One night before going to bed, my wife poured out her worries about her daughter to me one after another. When I heard "frustration education", the concept came to my mind: "artificially set some difficulties and obstacles for children, or do something against their wishes to help children improve their ability to resist setbacks in real life in the future."
Then the images of "tiger mother" and "wolf father" came to my mind. The next second, I denied my thoughts: "How did I become such a father?" but ......
How to improve children's ability to resist setbacks? Is there such a systematic and authoritative book for my reference?
When I saw the cover and introduction of Adversity Quotient: How to Deal with Bad Things, it was a treasure.
The author of this book, Dr. Paul Stoz, is the founder of adversity quotient theory. He was named one of the "Top Ten Most Influential Thinkers in the World" by Human Resources Magazine. He spent decades studying and understanding people's ability to cope with adversity, put forward four dimensions of adversity quotient, and provided readers with many methods and strategies to cultivate and develop in adversity from four dimensions.
This book has been translated into 17 languages, and his course Adversity Quotient has been a permanent course of Ivy League schools such as Harvard Business School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, as well as a training course of Fortune 500 companies such as Johnson & Johnson and GE. This book has been recommended by many well-known entrepreneurs and scholars at home and abroad, such as Zhao Zhou, founder of Kaiben Gang, and Zhang Defen, founder of Akiba PPT. Some scholars even think that this book can be compared with Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I also found a way to improve children's resilience from this book, and finally I don't have to be a wolf father.
The greatest benefit of this book is to explain what adversity is from the perspectives of cognitive psychology, psychoneuroimmunology and neurophysiology. From which four dimensions should resilience be cultivated? What is the fork in the road that is prone to setbacks? And how to help individuals, others, children, teams and organizations use tools to cope with adversity, how to reshape their lives, and thus climb upwards. In this era full of uncertainty, only those with high adversity can actively face all kinds of difficulties and obstacles.
Frustration is a negative emotional experience, which usually happens when people can't achieve their expected goals. It is caused by problems, challenges, difficulties, obstacles and other factors brought about by the social, work and personal environment in people's daily life, which produces a superimposed pressure in people's hearts.
It can be seen that frustration does not need to be artificially created at all, it exists all the time around children, and as children continue to contact the society, this experience will be more and more.
Pudding avoids using curriculum tools, that is, she finds it an impossible challenge for her to use this tool, including simple knee bending movements that her mother seems to be "frustration".
Therefore, as parents, what we need is not to create "setbacks", but to teach our children the courage and methods to face "setbacks", that is, to improve their adversity quotient in an all-round way.
So what is adversity quotient?
From this picture, we find that adversity quotient is a system presented by knowledge theory, measurement methods and practical tools.
Adversity quotient (adversity quotient? AQ), mainly as an indicator of frustration tolerance, reflects a person's psychological state and resilience in the face of adversity and frustration, and is a quality standard to measure a person's tolerance and resilience to adversity in social life.
In order to improve children's ability to resist setbacks, we need to understand the four dimensions that determine adversity quotient.
Sense of control: When you encounter some kind of adversity, how much control do you have inside?
Attention is "what do you think", and this dimension is more about your inner recognition of your abilities. The degree of control depends on your attitude towards setbacks.
A person with a strong sense of control firmly believes that he can control the situation and do anything. Even if others think that he can do nothing, he can observe things calmly, try his best to save them and never give up easily.
In the process of children's growth, it belongs to the stage of low sense of control. They are constantly aware of their control ability, such as our pudding control tools, which have never been touched. In her opinion, she could not control it and was not sure how to use it correctly, so she chose to retreat.
So how can parents improve their children's sense of control when cultivating their children's adversity quotient?
Select the difficulty of waiting and decomposing the target.
I have a deep feeling for children riding bicycles. I bought a tricycle for pudding when I was two years old. At that time, I thought about buying a bigger size, and I could ride it when the children were older. Who knows, after buying it, the child doesn't know how to get on it, so he doesn't ride it after trying it several times. Every time my wife sees her bike idle, she always encourages her to say, "Try the pudding. Now I am grown up and can ride! " "But she just won't try.
I said to my wife, "Don't rush her, let's wait." After I was three years old, one day I was exercising beside my bike. Pudding was playing around, turning the pedal of my bike, and then I tried to climb up by myself. I stepped on it twice, and when I saw the opportunity, I pushed it behind her when she wasn't looking. She found that she could take a step forward, and then stepped on it with excitement. What she doesn't know is that every time she tries to get stuck, I give her a nudge in the back. Three months have passed, and now she is riding a bike that I can't catch up with.
Parents wait patiently for their children's sense of control, and don't rush to let their children do what parents "think" their children "should" be able to do.
In order to enhance their sense of control, sometimes what we need is not to create "difficulties", but to reduce "difficulties" and decompose what you expect them to accomplish. If this matter needs a few small steps, we can do the first few and leave the last step to the children themselves. Next time, we will stay one step further, so that children can find confidence in the growing sense of control in the face of adversity.
Responsibility: refers to the degree to which people attribute themselves and take responsibility when analyzing the causes of adversity.
If a person always subconsciously blames setbacks and problems on the outside world, always has a "victim mentality" and takes shirking responsibility as a habit, then his sense of responsibility is very low.
People with high AQ will take the initiative to take responsibility and believe that they will definitely improve the situation.
Therefore, responsibility refers to a responsible dimension, dare to take responsibility, even if it is failure and mistake. This responsibility is also manifested in learning from mistakes and being more willing to bear the consequences of adversity.
What do we need to do in this dimension?
Agree to ease children's emotions, find reasons together, and help children learn to attribute.
When encountering difficulties or making mistakes, children will inevitably be depressed and sad. Parents should understand their children emotionally, not blindly blame or be completely negative.
For example, if a child loses a ball game, he will feel disappointed and unhappy. At this time, if parents accuse their children of not playing well, it will not help them at all. Simply say: "It doesn't matter!" Or "What's so unhappy about this?" Or "do everything possible to please the children" is not a good idea. Either the child gets deeper and deeper in negative emotions and loses confidence, or the child can't feel his true feelings when facing setbacks.
At this time, parents need to give an emotional support: I understand your feelings, but no matter what the outcome, parents will support you. We also hoped that you won, but you lost. If you need help, we can always help you.
These words are not used to say, but are made through small things. When they are emotionally stable, they can find the reason together calmly and help the children find the part of the reason that they can control.
Attribution bias is a mistake that most adults make. If children are allowed to bear the responsibility of attribution from an early age and learn to be responsible for the consequences of things, their sense of responsibility will become stronger and stronger.
Influence refers to whether people will extend to other aspects when facing the consequences of adversity.
People with high AQ will only consider the consequences of a single event, not the consequences of chain reaction (also known as landslide fallacy), and will control the consequences within a certain range without affecting other aspects of themselves. People with low AQ will give people a feeling that "the sky is falling" and feel that everything is terrible, because one setback denies everything.
Persistence means how long you can persist in adversity.
People with fixed thinking mode put forward by Carol Dwek will feel failure and difficulties in the book Lifelong Growth, and their personality is permanent. "Forever loser", "procrastinator" and "I never …" are the words that these people often talk about, and they often give themselves stickers. In their view, adversity always exists.
How can we help children in these two aspects of life?
Encourage rather than praise: pay more attention to children's behaviors, methods and attitudes, and don't praise children's talents.
Parents talk about things: parents form the habit of only talking about facts and feelings, and find one thing, that is, not talking about the front car, not talking about the rear car, but only talking about the present, which exerts a subtle influence on children.
For children's "frustration education", we don't have to try our best to find or create opportunities, because children's lives are full of such opportunities, and we need to seize the fleeting educational opportunities. The real frustration education is that parents and children face setbacks together, cultivate children's ability to "solve problems", and finally accompany children out of setbacks.