Social competence
Social competence is the ability of a child to deal with people in a group. It includes how to interact with people, self-awareness, emotion recognition, and other abilities.
And to develop the child's social ability must go to the place where there are many people, just like to learn to swim, you must go to the pool, so we have to put the child into the people to raise.
Before that, I also often took my children to the neighborhood, to the park, to play with other children, when simply want to let the children have playmates, to be able to build friendships from childhood. But there's always conflict between kids, whether they've just met each other or they've played together a lot, because they're still self-centered and self-motivated. The absence of conflict is obviously not compatible with their mindset.
And conflict is a good time for them to construct their social skills. As long as there are no major safety concerns, adults should not intervene and let children work it out on their own. If you pull them away immediately, you lose an opportunity to develop social skills.
If you want your child to develop social competence, don't organize them, let them be free, let them have more and deeper contact, social competence is a deep engagement with the human soul.
Why develop social skills
I love my child, I want him to experience good things in his life, and to have a smooth sailing in the future, I hope I can be with him until the end of his life, I hope I can make enough money that he can't spend in his whole life, and never have to worry about food, rice, oil, and salt, but all these, can I do it? Obviously not. Sooner or later, he will leave us and go out into the world on his own. So what can we do for him before he leaves?
That is, to develop his ability to adapt to society and to interact with others, to build up his ability to create a happy life, and to develop a personality that is easy to live with.
Yesterday afternoon, pick up the child on the way from school, passing the swimming pool, I saw a father and daughter in the pool, the little girl is estimated to be 3-4 years old, the father asked the child to inhale a breath, hold it, and then sank his head underwater, the child is afraid of, wailing and crying, do not do it, the father said, "If you cry, I don't want you to do it. to scare the little girl, the little girl was afraid that her father did not want him, hard to stop crying, took a breath and buried his head into the water, but soon raised his head again, in exchange for louder crying. This scene reminds me of a video played by Mr. Ma of a mom teaching a 4-year-old girl to memorize her multiplication tables.
Can you say they don't love their children? I think they love their children as much as anyone else for sure. Otherwise they wouldn't spend so much effort to teach such a young child to swim and learn multiplication.
This is something we should think about, as parents living in the era of big data, artificial intelligence, and knowledge explosion, which aspect of the child's ability should be emphasized?
Obviously, cultural knowledge and swimming techniques are not non-now can not learn, and inappropriate age, for the child a hundred harm and no good, while social competence can only be constructed in childhood to complete.
The best stage for constructing social skills
In fact, before I went to listen to the speech, I was still wondering. The children are so young and still need to be taken care of by their parents and teachers, so how can they need social skills? The ability to deal with people at least until the elementary school, right, to face the problem independently when you need to ah. The first thing you need to do is to get your hands on a new pair of shoes or boots.
It turns out that social skills must be constructed in childhood, that is, before the age of 6-7 years, is the best stage to construct social skills. Why?
Mr. Ma told us the story of Cinnabar and Nande in The Little People. Cinnabar loved Nande and waited for Nande in front of the kindergarten door early every morning, and Nande came to school very late every day. Once, Cinnabar went out for a trip and found a beautiful shell on the beach, and brought it back to Nande as if it were a treasure, but Nande didn't even look at it and said, "It's all broken, but still give it to me". If this were an adult, he would probably never play with him again, and his heart would be broken. But Tatsuya is not affected at all, and he is still playing with Nande as usual.
And look at the children around us, one minute the two had a fight, the next minute the two were happy to play together. One minute, they were angry and said, "I'm not going to be good friends with you anymore, and I'm not going to share my food with you anymore. And the next second, the two people happily do the game.
This is the world of children, the heart is big, do not bear grudges. If this is an adult, a conflict, a fight, I guess it is old and dead, how to construct social skills, no chance at all.
Adults are more vulnerable to things like this.
Parental beliefs need to be oriented toward what's good for the child
This struck me particularly hard for the reason that I'm doing a terrible job at this. The fundamental reason is that I had not learned the lesson of how to construct a child's social competence.
A thought is a world. But it's only when you know it that your perception changes.
Mr. Ma said: when a child hits your child, you have to be grateful to the child who hit, he is an angel, so that your child has the opportunity to face the strong force, and has the opportunity to develop the social ability of how to face the strong force.
This idea completely turned my perception upside down, I used to worry about my children being hit and bullied. I didn't know how to deal with it, and of course my child didn't know how to deal with it, so he could only cry to vent his frustration and draw attention to himself. My worries are also sensitively captured by my child, resulting in his frequent anxiety: What if he hits me? What if so-and-so steals my toys and doesn't give them back to me? He has a lot of worries and anxieties about things that haven't happened yet when he's interacting with other children.
Today I finally got to the root of the problem. My victim mentality is influencing my child's behavior and making him feel like a victim everywhere.
And the belief that is good for your child is to cherish every opportunity for conflict, because conflict, conflict is an opportunity for your child to learn. Just as mistakes are opportunities to learn, challenges are opportunities to learn.
What I want to do is to implant in my brain the belief that Mr. Ma said, "Be thankful for the child who hit you," and guide him to face the strong forces, so that he can develop his own abilities.
Summary
The future is ****winning, so we must work together.
Only by understanding and adapting to the changes in society can we provide a valuable service to others and have a chance of survival.
Good social skills in children are an important prerequisite for a high quality of life in the future, and are foundational and generalist skills that affect every aspect of a child's future life.