Raising a Rising Generation with Inner Strength

✎ Editor’s Note

Introduction:

In a family’s continued development, human capital is a most important family asset. In the course of our work in family office services, we have found that many of our family clients devote most of their attention to the growth of the enterprise and the succession of wealth, while overlooking the cultivation and growth of the rising generation. As children grow older, many of the problems that arise in their development become irreversible. Yet the rising generation is vital to the family’s sustainable development and succession, and so, in the course of our family office work, we too pay ever more attention to the question of educational planning for the next generation.

At various events and speaking occasions, we came to know Dr. Huang and the ideas she champions. This time, by a happy stroke of fortune, we were able to sit down with her and enter into an in-depth exchange on the education and growth of children, from which we drew a great deal of inspiration. We share these reflections here, for the benefit of our readers.

“Education, done to the very end, comes down to the human heart and human nature—drawing near to the heart’s hatred and fear, and awakening the goodness and love in human nature.” —Dr. Huang

Dr. Huang Zhaodan

Founder of Youni Education

Doctorate in Education from Columbia University; Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Peking University

Author of Raising the Next Generation of Innovators

Member of the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA)

Joyce: I too am the mother of a child in middle school. When my daughter and I chat, it is like being close friends—she tells me everything, and perhaps my part is mostly to listen, because from the time she was small I have treated the trust and honesty between us as the most important and most fundamental thing. But my daughter tells me her classmates are not like this; they are unwilling to share with their parents, and perhaps this is a common phenomenon among many children today. So I would like to ask you, Dr. Huang: how can we see a child’s true inner state?

Dr. Huang: A child’s inner world is like a fathomless sea. Sometimes even they themselves do not know why they feel surging, stormy impulses, or a boundless sadness. So it is not easy for us to “see” a child’s inner world—but with careful observation we can “feel” it. Very often, though, parents are so focused on what they think is important that they cannot see these details. We had a student in our growth-planning program, a well-behaved and aspiring child. One day, when we had arranged to hold a review meeting with him, we could tell clearly from his eyes and his body that he was not in a good state. We asked him to rate his own energy, and the child gave himself half a point out of ten. So, through a process of subtraction, we let him slowly speak the source of his pressure. It turned out that he had not done well on an exam; and although his parents had not blamed him at all, he felt he was “guilty”—the child’s word was not “at fault” but “guilty.” To ease his anxiety, he had slipped out with a classmate in the middle of the night and gotten drunk. Even though his parents had not reproached him harshly, very often the pressure a child places on himself is enough to crush him. When the child said that he had even had the impulse to hurt his own body, his gaze wandered—now looking up at me, now lowering his head, endlessly rubbing his hands. I knew he wanted to see my reaction, yet did not want to see a look of shock on my face, because that would have confirmed that he was “sick.”

In family education, parents “wear many hats.” Beyond being the providers of food and clothing, they also want to be good teachers, psychologists, emotional experts, and other roles besides. The result is that they cannot do their own most important job well, let alone the other roles. It is like baseball: one person cannot hit a home run and run the whole field alone.

Joyce: One can imagine that this child was extremely anxious, that his anxiety and the voice of his heart had no one to listen to, no one to understand, and no outlet. So his helplessness took shape as certain behaviors, through which he tried to get his emotions under control.

Dr. Huang: Yes. The hallucinations came from his extreme anxiety, and the hallucinations too arose because his anxiety had nowhere to be released—and on top of that, he set very high demands on himself, which created a great gap. After nearly three hours of guidance and dialogue, he finally set down all the burdens in his heart and shared his fears, his sorrow, and his anxiety. When the conversation ended and I saw how unburdened he looked—the muscles of his face relaxed—the child said that today felt like taking a sauna, with all his pores opened. Because he had received confirmation that he was not “sick,” and not “guilty.” Here was a child everyone regarded as obedient and good, crushed and unable to breathe under the persona of the good child. A single conversation is not enough to help him lastingly; there must be communication at a steady, regular frequency.

Joyce: On the surface it looks as if Dr. Huang and her advisers merely had a very long chat with him. But how to ask questions, how to let a child set down his burdens and speak what is in his heart—this is the key to the exchange, and it is the first step toward winning trust and hearing a child’s inner voice. In life, the role of the parent is also crucial. Many of the conflicts between parents and children arise precisely because parents do not use questions that prompt the child to realize things for himself, but instead, in the name of experience and of love, hand the child their advice with the authority of one who has “been there.” I would also like to hear how you communicated with his parents in the process.

Dr. Huang: This child had, in fact, shared with his mother the act of hurting himself. But at the time the mother’s reaction was to weep with heartache and streaming tears, which only deepened his guilt and sense of sin. First, he is a sensible child, and he felt he had made his mother worry. Second, from his mother’s expression he could tell that she thought this child had surely gone mad, that he was ill. So he kept reinforcing this idea in himself. When a child speaks out some secret that borders on darkness, the listener’s management of their own expression matters greatly: one must be both composed and full of tender concern for him.

The next day I arranged a phone call with the child’s father. Respecting the child’s wish that his father not know all the details, I shared with the father our observations and suggestions. When an adolescent grows more and more unwilling to communicate with his parents, it is mainly because he already knows their reactions inside out. For every question, he knows how his parents will respond. That being so, there is no need to communicate—listening will only upset him anyway. Say, for example, he tells his father he did not do well recently. There are generally two reactions: “Ah, how did you do badly? You must not have prepared thoroughly, and you were too careless in the exam.” Or: “It’s all right, just work a little harder next time.” Neither of these is what the child wants. One might try instead: “You didn’t do well—you must feel a bit sad about it, don’t you?” A single sentence like that makes the child feel you understand him. In truth you have done nothing—you have simply seen his emotion.

Joyce: So as a family education adviser, one is really letting parent and child find inspiration within the problem, and thereby build their own system of values and understanding. This is not easy, and it is a process that takes persistence. And of course, what should one do if, in the course of the planning, the child slips back into his former state?

Dr. Huang: The next step is to increase high-frequency contact with the child. Besides communicating once every two weeks, we have him write a mood journal each week, recording his feelings over the seven days. Once the mood journal is written, it is as though he has poured out his emotions to us face to face; and when he comes to talk with us again the following week, the frequency is increased once more. For the father, we make simple requests like the one above. Parents are not always skilled at communicating either, and the child’s present state is inseparable from the absence of the father’s role. So for us, the child is of first-order importance, and the parents of second-order importance. The first thing we must do is win the child’s trust, so that he is willing to work with me. If you want to influence another person, you must first build a connection with them and earn their trust: they must believe you are professional, believe you understand them, believe you can help them—these are three layers of trust.

Joyce: The process of building trust is also the crucial first step of a home run. It comes from continual interaction with the child until a sense of trust is produced—until he knows you are on his side, not a “spy” sent by his parents. So at the beginning, building a mutually trusting relationship may be very slow, but forming a connection with the child is enormously important. How, then, does Dr. Huang manage to form a connection with a child?

Dr. Huang: Forming a connection is a process. It is not that a connection must exist first before there can be service; the connection is produced in the very course of the service. I think that, besides communication, the way people build a connection is by doing some things together at a high quality—summing up in the midst of the experience, exchanging thoughts in the moment. Let the child take part in a winter or summer camp, in a study tour, and he will not feel any pressure; in a relaxed state, even in a crowd, he will let his true self show. Then he can feel that the adviser is professional enough, reliable enough, sincere enough. It is the same with parents: trust is built in the process of doing things together, keeping company. One father came to consult us and said that his son was already nineteen, but basically did not communicate with his parents, and loved nothing so much as playing video games; his question was how to create a scenario that would make the child willing to chat with him more. You see, this is a false problem. The real problem is not about how to chat, but about what has gone wrong in the father-son relationship. Only by tracing back to the source of the true problem is there any possibility of solving it. When a child loves playing games, it is not necessarily an addiction; it is that he has nothing else to do, or no other way to build a connection with people. A child who does not love learning simply does not love learning the things you want him to learn. But he surely has something he wants to learn himself. So as long as he still has the drive to learn something he loves, there is still hope.

(The above is an edited excerpt of a portion of the conversation.)

When most children develop problems of one kind or another, it may have to do with too little time spent with their parents, or with parents having used some crude and simplistic way of communicating and teaching, or with parents focusing only on a child’s grades while rarely listening to the voice of the child’s heart. In truth children are the same as adults: all of them wish to be seen. So very often, a parent comes to consult with one concrete problem (getting into a good school, say), and in the end discovers that the learning motivation and the parent-child relationship behind that goal are the true problem.

Communication of this kind, on the one hand, can lead a child in the world of the spirit, and at the same time can help him to build up habits, so that the parts missing within his heart may be steadily filled. In fact every family could have a figure much like the old private tutor of the classical academy, and that would be enormously helpful to a child’s growth.

The cultivation of the rising generation is vital to a family’s sustainable development and succession, for it is people who are the subject, and wealth merely a tool for realizing a happy life. So the leaders of a family should, at the appropriate time, place more of the emphasis on cultivating the future rising generation, so that human capital may keep appreciating in value in the course of the family’s development.