Five standards for children’s mental health

Emotional adaptability meets the standard, cognitive development matches age, interpersonal relationships are harmonious, behavioral responses are appropriate, and self-awareness is clear.

There is no need to rotely memorize these dry words. I have been doing child psychological intervention for 7 years and have contacted more than 300 families. I have seen too many parents who either think that "if the child can eat and run, there is nothing wrong with it", or they go online to check the child's temper when they see it. It's like looking for problems with a magnifying glass, always doubting whether the child has a mental illness. In fact, applying these five dimensions to daily scenes is much more reliable than the messy homemade self-evaluation forms on the Internet.

Let’s first talk about emotional adaptability, which is most easily misunderstood. Last week I just received the mother of a third-grade boy. She cried as soon as she sat down and said that her baby was hysterical at every turn. She didn't get an excellent grade in the group assignment last time. She threw stationery in front of the whole class. She didn't do well in the exam at home and she cried for an hour with the door closed. She must have a problem with her emotional management. I looked through this child's observation records for half a month, and found that there were no big problems: he would jump excitedly for 20 minutes when he saw his favorite dinosaur exhibit, and he would turn around and play ball with his classmates after being criticized by the teacher for half an hour. Even if he cried, it would be for a reason. He would not lose his temper for no reason, and he would return to normal soon after venting. This is actually the core of emotional adaptation: matching the intensity of the response to the event, so that he will not continue to be trapped in negative emotions. Of course, the judgment standards of different schools are also different. The psychoanalytic school believes that as long as emotions can be expressed freely and are not suppressed, it is healthy. Behaviorism will pay more attention to whether emotional reactions affect normal schooling and social interaction. When we practice, we will never stick to a single standard, and we will not label a child as "emotionally unstable" whenever we see a child crying.

By the way, speaking of things that are easily misjudged, there is also the matter of interpersonal relationships. Last month, the mother of a second-grade boy brought her baby to me anxiously. She said that her baby had never been gregarious and would squat in the corner of the playground to watch ants after class. Other children would not play even if they called him. Could this be a sign of autism? I followed me to school and stayed there for two days. I happened to meet a kid in the next class who also liked insects and asked him what he was looking at. The kid immediately started chatting, starting from the classification of ants to the snails he raised at home. He talked for almost half an hour, and at the end he even took the initiative to invite the kid to his house on the weekend to see the insect specimens he had made. In fact, the core of this standard is "being able to establish and maintain the relationships you need", and it does not require children to be social jerks at all. There is also a very common controversy here: many schools' evaluation standards require children to "be gregarious and integrate into the group." However, sociological child psychology research generally believes that as long as children have their own social comfort zone, it is completely fine even if they have few friends. When we intervene on the front line, we will never force introverted children to join the crowd.

What many parents tend to overlook most is self-awareness. I was particularly impressed by the little fifth-grade girl I met two months ago. She would cry every time she took a test, even if she scored 98 points, saying that she was too stupid to do anything well. Her classmates praised her for her beautiful paintings, but she also felt that others were pitying her and saying such nice things. According to Erikson's theory of developmental stages, the core development tasks of school-age children are to establish a sense of diligence and avoid inferiority. If at this stage they fall into self-denial for a long time, or even suffer from insomnia and weariness of studying because they feel that they are "not good enough", they must be wary of self-perception bias. Of course, it does not mean that there is a problem when children have high demands on themselves. The school of positive psychology will tend to guide children to pay more attention to their own strengths. The school of psychodynamics will give priority to tracing whether the child's low self-evaluation is caused by parents' long-term high demands. We generally do not label children right away. We first discuss the details of parenting with parents before making a judgment.

As for the cognitive development matching age, to put it bluntly, it is "what age do what", you don't have to be too far ahead and you can't fall too far behind. A parent once brought his 6-year-old child for evaluation and was told that the child could not do arithmetic and whether there was an intellectual problem. After asking, he found out that the child had never been taught mathematics at home. The child was allowed to play in the mud and dig out sand every day. After two weeks of teaching, the child could not do addition and subtraction within 100 very well. It was a false alarm. Nowadays, many parents are ahead of their children, always thinking that their cognitive development is good because their children memorize hundreds of poems more than their peers. In fact, it is completely unnecessary. Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development has long mentioned that each child's development rhythm can be faster or slower, but the sequence of the core stages will not change. As long as they can reach the average level of their peers, they are fully qualified.

The last aspect of behavioral response is appropriateness, which is actually the easiest dimension to observe. For example, if your child is too excited to sit still after a physical education class, it is normal to squirm for ten minutes. However, if your child spends the entire class squirming in his seat, pulling the hair of the classmate in front of him, throwing small notes, and standing up and running three laps in ten minutes to do homework, then you should pay attention to the possibility of ADHD. I should also mention here that many schools now regard "sit still and obedient" as the standard for behavioral health, which is actually problematic. When we evaluate, we will give priority to the scene: running wildly and yelling in the playground is normal, and being able to sit down quietly and read a book in the library is enough.

In fact, after all is said and done, these five rules are not golden rules that must be strictly adhered to. I have also seen many children who are introverted and occasionally have a little mood, and still live happily and comfortably. After working in this industry for a long time, I feel that the meaning of these standards is never to label children as "healthy" or "unhealthy", but to give parents a reference yardstick. When you are really unsure, don't make blind guesses on Baidu. Talk to a regular child psychology clinic or a full-time psychological teacher at school, which is better than anything else.