Mistakes of parents and teachers

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

Parents and teachers are those people who have the greatest influence on the process of forming a child's personality. The importance of their role in the lives of children can hardly be overestimated. Therefore, I would very much like them to understand this and approach the upbringing process with all responsibility. Usually, adults have two ways of raising children. The first of these is criticism, when mistakes and shortcomings are dealt with. The second is praise.

This article discusses criticism: what it is (negative and constructive). It also raises the question of whether criticism is needed at all and wouldn't it be better to do without it at all? In the form in which it is given by most parents and teachers, it is a work of forming and fixing mistakes or an excellent mechanism for forming complexes in children. With this approach, children get the impression that nothing else exists except for mistakes. If you are to criticize, then you should always start with praise, and then further criticism will be easier to perceive.

Anecdote on this topic:

The Japanese delegation visited our country. When asked what they liked the most, they answered in unison:

- You have very good children!

- What else?

- You have very, very good children!

- But besides children?

- And everything that you do with your hands is bad.

But the best and most competent way is to do without criticism! There is no need to talk about shortcomings at all. All attention should be focused only on the merits. First, on those that already exist, then on those that can be purchased. The emphasis on the good contributes to the creation of a benevolent atmosphere in the upbringing and education of the child, helps him to believe in himself and his own strengths, creates additional motivation and desire to learn. An emphasis on mistakes, on the other hand, instills self-doubt and discourages any desire to learn.

And another very important point: if you still cannot refrain from criticizing the child, you must learn to distinguish between criticism at the level of behavior and criticism at the level of the child's personality (identity). If the child did something wrong, was guilty, this is not at all a reason to make comments about his personality. Adults very often do not distinguish between the behavior and the identity of the child, and this is the most serious mistake of parents and teachers in upbringing, for which children have to pay for the rest of their lives. Adults like to repeat:"

I would also like to say a few words about grades. Unfortunately, they are an integral part of our children's lives. These are school grades, and points on entrance and final exams, and grades while studying at a university. Assessments are needed to determine the child's level of knowledge. But parents and teachers are gradually beginning to forget that the given grade fixes the level of knowledge only at the moment. It is not directly related to the student's abilities, and even more so to his personality. You don't know how the same child will do the same job in an hour, a week, or a month. Meanwhile, there is a category of assessments that literally determine the future life of the child (exams, for example). But these tests are influenced by so many different factors: a successfully or unsuccessfully drawn ticket, the child's well-being, the mood of the examiner / teacher, his attitude towards the student. Some are particularly interested in the child's past assessments. It can be very offensive when the assessment of our children depends on a set of random factors. But by the totality of the marks received, they are sometimes judged about themselves. And so there are "poor", "C", "good" and "excellent". And the attitude of teachers towards these groups of students is usually different, biased.

As an example, I will cite one, I am not ashamed of the word, a cruel experiment conducted by two American psychologists and demonstrating the effect of teacher attitudes towards different categories of students in college. Initially, psychologists tested all students. They were supposed to determine the intelligence quotient of everyone. However, in fact, the researchers did not set themselves such a task and did not take into account the final test results in their further work. In the meantime, college professors were told the fictitious giftedness ratios of new college and previously unfamiliar young people. Researchers quite arbitrarily divided all "tested" into three subgroups. With regard to the first subgroup, the college teachers were given information that it consisted entirely of highly developed people. The second subgroup was characterized as having the lowest results. The third was "presented" as the average for the coefficient of mental giftedness. Then they were all assigned to different training groups, but they were already provided with a corresponding "label", and those who were to teach them knew and remembered him well.

By the end of the year, researchers inquired about their academic progress. What turned out to be? The first group delighted the teachers with academic results, while the students who were part of the second subgroup studied very badly (some were expelled for academic failure). The third subgroup did not stand out in anything special: in it, the successful and the unsuccessful were distributed fairly evenly, as in the entire college. This experiment clearly shows how teacher bias can be beneficial for some students and detrimental to others.

I would like to hope that this article will make adults at least a little bit think about how they raise their children (or students) and help them not to make mistakes in the future.