父母做的那些貌似正确的事
父母做的那些貌似正确的事
It would be easy, on first glance, to dismiss Madeline Levine’s “Teach Your Children Well” as yet another new arrival in a long line of books that have urged us, in the past decade or so, to push back and just say no to the pressures of perfectionistic, high-performance parenting. But to give in to first impressions would be a mistake.
乍一看，你很可能会把玛德琳·莱文(Madeline Levine)的新书《教好你的孩子》(Teach Your Children Well)丢到一边。你会以为它又是一本不认同高标准、严要求、追求完美的教育方式的书。最近十年，传输这样理念的书还真不少。但是第一印象往往是不靠谱的。
For Levine’s latest book is, in fact, a cri de coeur from a clinician on the front lines of the battle between our better natures — parents’ deep and true love and concern for their kids — and our culture’s worst competitive and materialistic influences, all of which she sees played out, day after day, in her private psychology practice in affluent Marin County, Calif. Levine works with teenagers who are depleted, angry and sad as they compete for admission to a handful of big-name colleges, and with parents who can’t steady or guide them, so lost are they in the pursuit of goals that have drained their lives of pleasure, contentment and connection. “Our current version of success is a failure,” she writes. It’s a damning, and altogether accurate, clinical diagnosis.
莱文的新书实际上是一位临床心理医生衷心的恳求。在富裕的加利福尼亚州马林县， 在莱文的心理诊疗工作中，她每天都处在冲突的第一线。冲突的一方是人类天性中美好的一面——父母对孩子深切而诚挚的爱与关怀，另一方是社会文化最恶劣的影响——鼓励竞争、追求物质，日复一日越发糟糕。莱文的诊疗对象是十几岁的孩子和他们的父母。孩子因为要努力考入那几所名校而感到疲惫、愤怒和悲伤;父母呢，既稳定不了孩子的心神，也给不出指导意见。他们迷失在对目标的追求中，生活毫无乐趣，得不到满足感，失去情感联系。“我们现在对成功的定义本身就是失败的，”她在书中写道。这该死的结论却恰恰是来自准确的临床诊断。
Levine’s previous book, “The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids,” opened with the image of a “bright, personable, highly pressured” 15-year-old girl with wealthy parents, who seemed, on the surface, to have it all. But a glimpse at her forearm revealed that she had also carved the word “empty” into her flesh with a razor. Teenagers like this, and adoring if preoccupied adults like her parents, haunt the pages of “Teach Your Children Well.”
莱文的上一本书名叫《特权的代价：父母的压力和优越的物质条件如何造就了一代孤独而不快乐的孩子》(The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids)。书的开头提到一个15岁的女孩，她“聪明、美丽，但是压力很大”，父母很富有。表面上看，她要什么有什么。但是瞟一眼她的小臂，你会看到她用剃刀在肉里刻了一个词：空虚。《教好你的孩子》里全是这样的青少年，以及对他们过度宠爱和关心的父母们。
One academically talented girl in Levine’s care is knocked off her feet by self-loathing and grief after she’s rejected from a particularly desirable college. She “lies in bed for days,” Levine writes. “She will not get up, and when I visit her at home, all she can say through her streaming tears is: ‘It was all for nothing. I’m a complete failure.’ ”
莱文碰到过一个成绩优异的女孩，在被她特别钟意的大学拒绝后，自责又悲伤，不能自已。她“在床上躺了好多天，”莱文写道：“她不想起床。我去她家看望她的时候，她不住地流泪，就说了一句话：‘什么都完了。我彻底失败了。’”
Other kids cheat, take drugs, drink, shut down or, worse still, keep up their tightrope act of parent-pleasing, Ivy-aiming high achievement while quietly, invisibly dying inside. “The cost of this relentless drive to perform at unrealistically high levels is a generation of kids who resemble nothing so much as trauma victims,” Levine writes. “They become preoccupied with events that have passed — obsessing endlessly on a possible wrong answer or a missed opportunity. They are anxious and depressed and often self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. Sleep is difficult and they walk around in a fog of exhaustion. Other kids simply fold their cards and refuse to play.”
还有些孩子撒谎、吸毒、酗酒、辍学;更糟糕的是，有些孩子绷紧了神经，想考入常青藤盟校，以取悦父母，但内心已经无声地枯萎了。“无情地逼着孩子去追求不现实的目标，使这一代孩子遭受了巨大的心理创伤，”莱文写道：“他们为已经过去的事情忧心忡忡——为可能答错了一道题或者失去了一个机会而纠结不已。他们焦虑、低落，经常用毒品或酒精来自我疗伤。他们睡不好觉，累得精疲力竭还硬撑着。还有些孩子干脆就自暴自弃了。”
Levine has spent 30 years with these unhappy children, as a therapist and a mother of three sons who attended high-pressure schools. And now, it would seem, she’s had it. She’s had it with schools that worship at the altar of high achievement but do everything they can to undermine children’s growth and well-being: eliminating recess; assigning mind-deadening amounts of homework; and ranking, measuring and valuing kids by narrowly focused test scores, while cutting out other areas of creative education in which large numbers of students who don’t necessarily test well might find success and thrive. And she’s had it with parents who profess to want nothing more than “happiness” for their children (“Kids laugh when I tell them that their parents don’t mention money as a measure of success; they think I’ve been snowed,” she divulges) while neglecting the aspects of family life that build enthusiasm and contentment, and overemphasizing values and activities that can actually do harm.
在过去的30年里，身为理疗师的莱文都在跟这些不快乐的孩子们打交道。她自己的三个儿子就读的学校压力也很大。现在她已经受够了。她受够了学校只看重考试成绩，想尽一切办法，妨碍孩子们幸福成长：取消课间休息;布置大量耗费脑力的作业;仅根据考试分数来排名次和评价学生，缩减创造性教育的其他方面(很多考试成绩不好的孩子，在这些方面也许很擅长并能有所作为)。她也受够了家长们自我标榜说，除了想让孩子“幸福”别无所求(“当我告诉孩子们他们的父母不把钱作为衡量成功的一个标准时，孩子们大笑，认为我被愚弄了，”她透露说)，却忽视家庭生活中能带来热情和满足感的那些方面，过分重视那些实际上会带来危害的价值观和活动。
These are parents who run themselves ragged with work and hyper-parenting, presenting an “eviscerated vision of the successful life” that their children are then programmed to imitate. They’re parents who are physically hyper-present but somehow psychologically M.I.A.: so caught up in the script that runs through their heads about how to “do right” by their children that they can’t see when the excesses of keeping up, bulking up, getting a leg up and generally running scared send the whole enterprise of ostensible care and nurturing right off the rails.
这些家长们自己因为工作和“过度养育”而忙碌不堪，还提出了一种“貌似成功、实则舍本逐末的人生模式”，让孩子们照着模仿。表面上看，孩子需要的时候，这些父母都在身旁，但是在心理上他们却缺席了：他们被头脑中设定好的“做正确的事”的剧本缠住了，却没有意识到，一味激励孩子处处要胜人一筹、时时要小心谨慎，看似是对孩子的关爱，其实是拔苗助长，误入歧途。
This message — that, essentially, everything today’s parents think they’re doing right is actually wrong — is the most noteworthy take-away from the first two-thirds or so of this book, which otherwise spends a bit too much time consolidating and restating (without, unfortunately, adequate footnotes or in-text credits) a great deal of previously published wisdom on the dangers of winner-take-all parenting.
这个观点——其核心内容就是，现在的父母所做的每一件自认为正确的事，实际上都是错误的——是本书前大半截最值得注意的观点。其余部分花了太多篇幅强调和重述“胜者为王”的教育理念的危害——这个观点很多之前的出版物已经提到过了(可惜本书在脚注和文中都没有充分说明出处)。
Levine has good, if familiar, lessons for parents about the virtues of teaching empathy; encouraging the development of an authentic self; and making time for dreaming, creating and unstructured outdoor play. But she really comes into her own — and will, if widely read, make an indelible mark on our parenting culture — when she moves beyond child development to concentrate instead on parent development, exploring why we do the misguided things we do, and asking how we might (as we must) change ourselves and behave differently.
莱文举了一些很好的(也有些常见的)例子，告诉家长以下行为是大有益处的：教育孩子具有同情心，鼓励孩子塑造真实的自己，腾出时间去梦想、去创造、在室外无拘无束地玩耍。但是，本书的独到之处，在于它不仅讲述了怎样培养孩子，更进一步讲述了怎样培养家长：探究了为什么我们会做出误导孩子的事，怎样才能(因为我们必须)改变自己，走上正途。如果这本书被广泛阅读的话，这些创见将为养育方法的改变起到极大作用。
Here, her insights are fresh. “When apples were sprayed with a chemical at my local supermarket, middle-aged moms turned out, picket signs and all, to protest the possible risk to their children’s health,” Levine reflects. “Yet I’ve seen no similar demonstrations about an educational system that has far more research documenting its own toxicity. We have bought into this system not because we are bad people or are unconcerned about our children’s well-being, but because we have been convinced that any other point of view will put our children at even greater risk.”
在这一点上，她的见解很新颖。“如果当地超市卖的苹果喷了农药，中年妈妈们会扯出示威标语，抗议这可能给孩子健康带来的危害，”莱文反思道。“但是我却没有看到任何类似的针对教育系统的抗议，很多调查证明教育系统的危害更大。我们已经接受了这个系统，不是因为我们是坏人，或者不关心孩子的幸福，而是因为我们以为任何其他观点都会使孩子陷入更大的风险。”
With vastly increasing numbers of children now showing stress-related symptoms, it’s more urgent than ever, Levine argues, that parents learn new ways to express their love and concern, trading their fears of failure for faith in their children’s innate strengths, and prioritizing the joys and challenges of life in the present over anxious visions of an uncertain future. “There comes a point in parenting,” she writes, “where we must decide whether to maintain the status quo or, armed with new information, choose a different course. There is little question that our children are living in a world that is not simply oblivious to their needs, but is actually damaging them.”
莱文认为，现在越来越多的孩子因压力过大而出现病症，所以现在比以往任何时候都更加迫切地要求家长们学习表达关爱的新方法，把对失败的恐惧转化为对孩子天分的信任，优先考虑目前生活中的快乐和挑战，而不是去担心未知的未来。“父母的教育方式现在到了十字路口，”她在书中写道，“我们该决定是继续保持现状，还是用新的理念武装自己，选择一条不同的道路。毫无疑问，我们的孩子现在生活的世界，不仅不关心他们的需求，甚至还在伤害他们。”
Levine is correct to say that, as parents and as a society, we’ve reached a tipping point, in which the long-dawning awareness that there’s something not quite right about our parenting is strengthening into a real desire for change. Families, their fortunes tracking the larger economy that encouraged so much of their excess, are crashing after bubble years in which they spent their every penny, and then some, on cultivating competitive greatness in their kids. Now exhausted, often disenchanted and (conveniently enough) broke, they’re reconsidering whether the mad chase was worth all the resources that sustained it.
莱文说得对，家长和社会，都到了转折点。很久以来，我们就隐隐感到我们的教育方法有问题，现在我们迫切地感到需要改变。经济大环境好的时候鼓励大家过度消费，所以人们在经济泡沫时期花光了所有的钱。经济泡沫破灭之后，依赖经济大环境的家庭财富也随之化为乌有，家庭也变得支离破碎，这时候有些人就把钱都花在培养孩子的竞争能力上。而今家长们精疲力竭、疲惫不堪，终于醒悟过来，开始反思这种疯狂的追求是否值得。
