A sense of security is the highest starting line for children

During her confinement period, my best friend hired a very good confinement nanny. The confinement nanny taught her how to massage the baby, saying that skin-to-skin contact would help increase the baby\’s sense of security. Sure enough, her baby seldom cried except for normal physiological needs. During the weaning period, she still played with the baby, but reduced the frequency of feeding. After persisting for a period of time, the baby naturally accepted the milk powder. She said: \”The advantage of this is that the baby will find that except for the change of food, nothing has changed, and the mother still loves him.\” For mothers, weaning their children is a particularly painful thing, especially according to the ancestral method. , when weaning, the child should be isolated from the mother. But in fact, the difficulty of weaning is closely related to the baby\’s sense of security. Babies with a low sense of security will suspect that they have been abandoned by their mothers when they cannot see their mothers and cannot be breastfed. Therefore, it is more difficult for them to accept milk powder. In the famous rhesus monkey experiment: psychologist Harlow compared a wire mother with a bottle hanging on her chest and a velvet mother without a bottle, and found that the young monkeys only went to the wire mother to drink when they were hungry. Milk. After drinking the milk, he will return to the flannel mother and nestle against the flannel mother. The flannel mother becomes a source of security for the baby monkeys. Harlow concluded from this that physical contact has a far greater effect on infant development than breastfeeding. In other words, security is no less important to a person than food. In the study of children\’s attachment styles, psychologists have found that children will develop secure, anxious, and avoidant attachment styles, which are related to the way their parents responded when they were young. The baby will cry when he or she is hungry, peed or defecated, or feels uncomfortable somewhere and needs to be comforted. At this time, if the parents can respond to the baby\’s needs in time, he can confirm that the outside world is basically safe, thus forming a secure attachment. If parents occasionally respond and sometimes do not respond, the baby will become anxious and eventually form anxious attachment. Parents who rarely respond to their babies will make their babies realize that their needs cannot be met. Therefore, they suppress their needs, suppress their emotions, and eventually form avoidant attachment. Researchers conducted an experiment on children with different attachment styles. In the experiment, the tester took out a toy that looked like both a bird and a fish. Overall, there are more bird-like parts. The testers then told children with three different attachment styles that this was a bird. The mother of these children will tell them that this is a fish. Faced with two different answers, secure children will respect objective facts. Although he loved his mother, he recognized that it was a bird. As for the anxious child, he doesn\’t care about the truth at all. He only listens to his mother\’s words. When mother said it was a fish, he said it was a fish. Because the avoidant child has a relatively distant relationship with his mother, when his mother says the toy is a fish regardless of the fact, he will distrust his mother even more and trust the tester. Obviously, among these three types of children, secure children learn in a healthier way. They trust their mother and at the same time respect objective facts. And this begins to show when they are two or three years old. My niece is almost three years old, my sister sent her to kindergarten this year. After a week of kindergarten, she made a video call to me. I asked her: \”Are you happy in kindergarten?\” She answered me: \”I was very good today. There are many toys and many children in the kindergarten.\” I asked again: \”You are not going to kindergarten on the weekend. Are you going to go to kindergarten?\” Where?\” She said: \”Go to the beach. Because I am very good, my parents took me to dig sand at the beach.\” I chatted with her for a few more words, but every one or two sentences, she would emphasize: \” I\’m very good.\” She was like this because her grandma often said: \”If you are not good, grandma will not love you. Your parents will not like you and will beat you.\” She was too afraid of saying the wrong thing because If she makes a mistake, her parents will abandon her and everyone will hate her. In the end, she could only carefully become a good baby in the eyes of her parents. However, artificially creating insecurity in this way plants the seeds for the child\’s \”pleasant personality.\” There are also some unqualified parents who even take pleasure in their children\’s insecurities. I once met a family of three. When they were passing through an underground passage, because the lights in the passage were not turned on, the child hid behind his mother, saying that he was afraid of the dark and did not dare to go forward. I thought they would stop to comfort the child, but unexpectedly, the father suddenly let out a strange scream, which startled me. When the child heard the sound, he held his head and ran away screaming as if he had seen a ghost. As he ran, he said, \”I won\’t go, I won\’t go, there are monsters inside.\” But his parents were made to laugh. The father said: \”You are too timid, and now I can help you practice your courage.\” They did not realize that the child was afraid of the dark because he lacked a sense of security. Not only did they not comfort him, they also deliberately stimulated him and made him even more frightened. It is not difficult to imagine how children will be afraid of a dark room when the lights are turned off at night. If such stimulation is frequent, it may even lead to sleep disorders. John Watson, the founder of behavioral psychology, once conducted a fear experiment on eight-month-old Albert. At first, Watson gave Albert many cute stuffed animals. He wasn\’t scared at all and was petting them excitedly. Two months later, Watson placed a white mouse in front of Albert, and he happily wanted to pet the mouse. At this moment, Watson knocked hard on the iron rod hanging behind Albert. The sharp and loud sound startled him, and he lay on the ground and cried loudly. Afterwards, whenever Albert wanted to pet the rat, Watson would hit the iron rod. This stimulation made Albert start to fear the mice. Not only that, but he was afraid of all stuffed animals, including the beard on the Santa Claus mask, which also made him tremble. Watson said in his experimental report: \”Human behavior can be manufactured like a machine.\” This experiment made him famous, and his thoughts became more radical as a result. He even said: \”As long as he gives him a dozen healthy babies, he can train them to become any type of character.\” However, when Watson trained his children according to theory, his children differed to varying degrees. something is wrong. His eldest son committed suicide in his thirties after being rescued many times. His second daughter also committed suicide many times.The younger son has been wandering and living on his charity. We are familiar with the cry immunity method, delayed gratification, frustration education, etc., many of which are at the expense of the child\’s sense of security. Parents who make their children completely lose their sense of security are reported in the news as either developing schizophrenia or autism in their children, or causing their children to die due to accidents during training. As early as 1979, the American Psychological Association published the Ethical Code of Psychology Experiments in response to Watson\’s anti-human experiment. However, more families are forcing their children to be well-behaved and sensible at the expense of their children\’s sense of security. They always feel that the so-called excellence is to become a standard person. As a child, if a child is chubby and obedient, he or she is cute; if he grows up and has good academic performance, he or she is lovable; as an adult, if he can make a lot of money, he or she is the best. They always want their children to win at the starting line, so they constantly look for parenting guides, sign up for early education classes, and use various methods to deprive their children of their sense of security and force them to grow up. Little do they know that a sense of security is the highest starting point for children.