I’m not the kind of mommy who embraces the idea that getting one step ahead of others will double the gains. I’m also not that kind of mommy with the expectation that my own child would have unique skills and grow to be a hero.

To me, it sounds a little too broad. To be more precise, I don’t require my child to be superior to others or have any special skills.

 My thoughts are very simple. Once I’d found out that the little fellow was able to use his brain and consciously talk to me using baby language, I decided to embark on a journey to find ourselves together.

It is probably a family superstition that every newborn child has to have their fortune told to predict the direction of their future. Although I have never taken it seriously, I have to admit that the logic of such thinking is correct, but the direction of future must be explored by practice rather than by prediction.

We should find out our children’s interest and shining points from how they start to interact with the world and everything around them. So when my child was just two years old, I started exposing him to Montessori education.

Two years old is a very happy stage. At this age, my child was able to play football and he played it so well that I almost thought that he might be able to save Chinese football! Of course, I am not that kind of mommy who wants to determine their child’s character.

He began to speak many languages, interacted with different educational toys, and cultivated the interest of reading. Telling bedtime stories is a habit we have maintained until now. Of course, there are all kinds of toys piled up in our house. Maybe it is because we take for granted that young children will not be as smart as we are, so when children complete something unexpectedly, we will be very surprised and praise them with “How smart!”

 In fact, the reason why we have this kind of misunderstanding is that we know little about children’s IQ. Children can respond to various things (five to seven things) at the same time, compared to one or two things as adults, which is why children need to develop their “concentration”.

My nephew loves making trouble. From him, I learned how to deal with my child’s attention problems in advance. Since my child was six months old, I started to read books to him. As a result, he has developed his concentration pretty well.

During the age of 2, everything was fine and it seemed that we could have fun with our child like this all the time. But when he was three years old, the rebellious period had begun! It sounded so serious, but actually it was the focus of our story.

Let’s start with why my child had become rebellious in the first place. We have a happy family. As his mother, I don’t suffer from any type of “OCD”. His father is not strict with him at all, but actually very sweet to him.

But why did he become rebellious? I squeezed some time from my busy work schedule to explore the problems my child encountered in his learning environment. It turned out that the main reason for his rebelliousness was the lack of confidence caused by the mixed-age learning environment, in which he failed to get any assistance from other classmates. At that time I came to realize that as young as he was, he was also sensitive.

Indeed, according to the pediatric psychologist, it is very important to help young children develop their self-confidence. I felt so glad that I found early that my child was unhappy and noticed how he interacted with the outside world so that I could respond to the situation quickly and find an appropriate school for him.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m not the kind of mother who requires my child to pursue academic qualification. When searching for an appropriate school for my child, I don’t require it to be extremely famous. All I want is just a place where my child can feel comfortable to develop his confidence.

But what is the source of confidence? Perhaps because I grew up overseas and had education there, I don’t think foreign teachers are the best. What matters is whether teachers can give children enough encouragement and recognition, which will help to develop children’s courage; and whether teachers can always notice the advantages of children, rather than criticizing children for their shortcomings.

I even asked the administrative clerk for help to collect more information about various schools. Through a comprehensive comparison I found that Sunshine Home was really unique in respect to its teaching model, which was quite similar to the school I went to when I was a child.

The teachers at Sunshine Home would demonstrate different chemical or physical changes in a very scientific way. And they would encourage the children by heart. Therefore, I decided to choose Sunshine Home as the next “training base” for my child. Here at Sunshine Home, he will definitely gain more confidence.

Three months later, my child regained his confidence and became very energetic. He would be actively involved in all the interactive activities in the class.

This is not a letter of thanks, so I will leave my special thanks to the teachers until my next writing or speech. I thought I was back to my happy and steady life, so I continued to concentrate on my work. However, one day, I received the first phone call from his teacher. I was told that my child scratched his classmate. Since then, this kind of notification, just like traffic tickets for illegal parking, kept coming one after another.

During this process, his father and I worked closely with the school to figure out the solutions. As his parents, his father and I would work together to improve ourselves, strengthen family education and teach my child to follow the rules and principles. I applied almost all the training methods I knew on my child. However the results were unsatisfactory. After several rounds of efforts, a phone call from the teacher revealed my failure.

As for a child’s rebellious period, I’ve always agreed with this point of view, that children at this stage, especially boys, are better at expressing themselves in body language rather than in words.

So I firmly believe that my child is not a bad boy. Please don’t misunderstand him. According to the PDCA management methodology, we should find the root cause first, make a plan, implement the plan, and then solve the problem. After several tests, I discovered that the root cause should be that we failed to communicate well with our child.

We have always loved him and he certainly didn’t want his father and me to be disappointed by his bad behavior. However, when he raised his hand and hurt someone else, he certainly didn’t expect me to be so angry that I wanted to beat him when I received the phone call. So I started to communicate with my child more often. Due to my work, I didn’t have much time to talk to him, but I would insist on talking with him about his daily life, how he felt and what enjoyable things he did that day.

Often, he would realize that he had done something bad, so when we talked to each other, he would confess what he had done truthfully. I would take this opportunity to recognize his confession and learn about the motivation of his behavior. Then I would tell him “You can handle this by…”, which would help him understand that he could choose at least two other ways to express himself and avoid bad behaviors.

Whenever we thought he’d been making progress, we will give him a reward and his father would buy him a gift.

Ok, it’s time to give some advice.

Children at different stages will behave differently. What they like may also change at different stages. We should respect every child, as each of them is an independent individual. We should respect the children’s ideas and likes.

Please don’t look down on them just because they are young. Encourage children to express themselves and respect their emotions. Whenever they cry, get angry or scream, we should hug them and let them know that we understand their feelings. As for the reason why they can or cannot do something, we should make it clear and offer appropriate guidance.

Parenting also requires execution. As mentioned above, children may go through different stages, so parents need to adjust themselves accordingly, face up to the problems bravely and figure out the solutions.

The best approach is to make certain changes and conduct related experiments until our children make certain breakthroughs as a result of these changes.