What should I do if my child likes playing games but doesn’t like doing homework?

Question 1: Dabao is nine years old. He likes to play online games and watch game videos. When he talks about games, he gets excited. When he talks about studying, he sighs and says why there are so many homeworks? Is there any way to improve it?

Yi Mingqian: Online games, this problem has been around for a long time. By the way, let’s talk about the problem of Internet addiction.

Last year Internet addiction was classified as an "addictive" mental illness. But in fact, this issue has always been controversial.

Internet addiction, like all addictions, alcohol addiction, smoking addiction, etc., can be said to be a disease or not. I prefer to regard it as a human characteristic. Humans are addictive creatures.

We all know that we have two types of motivations, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. When you are happy, dopamine is released in large amounts. If we experience this kind of pleasure from surfing the Internet, drinking alcohol, etc., we will keep coming back to find this feeling again.

But our desire is a bottomless pit. When you experience something repeatedly, your senses will gradually become numb, so we need a larger amount to experience the same pleasure again. This is why the behavior will gradually escalate. The more you drink, the more you play games, and eventually a dependence is formed.

If you look at it from the front, it is actually the same. Some people are addicted to learning, and some people are addicted to running. This category can be called "positive addiction" because this category of addiction can help you better adapt to society and life.

In short, addiction is a characteristic of human beings. is a feature, we can take advantage of it. How to use it? After you develop a habit with Wu Po Hai, if you actually get some pleasant feelings from that habit, you are on the road to active addiction. Then this habit will become stronger and stronger.

Children like games but don’t like reading. It can be explained by the sentence I just said. There are two kinds of human motivations: pursuing pleasure, so we like games, and avoiding pain, so we avoid learning.

Is there any way to improve it? There is no way to improve it. Unless he can get happiness from learning, it may not be possible to get happiness from learning? possible.

This kind of happiness is actually a higher level of happiness. Running alone makes him die of pain, so how can he become addicted?

Running is indeed painful at first, but it will eventually get a lot of dopamine from two places:

One is when the person achieves today’s goal and completes the running task After that, a feeling of pleasure arises;

The other is that everyone has a limit point. When the runner reaches this limit point, a large amount of dopamine will be secreted in an instant, and the person will suddenly Relaxed. So people who are addicted to running generally like to run marathons.

To put it simply, there are two ways to obtain pleasure: one is to achieve the goal, and the other is to exceed the limit.

The setting of the game is this: on the one hand, it allows you to achieve your goals. It will have many, many small goals to keep you moving forward. Advanced challenge. On the other hand, there will be big bosses, which challenge you to your limits.

Psychologist Mihaly proposed a concept called flow. It is easy for us to enter a flow state when playing games, and some people will also enter this state when studying.

When you are in a flow state, you will forget time, cannot hear the sounds around you, focus on the task at hand, and finally solve the problem and be satisfied.

This state of play can also be obtained in learning. How to get it?

There are three elements:

These three points are simple to say, but not easy to design.

How much does it cost and how many people to design a game? How much energy and time do you spend on designing it?

Question: My daughter is a freshman in high school this year. Three weeks after school started, she basically took the test once in every subject, but it was not satisfactory. When my daughter went home at night and talked about studying, she said she felt inexplicably uncomfortable and felt that she It’s hopeless... What should I do at this time? How can we enlighten her effectively?

Yi Mingqian: I didn’t do well in all subjects, and then I felt like I was hopeless. This problem is very typical.

This is a child who may have a fixed mindset. However, I would like to remind everyone that no one can be simply classified. Everyone has a mixture of fixed mindset and growth mindset.

In some cases, you will adopt a fixed mindset, and in other cases, you will adopt a growth mindset. The same goes for this child. She must have a growth mindset in many situations.

You must learn to observe when you or your children are prone to arouse the fixed mindset personality, and when the growth personality is prone to emerge. What should you do if you observe it?

The following may be a bit more professional.

There are two operations you can perform. The first one is called migration.

The principle is actually just one sentence, use her resources to deal with her problems. In some situations, she has a growth mindset. She uses the resource experience of that situation to deal with the matter of not doing well in the exam. Let her think about what she would have done if she had faced that matter.

Explain with an example. For example, there is a child who becomes nervous and anxious during exams. Then he asked, have you ever had a similar feeling? The child said yes, when you were on the football school team. Next, I asked, how did you deal with it at that time? If you find that there is no such thing, the resource will be activated immediately.

It’s useless to talk about other people’s things, because these are other people, what does it have to do with her? Use the successes in her life, her resources, to deal with her current problems.

A second operation can be performed: The second one is called externalization.

We talked about externalization in the examination class. The most important operation is to name this "hopeless" thought and then discuss it. For example, it can be called "hopeless thinking", "powerless king", or "hopeless".

It would be better if there is a metaphor, such as a little monster that makes people weak. She needs to feel this by herself, and then it will happen spontaneously.

Why do this? This is of great significance. When you name and then discuss this thing, we are like standing in a third perspective and discussing an object in front of us. This object can be separated from you.

Then, we can discuss when does "hopelessness" tend to appear? What are the external stimuli that activate it? When did it come to you? What measures have you taken? What things would strengthen it? What things would weaken it?

This is to separate the problem from the person. The problem is not you, and you are not the problem. Along with these discussions, people will have a sense of control, and when there is control, power will appear.

If you go further with externalization, you can even externalize the fixed mindset. What I always said was to discuss, rather than give her a solution directly. This is very important. Even if the result of the discussion is nothing, the discussion process will still have a good impact on her, because at this time, subconsciously, she will separate herself from the problem.

Question: A first-grade child cannot read or understand the questions, which leads to procrastination in homework. He also does not take the initiative every time he does homework. He habitually goes home to watch mobile phones and TV. His mother always needs supervision and supervision when studying. Only through criticism and education can we complete it quickly. After doing it, show it to your mother. If you don’t check it yourself or complete it quickly, how can you change your habit?

Yi Mingqian: It’s another question of running away from pain and pursuing pleasure.

The difference with this question is that the child is in first grade. Pay attention to this age. You have just finished kindergarten and there will be a transition period when entering first grade.

Kindergarten children mainly play various games, which is very beneficial. Nowadays, public kindergartens do not teach anything, which is in line with the laws of developmental psychology.

So when I first entered the first grade, a new pattern had not yet been formed. This transition period is necessary and objective.

The first turning point for children in learning is probably in the third and fourth grades. At this time, some children will perform outstandingly. Because logical thinking begins to form, the legendary child psychologist Piaget's famous cognitive development stage believes that around the age of 11, formal logical thinking begins to develop, which is the generation of logical reasoning, induction, and deduction to solve problems.

Now it seems that this age may have to be pushed forward a little, starting from the age of 9 to 10. Because his research was probably around 1930, 70 years have passed.

Which kind of children develop formal logical thinking earlier? Are they those children who start in kindergarten and learn a lot of knowledge and memorize a lot of knowledge?

On the contrary, those children in kindergarten who enjoy playing develop their logical thinking earlier. Under the same innate conditions, children who enjoy playing develop their logical thinking earlier.

The reason is that he has more experience while playing, especially when playing independently. In the process of playing games independently, he will definitely encounter problems and he will think independently. , how to solve it, this is the bud of logical thinking.

On the contrary, those children who are educated can only wait for the solutions given by others, and it is difficult to generate their own solutions. This is why I always emphasize that you can provide help, but you cannot solve the problem for the child.

This is a little background knowledge. So back to this question, after the first grade, this mother mentioned a very key thing, cultivating habits.

The homework question is not an important question, nor is it a critical question.

A mother in the group also asked about homework. When she was in the first grade, her homework was always delayed until after 10 o'clock.

Later we came up with an idea to limit the time. Limiting time is really a method that can be used frequently. Limit him to go to bed immediately after 10 o'clock, regardless of whether you have finished your homework or not. As a result, the child got up early the next morning to write, and continued to write in the car on the way to school, because he did not want to be criticized.

At this time, this mother took the opportunity to guide, does it feel good, then what are you going to do? Remember, let the child bear the natural consequences of things and let him experience them.

Homework is not the problem, the problem lies in the cultivation of habits. He has no habits because he has not consciously cultivated habits in his life, and he has not started to cultivate habits because no one has guided him to cultivate habits. If you don’t consciously cultivate good habits, you will unconsciously develop habits that may not be so good.

This is why you must first try to develop a habit yourself. Only when you experience this process from scratch will you know how a habit is formed.