The content of children’s mental health mainly includes

Emotional regulation and emotional perception capabilities, a complete and stable self-cognition system, and social adaptability to adapt to the environment. This is the core framework that I have sorted out based on the consensus of the academic community after working in a community child psychological intervention station for 5 years and contacting more than 200 families. Without those fancy add-ons, it is the bottom-level ability that truly affects children throughout their lives.

I just received a 7-year-old boy last month. When her mother dragged him in, she kept scolding him, "This kid has a bad temper. He throws things at every turn and even talks back after saying a few words." After chatting for half an hour, I discovered that he couldn't tell whether he was aggrieved or irritable when he was angry. When he failed in an exam, he was so frustrated that he would only vent his anger by smashing pencils. This is a typical emotional perception ability that has not been established. You don't even know what your own emotions are, let alone regulate them. In fact, the academic community has always had different intervention ideas for this kind of problem: the psychoanalytic school tends to look back for omissions in parenting. Is it because the needs of children in infancy were not responded to in a timely manner, which formed the pattern of "expressing needs with aggression" ； The behaviorist school will feel that there is no need to trace the root cause and directly teach children to recognize emotion cards and set up "calm corners" for time-out exercises. After a few times, there will be significant improvements. My own experience from practical experience is that there is no need to take any side. Children under 6 years old will get faster results by practicing specific skills first. If children over 10 years old have stubborn emotional problems, it is not too late to look back to their early experiences to find the reasons.

Many parents tend to regard "good" and "obedient" as the standard for mental health, but ignore the importance of self-awareness. There used to be a 10-year-old girl who was the class monitor at school. Her grades were always among the top, and she even won a national award for drawing. But every time she was praised, she would hide away. She told me privately, "I'm not as good as they say. Winning awards is just luck. I might fail the exam next time." She attributes all success to external factors, and blames herself for any minor mistakes. This is a typical lack of self-worth and a problem with the self-cognition system. There are also differences between different schools of thought on how to help children build a healthy self-awareness: Positive psychology has been promoting the method of "concrete praise". Don't just say "you are awesome" in a general way, but praise specific behaviors, such as "you were very considerate when you opened the door for grandma today."” ； However, many education scholars have objected, believing that deliberate and excessive positive feedback will make children completely bind their self-worth to the evaluation of others, and instead easily form a pleaser personality. The most extreme case I have ever encountered was an 8-year-old boy. His parents had praised him as "the smartest in the world" every day since he was a child. However, he scored 80 points on the first test. He went home and locked himself in his room and cried for three hours, saying, "I am not smart anymore, and you must not love me anymore." In fact, there is no absolutely correct method. The most important thing is to grasp the right balance. Don't belittle your child every day, and don't praise your child to the sky. Let him know his own advantages objectively and accept his shortcomings calmly. That's enough.

The most easily misunderstood aspect is the flexibility of social adaptation. Many parents think that this is to make their children outgoing, capable, and able to be the king of children wherever they go. In fact, this is not the case at all. Last year, there was a little boy in the first grade who cried and wanted to transfer to another school every time he lost when he competed with his classmates for toys. At first, his parents thought that the child was simple and had never endured hardships. However, after talking with him, they found out that the whole family had followed him in everything since he was a child. When he was 6 years old, he never had the experience of "not getting what he wanted" even once. Naturally, he had no ability to be frustrated at all. Regarding this point, the debate on the Internet is even more heated. Some parenting bloggers say that we should give our children a "100% sense of security." We must not let our children suffer any grievances, and we must block out all possible setbacks for them. ； However, more than ten years of follow-up research in developmental psychology has shown that children who have experienced "controllable setbacks" before the age of 6, such as rebuilding building blocks by themselves after falling down, or trying to communicate by themselves after conflicts with children, have about 30% lower rates of depression and anxiety in adolescence than children who are completely protected in a greenhouse. My own feeling is that unconditional love and appropriate setbacks actually go hand-in-hand, just like taking a vaccine and not being exposed to any inactivated virus, which makes it easier to collapse when you actually encounter the flu.

In fact, these three dimensions are not separated at all. Children with poor emotional perception often find it difficult to objectively evaluate themselves. Children with chaotic self-perception are naturally prone to problems when dealing with others. There is no need to separate them clearly and benchmark them one by one. I have seen too many parents use the "Children's Mental Health Standards" that they searched online to check their children one by one. Sometimes they worry about whether their children are too introverted and have social difficulties, and sometimes they worry about whether their children have emotional problems because they are prone to losing their temper. Instead, they make their otherwise good children more and more nervous. To be honest, is there any unified standard for children’s mental health? Some children are naturally slow-tempered, and it is normal for them to hide behind their parents when they see strangers. Some children are born to be impatient, and it is not a big problem to cry a few times when something is urgent. As long as they can get along with themselves comfortably, and will not always get into trouble when encountering unpleasant things, and they will not always think about hurting themselves or others when getting along with others, it is already a very healthy state.