What Is a Complete Personality?

2024-01-01 00:00:00
中国新书(英文版) 2024年3期

The material of this book is selected from the bits and pieces of children’s lives. The author hopes that parents can understand some methods of interacting with children through this book, which can help children construct all aspects of their lives in the background of love and become the greatest supporters in their lives.

Zhang Lihong

Zhang Lihong has been engaged in educational work for nearly thirty years. She now owns multiple kindergartens and a nationwide educational training institution. She has founded the “Lihong · Golden Childhood” kindergarten brand, with over 100 partner kindergartens nationwide.

When a child is born, they are just a weak, needy little new life. Until one day, they grow into a capable, independent, responsible, strong, charming, personality-filled, creative, and passionate adult. This long process of growth cannot be separated from the assistance of parents.

A child’s growth is influenced by three major educational environments: school education, social education, and family education. It is generally believed that school education accounts for 25%, social education accounts for 5%, and family education accounts for 70%. The younger the child, the greater the influence of the family and school. The older the child, the greater the influence of society. This ratio fluctuates, but no matter how it fluctuates, family education always occupies the largest proportion of the child’s growth process. Schools focus on ensuring cognitive completion, while other aspects of life growth are to be undertaken by parents.

Parents are willing to devote themselves to loving their children and giving everything to them, but nurturing children solely with “love” and good intentions is not enough. Having good intentions but using the wrong methods can lead to results that are contrary to one’s intentions. In addition to good intentions, good methods are also necessary to achieve good results. As parents, how much time, energy, material resources, and financial resources have we spent constantly seeking the best parenting methods? What exactly is an effective, systematic, and complete parenting method? What kind of children do we want to cultivate in the end?

A person’s personality traits are composed of six major foundations: physical traits, emotional traits, sensory traits, cognitive traits, psychological traits, and spiritual traits. We need to construct all these six foundations for children in the background of love.

Physical

A child with a free body is energetic and will not become passive due to delayed physical development.

What impact does delayed physical development have on a child? Some children learning to write Chinese characters may accidentally write the character “如” (meaning “if”) in reverse or write the number 9 as 6. When you find them making these mistakes and say, “Look how careless you are!” you are unjust to them because you also bear responsibility; such behavior in children is due to delayed physical development.

Physical development cannot be separated from an environment of free exploration. After birth, children actively explore the world with their bodies and gradually develop physically in the process.

Some children can learn to write quickly, indicating that their parents’ caregiving methods and teachers’ assistance have allowed the child’s body to develop fully in the early stages. A well-built body will lay a good foundation for a child’s lifelong learning and work.

Emotional

There are two kinds of energy in every life: positive and negative. Our emotions also have this characteristic, and we can see this especially clearly in children: when a child feels love, they suddenly become very soft, harmonious, and friendly, but when a child is angry, they appear very aggressive.

Emotional state is one of the criteria for judging whether a child is growing normally, and a calm and joyful state is the premise for ensuring the physical and emotional growth of children. Children who are consistently depressed are always in a state of complex emotions, and their innate emotional regulation mechanisms fail. In prolonged anxiety, they may even subconsciously negate themselves: “It’s because I’m not good.” This low self-worth can persist into adulthood, meaning the child will always be a slave to emotions controlled by them.

Establishing rules can effectively help children manage their emotions. A child with a sense of rules has mature emotions and is not easily controlled by emotions but can express their inner emotions and inner self well. Rules hide negativity, allowing children’s emotions to develop in a peaceful, civilized, and orderly environment. When rules are established, children will quickly live and work in a very calm, friendly, and harmonious environment. A harmonious environment allows children to develop their attention infinitely, while a discordant environment can easily lead children into conflicts.

Sensory

Sensory development is often overlooked by parents, but it is very important. Why develop senses? Because senses are related to a child’s creativity. A creative child has an amazing ability to perceive; they can constantly perceive the complex and changeable external world, feel the beauty and wonder of the world, and also perceive their unique selves within, while a child without sensory development tends to be dull.

For example, if a child asks, “What is a wheat wave?” How would most parents respond? “Child, have you seen waves? When the wind blows over the water, it forms ripples, which are called waves. Wheat waves are formed in the same way, but they are formed by wheat ears.” This is called using concepts to explain concepts. Wheat waves are just a concept, a cognition for the child, and are not so vivid.

There is a literary worker who is particularly adept at ancient poetry, and in her memoirs, there is such an incident:

One day, she asked her father, “Dad, what is a wheat wave?” Her father didn’t explain but took her on a bike ride to a wheat field on the outskirts of Beijing for over an hour. It happened to be the season for harvesting wheat. She stood by the wheat field and felt the rustling sound of the wind, the fragrance wafting from the field, and the undulating posture of the wheat ears. All of this formed the concept of wheat waves. After a while, her father said, “Look, that’s a wheat wave.”

At this moment, the concept of “wheat wave” became vivid for this child. Only by touching this vivid concept can she apply it better.