We Do Not Need an Exceptionally Outstanding Child

There is a saying in Buddhism: Bodhisattvas fear causes; ordinary beings fear effects. It means that because Bodhisattvas have transcendent wisdom and can see the effect in the cause, they fear planting bad causes; ordinary beings, lacking understanding of cause and effect, do not become afraid until the effect arrives.

This saying also holds for parenting. Many anxious parents hope their children become exceptionally gifted geniuses. In reality, this is simply because they do not know what the inner world of a genius is really like; once they know, they would no longer wish their children to be geniuses.

I once used this example to comfort a parent who came to me for advice on parenting. I told her that as a child I attended the same school as an older student who had lost both arms in an accident. He wrote and ate with his feet; his feet were even more nimble than other people's hands, and the characters he wrote were more beautiful than mine. So, would you want your child to lose both arms and develop such extraordinary ability? She said of course not; she would much rather her child have intact arms and legs.

This shows the mother had normal judgment. We can easily make accurate judgments about things we can see with our own eyes, but not necessarily about things we cannot see. Many geniuses have unbalanced brain development.

Speaking of Newton, few do not marvel at his greatness. But Newton was a premature baby; his father died before he was born, and his mother abandoned him when he was three. In recent decades, rapid advances in brain science have let us understand why people are born prematurely. There is a deeply tacit "agreement" between fetus and mother: when the fetus consumes 15% of the mother's energy, the mother's and fetus's brains simultaneously secrete oxytocin, and the fetus is born. Preterm infants usually develop abnormally in the womb, consuming the mother's 15% of energy too early and thus delivering prematurely. Preterm infants have lower oxytocin levels than people born at term.

Oxytocin is the lubricant of good intimate relationships between people; its secretion does not end with childbirth but continues to play an important role throughout life. People with low oxytocin levels struggle all their lives to form intimate relationships; their emotional world is a desert, and preterm infants with very low oxytocin are prone to schizophrenia. Unfortunately, Newton ultimately developed schizophrenia and in his lonely old age could only find solace in religion.

Was a great figure like Einstein any different? Read Einstein's biography and you will see that his inner world was not as enviable as his achievements. Einstein also had some kind of genetic defect that made it hard for him to handle intimate relationships well; in old age he was very lonely, and one of his children developed mental illness.

People often say that the other half of a genius is a madman. Though this statement is too absolute, one thing is certain: if someone excels in some direction, it often means they have major defects where healthy people do not look. This is the law of evolution. Lamarck said the giraffe's neck is so long because it must reach leaves for enough food; the environment forced it to evolve such a long neck. This epigenetic idea was once a laughingstock of the scientific community; arrogant scientists mocked Lamarck, asking whether cutting off mice's tails would lead to tailless descendants. But now epigenetic ideas have been confirmed, and people realize Lamarck was right. Those who mocked Lamarck have themselves become the laughingstock.

One can use all kinds of means to force a child to become exceptionally outstanding in some area, but the risks are enormous: it may mean the child cannot develop in a balanced way, and when they reach adulthood they will develop a host of mind-body diseases.

What we gain is always proportional to what we give — a well-worn truism. But in fact, if we are deep thinkers, we go further: our needs are limited; people do not need excessive resources to live a happy life. Sometimes extra effort is pure waste; moreover, excess effort usually harms body and mind.

When we anxiously and urgently hope our children will excel, they may or may not. But the parents' anxious and urgent feelings will trouble the children for life; once grown, they too will fall into anxiety, urgency, and depression.

All things are complementary opposites; every advantage has its disadvantage, and excellence is a double-edged sword. I will not cheer for any genius who is feted by the crowd, because I do not know whether that applause is good or bad for them. Zhang Shousheng, Yang Zhenning's most admired student, was considered by Yang to be a potential Nobel laureate; unfortunately, he was actually a severe depression patient and died by suicide on December 1, 2018. During his lifetime, many people applauded him, but only he himself, in the dead of night tossing and turning, knew how great the pressure he bore and how exhausted he was inside.

For a time I volunteered at a temple in Beijing and got to know some highly educated people who had taken monastic vows there. Many had enviable achievements before ordination, but they had not felt happy or joyful, so they sought liberation in the wisdom left by the Buddha. These people were naive and pure, easily deceived. Later, when the abbot of the temple was caught in a sexual scandal, they suffered another major spiritual blow: they had thought they had found a good teacher to rely on, only to become accomplices in his sexual abuse.

Compared with being exceptionally outstanding in some area, balanced development is more important for a person. My mentor often told me that happiness has no fixed standard; what matters is the sense of happiness. If a person has a sense of happiness, then whatever their life circumstances, they can feel happy. His teaching was always concise yet deep, and I will never forget it.

China currently has 46 million people with depression; the number of people with anxiety disorders is more than twice that, about 100 million people with anxiety problems, and about 250,000 people die by suicide each year. If you already have anxiety and depression, and are especially anxious about your child's education, the following four books may help:

1. Learned Helplessness (by Martin Seligman, president of the American Psychological Association). Learned helplessness is Seligman's original discovery in psychology. In animal experiments in which dogs were given electric shocks from which they could not escape, after a while the dogs, though they still whimpered in pain when shocked, no longer tried to run away, because they had grown accustomed to pessimism and helplessness. Seligman thus uncovered the mechanism by which anxiety and depressive disorders form.

2. The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook (by Edmund Bourne; the latest edition is the 6th). Professor Bourne is an authority on anxiety and phobias, and this book has become a classic in the field.

3. The Self-Driven Child (by William Stixrud and Ned Johnson). This book combines brain science with education research and offers deep insights into parenting; it is an excellent work for preventing children from developing psychological disorders.

4. Burns' Anxiety Help: The New Mood Therapy (by David Burns). This book is popular among anxiety patients as a guide to self-help in daily life; it is helpful for patients who cannot afford expensive psychological counseling.