Confused Fathers - The Dilemma of Home Education

Home education is an issue that Chinese families pay special attention to. As parents, we all want our children to have a successful and happy life. In general, I think parents want to care for their children and are willing to devote time and energy to them. However, we find that family education is getting into more and more difficulties, parents and children are difficult to communicate, and parent-child conflicts are becoming more and more prominent. The more popular saying is: absent fathers, anxious mothers, confused children. And there are also surveys showing that fathers do spend significantly less time with their children, while mothers take on more responsibility for educating their children. Have fathers really abdicated their responsibilities? Possibly, but are there other reasons? I feel that current fathers are in a bind and this is one of the very important reasons. Let me talk about a very representative case I have come across to illustrate the current dilemma of fathers in home education.

This is a girl who went to college and dropped out. She has serious family conflicts with her parents. Her father is a businessman and has been away for many years, and her mother is a teacher and takes care of the family at home. Both parents are the oldest in their families, so they spend a lot of time and energy taking care of their siblings and their children.

The girl's biggest complaint is that whenever she goes to school, she has to move out of her room and give it to her cousins who come to the house to study. Only on vacation can she have her own room. Of course, as a big sister, a girl also has to take on the responsibility of managing the care of her younger siblings. Since childhood, girls have been the pride of their parents, the benchmark of their teachers, and the role model of their classmates. However, girls do not feel the love and care from their parents in their hearts. Under the pressure of the college entrance examination, she nearly collapsed. The girl was barely able to get into a university, but she gave up her studies and stayed at home to recuperate.

The girl had several interviews with me. I was y impressed by her inner misery and loneliness. She originally said, I found that even if my parents are around me, I still feel lonely, like being alone in the cold snowy plains without support. In a later counseling session, she told me something that shocked me. One day, driven by anger, she said to her father, You love your daughter, you do not love me. My father was extremely surprised to hear this, "You are my daughter? I love you. But the father was confused, he could not understand the meaning of his daughter's words.

Have you ever wondered what the girl is saying to her father when she asks him this question. You love your daughter, not me. If you look closely, the girl's words indicate the relationship between an individual and a social role. To be honest, the reason why I was shocked was that I marveled at the girl's ability to think independently. She y realized that she was not respected, loved and understood as a real individual. The only way she can be cared for and loved by her parents is to put on the jacket of a daughter and act according to the role of a daughter that her parents expect of her. That is why the girl has a profound sense of loneliness that cannot be overcome even when her parents are around. Girls cannot relate to their parents as real and independent individuals.

This is a very representative case. It is a profound reflection of the current conflict in family relations: the contemporary individualized child is challenging the traditional patriarchal father.

The girl clearly expresses to her father that she is an individual in addition to her role as a daughter. But this is not understood by the father, who conceptualizes only the roles of parents, children, and so on. These roles represent the rules and orders that are easy to follow in a traditional family, especially the very clear patriarchal system.

Traditional patriarchy requires children to be obedient to their parents as sons and daughters. In this traditional way, the child has no individualized respect, but only the requirements of the role of the child. As a result, parents treat their children in a simpler way, believing that it is good for them to be obedient and well-behaved.

Today's society is modernized and highly developed with information technology. Children growing up in such an environment are exposed to a lot of respect, personalization, independence, and equal treatment. The result is a growing trend of conflict between children and their parents.

The above case is a typical example of a father who is confused because he has been raised in a more traditional culture. In addition to the need to reorganize the content of education, fathers are also challenged by the methods of education. Let me illustrate this with a case study from another interview.

In this case, a young male who was home from college had an interview with his parents only. From the mother's introduction, he learned that the child had spent more time with his mother since childhood, and that the father was busy at work and spent relatively little time with the child. The mother is more accommodating to her son and generally tries to fulfill whatever needs she has. The father is also involved in the child's education, but once the words of some strict or may be angry to do when the mother will try to stop, and persuade the father can not use simple rough way to treat the child.

As a result, the child was not very disciplined in his upbringing, and although he did not make any major mistakes, he did not make any minor ones, and he did not study very hard. In particular, after the university, basically play games, read novels, sleep lazy. After a school year, I failed a lot of classes and my studies were in jeopardy. Parents tried all sorts of ways, and finally the school agreed to take a year off from school. After the break, he will go back to school. Currently at home to recuperate, but work and rest time is not regular, and spend a lot of money, in these things and parents have a lot of contradictions.

At the end of the interview, the father's words expressed the helplessness of many confused fathers: now the children can't hit, can't scold, you asked me how to teach. Behind this statement shows that the father knows that the simple and rough way to educate the child has problems, but what new ways and means to educate the child is confused.

Whether in theory or in practice, the role of fathers in family education is undeniable. The father is an important role in the gradual socialization of the child. Socialization means the fitness of an individual in all aspects of social life and society. The more socialized an individual is, the more he or she is able to comply with the culture and laws of the society, balancing his or her own interests with those of the society to reach a mutually beneficial outcome. Fathers have never been irreplaceable figures for children to gradually understand and recognize the rules of society and act according to them.

The two cases I cited above were children who dropped out of college and took a break from school,

but with the full development of society, children are calling out to their fathers for respect, equality, understanding, and acceptance. Fathers are caught in a bind, confused by their children's demands, unable to reflect and respond in a timely manner, and instead creating two potentially extreme outcomes: conflict and degradation.