“My husband watches football, he goes to work tomorrow morning. If you come up and say: “After the first half to sleep, tomorrow you will get up early!”, Is this possible? How long will your family last? Why is it possible with a child? How not to lose a relationship with a child, why it is impossible to accuse him of laziness, how to help him find a vocation, is it possible to develop it harmoniously and comprehensively and what to do on the eve of the Unified State Exam - says the teacher, journalist, writer, TV and radio host Andrei Maksimov.
You are engaged in psychological counseling, you have been talking with your parents about upbringing for fifteen years. What is the most common question your parents ask you?
- "Why did the child and I become enemies?" He was so wonderful, and suddenly at 13, 14 or 15 years old it happened. What happened?
Janusz Korczak used to say: “I don’t know how mothers I don’t know raise children I don’t know.” I really like this wording. But the answer is always that a child has never been seen as a person - he endured, endured and that's it, stopped.
What does it mean - "not to see a person"?
- There is a well-known principle: treat another the way you want to be treated. If the children communicate with us the way we do with them - they will constantly make comments, indicate how we live, what to do, watch carefully so that we do not forget to put on a hat in the cold - we will go crazy in two days.
We clearly divide the world into two clubs - wonderful adults and idiots - these are children who, as it seems to many, were given to us in order to educate and direct them wherever needed. We do not see living people in them, we do not understand them.
Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician who has done a lot of child psychology, worked for thirty years as an obstetrician in a London hospital, and half of Londoners passed through his hands. He said that as soon as a child is born, the mother thinks: "My God, my child does not know anything yet, I will teach him everything." And the baby knows something that we never dreamed of - how life was born - only he cannot tell us anything. Soloveichik writes about the same: how can you tell a child “You haven't done anything in your life”? He was born!
Promotional video:
It is important to treat the child as someone with experience. From the first minute of birth, he has an experience of suffering, his own experience, he is different. Children are people you can learn from. Unlike adults, who are guided by social logic, children have divine logic, they are very logical.
Korczak said: "The process of education is the process of teaching parents by children and children by parents." If this is understood, there will be one story. If you think that you have been given a moron who does not know how to live, and now you bring him up and start to pressurize, then somewhere in adolescence there will be an explosion.
But does the child need to set any boundaries?
- Who gave the parents such a right and why? After all, this is a man, the same God unit. I recently gave a lecture at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, I asked those who feel happy to raise their hand. Four arms. Then I asked: “What are you all teaching your children? Be as unhappy as you are? If you have failed to build happiness, why are you behaving this way? What are the boundaries? Everything must be negotiated.
There are two forms of relationships with children - this is your own example, which can be either positive or negative (either an alcoholic or a non-drinking person is born in a family of alcoholics), and conversations. There is nothing else. And what we call pedagogy is training. If you give the lion meat and sometimes beat him, he will jump over the ring of fire, but as soon as you stop doing this, he will stop jumping.
Training is when we don't give a damn about a person's desire. A conversation is when we try to understand it. A conversation can remain in a person forever. Now there are a lot of disgusting French books on training like "French kids don't spit food." This book gives an example of upbringing: a boy did not greet a woman who came to visit his mother. Mom took him and locked him in the room for two hours so that he remembered to greet the woman. It did not occur to my mother to ask: “Why don't you say hello? Maybe something happened?"
You have a book How to Reeducate Difficult Parents. Difficult parents are those who bring up by training?
- Difficult parents are people who do not see a person in a child, who do not understand how hard it is for him to live.
Parents, it seems to them, give birth to their children for themselves, but in fact they give birth to them for the world. A child is a man of the world, not your property.
If you treat a child as your property, he, like any slave, in the end, will rebel or drink too much, he has no other choice.
But what is a child, especially for a woman? This is a person who is created from her flesh and blood, just from her body, this is a being who at first absolutely believes her. He can become her closest friend, if you do not treat him as a kind of creature who needs to be shown how to live. When mothers come and talk about the conflict with the child, I think: it’s your flesh and blood that is in conflict with you, to what extent did the situation have to be brought so that this conflict would arise instead of friendship?
Does it happen that a child's adolescence has come, but there is no conflict with parents?
- Often. My children didn't have anything like that, although we expected. All this teenage "Play, accordion" can provoke an exacerbation of some qualities in a person, but cannot give birth to new ones. If there is no anger and rudeness in a person, they cannot appear due to the onset of adolescence. But if there is, they may appear.
In fact, I am convinced that the teen story was made up by adults. And the most difficult transitional age for a person is four years. Nobody pays attention to it at all. Korczak said that we live in a world where everything big is more significant than small.
Does the child have the most serious crisis at this age?
- From zero to three years for a child, mom is the world, mom is everything. Mom is to feed, protect, it is clear why she is. After three years, it suddenly turns out that there is a dad, why is not clear. Then a lot of other people are revealed. This, roughly speaking, socialization is very difficult at this age of three or four or five years. Therefore, Pestalozzi said that a person should choose a vocation at 6-7 years old. He gave three years for this socialization.
The search for a vocation is generally the most important issue. This is something that neither the school nor the parents are focused on, although this is the main thing for the child.
What does human life consist of if we are talking about healthy people? Love and work. We cannot help the child to find love. You can help find a job, a vocation. The search for a vocation is a search for happiness, not a search for a salary.
But we have no one aiming at this. A huge number of parents seriously believe that a child should study well and get good grades. This just amazes me, because, firstly, to get a good grade, the main thing is to build a relationship with the teacher, and not know the subject well; secondly, the assessment has nothing to do with the case at all.
There are thousands of great people who studied poorly, but made a real revolution in the business they were doing. Let us recall the 26th out of 29th place of Pushkin in academic performance among students of the lyceum or the absolutely terrible characteristics of Einstein, especially in physics - there are many such examples. For some reason, parents are focused on grades, instead of focusing on the child's hobby. We don't even have the word "vocation" in the education system, we have "vocational guidance". Calling and calling are related words. A vocation is what the Lord called you to Earth for.
Pestalozzi came up with a method of natural conformity, when you need to find what he likes in a child and do it. This is the foundation of my vocation search system. When parents come to me, we talk to them for a long time about how to help the child find him. This can always be done. Unfortunately, until the eighth or tenth grade, such a task is not necessary at school, and this is the most important thing.
That is, it is not the child's assessments that are important, but the presence of some developmental dominant?
- Grades are absolutely not important, the child must understand that together with him we must find his vocation. We will find it, and he will implement it. If he doesn't like it, we will change him, and he will do something else. If we do this, don't give a damn about grades and everything else; if we are not doing this, then another story.
- It seems to me that now the world pedagogical system is moving in a slightly different direction - the entire Liberal Arts system is designed just for late vocational guidance. It is believed that one has to choose a profession, a specialty much later. In a bachelor's degree, you receive some kind of general education, for example, general humanitarian, and then decide whether you are a historian, philologist or psychologist.
- At the age of five, you do not understand that you will be a psychologist, but you understand whether you are a humanitarian or a technician, you understand, for example, what you like to research. I often cite the example of my friend's son who cut beetles. Mom bought a microscope. Then the child said that he wanted to dissect other animals as well … But as a result, he became not a biologist, but a lawyer, because he found the use of his meticulousness and research talent in this profession. The point is not that you have to choose a future job for a child of five or eight years old, but about choosing a direction, and he must move along it. He will come somewhere by himself.
It's hard to understand at the age of five what your relationship with mathematics is
- Very easy. There are people who love numbers, there are people who don't. Some children sit and count, others draw. Mathematician, physicist, journalist - this is the device of the head. If parents watch their child closely, they will see it. It can be assumed that God creates everyone different. And you can - like our school - assume that everyone is the same, and teach everyone everything. Pestalozzi called this system antipsychological.
There is a well-known American experiment, when the reactions of newly born children, who were about 40 minutes old, were studied. Sensors were attached to the brains of children and acted in different ways: light, classical music, rock music, barking dogs, noise of a wave. All children reacted differently to different signals. Fantastic experience!
Or another experiment, when very young children, who are one and a half years old or less, were shown a cartoon in which a certain creature climbs uphill, one creature prevents him from going uphill, and the other helps. The cartoon lasts 1.5 minutes, and then the children are given a choice of two toys - "good" and "bad", the one that helped and the one that hindered. All children take the one that helped. How do they know helping is good? Nobody told them that. Why do they love those who are kind? It means that something is already in them, it means that something is already in them.
The main problem is not the child's socialization, but the loss of friendship and communication with the parents. I often cite the same example, it is very revealing: when a small child falls, the first thing he does is look at his mother. If she says: “Oh, what a fine fellow you are, how beautiful you fell!” He starts laughing. If mom says: "Ay-ay-ay!", He begins to cry. He perceives the world through his mother. Absolute 100% trust, and then it disappears somewhere. This is the main problem.
I always say one terrible thing to both parents and children: children are obliged to help their parents when they feel bad (for example, when they are old), but children are not obliged to love and respect them. Parents must win love and respect from their child.
If parents do not respect the child, if they do not see him as a person, they should understand very well that as a result, children will perceive them in the same way. One person came to me for a consultation with the problem of a love triangle, and I asked him along the way: "Do you have children?" - "Yes son". - "Good?" - "Yes, everything is fine, good relationship." - "Are you punishing him?" “I don’t punish that much, but if you have a deuce, then five belts.” I ask: "How do you encourage?" - "For a good mark 1000 rubles." I say: “Do you understand that when you ask for the notorious glass of water while dying, your son will tell you:“1000 rubles”, because he is used to it? You teach him to do this. " The saddest thing is that parents do not understand that their children are mirroring them.
From one of the first-year students who were asked to help with something, I heard the phrase: "What will I get for this?"
- It's all taken from somewhere. So, at home they did not say, for example: "Wash the dishes, please, because my mother is tired," but they said: "You wash the dishes - I will give you something." This is how these things line up. As an Orthodox person, I believe that sin is an introduced concept. You can try to live without sin, live a normal life, but what about when your parents bring it to you all the time, when they show you an example of an impossible life?
Once upon a time, my wife interviewed a very famous person, and he asked his daughter, a schoolgirl: "Could you take a photo with us?" She said, "Four pairs of tights." What did dad say, the most famous person? He said, "Three." Fine? Dad bargained with his daughter to take a picture with him. Then she goes to the institute and says: "What will I get for this?" Because she knows that these are the laws. That's all.
If you have a 15-year-old rude, ill-mannered, bad-speaking person in your family, you should look in the mirror, not at him, and understand what is wrong with you.
What if the child is rude, responds with rudeness?
- If a child is rude, then he knows from somewhere that it will bring results. How does the child know that the result is achieved by rudeness? He saw it somewhere, perhaps at home. We need to talk to him, explain: "This is unpleasant for me."
All children are curious, but at school they teach to sit still
Now the most nervous period begins - OGE, USE, exams, end of school. How to support a child?
- First of all, you need to understand the basics: we have good teachers and good schools, but in general our school does not teach anything. In addition, the USE is never an assessment of knowledge, it is an assessment of the nervous state.
Why do you think that the school does not teach anything?
- I have two teaching experiences from two sides. One experience I get during consultations, when parents come to me - it seems to me that pedagogical science has passed from school to family. We have almost no innovative teachers for a long time, everything now happens in the family. Second, I endlessly teach students. I see that the school does not teach anything. They are good, smart, interesting guys, wonderful people, but they don't know anything.
All foreign studies, which are now so fond of referring to, indicate that in order to make a career in the 21st century, three main qualities are needed: creativity, the ability to work in a team and the ability to evaluate oneself and one's capabilities. There is no knowledge in this system. Nobody says that you need to know a lot to make a career.
Our school is not fundamentally different from the parish school of the 18th century. It differs in the presence of computers, but it is external. Our school drives knowledge into people's heads - but it does not work, knowledge is not driven in.
A person cannot receive information if he a) does not need it, b) is not interesting. It just can't, because that's how it works.
There are good teachers and there are children with good parents. These children at the age of 10 understood what they would do, and they succeed in this, they know a lot about it. Thanks to this, trolleybuses still somehow walk the streets, although the rockets no longer fly. We are already beginning to feel the results of how our children are taught, and we will continue to feel it.
I endlessly tell my parents, I write in my books: "If you want your child to be educated, happy, no one but you is responsible for this." School? I say again, there are good teachers who understand that a child needs to be taught to learn, think, draw conclusions, that if a child says something unexpected, it's great.
This is why Pestalozzi became an educator. There is such a character in world pedagogy - grandfather Pestalozzi, no one knows what his name was, his name has not survived, he was a priest. Little Pestalozzi came to him for the summer, and he taught him, told him about life, about nature, about bees, about God, and his grandson was terribly interested, he asked his grandfather about everything. And then Pestalozzi entered school, and he became wildly bored, it struck him: why was it so interesting with grandfather, but not with school …
The same thing happens with us - all children are curious, they all ask questions, draw conclusions. Then the child comes to school, and there they do a strange thing to him - they teach him in what position to sit at the desk - quietly and neatly folded his hands. But the movement of the hands is a manifestation of emotions. As soon as they put you at the desk, your activity is killed, and that's it. Then they start to tell you: learn from these people by heart.
When my son was six years old, we went to Mikhailovskoye, there was a very good guide, my son fell in love with Pushkin incredibly, he just adored him, hung a portrait on the wall. In the third grade I took it off. I ask: "What happened?" He says: “Pushkin, what a horror! All other poets have passed and no longer need to be taught. And to teach Pushkin until the end of school. " They brought the person. When did this change? When he watched Tuminas' play Eugene Onegin, he was in the tenth grade. The son came home and said: "What good poems Pushkin wrote." The school did not explain to an absolutely humanitarian child that Pushkin wrote good poetry.
It turns out that parents need to build their own, completely parallel learning system?
- Unfortunately.
Do you need school at all? Maybe transfer to home schooling of children?
- School is still needed. She teaches socialization, teaches relationships with bosses, with fools, with the team. If a child at a young age decided to be a physicist and goes to a physics circle at a university, he can study as an external student, because he socializes there. If he has not yet found his calling, then these lessons of socialization must be received somewhere. I conducted a survey among acquaintances of children in Israel, asked: "Why do you go to school?" Everyone says, "Learn." In Russia, everyone answers: "Communicate." Children understand everything perfectly.
Is the Israeli education system very different from ours?
- Fundamentally. In a typical Israeli school, a child receives three or four grades in a quarter, not a day. And there is a wild bias: the child is always right. This is also bad.
If a child somehow behaves differently at school, then all claims are against the teacher?
- Specific example. A close friend of mine is a teacher in an Israeli school. The child spits on the floor. She leads him to the director. The director calls dad. What does dad say to the teacher? “Well, you somehow teach so that he would be interested so that he doesn’t spit” (everything is on “you”, in Hebrew there is no reference to “you” to one person). And there is nothing to argue about. At any time, even at 12 o'clock in the morning, parents can call the teacher and say: “Somehow my son passed English badly. Are you bad at teaching? He’s learning badly.” Children are always right - this is a bias, and it seems to me that this is wrong. But when the teacher is always right, this is also a bias.
Say that you love him and it does not depend on the exam
- It is very important to be able not to demand from the child what you do not do yourself. Rather, to strive to meet their own requirements, and not to achieve this from the child.
- When my mothers ask me: “How to understand whether it is necessary to act like this in relation to the child or not?” I say: “It's very simple. Compare, would you do this with your husband? " My husband watches football, he goes to work tomorrow morning. If you come up and say: "After the first half to sleep, tomorrow you will get up early!", Is this possible? How long will your family last? Why is it possible with a child? The husband sits on Saturday, drinks beer and watches football, rests. This is useful? No, but he's resting. The husband can rest, and the child who sits and plays computer games, let him go for a walk, get some air, because leisure should be useful. An adult shouldn't, but a child should.
We started our conversation with this, and this leads to a conflict between parents and children - when the child understands that parents live according to one laws, and he according to others. I really like to tell an incident that I myself saw - in a children's toy store, a boy says: "Mom, well, buy me a car." Mom says: "Seryozha, you already have 25 typewriters, I can't buy you any more." What does Seryozha answer? "Mom, you have so many tights, and you buy and buy everything." They see everything. People can buy themselves as many things as they want. This means that I can buy as many cars as I want. If I cannot do this, then I am not human. If I am not human, then who am I? I am a tiger and will begin to gnaw you all.
Let's go back to the crazy time of exams and other results of the school year: how can you help children get over it?
- There are children who understand what they will do next. They need to try their best to pass the profile exam so that they go to college, because it is important. But it's much easier for them, because they have a goal. It is very difficult for children who have no goal. And the most important thing that parents have to do is say that they love them. When I tell my parents about this, they often wonder: this is understandable - since this is my child, I love him. But we must talk about this.
Tell your child that you love him and that his success in passing the exam will not change anything in your attitude towards him.
If you want your children to be happy, you need to tell them all the time that you love them.
The USE and all the rest are absolute nonsense compared to the mental health of a child. This is how it should be treated. In no case should you tell your child: "This is an important moment in your life, decisive." We need to facilitate this. “Everything is in the hands of God, let’s pass, let’s go.”
- There are children who endlessly worry about their successes and failures, and they need to be constantly reassured, and there are children not only with a stable psyche, but with a different attitude to the problem: “I won't study, so what? And get away from me!"
- There are none if we are now talking about healthy people. Sometimes parents are afraid that if children are allowed to do what they want, they will lie on the couch for days, reading books or playing computer games. There are no people who enjoy lying on the couch for many days. If a child behaves this way, it means that his vocation was not found, the point is not in the psyche, but in the fact that he has no goal. A vocation is what pulls a person out of such a state of depression.
Where to start looking for a vocation? If it is not clear what the child is interested in
- First, you need to come to an agreement with your child: “You and I are looking for your calling. We have such a joint business. This cannot be solved with one conversation. We explain to him for a long time what a vocation is, he has nowhere to get this information. We explain how bad, stupid it is to marry for convenience. It is also foolish to look for a job that brings money, but not love. It may take months, but we understand that the child and I are doing one thing in common - we are looking for a calling.
Then we ask him different possibilities. Then comes the most crucial moment when the child receives a difficult creative task. For example, my son wanted to be an artist, and then he became the best striker in Tagansky district in football, came to me and said: "Dad, I am taken to CSKA to play football professionally, but I have to give up the theater." I, stepping on all parts of the body, said: "Decide for yourself." If this is your business, you will get mad, vomit, but you want to do it.
For some reason, when I was ten, I wanted to write a play about the hard life of blacks in America, although I had never been there. It was very difficult. A lot of characters, a lot of volume, I was angry, I couldn't do it, but I really liked it. This more complex creative task is the most important in defining a vocation.
If this is a man's business, then he, overcoming all this, will do it.
I had a very good literature teacher who gave us the task to write a film script based on any story by Turgenev. Can you imagine a movie script in ninth grade? I remember how I went crazy, I asked my dad how it was. For two days I didn’t get up from the table, I was furious, I didn’t eat, my mother was very nervous. As a result, I realized that I really like it. Dad gave me his typewriter and said, "You're a writer now, type on a typewriter." It was hard, but I liked it. And some boy could not do it, because it turned out to be none of his business. Everyone knows - if this is your business, then it is done.
If a child draws little people in a notebook and he seems to like it, do we complicate this task for him? And if he merges and says: “No, something is not about that,” then it’s not his?
- Yes. Although it can merge, then return, it also happens. Desire draws out, we know this very well. Genuine desire gives incredible strength. The most important thing is not to accuse the child of being lazy. I never tire of repeating that laziness is a quality of an intelligent person, laziness is unwillingness to do what you don’t want to do. Not a single person is lazy to do what is interesting to him. If a child is too lazy to draw, then this is simply not his business.
It is very interesting, because I see in my children how difficult it is to keep some chosen goal
- Because there is no such task. Because there is a completely strange task to bring up a harmoniously developed personality. We somehow forget that such people, with rare exceptions - Leonardo da Vinci, Lomonosov - are very few. History was driven by inharmoniously developed people who completely immersed themselves in one occupation, were engaged in physics or literature, like madmen were painting, as madmen were writing some kind of prose. There are very few harmoniously developed people, all the rest are very stubborn people. It was in those centuries when there was not so much information, but now what to say? If now a child at the age of five or six is interested in doing chemistry, he will not read War and Peace, but he will probably be Mendeleev.
Authors: Andrey Maksimov, Anna Danilova