Courage: The panacea for children's interpersonal growth

What is courage? For young people, being able to assert themselves clearly, finding meaning in failure, and being grateful are the three things that they should do. When they take these three courages as their foundation and continue to exercise these three abilities at various levels, they will become the important cornerstones for their future entry into society and success.

Life is full of tests. Some tests transform people, while others leave them devastated. What is the difference? Many fairy tales about princes and princesses describe how they need to go through a series of adventures or tests to successfully transform themselves into kings and queens. The key factor that leads to their successful transformation is the quality of courage. Courage needs to be tested. After the test, courage will become stronger and stronger like alchemy, supporting people to overcome more difficult obstacles and challenges.

If they can often think about how to have a "win-win self-assertion", when their peers ask them to borrow money or things, they will not be afraid of being rejected and ignored by their friends, so they will not force themselves to lend money to them; nor will they use too tough methods to destroy friendships. They will think about what is the best for their peers and themselves. If teenagers do not want to borrow a lot, they can say, "I really want to lend you money, but the most I can lend you is ××. What else can I do to help besides money?"

If they can find meaning in failure, when someone laughs at their poor grades, bad hygiene habits, etc., they will not immediately enter a defensive attack state, but calmly admit that what their friend said may be true. They will want to attack back, which means they want to protect their fragile and dissatisfied selves. However, the best weapon for self-protection is not to resolve it with anger. Instead, they should make good use of the power of anger and turn to thinking about how to improve learning outcomes or improve hygiene habits. This is the best defense and response.

If they can be grateful, when their classmates generally have smartphones but they only have traditional phones, they will not be stuck in shame and inferiority complex. Instead, they will take a step back and think about the functions and significance of mobile phones to themselves, and then thank the mobile phone for providing assistance in emergencies, thank them for not being phone-dwellers and having the opportunity to appreciate the beauty around them, and thank themselves for not basing their confidence solely on the functions of their mobile phones.

To cultivate these three kinds of courage in teenagers, the attitude of adults is the key. If adults can make good use of these three kinds of courage, when children shout why they should listen to you, don't be irritated by the seemingly fierce words, think about a win-win approach, what exactly do teenagers want to say? It sounds like you have something to say, do you want to have more decisions? Talk about it... which ones you can decide... When children have poor grades, don't laugh at you and ask you how you got these scores. It turns out that doing these things will have these learning effects. What can you do if you want to make more progress?

When your child doesn't thank you for the phone you bought him, but instead complains about not having a smartphone, you can say thank you for telling me your thoughts. I know teenagers want to be like everyone else, but I want to know what your purpose is in wanting a smartphone? I think your person is more precious and unique than having a smartphone.