This article is from WeChat official account:阿肉阿团 (ID: yiqiuyiyang) , author: Qiu days, Bo Chao, Yang Yang, Yilong, head Figure from: “dad tiger mother cat” still
Uncommon children
Our children are being deprived of their right to be ordinary people.
I don’t mean to say that our children must be ordinary people. Every parent has expectations of their children, hoping that their children will live better than themselves. However, If you don’t even have the right to become an ordinary person, and you can’t even be an upright, kind, healthy, and ordinary person, their lives will face imaginable pressures-unless they are successful , There is only a dead end.
Ordinary rights do not disappear naturally in society, but are targeted and eliminated in a premeditated and organized manner.
In 2020, mere tutoring institutions for online education will have tens of billions of funds for marketing. Under the arrangement of huge amounts of capital, a series of seemingly righteous, but extremely distorted logic has captured the market-“The winner is the loser. If the child does not succeed, it is a Loser.” “If the child is to succeed, we must first To win the educational arms race; and to win, you must first enroll your child in extracurricular classes.” “Even if the child fails after enrolling in classes, the parents have tried their best; if they do not enroll in classes, the child’s success is just a fluke.”
Various algorithms accurately lock the parents, and ambush all kinds of anxiety on the only way for children to grow up, output these distorted values to parents in various forms over and over again, and kidnap parents with negative emotions Make consumption.
In this way, parents’ wallets are getting weaker and weaker, their children’s lives are getting harder and harder, and the whole family has become a double poor in material and spiritual life. Not only children can’t be ordinary people, even parents can’t be ordinary people anymore. One by one, they become anxious workers, working hard just to pay for their children.
Anxiety Manufacturer
Anxiety is not only natural, but also artificially created; as long as it is profitable, it will continue to be created.
A good friend of mine was responsible for advertising in the marketing department of an online education giant. She told me that platforms such as TikTok Kuaishou and Weibo will use algorithms to identify the “moms” among users, as potential users, package them into accurate traffic and sell them to education companies. The targeted advertisements for online education are all carefully designed to arouse strong negative emotions among “moms”.
As early as the last century, advertising has begun to skillfully use consumer negative emotions.
Fear, guilt, shame… These emotions continue to torment every parent, let us constantly examine ourselves and our children: my children are not as smart as others, I have not been able to provide children with sufficient resources, and social competition is becoming increasingly fierce , My child may be eliminated by society, as a parent I am too incompetent and too failed…
University of Richmond(Richmond University) Marketing Professor Dana Rascu(Dana Lascu) pointed out in a 1991 study on consumer guilt: The anxiety caused by negative emotions may make us hate information sources, but at the same time they It also reduces our level of attention and makes us more susceptible to information sources. So while we frantically spit out all kinds of crude ads, we were disturbed by them and lost our rational judgment.
In the 1960s, Betty Friedan (Betty Friedan), the leader of the second wave of feminist movements in the United States, wrote As mentioned in “Women’s Myth”, businesses realize that women are the main customers of American businesses, and one of the most important functions of housewives is to buy more things for the home. Therefore, the stereotype of “good mother and good wife” has actual value. The advertisements at that time were full of all kinds of express and suggestion: If you don’t provide the best things to your children and leave them behind in nutrition, you are the mother. Because of the inaction, the child may be weak and sick and learn to count down. Today, when the status of women has been greatly improved, advertising is still the same as that of the previous year. Use parents
“The children of other people’s families are exceptionally good”, “The competition is getting fiercer”, “If you don’t work hard to enroll in classes, you will become a loser”. This information is constantly instilled into parents by algorithms, and the panic and anxiety of backwardness are deeply affected. It’s all because negative emotions can promote parents’ consumption. Parents who are successfully kidnapped by emotions, like those teenage girls who have been humiliated and suppressed by the “perfect body” of the Victoria’s Secret supermodel, fall into the trap carefully designed by consumerism.Through continuous buying behavior, the algorithm is strengthened and inspired, and waves of more intense emotional offensives are designed.
How to escape the algorithm
Under the coercion of big data algorithms, it is really difficult to be an ordinary person without anxiety. However, it is not impossible.
By summarizing my own practical experience, consulting research and literature, and constantly discussing with relevant professionals, I came up with the following three-step method.
The first step: recognize the algorithm and avoid stressful behaviors
The precise positioning of our algorithm, coupled with the marketing content carefully designed through psychology and advertising, can always accurately target our pain points, incite our strong emotions, and put us in a “stress state” .
A large number of studies have proved that when people are in a state of stress, feel pressure and urgency, they will produce impulsive shopping, even compulsive shopping behavior. That’s why, most of the soft texts of online courses are not to rationally analyze the advantages of their courses for parents, but to incite parents’ emotions. As long as it can sting parents, it can encourage impulse shopping to happen continuously.
However, although impulsive shopping can alleviate temporary stress, it will bring more long-term negative effects-when parents find that their children waste a lot of time in online courses, they face short-term “effects” Long-term lack of abilities, or difficulty persisting in completing online classes, buying classes, and abandoning school, will cause parents to fall into deeper anxiety and further reduce their resistance to various online consumption traps.
To break this vicious circle, we must first face our anxiety and regulate our emotions.
How to regulate emotions? A study on emotion regulation published in the journal (Psychological Science) in “Psychological Science” in 2005 found that if we want To alleviate negative emotions, we must do two things at the same time: First, we must get out of the eventand stand a little far away to examine this anxious event;Secondly, we have to think furtherWe judge them in the general direction, analyze costs and benefits, and will not easily accept the rhetoric of capital.
Those articles based on algorithms will not help you analyze the true cost; Behind the cheap price, the greater cost is the time wasted by the children and the internal driving force wasted.
In the previous series of articles on internal drive, we have introduced in detail the importance of internal drive for the long-term development of children. Internal drive is a kind of drive that all people are born with, which encourages people to explore and learn continuously to obtain better survival and development. Although the child’s natural internal drive is very strong, if the parent exerts too strong external drive, the child’s interest in learning will be wiped out.
For example, if parents schedule their children too full, they will severely squeeze the children’s sense of autonomy; when the difficulty of the course does not match the child’s current ability status, it will wear down the child’s sense of competence; give the child too much The requirements and expectations of the child can easily establish a negative emotional connection. When a child’s sense of autonomy, competence, and emotional connection are all hit, her drive will be severely frustrated, and she will gradually lose energy in all aspects of learning.
In addition, parents who have read our math series articles can have some initial experience. Children’s free play and exploration are often more advanced than adults’ self-righteous “teaching”.
For example, children’s many natural exploration methods are themselves excellent mathematical thinking (Children’s Mathematics Thinking Class: Emancipating Thinking or Imprisoning Thinking?) , children’s games also contain profound mathematical principles (Geometry series stamp here); human cubs are naturally sensitive to numbers, For smaller numbers, you can even know the number accurately without counting.(Suppitel series stamp here). However, many “interest classes” and online classes that parents report to their children out of anxiety, in order to show the parents obvious results, teach their children “adult” ideas and long-term useless knowledge, not only Often the form of external drive squeezes the child’s internal drive, and it also obliterates the child’s built-in excellent ideas. It is really better to let the child go “playing blindly” by himself.
Some parents think that we are too “Buddha”. In fact, this is a complete misunderstanding. We are not to prevent children from learning, but we hope that children can learn in the best way and with the highest efficiency. The biggest criticism we have for online lessons in the younger age group is that the benefits that children can get from online lessons are too small, and the time wasted is too much, and it also squeezes children’s internal drive. It was too serious, so we chose not to take online classes.
Of course, every family has different needs. As long as parents can recognize their needs and define a general direction, they can eliminate the interference of noise in the flood of information, and make a choice after truly weighing the pros and cons.
Step 3: Introduce randomness-time is wasted in order not to waste time
The final point is also the big trick of the rice ball in our last “Two and a half year old baby beat algorithm” article: introducing randomness.
Introducing randomness does not mean that in order to defeat the algorithm, we have to live in disorder, give up our goals, and become salty fish who do not work hard. On the contrary, the optimal strategy should have both a clear direction and a lot of randomness. This is the most ideal way of life for ordinary people in the era of big data.
What exactly is randomness? I think that full rest, relaxation, full play and entertainment, all kinds of things that enjoy life and seem to be a waste of time, can be regarded as random. The old saying goes very well: only those who can play will work.
Why is it difficult for us to find time to read books, especially casual books, such as poetry, prose and novels? Because our goals are too clear and the timetable is too full, and reading free books is a matter without goals and short-term practical significance. If our state of mind is hurried and utilitarian, no matter how hard we try to squeeze some time on the timetable to study, we will not be in the mood to really let go of everything and do such a “waste of time”.
And when we schedule our time to the full,the more we want to achieve our goals efficiently, the harder it is to achieve efficiency. We are in a hurry and tired, our children are lingering under the burden, it is difficult to understand the meaning of life.
How much time did we sit in front of the computer, while persuading ourselves to start simple tasks, while taking out our phones to scan WeChat and Weibo. We comfort ourselves in “multi-threaded work”, in fact, fishing fish consumes a lot of time. We don’t want to “wasting time” to really take a good rest, go to the sofa to lie down, go to the park to walk aimlessly, to read a good novel. On the contrary, we stuffed our schedules, we worked day and night, and spent a dozen hours doing things that could be done in three or four hours.
In fact, when we are resting, empty, doing nothing, and wasting time, our brains are integrating more in-depth information. Most of the long-term memory and deep learning are realized during the rest.
Experiments for all age groups have shown that sleep and memory are directly related, and adequate rest can lead to better learning and work performance. Whether it is staying up all night or losing one hour of sleep a day, children with sleep loss will be significantly affected when doing abstract thinking, attention and language-related activities. In addition to sleep, a short rest also helps to learn. It’s not that rest can give people the opportunity to practice repeatedly, but just rest itself will bring a consolidation effect, enough to make the memory last longer.
Human is a complex creature, we can understand it this way—rest, relaxation, and play are integral parts of learning, working, and running toward a specific goal; in other words, proper randomness is the most important Shortcuts to efficiency goals.
From time to time, we need to waste some time. This is to better not waste time.
Conclusion
In the torrent of madness, chased by big data algorithms, and in tailor-made anxiety packages, it is not easy to maintain concentration and be an ordinary person who is not anxious.
But anxiety itself is the worst thing. Parents’ anxiety will not only make adults physically and mentally exhausted, but also directly affect their children’s development. Parents’ anxious behaviors will give their children an example of anxiety, and they will always send out a signal that makes the children feel that the world is neither safe nor beautiful, full of crises everywhere. This kind of anxiety has a particularly great impact on young children, and even inhibits the development of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, and affects children’s learning and development in the long term.
The purpose of our official account is to use our professional knowledge, our thinking and practical and effective practices to help parents find their way and reduce anxiety.
If one day, after reading our article, you feel that you have the courage to be a comfortable and calm ordinary parent, and are willing to accept your child as an ordinary person with physical and mental health, we will really succeed.
References:
1. Dana-Nicoleta Lascu (1991) ,”Consumer Guilt: Examining the Potential of a New Marketing Construct”, in NA-Advances in Consumer Research Volume 18, eds. Rebecca H. Holman and Michael R. Solomon, Provo,UT: Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 290-295.
2. Dewar, M., Alber, J., Cowan, N., & Sala, SD (2014). Boosting Long-Term Memory via Wakeful Rest: Intentional Rehearsal Is Not Necessary, Consolidation Is Sufficient. PLoS ONE, 9.
3. Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mystique. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
4. Hu, H., Lin, J., Zhou, C., & Yao, Q. (2018). Online Impulsive Shopping Behavior and Stress: The Mediation Effects of Emotion.
5. Kross, E., Ayduk, O., & Mischel, W. (2005). When Asking “Why” Does Not Hurt Distinguishing Rumination From Reflective Processing of Negative Emotions . Psychological Science, 16(9), 709–715. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01600.x
6. Meijer, A. M., Habekothe, H. T., & van den Wittenboer, G. L. (2000). Time in bed, quality of sleep and school functioning of children. Journal of Sleep Research, 9(2), 145-153.
7. Randazzo, AC, Muehlbach, MJ, Schweitzer, PK, & Walsh, JK (1998). Cognitive function following acute sleep restriction in children ages 10-14. Sleep, 21 (8), 861-868.
8. Zheng, Y., Yang, X., Liu, Q., Chu, X., Huang, Q., & Zhou, Z. (2020). Perceived stress and online compulsive buying among women: A moderated mediation model. Computers in Human Behavior, 103, 13-20.
This article is from WeChat official account:阿肉阿团 (ID: yiqiuyiyang) , author: author: Qiu days, Bo Chao, Yang Yang, Yilong (Qiu days, graduation He is a continuous entrepreneur in the education industry at Brown University, Ivy League School in the United States. After returning to China, he worked at the THBI Children’s Cognitive Research Center of Tsinghua University and opened an ideal kindergarten for two children. During the epidemic, he founded the public account “Arou A Tuan”, Hope to relieve anxiety for more parents.)