According to media reports, UNICEF released a report on the state of the world’s children, stating that 20% of adolescents worldwide suffer from mental illness. Over the past 20 years, family breakdown and rising parental unemployment have been the main reasons for the increase in mental problems among adolescents. One of the most common problems is depression. For families and schools, every child with a mental illness means deep pain and difficult parenting.
We will discuss the psychological crisis of contemporary minors and study the many findings of adolescent problems. First of all, we need to understand that there are rules for the growth of adolescents, and naturally there are also rules for education. Here, we call on families, schools, and society to pay attention to the three elements of the mental health of minors: attention to the mental health of each child, cultivation of supportive interpersonal relationships, and training for resilience to frustration.
In 1992, the World Health Organization released a new concept of “health”: a person is considered to be completely healthy only when he or she is sound in four aspects: physical health, psychological health, good social adjustment, and moral health. The mental health of minors refers to a state in which their entire mental activities and psychological characteristics are coordinated, moderately developed, relatively stable, and compatible with the objective environment. According to Lin Chongde, president of the Chinese Psychological Society and professor at Beijing Normal University, the core of the mental health standard is that a person who responds positively to all events or activities that are beneficial to mental health is mentally healthy. The mental health of elementary and middle school students can include three aspects of dedication, enjoyment and self-cultivation.
The most thought is not how to show the tragic tragedy, but to analyze the causes and find solutions.
1. Pay attention to the mental health of every child
We need to change the misconception that mental health education is carried out because many students are psychologically ill, which is the biggest misconception about mental health education. The fundamental purpose of mental health education is to improve the overall psychological quality of students, to maintain and improve the level of mental health of students. The primary goal of mental health education is to strengthen students’ mental health education, cultivate students’ perseverance and enhance their ability to adapt to social life, followed by prevention and correction of individual students’ psychological abnormalities.
From an educational perspective, the focus of psychological counseling in schools is on developmental counseling, supplemented by counseling on barriers. Regarding developmental counseling
- Counseling is needed. To guide students to have the right social needs and good spiritual needs, and to solve the problems of students who have no ideal, no motivation, and no interest.
- Growth Consulting. In different stages of development, students will have some corresponding psychological problems and need targeted counseling.
- Counseling for success. The teacher should not simply rely on the “IQ” of the student, but also on the influence of non-intellectual factors on the growth and success of the student.
- Innovative Consultation. The fourth is creative counseling. Guiding students to become high quality and creative talents.
In our opinion, the focus of counseling on developmental counseling is not only necessary for schools, but also for families and society. Some people may worry that parents are not psychologists, so how can they do counseling? Indeed, psychological counseling is a science, and to serve without professional training may be misleading. In fact, it is the usual topic of communication between parents and children. In other words, the best mental health education is when parents understand and respect their children, care about their developmental needs, and provide positive and timely guidance. From this perspective, parents are all “psychologists”.
2、Cultivating supportive interpersonal relationships
The most typical and vivid cases were extracted from hundreds of primary and secondary school patients’ painful psychological journey from healthy to unhealthy, from the survey experiences of many primary and secondary schools, psychiatric hospitals, and brain hospitals, to issue a warning to the society with the living and painful facts: mental health determines children’s lifelong happiness, and being human is more important than being successful!
In years of research studies, such as the large survey on Internet addiction among minors, it was also found that psychological crises are disastrous. In particular, it should be noted that the primary cause of psychological crisis in minors is the lack of supportive interpersonal relationships, including parent-child relationships, teacher-student relationships, and peer relationships, with parent-child relationships being the most decisive ones.
The statistical analysis of students’ counseling problems shows that the first one is interpersonal problems, accounting for 42% of the total number of counselors; the second one is learning problems, accounting for 27%; the third one is self problems, accounting for 20%; and other problems account for about 10%.
Parent-child relationship crisis is often the source of psychological crisis in minors. There are three most common situations of parent-child relationship crisis: first, the child lacks a sense of security and happiness due to the failure to establish an intimate parent-child attachment before the age of 12; second, the parents give the child too high expectations and excessive pressure to detach from reality, or too simple and rough discipline; third, the parents are divorced or go away for a long time without caring for the child, which makes the child difficult to survive and desperate for life.
3、Children need anti-defeat training
While the excellent conditions for children to grow up today seem unprecedented, in reality, minors today are a generation that is particularly lacking in physical exercise and social practice, and especially in anti-defeat training. Therefore, one of the three elements of mental health education for minors is indispensable. If mental health education and supportive interpersonal relationships are available, but anti-defeat training is lacking, the child may still have a psychological crisis. This tells us that the most important protection is self-protection and the best education is to give people great inner strength.
How to conduct frustration training specifically?
The following are suggestions.
- Learn the educational method of delayed satisfaction
- Love children to dare to say no or even discipline
- Cultivate children to develop the habit of exercise
- Encourage children to participate more in social activities
People often say that children are tomorrow, is the hope. In fact, it is right to say that children are hope, but children are not only tomorrow, but first of all, today. As UNICEF official Escudero emphasized, young people cannot be described as the “next generation” but rather as the “current generation,” so society should provide them with protection, space, opportunities and support. Children can’t wait to grow up, and neither can education.
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