On Raising a Child to Be a Mentally Healthy Person

Over these years, those who have come to me for consultation include not only patients with physical illness but also patients with mental illness, and even patients with various twisted personalities.

Some problems I can help them resolve; some I cannot. Because some problems have become too deeply entrenched to be resolved by medicine alone.

A few years ago, because I posted online a series of articles criticizing the various scandals in today's religious circles—such as "My 'Labor Reform' Record at Longquan Monastery," "Religion Looks More and More Like a Pyramid Scheme, and Pyramid Schemes Look More and More Like Religion," and "When Studying the Buddha, Know the Harmful Side of the Buddha"—I attracted a group of parents whose own children wanted to become monastics.

After reading my articles, especially after reading my 2015 debate on Tianya Community with a group of monastics and Dharma-protecting laypeople from Beijing's Longquan Monastery, they came to me one after another, hoping I would help persuade their family members who wanted to leave home. Later I simply wrote another article, "Problem Families Come Before Problem Children," to answer them uniformly, because I had no time and knew I lacked the ability to persuade their family members.

In recent years I have also come into contact with many depression patients; the youngest depression patient I have met was only fourteen. These people have deeply touched me as well. Many of them attribute their depression primarily to the harm they suffered in family life.

But their families are completely oblivious to the harm they have caused these depression patients, regarding these patients merely as "troublesome" people who will not listen to them. Repeatedly, with ugly words and deeds, they continue to harm them and worsen their condition, leading some patients, finally unable to bear the burden, to die by suicide.

My son is in second year of middle school this year, right at a critical age. I often think about how I should educate him so that he will be happy for the rest of his life.

Because I now study medicine, my perspective starts first from physical and mental health. This is also how I look at education: the first thing I think of is whether the education I give my child will cause him physical or mental harm—not how I should educate him so that he can get ahead in the future.

A few days ago, a depression patient who had lost all interest in life came to me. Her problem was a deep conflict with her father; she deeply hated her parents, and at thirty this hatred had not lessened in the least. Sometimes she could not even control her impulse to beat her father, or even kill him.

This kind of behavior would, of course, be morally condemned in a country like ours that so exalts foolish filial piety. So after having such thoughts, she would accompany them with another thought—that she was utterly wicked—and in the end she could only attribute all of this to bad karma she had created in a past life, which is why in this life she met such parents.

Through continued conversation, I learned that from the very beginning her father had only liked boys, and she had never been her father's favorite. She was rather quiet and reserved, with average grades. Her father liked the kind of child who was clever, lively, and academically excellent.

So her parents constantly pressured her, demanding that she strive. She did everything she could, but in the end still could not meet her father's expectations. When she grew up, her father wanted her to get ahead, to open a company and be a boss, and to marry a good man, so as to bring honor to her parents' faces.

I once wrote an article called "Loving and Enslaving," which is exactly about how Chinese-style parental love carries an enslaving nature. This patient's father is a typical representative.

This patient's depression, in my view, was already quite severe, but her father only felt that all of this was because his child was disappointing and disobedient.

Later, after going to a temple, she felt much lighter and happier, and so she wanted to leave home. She believed the Bodhisattva was drawing her toward him.

After the Longquan Monastery scandal broke, I quickly deleted every post I had published on public forums about Buddhism, leaving nothing behind.

There were two reasons I did this. First, I did not want to get embroiled in this affair and waste energy that should go toward treating patients. Second, having come into contact with too many monastics and people wanting to leave home, I would not dare say that every person planning to become a monastic has deep suffering in their heart, but at least more than ninety percent are already deeply sunk in pressure and pain, unable to extricate themselves.

Not long ago, a double-cancer patient (with both gastric and ovarian cancer) came to me, accompanied by her parents. Throughout my conversation with the patient, her mother constantly worried that her daughter would say the wrong thing; almost for every ten sentences her daughter spoke, she would inevitably cut in to criticize her daughter for saying something wrong, while also explaining to me the facts she believed to be correct.

She did the same when her husband spoke. Observing silently from the side, I understood why her daughter was always emotionally tense. In fact, both gastric and ovarian cancer are somewhat related to emotional tension. One could say this mother bears some responsibility for the onset of her daughter's disease.

As an onlooker with a little medical knowledge, I can see the problems of many of my patients very clearly. When you see someone worthy, think of equaling him; when you see someone unworthy, examine yourself within. So I worry a great deal about whether I will make mistakes in educating my son. I often communicate with him about his education, asking what opinions he has about how his parents raise him.

Once I asked him: "Son, do you love studying?" My son answered honestly and wittily: "No, but studying loves me." I asked again: "Do you feel that the pressure Mom and Dad put on you is so great that it makes you unhappy?" My son smiled and replied: "Don't you see how thick-skinned I am? How could a few words from you two hurt me?"

To be honest, hearing my son answer this way, my heart was put at rest. What I want is for him to be thick-skinned enough not to take his mother's and my words too seriously. Because as parents we are always nagging; if children took our words too seriously, they simply could not live.

Just think: if someone nagged at your ear the way we nag at our children's ears, how many people could endure it for more than a week?

Once I tried to make my son appreciate the sweetness of life by recalling hardship, telling him how his mother and I had helped our families farm the land as children and how bitter life was. My son said straight to me: "If our family still had fields to farm now, I would help with the farm work too." I burst out laughing after hearing this; the child spoke sense. As people grow older, they always want to educate their children with the lessons of their own upbringing, never realizing this is like marking the boat to find the sword.

Of course, my approach to raising this child has been rather different since he was small. As a child he loved stories, so every night before bed I told him stories—thousands of them, all made up by myself according to his interests. I have my teachers to thank for teaching me so well how to invent fairy tales.

So as for the parent-child relationship, there is no problem. Although my son has reached adolescence, he can still walk arm in arm with me. I still often call him "little sweetie" as I did when he was small, and he does not find it cloying.

Also, I cultivated his sense of independence from an early age. For example, in the Beijing winter, when the river froze over and he wanted to walk on the ice, I would not stop him; instead I let him walk on it, only telling him that he was responsible for the consequences and must not cry if he got hurt. He walked on it several times and fell through an ice hole twice, but remained quite calm.

When small, if he wanted to climb a tree, I let him climb, likewise telling him he was responsible if he got hurt. This child was bold; he really climbed. After climbing up, he cut his hand; I watched from the side and only handed him toilet paper and a band-aid, not even cleaning or bandaging the wound for him. Though blood flowed freely, he had a strong sense of contract—what was said counted—and did not cry or fuss.

Beijing has no shortage of warm-hearted aunties. When I educated my child this way, there were always warm-hearted aunties around who, seeing this, would grumble that I did not know how to raise a child, that I was hard-hearted and careless. I could not be bothered to care.

When he was still in middle kindergarten, I took him out to collect mineral-water bottles to sell, telling him: even if you meet the greatest difficulties in the future, even scavenging can still feed you; never fear or worry about survival.

So over time, his sense of autonomy became relatively strong, and he was very confident, not easily bound by parents or teachers. According to his teachers, his personality at school is very gentle and he gets along well with people. And his teachers told us: your child is the least likely of anyone to develop adolescent rebellion.

It is not that I do not discipline my child; I also often let him feel a father's authority, and when he does wrong I punish him, often quite severely. When he is young and cannot regulate himself, after he comes home from school I stay at home rather than going out to socialize. I do not criticize or lecture him; I just stay at home reading my own books, and he dares not misbehave.

My son's electronic devices have all been confiscated by me one after another this year. For his birthday in May, I gave him a Kindle e-reader, and bought and downloaded for him four or five hundred general-education readers and classics in literature, history, philosophy, medicine, psychology, religion, economics, sociology, and anthropology. I believe he is now ready to read books of some depth. In his free time he can choose from among these books whatever he likes and read at will.

My son read on and became absorbed; he stopped playing games and stopped reading joke books of little substance, occasionally playing the horn. As a result, the child's mother worried this would delay his studies and confiscated the Kindle. My son was right in the middle of reading the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the history of the European Renaissance, found it unbearable, and shed tears.

I strongly advocated returning the Kindle to the child. China's impoverished exam-oriented education has already produced too many batches of students lacking their own souls. I am not striving for my son to live a face-saving life; how could I deprive him of this little pleasure of his?

In my humble opinion, as long as a person still has curiosity, there is plenty of time to study throughout life; there is no need to be so short-sighted about these few years of exam-oriented education. Cultivating an interest in learning is what matters.

Although I am not without ability, among my classmates from childhood on I was not especially bright. But of my current classmates, I fear there is not one who has learned more than I. For no other reason than that, once they left school, most of them stopped learning. My curiosity has always been strong, and I have read and studied throughout my life.

People say the slow bird flies first; mine is the slow bird that keeps flying. Your clever bird may fly fast, but after a few flaps it stops; the slow bird keeps flying, and I fear it will still fly farther than the clever bird.

So curiosity matters more than anything, and personal interest must not be stifled. What use is a degree? What use is a diploma from a famous school? I myself am a rebel who broke free from exam-oriented education; how could I let my son be slaughtered by it again?

Even if he ends up at a second- or third-tier university, or even a vocational or technical school, even if he is inferior to others in every way, as long as he has a way of living that he enjoys, I will be content.

I did not give birth to him so that he could win face for me; I have long since wanted no face. I wanted to experience the joy of life together with him.

If my son wants to practice medicine in the future, I will have him take the medical licensing exam; beyond that, he should never want any titles for the rest of his life. If he does not want to practice medicine, I will certainly not force him. He need not care about any of the rules of this world. I believe that books alone can make him a truly cultivated person.

I see that much family education today is problematic. Of course, I cannot claim that my own family education is a success; my child is not yet an adult, and whether he will be happy for the rest of his life is still unknown, so this boast cannot be made too early. I pray for his health and happiness.

There is a saying that may be a bit sharp: I believe many people are not qualified to be parents. Their own mindset is flawed and their guiding ideology for educating children is wrong, and as a result their children grow up to be neither physically nor mentally healthy.

As parents, one should not pass one's own sickly pursuits on to one's children. Social competition is fierce now and everyone is deeply caught up in keeping up appearances; all the more should parents not infect their children with these things.

Let children grow freely! Cherish them more and point fingers less. Drop all the lofty educational theories; the essence of education can be summed up in one sentence: just treat children as ordinary people.

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