “Learning and Interest” written by a Soviet educator. The basic concept there is that interest is learned, not born. The so-called interest is when the child does the behavior, he can feel the pleasure, without forcing himself to do it by willpower, forming an automatic response called interest. If a child’s nervous system is conditioned to take pleasure in doing a subject, interest in learning is created. This habit of behavior is cultivated, the first time the child does this behavior is not what will be happy, repeated behavior, and finally can do things right without willpower, conditioned reflexes. And then due to parental praise, encouragement, the child found joy, over time, the formation of automatic response, each behavior the child can find the feeling of competence and ease. At this point, the so-called interest is generated. Too many of our parents think that children who learn well have the most willpower, but in fact, children who excel in learning never learn by willpower. Children read books at night until one or two o’clock because they are interested in reading and do not want to go to bed, nor do they feel tired. If you do it by willpower, you will never be able to do it! Therefore, we conclude that for children to learn well, it is a prerequisite and the first thing to develop interest in learning. And interest in learning is something that parents need to cultivate in their children from an early age. The sixth spiritual software is “good habits”, that is, the ability to respond automatically without willpower. Good habits are the fast track to rapid success. No one who really studies for a living, such as many excellent masters, doctoral students, and professors, studies by willpower. All of these people do it day and night because studying produces pleasure, and later it becomes a habit. A person’s habits determine his daily behavior, and this daily behavior determines his lifetime achievement. To sum up the above points, our task as parents is to encode these mental software in our children’s brains. Parents are like programmers, and children are like computers that have just left the factory, with hard drives that have not yet been formatted and need to be programmed one by one before they can be used independently. Only when a child becomes an independent person can he or she walk properly in society!