Insights into children’s mental health

The core of children's mental health has never been "correcting children's problem behaviors", but whether adults can let go of the default of "perfect children" and catch their seemingly rebellious and perverse emotional signals.

Last month, I met a little boy in second grade at a community service station. His teacher and parents jointly escorted him here. He was told that he tore up his textbooks and homework books in class. His good books turned into shreds within two days. He had been tested at an institution and said he had ADHD, and he was ready to prescribe medication. I sent his parents out and sat on the floor alone with him to play Lego for ten minutes before he whispered to me that when he was tearing up the book, his parents who were arguing would stop at the same time and ask him, "Why are you crazy?" That was the only time he could see his parents at the same time without staring at each other.

Interestingly, I later brought this case to my colleagues for supervision, and counselors with different backgrounds gave completely different starting points: Seniors with a psychoanalytic orientation would use the symbolic symbol of "tearing paper" to dismantle it, saying that what they tore was a textbook, and that it was the illusion that "our family is very harmonious" that his parents had always played for him.； The first thing that counselors doing behavioral intervention say is to prepare special tear-paper books for children to clearly define the boundaries of disruptive behavior to avoid subsequent behavior that turns into aggression against others. ； The first thing the humanistic counselor said after hearing this was, “When he was tearing up the paper, was he so blocked that he couldn’t even find a place to cry? ”No one is right or wrong. There is no standard answer in children's psychology. Different intervention paths ultimately point to helping children express their unspoken emotions.

The National Health Commission previously released a set of data, saying that the detection rate of psychological problems among children and adolescents under the age of 17 in my country is about 17.5%. This data is now controversial in the industry: some people think that the current judgment standards are too strict, and the normal rebelliousness and occasional low mood of children in adolescence are considered as problems, which creates anxiety for parents in vain.； Some people also think that the actual situation is more serious than this. Many parents are afraid of being accused of "not teaching their children well". They hide the problem even though they have discovered it. They will not seek help until their children are in extreme situations such as self-harm and being tired of studying. In the cases I have been in contact with, I have seen both situations. Some mothers mistook their children's normal love of running and jumping for ADHD and sought medical treatment. There are also children who have refused to go to school for half a year, and their parents said, "He is just lazy and is pretending."

To be honest, I feel aggrieved for my children sometimes. Adults can still complain to their friends when they are trying to catch a fish at work. Children who wander off in class will be labeled as "inattentive". If they fail in a test, they will be labeled as "not working hard enough". When they get emotional, they are "ignorant". Even crying has to be done at a time when adults are not busy. A little while ago, a little girl in fourth grade came to see me. She ranked first in the class every time she took exams. However, she developed a fever as soon as she took the midterm and final exams. The fever reached over 39 degrees. She recovered immediately after taking the exams. Her parents took her to several hospitals to check her health, and she found no problem, so she thought of seeing a psychiatrist. In fact, it is a typical somatization symptom - there is no place to vent the emotions in the heart, and it turns into a physical reaction. It is not pretending to be sick, but it is really uncomfortable. At the end of the conversation, she said that after she came in second in the exam last time, her father casually said during dinner, "Have you been playing too wildly recently, and you can't take it back?" She was afraid that if she didn't do well in the exam next time, her parents wouldn't love her anymore. You see, a casual word from an adult can turn a child's mind eight hundred times, and finally turn into a high fever that comes to the door as soon as he takes an exam.

Many parents also ask me, does it mean that because we now advocate "love and freedom", we cannot control our children? Not really. I have seen families that are completely free-range. Because the children do not know where the boundaries are, they feel insecure all day long, and are more likely to have emotional problems. There has never been a unified standard for education. The only criterion is whether when you criticize him or ask him to do something, do you really want to help him get better, or do you want to satisfy your own obsession with "being a qualified parent", or are you afraid that he will embarrass you. There was a mother who attended our parent salon before and came home and said to her son who had just entered junior high school, "My mother always compared you with others before, it's my fault." The little boy, who usually didn't speak more than three words to her, hugged her and cried for almost half an hour on the spot. All the unspoken grievances that had been stored up for more than half a year came out because of this sentence.

I still remember the little boy who loved to tear up books at the beginning. Later, when I came to the service station, he brought me a picture he drew: two adults holding the hand of a child under a blue sky, and next to it was a small sun he made with colorful scraps of paper. He said that now his parents no longer quarrel, and they still make collages with him using scrap newspapers, and he will never tear up textbooks again.

You see, there are no born "problem children", it's just their inner thoughts that no one was willing to sit down and listen to.