Child psychologist Anna Stepanenko helps adults understand their children better
An absent look, anxiety, cheeky manners … Modern schoolchildren are increasingly defiantly bored in the classroom. The advent of the Internet, an interactive and exciting source of information, has dramatically changed the situation in the school: the old methods are no longer able to keep children’s attention. But the reason for boredom is not only this. “School teachers often impose a passive position on the child,” Anna Stepanenko, an analytical psychologist, regrets. The teacher speaks, the student listens and takes notes. But in order for information to become knowledge, the child needs to test it in practice, to act. Then he feels confident and enjoys success.” In addition, studying at school requires effort, and their results are delayed in time. A child who lives in the present does not see the point in it. It depends on the parents whether he can find this meaning, whether he can strengthen the ties between the school and the world, between a paragraph in a textbook and his own experience. For adults who do not enjoy new knowledge themselves, but achieve a high place in the ranking from their son (daughter), it is not easy to instill in him (her) an interest in learning. “Infect your child with your curiosity,” insists Anna Stepanenko. – Look with him for a date that you forgot, tell us how much you enjoyed going to the exhibition, discuss a movie or an article on the Internet. And listen, listen to his stories about school in order to understand: the child is bored because it is incomprehensible, difficult, or, on the contrary, he grasps everything on the fly and the pace of the lesson seems too slow to him. The task of parents is to stimulate the development of the child outside of school, to set complex and exciting tasks for him in order to “spur” the thought and prevent him from falling out of the educational process. In the end, it is worth remembering that the school is not an entertainment center, classes require effort, patience, and concentration. And yes, sometimes you have to “get bored” while solving a difficult problem, although there is often another reason: school boredom can mean … just a respite in the life of information overloaded children. Torn off in class from text messages and social networks, they can finally relax and just dream. Boredom, as child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto has observed, is sometimes a cunning manifestation of the mind, allowing us to escape from the system that turns us into robots.
Anna Stepanenko, analytical psychologist, psychologist at Moscow School No. 1280.
In the book “School and How to Survive in It”, humanistic psychologist Irina Mlodik tells teachers and parents how to turn education into an interesting and important thing for a child (Genesis, 2008).