A new school year is about to begin, but sadly many children in Ukraine will start their studies remotely. This requires more parental involvement in the learning process, especially if the children are primary school students or have problems with concentration.
I think we’ve all seen this funny sketch about home lessons in which the mother is hoarse, the daughter barely hears anything, the neighbours have already learnt everything by heart, and the dog has recited the text.
Parents laugh at this joke, but it has a sad aftertaste. I often hear children’s stories about homework under parental control, and it is like torture. Slaps, whacks, hits with a ruler on the hands, screams and insults:
– Are you dumb? How many times do I have to explain?
– Even a fool would understand this task!
– Are you making fun of me? Where do your hands come from? What are these scribbles?
What do children get from this kind of interaction? They get parental messages like “You are worthless, you are stupid, we are ashamed of you, you are not worthy of our love”. Of course, these children are guaranteed to have low self-esteem and will be doomed to a long endeavour of proving their worth first to parents and then to everyone else. As they say, I wanted my mother’s approval, but I got three university degrees instead.
Many adults who grew up in such destructive family environments promise not to be like their parents. They read a lot of books on child psychology, they know that they need to be patient and kind and not raise voices at their children. But it often happens that a child doesn’t understand something right away or simply sabotages learning because it’s difficult / boring / uninteresting. And despite the promises to be patient, irritation begins to grow in parents, similar to steam in a pressure cooker. When it becomes unbearable to hold back these emotions, we have an explosion. And things that parents have absorbed since childhood begin to “fly out” – insults, humiliation, name-calling.
Of course, many parents still manage to supress the wave of irritation, but they feel like a squeezed lemon, because all the energy was wasted on keeping irritation, anger, powerlessness and other difficult feelings in check.
So, the question is: are all parents doomed to experience such difficult emotions when helping their children with their homework?
Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to get rid of negative reactions, and you need a specialist. When working with a psychologist, parents develop awareness and become researchers: “What is happening to me?”, “What do I feel?”. People learn to give these emotions the right to be, answering the question of why these emotions arose, what they are about.
For example, one man went nuts when his kid could not understand how to solve a simple equation even from the third time. The problem was that in this man’s childhood his parents had demanded that he did everything right from the first time, insulting and ridiculing him when he made mistakes. And when we analysed his adult life, we found many situations in which he scolded himself and engaged in self-criticism for not foreseeing, not taking into account everything to make things work right from the first time. That is, HE DID NOT ACCEPT HIMSELF in the “stupid” state.
And until a person is able to accept himself or herself as imperfect and with limitations, he or she will be irritated with the child every time when the latter makes mistakes and does not understand something.
Self-acceptance is not a forceful act; sometimes it is a very long process in psychotherapy. However, after accepting themselves as imperfect, parents will no longer feel irritated but will see the child’s limitations and help the child overcome them. For example, when a child is a humanitarian and maths is all Greek to him, parents can calmly say: “Yes, we understand that maths is difficult for you. Let’s take a break, and then we’ll try to explain it again”.
I also want to raise another important point. For many parents, a child’s academic success means “I’m a good mother / great father”. That is, when parents see that a child does homework “fast and cheaply” and without trying, they feel ashamed – “I am a bad parent, I am not coping, I am doing something wrong, and everyone will judge me for it”. For many parents, these are very difficult, even unbearable feelings, so they “dump” these negative emotions onto the child.
If parents have a destructive “successful learning = we are good parents” attitude, it is important to replace it with neutral one: “if the child fails in school, it has nothing to do with the kind of parent I am”.
And it is about exploring expectations from yourself and your child, and how realistic these expectations are: “What can we do as parents to help our child learn better, and where are our limitations in this?” “Is it possible to learn well amidst endless air raid alerts and asynchronous learning?”
And, of course, it is important to investigate whether parents have the resources to work with their child. After all, no one has cancelled household chores and fatigue after work. I advise parents to choose communication with their child rather than trying to explain homework when all family members are exhausted.
Parents are often overwhelmed with fear that if they don’t help the child with studies now, he or she will not do well in school and will be unsuccessful in adult life. It is this horror that something terrible can happen because of crooked letters that overwhelms parents when they see that their child is not trying very hard to do the homework.
It is important to understand the reason for the fear – if a child does poorly in school and cannot enter a university, will he or she be successful without higher education? In the past century, higher education was almost the only opportunity to get a prestigious, well-paid job. Nowadays, you don’t need a university degree to become a successful person. Beauty specialists, video bloggers, web designers, SMM managers, game testers, photographers, coders (most of them self-taught) and many other professionals often earn more than people with higher education.
In addition to parental fears, it is important to understand whether their desire to give the child a higher education at any cost is not based on unfulfilled ambitions: “I didn’t become a lawyer (because, for example, I became pregnant early and had to give up my studies), so my child must become a lawyer by all means”.
When parents throw all their energy into ensuring that their son or daughter receives a higher education – and this burden is difficult for children or is not their choice – it often ends in depression. And this young person, having graduated from the university, plunges into an apathetic state, does not look for a job, lies on the couch with the phone. And the parents throw up their hands in despair for having raised such a “lazy bum” who wants nothing.
These are, of course, not all the reasons for the strong negative emotions that parents may have when preparing for school together with their child. Everyone has their own story to work with during counselling.
It is worth recalling that children rarely perceive their parents as teachers and often sabotage parental “teaching interventions”. The conclusion is that teachers and tutors are the ones who should help children learn, because not all parents have a pedagogical education or the ability to easily explain complex topics.
