Discussion keeps the world's turning.
This is Roundtable. Hello everybody, welcome to Roundtable.
Coming to you live from Beijing.
I'm Ha-Young. Good to have you join us on a Daze Show.
With summer vacation and full swing, kids are diving into a season of fun and relaxation.
But it can also bring some unexpected stressors.
Kids can play such a critical role in nurturing their children's mental health during this precious time off.
So what can you do to ensure your young ones not only to enjoy their break but also thrive emotionally?
And we're on a mission of starting your week with a motivational kick.
Our motivational Monday offerings will get you ready to tackle the week.
For today's program, I'm joined by Yushan and Steve Hatherley in the studio first on a Daze Show.
Toma Rigg is often seen as a time for kids, tweens and teens to relax and recharge.
But it's also a crucial period where their mental health needs special attention.
Recent community programs such as those in Shanghai and Jiangsu illustrate great ways to engage minors in managing their emotions and stress.
Yet the season can also present unique challenges, ranging from ineffective time management, such as procrastination, and other things such as the lore of endless screen time.
How can we balance these challenges and ensure that our children's emotional health can be nurtured?
So since summer vacation ensued, a slew of lectures on mental health awareness has mushroomed across China.
What are some of these key messages you get from them?
Well, obviously there are, like you said, a series of psychological activities that's aiming at rising mental health awareness and self-care among minors that is going on during the summer vacation that's all across China lately.
And this is according to a recent report by Newsporto Shanghai Observer that I've found very interesting.
That psychological health program was held in the residential communities all over Poo Tua District in Shanghai, and the activities are held on community level and are led by experienced school teachers working or volunteering to help out in the communities.
And therefore, we see that various communities in Poo Tua District are hosting lectures, games, and little seminars for minors for kids to just participate in real interaction and communicative activities to learn about, you know, what is mental health?
What can they do to stay aware of their mental status, emotional status, and as well as how to express it?
And I've already read on some of the outcomes on how these kids are giving feedbacks, like for example, after the little performance on how to show anger, how to show sadness, excitement, hesitation, and all the different kind of emotions, some kids were asking questions like, wow, so we have so many different emotional expressions.
I only know the most emotions, but the way to express them is like, there are so many different layers of expressions on that.
And the kids, for the first time they see how that is performed, how that is perceived, and they start to ask all kinds of questions that are really helpful for them to learn more about expressing their emotions and psychological needs.
I think it's a great thing.
I was thinking back as you were sharing that, you shunned to my school days in Canada, and we have a similar curriculum as other countries do.
You learn math and you learn science and things like this history, sociology.
But I remember a health class.
It was called health, and it was in middle school, where we learned about human emotions and things like that.
But that started in middle school.
We didn't get any education on that type of thing in elementary school.
So I think these types of programs in Shanghai, and who knows, maybe it'll grow to other parts of the country as well, to help kids learn about what they're feeling at particular times and how to express themselves in a healthy way.
Oh, this is just fantastic news.
I support this 100%. Yeah, and what's more inspiring to me is that as young as these kids could be, they even started to ask questions like, how should I deal with it when my parents, when my parents aren't coping well with their emotions?
I think it's really important for the kids to realize that it's not my fault that my parents are in, you know, just thinking in some sort of emotions because of whatever that's happening in the family.
But just to realize that they need to learn how to cope with it as well.
And speaking of which, I think the best part of this news, it's not getting there yet.
But the best part of this news is that it also in Shanghai, Poo-toe District, there are something, what they call the classrooms for parents that's regularly being introduced to over 3,000 parents in the district alone that's offline in local schools that cause onto the parents to be aware of the mental health of their kids as well.
So I think that's really nice.
It's not only one single directional feedback that we're seeing that's happening, but rather it's like a coherent kind of, you know, the kids are learning how to express it and the parents are also learning how to perceive it and how they could cope with, you know, the kids' expressions of their emotions.
Which is another great thing because parents need to be learning along with their kids.
If the kids alone are learning, what's this feeling?
How should I express this feeling at this time?
But am I feeling at this moment?
If the parents are there learning together with their kids, that's going to inspire conversation between the kids and the parents.
And this is just so very 2024.
I feel like, don't you? I think so too.
When I was a kid, I didn't have these types of conversations with my parents.
And I'm not saying I had bad parents or anything like that.
It's just, it wasn't on the radar, you know, to have conversations about processing emotions and things like that.
I think it's very modern day, I think.
It is. And so far, we're only seeing these programs happen during, well, mostly summer vacation.
But and also mostly through these special programs, it's hardly something that's widespread or, you know, sort of ingrained into public education yet.
And then I think we're still far away from that.
But it's so important to get the parents involved because for this generation of parents and their parents and so on.
I doubt that we've sort of, except we've received any type of education like this.
That's what I mean. And that's just so crucial for Chinese people as well.
And also we're seeing that in the city of Changshu, Jiangsu Province, which also offers another good example of these community programs, which has a lot to do with handling time and procrastination.
And this is such a big topic for kids, twins, all students during any kind of vacation.
Changing the kids how to procrastinate or how to not procrastinate.
And I procrastination, I suppose, because we've all been there.
Of course. Before the last day of the vacation, we're all scrambling, aren't we?
We're we're adults and we're still doing it now.
I'm sure in our lives what types of things were they doing there?
Were they similar programs or a little bit different?
I think these programs that we're talking about on coping, procrastination, or really other kind of say indulgence that teenagers may encounter include more than just games.
This time there are short films to help the teenagers and also like students who are students in schools to develop awareness on how to build habits on more scientific ways of using the internet, how to avoid overly indulgence on playing games, how to better manage your time, how to avoid procrastination and everything.
Because at the end of the day procrastination is just a symptom from avoiding pressure or anxiety or really a way for the kids who probably don't know how to better cope with that.
And eventually they choose to procrastinate.
So I guess here what the activities or rather the film clips is trying to show is to help them to overcome that as well.
Right. And also guys, how do some of these psychological issues emerge during summer vacation and well compared to the rest of the year and or is it just simply the best time to address concerns that may have been building throughout the school year?
Because you have the time.
No it's not exactly like that according to Dr.
Jania Klingenberg who is a mental health coach and reading about this, learning about this topic brought some things to light that I never thought about before when we think summer vacation for students.
Well, that just seems like pure happiness, 100% happiness, right?
Woohoo, we don't have to go to school for a couple of months or whatever.
But according to Dr. Klingenberg, this is a time where students lose their routine, where the things that they needed to do before, for example, wake up early in the morning, have a shower, have your breakfast, get ready, go out.
Those are all really important things to a young person.
And when that routine is suddenly disrupted, according to Dr.
Klingenberg, for many students, they'll lose the purpose in their day, the purpose, so they wake up at noon.
They don't want to do anything.
Suddenly social media, a little bit during school time, now they're doing it all day long.
And that's where feelings of, what's the point?
Comes into play for students.
So it's not just during the school year.
Summer vacation is a time when students can really suffer.
Sounds exactly like my Sunday.
Oh yeah, right? Yeah. That's a little mini summer vacation.
Yeah, and think about having 30 Sundays in a row, which really rocks, actually, in my meeting anyhow.
And I think here it's encouraged in many of the lectures or little programs as hell during the summer vacation as well that, you know, those teachers, those professionals, they're actually trying to encourage parents to work together with their kids to make a more reasonable vacation plan so that, you know, scenarios like you just mentioned Steve, like, losing
the sense of balance during their day-to-day schedules can sort of be overcome before the vacation started.
We're during the vacation.
It's not too late. It's always not too late yet, of course.
And just to arrange a more suitable amount of work and a more balanced time to play and to study for the kids to, you know, maybe don't go one way to off the balance during the vacation just so that they can in turn get back to school and feel more adapted as well.
Well, there are definitely a few things going on and depends on the parenting style or sort of the targets that maybe the parents have set for the kids.
It can vary drastically for some families, apparently.
And I remember my neighbor's mom being kind of like this when it's any kind of vacation.
I used to say to my friend, next door neighbor, this is the perfect time for you to get ahead.
So learn ahead. And sometimes that might, I know, we're all making faces in the studio.
That kind of parents, maybe Tiger mom-ish or whatnot.
So then encouraging your kids to either, you know, study math or, you know, all these core subjects ahead of time or maybe take extra classes in tutoring in like sports or dance or whatever it is.
Something to build the resume.
Yeah, extra curricular stuff.
There's that and also, okay, I'll just list a few factors and see which one you guys think is the worst or maybe important.
So there's also, of course, like you guys mentioned, so much time on the internet and how do you spend your time and space on the internet?
Is it social media? Is it watching lots of movies or, you know, TV shows that you can catch up?
Yeah, I love to do that. But not about me.
And then there's also, you know, a lack of parenting's companionship because parents could be busy working.
Working and that's one of the things that Dr.
Klingenberg was talking about as well is that students, when they're in middle school or high school, they're at an age where they can stay home alone.
Parents can go out without worrying about them.
But that's not necessarily a good thing for your kids.
Right. A fourth actor could be, you know, there's this change with, you're not hanging out with your peers anymore.
Like you could keep on touch on the internet, but you're not seeing them every day.
So you're not having these regular, you know, walks in the playground or hanging out with people of your same age.
That kind of thing. So, you know, these are just some of the jump-off points that you guys can discuss.
Do you think that, you know, these are, which is like playing more of, you know, a fact here?
Uh, I think it's the not seeing friends anymore.
Well, I think it's all important.
All the things we've talked about thus far, you know, that structure is gone.
The routine is gone. But the social part of a student's life suddenly just disappears, right?
Everyone that they talked with and hung out with and shared stories with and shared their stress, stress relief talking to your friends about your anxieties.
Oh, this test is going to be really hard.
All that's gone. And if you lose your social structure for a couple of months, then that's a difficult thing to deal with emotionally.
But I think one of the biggest issues here and why these projects in or these campaigns or whatever we call them in Shanghai and other cities are really important is because the students don't realize that they're having a hard, emotional time.
They don't, they know their friends are gone.
Maybe they know that they're sad, but maybe they don't know how to process that emotion.
They don't know how to verbalize what they're feeling or what they're thinking.
I think everything that you just mentioned though, Hui Yang, is really important to the kids.
I do agree with that. But one thing that triggered me the most is the first one where you mentioned that I made the phase about hearing, you know, your neighbor's kid, how the parents are expecting her to just get ready, get ahead and just be prepared for the next semester already by maybe joining off campus classes and all that.
Because that's how I, literally how I spend my childhood, which lead to like a very long term consequences that I noticed on me that even during breaks or recations that I have every right to enjoy nowadays, I still think about what's going to happen after the break.
I find it really hard for me to just enjoy myself during the break.
Instead, I'll just think about what can I do to get prepared for the work.
And I think that's all coming from summer time or vacation time from like a younger age when the kids were sort of encouraged if not kind of pushed to more work and joining the rat race already at their teenage hood or even younger time, which of course it's no longer the case as we see here or rather it's like very different nowadays as we go through the double, we call
the double reducing policy, which is a policy that we encourage people or the society that reduce the homework and off campus training for the kids these days.
But still it's like it triggered me the most because that's how I spent my childhood.
But in the meantime, I think how do we really balance the work time and playful time where rather the working side or the playful side of a children's life is the ultimate question that all parents should try to maybe ask themselves.
And it was the point of educating your kid if they only know about work or they only know about how to catch up with the race.
I did it myself when I was in university.
I took an extra summer class so that I could get ahead.
My parents didn't tell me to do that.
I made that decision on my own.
What a stupid decision that was.
Really? Well, I think so because my friends had these summer vacation plans and they were going to the beach for a weekend get away.
I said, no, sorry, I have to go to my summer class.
It was a marketing class that I took three days a week.
And yes, it did lighten the load for me in the following semester.
But I don't think I'd make that decision again if I were given the choice.
Why is that me? I ask because you must have been ahead in the game when the new school year starts.
Yeah, you're right. I was.
I was one class ahead, which to me didn't make a massive difference.
But I say that because of all the things that I missed out on in the summertime.
My friends going away to the beach or what have you.
I couldn't because I chose to go to school during the summertime.
I only did that one time.
But I think that's what you're talking about, you shine.
Don't push your kids maybe too, too hard.
Allow them to have a little bit of freedom, a little bit of fun time.
But I think some of those activities are not necessarily a bad thing.
Of course. It's, can't think of anything that's not a cliche here, but it's a balancing act.
Yeah, it's true. Yeah, because I think it's great to sort of learn something new or sort of refresh some of the stuff you've already learned and then maybe even getting ahead at the game if you're that kind of person.
But also this could, attending extra classes could mean parents are paying extra and I wonder if all families are willing to do that.
And also these days, I wonder maybe we've talked about this on the show or maybe in a future show about this trend in recent years that for every summer and winter vacations, some families who might are willing to invest a little bit more into their children's upbringing that is to send them off on study tours or just traveling tours to a different province or a different
country. Sometimes, yeah.
Which comes with a hefty price tag.
And then this also, I mean, this is a great opportunity for kids to open up their horizon, all those good things which I will not need to, you know, spend too much time explaining, but also for the kids who don't have this opportunity in the same classroom.
I think it's, it's kind of a weird situation to be in because it costs a lot, needless to say, and not every family is going to be able to afford it or want to spend on this.
But it's an interesting trend and this also adds to the complexity of, you know, summer vacation arrangements and its effect on children as much.
Yeah, I mean, when I was in high school, I remember some students during the summer vacation went away on like an exchange program type thing.
Some particular student went to France for the summer, came back speaking French almost perfectly, which I thought was weird.
How did you learn that much in that little amount of time?
But yeah, the same thing, same thing happens in Canada, you know, different families do different things with their kids.
But I guess again, going back to the beginning of this conversation, the point is to make sure you're doing your best to keep your kids happy and healthy and engaged.
Make sure the parents are happy and healthy and engaged.
You talk about not spending enough time with the parents during summer vacation if the parents are working.
Well, there's a flip side to that coin, spending too much time with their parents.
That can be stressful for the kids, but it can also be stressful for the parents as well.
And again, it goes back to the point of the disruption of the routine.
Right. And some suggestions that I've been reading on just, you know, adding up to these ideas just now is that, you know, some more affordable way of helping your children to build a more balanced and, you know, just a happy summer vacation time would include, according to my reading, like letting them help you to do some housework, which trains their independent
abilities. They'll be excited about that.
And of course, just in an ideal parent child interaction scenario, let's just allow the children to release their pressure from study from time to time and just be aware that they have the right to enjoy some self-time, fun time, playful time as well.
And most importantly, emotionally, the children can feel a bit of a sense of identification when they realize that the parents are giving them acknowledgement on respecting their choices as well.
So it all comes from healthy communication and plan setting.
Yeah, but if you are a parent and you have a student who is on their summer vacation and you notice that your child, there's a little bit of an attitude change.
Maybe they're moping around a little bit.
Maybe they seem a little bit sad or a little bit rude to you for some reason.
Well, this is probably part of the reason why.
So rather than get angry at your child and yell at them for that, just try to ask them some questions and ask them how they're feeling and try to draw those emotions out and see if you can solve it that way.
Yes, I think that's a really good starting off point.
And I wonder though, for a lot of Chinese families, let's face it, a lot of people don't really know the significance or truly understand the significance of mental health or psychological well-being, that kind of thing.
And I think the rule of the thumb for most people is like, don't fix it if it ain't broken.
And then for families, usually it's when the kids are showing signs that they don't want to go to school, that they're not interested in schoolwork.
And then for Chinese parents, it's usually when the red flag starts sort of floating.
And then they realize that, oh, there's something wrong here and we need to fix this.
But actually mental health, just like all health issues, I believe preventative care and measures are super important here.
And that's one of the reasons why we're talking about this.
So what do you see as maybe the preventative things that parents could maybe pay attention to or kids should know, which will make their childhood teenage years a lot smoother?
Well, here are some suggestions from a doctor named Lin Hong, who works at the sixth hospital of Peking University, also known as the School of Mental Health Peking University.
And this doctor Lin, she specialized in just children, mental issues.
And she says that for the parents, it's more about observing your kid and noticing different behaviors just in time before it becomes something much more severe.
Moved swings for hygiene, maybe they don't want to take a shower, take a bath, right?
Maybe they're diet changes, they don't eat so much.
You had to pay attention to those signs.
And also ask, have you listened carefully every time when your kid is trying to voice their difficulties?
Are you standing in their shoes and think through their problem instead of just judging from your own past experience or how you grow up?
Oh, that's such a good point.
That's a very sharp question, right?
Yes. And actually a lot of us, we take for granted and we sort of just repeat the parenting style of your parents and sometimes that can be a good thing or maybe not.
I think it takes a really smart person to realize the things that need to be corrected and not repeat that pattern.
And for summer vacation, I think it's also a great time for some physical exercise.
Yeah. Get out of the house.
Don't forget to have fun.
You're on vacation, right?
Yeah. And always sort of establish a family routine, maybe having dinner together and really chat with your kids and pay attention to what they say.
Be a good listener, that is a good parenting role and also maybe just a good role as a friend and a human being.
