What is going on when a child has depression and is pessimistic and world-weary?

Martin Seligman, president of the American Psychological Association and the father of positive psychology, wrote a book called \”Live an Optimistic Self.\” What impressed me most about this book was this concept: Your understanding of the things around you \”Explanatory style\”, that is, how you view these things, determines whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. Different explanatory styles lead to important differences between optimism and pessimism. Optimists like to explain good things as permanent, general, and related to themselves, and bad things as temporary, specific, and external reasons. A pessimist is just the opposite. For example, if a pessimist fails in a math test, he will explain it as: I will never do well in the math test (permanent, generalization), I am so stupid (self-problem); while an optimist will explain it as: This time my math test failed. I didn’t do well in the exam (temporarily, specifically), the test paper was too difficult (external problems). This is also the theoretical basis of the later popular “growth mindset”. Recommended scientific parenting books. I really hope my parents have read this book. Download the electronic version. A pessimist can \”cure\” his pessimism if he can consciously change his pessimistic explanation style into an optimistic explanation style. Martin Seligman is also a master of depression research, with special attention to children\’s psychology and emotions. He has an important point: a child\’s explanation style is generally formed before the age of 8, and once formed, it is not easy to change. This means: whether a child will become a pessimistic person or an optimistic person, early education and environment are very important. It seems that there is a golden period for shaping children’s optimistic character! Today, let’s share some chapters from this book with you. Let’s take a look at why children are pessimistic, why optimistic children get good grades, and why divorced parents make children pessimistic. The following text is excerpted from \”Live an Optimistic Self\”: Why are children pessimistic? Explanatory style has a huge impact on an adult\’s life. It can cause depression, or it can make a person cheer up immediately after a tragedy. It can make a person lose interest in life, or it can make a person fully enjoy life. It can prevent a person from achieving His goals can also lead people to surpass his goals. Interpretative styles are formed in childhood, when the pessimism or optimism developed at that time is fundamental, through which new setbacks or triumphs are filtered, and finally become a solid habit of thinking. If your child is over 7 years old, he may have developed an explanation style that is taking shape. When a child is 8 years old, his explanation style is basically finalized. He already has an optimistic or pessimistic view of the world, and this view is very important to his future, health and success. So where did his view come from, and is there any way to change it? What the mother does, the child will learn. There are three different views on the origin of the child\’s explanation style. The first view is that it is related to the child\’s mother. Children pay close attention to their parents\’ words and actions, especially their mother\’s interpretation of emotional events. Children ask a lot of \”why\” questions. This is because they want explanations for what is happening around them, especially social life. Once the parentWhen the mother becomes impatient and stops answering her child\’s never-ending \”whys,\” the child looks elsewhere for answers. In most cases, they will listen carefully to an adult\’s explanation of a certain matter, and in our normal speech, there is an explanation about once every minute. Your child will listen to this explanation word for word, especially if it\’s something bad. Not only do they listen, they notice whether the explanations are permanent or temporary, specific or general, your fault or someone else\’s. We gave 100 children and their parents an explanation style test. A mother\’s level of optimism is very similar to that of her child, whether it\’s a son or a daughter. We were surprised to find that the child\’s explanation pattern was not similar to the father\’s, nor was the mother\’s to the father\’s, suggesting that the child mainly learned the mother\’s explanation style of causal relationships. Criticism from teachers and parents will affect children\’s thinking patterns. What will you say to your child when he does something wrong? What did his teacher say to him? Note that children not only listen to what is said to them, but also how it is said. This is especially important with regard to criticism, which the child trusts and uses to form his or her own explanatory style. Research by world-renowned developmental psychologist Carol Dweck shows how optimism develops, and perhaps it can tell us what happened to women in childhood that makes them more susceptible to depression than men. Let’s take a look at a third-grade classroom. When you get to know the children in your classroom very well, the first thing you notice is that boys and girls behave completely differently. The girl sat quietly with her hands on her knees and listened to the teacher. Their noisy behavior consisted of whispers or chuckles, and they were basically very disciplined. Boys are different. They can\’t help but squirm even if they can barely sit still, not to mention that they rarely sit still. They don\’t seem to pay attention and are not as disciplined as girls. They shouted and chased each other. The class quieted down for the test. What would the teacher say to the students who failed the exam? If a boy fails the exam, the teacher will usually say: \”You didn\’t pay attention in class\”, \”You didn\’t work hard\”, \”When I was teaching these questions, you looked around and talked to other students\”. What is the nature of these explanations? They are temporary, specific, and non-universal because you can change them. Dweck\’s research shows that girls hear criticism very differently. Because they seem to pay attention during class, the teacher cannot criticize them for these reasons. Teachers usually say: \”Your math is not good\”, \”The homework you hand in is always messy\”, \”You never check the calculations\”. Most of the temporary reasons, such as not paying attention to lectures and not working hard, have been eliminated, and what remains are permanent and general criticisms. Dweck gave fourth-grade girls an unsolvable problem and then tested their explanations for their failure. \”Why didn\’t you get the answer?\” the experimenter asked. The girls’ response was “\”I\’m not good at charades\” or \”I guess I\’m not smart enough\”. But boys who did the same experiment answered \”I didn\’t pay much attention to it\” \”I didn\’t try my best\” \”Who cares about this bad charade\”. In this experiment Here, the girl\’s explanation for failure is permanent and universal, while the boy\’s explanation style is more hopeful-temporary, specific, and changeable. What we see here is the adult\’s explanation for the child\’s How criticism affects children\’s explanation style. Carol Dweck mentioned two modes of thinking, fixed and growth, in \”Lifelong Growth\”. They embody two ways of dealing with success and failure, achievements and challenges. Basic mentality. Crisis encountered in childhood will affect children\’s judgments about the future. In 1981 in Heidelberg, Germany, I heard a research report by the famous sociologist Glen Elder on children growing up in extremely harsh environments. In Before the Great Depression in the United States, some far-sighted scientists began a study on child growth. This study lasted for 60 years, and the subjects were children in Berkeley and Oakland, California, who are now in their 70s and 80s. They underwent detailed tests and interviews to understand their psychological strengths and weaknesses. This is a life-development study that includes not only these children, but their children and now their grandchildren as well. Elder is a professor of social psychology who has long studied the life experiences of children during the Great Depression in social changes. Elder said that although some middle-class girls were hit by the loss of family wealth in childhood, they still have a lot of trouble in middle age. They largely recovered from psychological trauma early on and entered old age in good mental and physical health. Like middle-class girls, lower-class girls also encountered poverty in the 1930s, but they remained They failed to stand up again. By late middle age, they collapsed. Their later years were bleak and unhealthy, both physically and psychologically. Elder speculated the reasons are as follows: I think that women who live well in their later years, they have learned from their childhood The Great Depression taught them that bad luck can be overcome. After all, most of their families recovered their economic status in the late 1930s and early 1940s. This taught them optimism and shaped their temporary, temporary attitude toward unfortunate events. A specific and external explanatory style. In contrast, the vast majority of lower-class girls\’ families did not recover from the Great Depression. They were poor before the Depression and remained poor after, and they learned to be pessimistic. They Their explanatory style is one of despair. When their friends die, they think \”I\’ll never make friends again.\” This pessimism, learned in childhood, colors their perspective on each new crisis, dismantling them. their health, their achievements, and their sense of well-being. The girls who survived the Great Depression believed that bad luck was surmountable and temporary. The girls who were struck down by the Great Depression and unable to recover believed that bad luck was destined and escaped. It won\’t fall off. So our childhood crises are like cookie models, molding us intoIn the future, we use the explanatory style of childhood to explain new crises. Seligman\’s optimistic maxim: ★ When a child is 8 years old, his or her optimistic or pessimistic explanation style is basically finalized. ★ A child\’s explanation style will be affected by three factors: 1. Children learn the cause-and-effect analysis of various events from their parents every day, especially their mothers. If you are optimistic, your children will be optimistic too. 2. The way a child hears criticism will also affect his interpretation style. If these criticisms are permanent, pervasive, and internal, then his view of himself will turn pessimistic. 3. Life, death, separation and huge changes in children’s early life experiences. If these events get better, he will be more optimistic; if this change is permanent and widespread, then the seeds of despair will be buried deep in the child\’s heart. Optimistic kids get better grades. Let’s go back to the basic theory first. When we fail, we all feel helpless or depressed for a while. We will not take the initiative to do something as we did before, and even if we do it reluctantly, it may not last long. Optimistic people recover quickly from this brief state of helplessness. For them, failure is just a challenge, some obstacle on the way to victory. They view setbacks as temporary and specific. Pessimistic people wallow in failure because they see failure as permanent and common. They become depressed and remain helpless. A small setback is regarded as a big failure by them, and a single failure means that the whole game will be lost, so they put up the white flag and surrender. It may take weeks or even months for them to recover, and with one more setback, they can fall back into the abyss of helplessness. This theory clearly predicts that in the classroom and on the sports field, being smart does not necessarily mean being successful. Success belongs to those who are smart and optimistic enough. A pessimistic explanation style will turn bad grades into a habit. When your child does not perform well in school, it is easy for teachers or parents to make wrong judgments and think that the child is not smart enough or even stupid. Your child may become depressed, which can prevent him from trying his best, persevering, and taking risks to reach his potential. Even worse, if you think that being stupid or not smart enough is the reason for his poor grades, your child will incorporate your thoughts into his own view of himself, and his explanations will get worse and worse. Bad grades slowly become a habit. A pessimistic explanatory style is very detrimental to children. If your child\’s score on the Children\’s Attributional Style Questionnaire shows that he is pessimistic when he is in third grade, he will be more likely to suffer from depression in the future. For example: The winter when Cindy was in third grade, her parents separated and her father moved out. Prior to this incident, her explanatory style had been a bit more pessimistic than average, and she now became listless and in tears all day long. Her schoolwork plummeted, and she began withdrawing from her friends like a depressed child. She then began to think of herself as unloved and stupid, a thought that made her explanatory style more pessimistic. It is very important for parents to be able toRecognize that your child is trapped in this vicious cycle and teach your child to break the cycle. Children whose parents are divorced are most likely to become pessimistic. Optimistic children are better able to withstand unfortunate encounters than pessimistic children. Children with good popularity are more resistant than children with poor interpersonal relationships. However, this does not guarantee that these children will not be affected by these misfortunes. The impact of unfortunate encounters. Here are some unfortunate events that we need to be aware of in advance. If these events happen, you should try to give your children some help and support. An older brother or older sister goes away to study at university or get a job. Pet dies. You may think this is a small thing, but it hits a child hard. A grandparent with whom the child was very close died. Parents quarrel. Divorce or separation of parents is the most devastating. Because divorce and parental discord are among the most common events that trigger depression in children, a long-term study at Princeton University focused specifically on children who experience these experiences. When we began the study, approximately 60 children (about 15%) told us that their parents were divorced or separated. We spent the past three years carefully observing these children and comparing them to other children. Our findings shed light on the implications behind this social phenomenon and can give you some ideas on how to comfort your children if you get divorced. We test children twice a year and find that these children are far more depressed than children in happy families. We had expected that this gap would shrink over time, but this did not turn out to be the case. Three years later, the children of these divorced families were still significantly more depressed than other children. Children from these divorced families are sadder, less disciplined in class, less enthusiastic, have a low self-evaluation, often have minor physical ailments, and they are also more worried. It is important to note that not all children from divorced families become depressed, and some depressed children recover quickly. In general, divorce does not make children depressed throughout their lives, it just makes them more likely to become depressed. The following things may happen to children from divorced families. Their classmates become unfriendly. My parents remarried. My parents are hospitalized. The child failed the exam. Children of divorced families may also experience more events that trigger their parents\’ divorce. Parents often quarrel. My parents often travel for business. The father or mother is unemployed. If you are thinking about getting divorced, I must remind you of these bleak statistics. It is my responsibility to tell you these facts. The root of the problem may not be the divorce, but the quarrel between the parents. In our study, 75 parents were not divorced but were quarreling heavily. Children in these families look just as bad as children in divorced families. They are also depressed, and their depression lasts long after their parents stop fighting. They also suffer more adverse events than other children. Parents quarreling may cause long-term harm to children in two ways: One is that parents are dissatisfied with each other for a long time, quarrel, and then separate. These quarrels and separations directly harass the children and cause long-term depression. The second possibility is that the quarreling parents are a very unhappy couple who are quarreling.Although the separation does not directly affect the child, the child can feel that the parent is very unhappy, and this feeling has a serious impact on the child and causes him long-term depression. Our data cannot show which theory is correct. Many people\’s marriages are not happy. They no longer love each other after a few years of marriage, but they care about the happiness of their children and barely maintain the marriage. I\’m not so naive as to advise you to never quarrel. Fighting can sometimes be useful, but in many marriages, nothing is gained. I can\’t tell you how to have a productive argument, what I do know is how to solve problems through arguments. If a child sees adults reach an agreement after an argument and there is a clear outcome, the child will not be so shocked and upset. This means that when you argue, you should try to resolve the cause of the argument and let your child see that the argument has a clear outcome. To study well, being smart is not enough. Over the past 100 years, ability and talent have been considered the key to academic success. I think the tradition places too much emphasis on talent. There is no accurate measurement method for these so-called talents, and it is not a good indicator of future success. This traditional view is simply wrong. The traditional view completely ignores an important factor, namely, explanatory style. It can be said that success also explains style, and failure also explains style. Which one comes first? Optimism or overachievement? Common sense tells us that a talented person is optimistic because of his talent. But our study clearly reflects the opposite causal relationship. In our study, we held constant so-called \”talents\” such as SAT scores, IQs, and the Life Insurance Sales Qualification Test, and then looked at the differences between optimists and pessimists in these high-talent groups. We repeatedly find that optimists perform above their potential, while pessimists perform below their potential. I think the so-called potential is meaningless without an optimistic definition. Seligman\’s optimistic maxims: ★ Pessimistic explanation style and unfortunate encounters are important factors in inducing depression in children. ★ Divorce or frequent quarrels between parents are the most likely events to trigger depression in children. ★ Lose optimism, and intelligence in the traditional sense has little meaning for success.