Shocked by 7 "blind spots" in today's child education

After more than 10 years of teaching, Mr. Nguyen Chi Hieu, a PhD graduate from Stanford University (USA), shares about parents' mistakes in educating their children.

1. Parents know everything

Every parent loves and wants their children to succeed. Therefore, many people constantly research and study to improve their parenting methods. That is a good thing. However, there is a reality that many parents read a little bit here and there, skim a little bit here and there, and sip on many “philosophies”, so that they… know everything.

There is a classic saying:A little knowledge of everything is just small thinking and that is really... dangerous(A little knowledge of everything is just a small thought and that is dangerous). The danger is that knowing a little about everything will lead to the illusion of many parents that everything they say is correct. Then, they make it difficult for the educators who do not know everything but know deeply, and demand many things without stopping, leading to "overeating".

And it is true that many children are overfed. They have everything, but everything is superficial and superficial. Asking a child about anything for 5-10 minutes will make them lose their breath, and asking about deeper, more abstract things will make their thinking and knowledge broken.

2. Parents do everything

Parents nowadays are busy making a living, this can be a valuable sacrifice. But unfortunately, many people do not pay attention to this, leading to a rather sad consequence: time is limited, so they are impatient and impatient. Therefore, if there is something that the child cannot do, cannot think of, or takes too long, let the parents handle it quickly.

For that reason, there are children who grow up but still have fragile self-reliance skills, loose emotional control, deficient self-thinking ability, and weak resilience and endurance. Parents often unintentionally deprive their children of the right to overcome difficulties. If a carp cannot jump over the dragon gate, how can it become a dragon?

3. "Mom and Dad give me a gift"

It seems like every little thing a child does now has a gift, from something as small as a candy to clothes, shoes, phones, computers, and a trip away. Parents have forgotten one thing in life: greed only deepens, and giving children too much material rewards is no different than amplifying their greedy nature.

Children will never realize that the most beautiful and meaningful gift of all efforts is the accumulation of knowledge, the stretching of thinking, the fullness of skills and the fullness of personality. Those are the most lasting and valuable assets, not the things that are used once and then gone, used for a few years and then changed. And when they go to university and work, they will realize that out there, sometimes even if they try hard, they will not necessarily get gifts. And because they wait too long without seeing gifts like their parents often "teach", they soon give up their efforts.

4. Parents constantly scold

When parents pave the way and take care of their children but they still cannot keep up with their expectations, and are unclear about their children’s physical and mental development, parents will “repeatedly” tell their children unpleasant things. A few times may be okay because “spare the rod and spoil the child”, but over time it becomes inertia. Parents themselves cannot control themselves and things start to exceed their limits.

Comparisons, criticisms, and scoldings are indeed valuable in the moment, helping parents to calm down and children to obey. But the blind spot is what happens in the future. Children are like balloons filled with air, silent but very easy to explode; just one more word or action as small as a needle can lead to many unpredictable consequences.

All praise and criticism should be converted into suggestions and analysis of the child's strengths and weaknesses. The beauty of education is recognizing and overcoming weaknesses, while also recognizing and promoting strengths, not insulting the child whenever there is something to compare.

5. Parents let their children go all out

I have had countless conversations with parents about the question "Why doesn't my child make any progress despite studying?" The first question I ask back is not which school the child goes to or who the teachers are, but what the schedule is like at home.

And then parents suddenly realize that each day is a kind of irregular schedule of studying, playing, living, eating and sleeping. Children do everything without limits or limits, at first it is a few minutes, then it stretches to several hours without them knowing. So their brains only feel happy when they can embrace those things, even holding a light pen makes them complain about how heavy it is.

Even now, when they go to school or to a center, many places throw them technological devices with advertising messages on the cloud, but they themselves don't know what is called.cognitive overload(brain overload). That so-called advanced technology, if we don't know how to control and balance the total exposure time in a day, it will "destroy the brains" of children more than the cool benefits they praise.

6. Parents want everything

Wherever there are exams, wherever there are good teachers, wherever there are interesting programs, parents will invest all their money in their children. A truly precious and beautiful idea, but somewhere there appears the tendency to take on too much, to run around, to eat quickly, so that children have to shoulder too many expectations from their parents that they often have no time to breathe, let alone digest and transform knowledge into content.

Not to mention that the things that parents are pushing their children to pursue are not necessarily the things they really need for the future. Then one day, everyone suddenly realizes that scores or medals are actually worthless if they lack general knowledge, thinking ability and basic skills to survive in any educational and working environment.

At that time, the children suddenly realized that being the best student in class for many years is not everything because out there, people also look at whether they have moral character to give them a scholarship, whether they have creative and quick thinking to step up on stage, whether they have enough social skills to put them in leadership positions, and whether they have enough profound knowledge to be listened to.

But during 12 years of high school, because of being busy with all those "want-it-all" things from their parents, they can only "skim" a little bit of each of the other important things, as fleeting as a passing wind.

7. Parents are clueless

Parents know almost nothing about what their children learn or who teaches them. They leave it all to grandparents, housekeepers, tutors, or even drivers, forgetting that the people who should have the greatest influence on a child are the parents.

Even if they like or dislike something, are happy or sad, disappointed or lonely, parents do not have time to sit down and talk regularly, helping them open up. As a result, the distance between parents and children grows wider each day. And negative attitudes or behaviors of the children also appear from there, all mistakes are gently brushed off by parents, pushed onto teachers and schools.

A child can study in a bad school but if at home, parents are still the lights that both illuminate and warm the child, the "anchor" of personality, awareness, and morality of the child is still strong enough to destroy the bad things out there that we may not be able to intervene.

Of the four skills of listening - speaking - reading - writing, listening is the first to come to humans, but now parents may have lost that God-given skill. Only by listening will we gradually understand, only by understanding can we start doing, and only by doing can we change our children and ourselves for the better.

Nguyen Chi Hieu