Teachable Child: An Eighteen-Year Journal of a Father's Upbringing

Author: Liu Depei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-07-01
Features: A child's family life should include two aspects: one is daily life, and the other is receiving education. Both are essential. Daily life is the foundation for a child's growth into adulthood and should be carefree, diverse, joyful, and interesting. Education, on the other hand, is aimed at promoting a child's healthy growth and comprehensive development. It should start from a young age and involve hard work to reach the ideal destination, ensuring that the child can have a happy and independent life as an adult and become a confident and responsible citizen. A child's family education has a dual nature: it is both a pursuit and a prevention, and neither can be neglected. The pursuit refers to how family education reflects parents' efforts to help children form their values, ways of thinking, and behavioral tendencies through modeling, instillation, and guidance, both materially and spiritually. Clearly, the outcome of this pursuit shapes a child's worldview, spiritual realm, sense of life, and level of social maturity. Prevention, on the other hand, means that family education should also serve another function: teaching children how to face the inevitable hardships, difficulties, frustrations, loneliness, pain, temptations, setbacks, and failures they will encounter on their life journey. This requires cultivating and training relevant basic qualities from a young age, such as a child's physical fitness, mindset, personality, and rational thinking habits.