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Mother and son


mother and son

1. The boys disaster

I n his book The boys disaster the pedagogue Frank Beuster refers to a phenomenon that many parents may know from their own experience. At least since the 90s, a trend is emerging that remains unbroken until today: boys are more concerned about girls than girls and on average bring significantly lower grades home.

According to the author, there are a number of different causes, of which I pick out one here, which seems to me particularly significant. Some of the points that I will address also apply to the combinations mother-daughter, father-son and father-daughter. But since the mother-son relationship plays a central role in practice, I focus on this topic here.

The content of the book, based both on the experiences with their own children, as well as on the results of scientific investigations. Beuster states that the average grades of girls are better than those of boys nationwide and sees the main reason for this being in his assessment more tailored to the lives of girls teaching structures in today’s school system. Since these will not change so quickly, the author recommends, addressed to the address of parents of school-age boys:

"If boys do not learn from the start to better control their learning processes, if they do not acquire the ability to acquire knowledge themselves and work independently, then they have little serious chance against the well-prepared competition of the girls."
Frank Beuster, The Boy Disaster, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg, 2006, p. 66

Does he really have a harder time at school these days?
his sister, as the pedagogue Frank Beuster says?

A good two thirds of the students I look after are boys. Mothers play the main role in several ways. For one, they are the ones who contact me in over 80% of the cases, and if only one parent appears for an initial interview, it is almost always the mother. On the other hand, it is usually the mothers who are mainly responsible for the upbringing and especially the educational needs of their sons.

This ranges from homework help to parental leave to the organization of tuition and other extracurricular help. And usually mothers are also the ones who worry the most when their sons at school eventually run out of steam.

2. Risks of overcare

We have never met a mother who would not have wished her son all the best in the world. But this approval is often the beginning of a long chain of problems, the beginning of which goes back to the time before the birth of the child. What mother is not looking forward to her child, expecting that she will have a happy and successful life, with the willingness to do everything humanly possible? This is as natural as it is good, but above all there are two dangers that can later become stumbling blocks.

First, there is the risk of overpowering your own child with positive projections. While the joy of the first steps in one’s own and the first happily babbling words is still completely unproblematic, the problems usually start at the moment when one’s own child is compared to others. It does not matter whether it is ahead of other children in the first years of life, lags behind or moves in the average range. Above all, what is important is the meaning of the mother of "performance" attaches to her child.

In all three cases she may be tempted to worry even more about her child: because she wants to keep the lead or expand because she wants to work out a lead or catch up. She is not necessarily aware that a child can also wither and grieve when caring too much. The understandable desire to teach one’s children as much as possible of what one has worked out for oneself can have fatal consequences if it is too much of a good thing. In my practice, I often meet students who are treated overprotective in this regard.

Even more so than young people, toddlers want to discover the world and not get explained. It makes a huge difference whether I admit this game space to my child, or whether I intervene too soon and too often in his confrontation with the world, no matter how well intentioned. In this context, I like to use the image of a magnetism that decides at a young age whether someone later develops a solid self-motivation, self-organization and ability to concentrate, or not.

If the child is looking for a solution to any common problem, then as an adult, you can deal with it in various ways. One can refuse his support even if it asks; You can grant it as soon as it demands it, and you can intervene before signaling the need for help. In consistent application, the former would mean neglect and the latter over-care.

If one imagines mother and child as two magnets organizing their own lives, just as in physics magnetic fields bring iron dust into a specific organizational form, then one can assume that the magnetic field of the mother is initially the stronger. Infants and toddlers are physically and emotionally dependent on it. They could not survive if their mother’s magnetic field turned away from them. That is why their antennas are from the beginning focused on this existential magnetism. The mother also feels the effect of her physical and loving attention on the child, in whose eyes her own love reflects, as the moon reflects the sunlight.

In the first years of life, this wonderful reflection is based essentially on the neediness and dependence of the child. The more independent it becomes, the more a second soul begins to stir in the mother’s breast. It is the fear that the mainstay of mother-child love might begin to crumble. Thus, on a mostly unconscious level, there is a struggle between the joy of the child’s development to ever more independence and the fear of being able to lose its closeness in this way. This results in a certain inclination to let one’s own magnetism act on the child even there, where it prevents it from being able to build up an autonomous force field.

If a child is helped too early and too much in solving his daily tasks, then he or she loses both the willingness and the ability to organize themselves, to think and act independently. When difficulties arise, they are on the lookout for the magical magnet that can do anything faster and better than themselves. In kindergarten, elementary school and, above all, secondary school, it then becomes apparent that maternal help is no longer available in critical situations be available.

Especially in performance reviews of various kinds, it is completely on its own and fails, because the forces of its own inner magnet too weak and the maternal assistants are too far away. If you do not overdo it with care and diligence, you personally benefit from a special kind of collateral benefit, provided that a grain of truth is in the spell I wrote on the subject: "Who likes to care too much, gets worry lines at the end." The best quality selection of my sayings and aphorisms can be found on zitate-aphorismen.de.

3. Change from elementary school to a secondary school

Most sons have problems with their first years of secondary education. This is because the maternal suggestive power at the beginning often has a system stabilizing effect. As long as the child is mainly required reproductive services, the maternal "power bonds" bring good returns, from which it can generate benefits for its competitors for a while.

in the "best" In this case, the son develops a strong sense of self, which enables him to achieve above-average performance without special effort. The success achieved with relatively little effort frees him from fears, strengthens his intuition and gives him the feeling that he can fulfill the school requirements with ease.

Pupils of this type usually move from elementary school to high school, where they find themselves completely unprepared for a fundamentally different situation:

  • You lose contact with good friends
  • Instead of a central teacher, they have to adapt to many different types of teachers.
  • The school building is bigger and more anonymous.
  • At the end of elementary school, they were the greatest of the few, now they are the littlest of many students.
  • The usually longer way to school as well as more lessons and homework mean that they have to spend much more time on school matters.

While these points are more or less applicable to all students, the mother-son relationship plays a crucial role in how the individual child copes with the changing circumstances. It may sound paradoxical, but according to my experience, the students at the Gymnasium are often the hardest to attend. Since their primary school, they have been most intensively cared for by their mothers with their homework and preparation for class work.

Hardly anyone will doubt that exaggerated foreign aid negatively affects the ability to help themselves. However, it is difficult for mothers to realize when the critical threshold is exceeded, especially since this depends less on the quantity than on the quality of care. By the latter I do not mean the professional qualification, but the extent to which the mother succeeds in recognizing and eliminating, or at least reducing, the resistances that occur when learning with her son, that is, the real causes of his lack of concentration.

At the most common problem when switching from primary to secondary school, mothers usually have little influence at first. Affected are mainly students with a well above average intelligence and intuition. For them, the primary school is a walk on which they collect good grades, without having to make an extra effort.

If they then face higher demands and stronger competition at a secondary school, they are usually unable to adapt quickly to the changed circumstances. They cling to the idea that you can be good at school without having to work. Then suddenly write the first bad work, do not understand the world anymore.

You rightly have the impression that nothing has changed in them, and that they are rated much worse than before. Even if they realize at some point that they have to change something themselves, they often do not manage to simply flip the lever. And even if they succeed, this is no guarantee for success, because usually the increased use is compensated by automated self-doubt negatively, so that the notes simply do not want to get better, despite increased efforts. Then it can happen that even a particularly intelligent and creative student resigns.

If his parents fall behind and make him feel like a lazy loser, the world can collapse completely for the student. More than ever, he now needs a mother who understands his situation and helps him overcome the crisis.



An often underestimated reason why many children have starting problems
on the secondary schools exists in that she after
to meet the change to a much larger school building, with
according to more students and teachers.

4. Mother and son learn together – three "natural" W >
There are three resistances of a general nature that can not be removed, but which can be mitigated if you are aware of them and deal with them appropriately. The first is that most students at the latest at secondary school school Eventually it will be too much. Initially, this has nothing to do with a lack of motivation, but simply with the fact that the students have a relationship between leisure and work "schooldays" as inappropriate. When I’m at school I mean school lessons, homework, preparation for class work, reconditioning of fabric gaps as well as any situation in which the school becomes an issue.

The latter is a bigger problem for students than some parents believe. Any verbal reminder of tasks to be done, as well as any non-verbal gesture that signals, "you could do this or that for the school now", is felt by most students as if you had one "mandatory corridor" through her "Leisure Landscape" drawn. This may result in their effective leisure being subjectively much shorter than it actually is and building up a more or less conscious resistance to anything that smells like school.

The second resistance is related to children being free in the house where they grew up lust room are accustomed to perceive. The school, on the other hand, is a time-space for them, in which they are confronted mainly with duties. While for most adults, when it comes to the editorial deadline, when they come home from work, students eventually have to resort to additional work after completing school. Then, especially students with average or bad grades find it hard to feel that what they are doing is always too little in the eyes of teachers and parents, no matter how much effort they put into it.

The domestic "lust Castle" In her eyes, she often turns into a fortress where she has to serve a long prison sentence. Under these conditions, they often work unmotivated and unfocused. Their resistance to learning can become so massive that they put more energy into the resistance than overcoming it, with the consequence that the learning times become longer and more inefficient, or that they come up with everything to escape the learning pressure.

If mothers want to learn with their sons, a third resistance lurks in the background, which can become so massive that the relationship between mother and child is put to a serious test of stress. The less appreciation a student can get from his academic achievements, the more important it becomes for him to focus on one "power base" for whom what he does is less important than what he is.

There is nothing to stop mothers from helping their son with their homework, as long as he wishes, and as long as the school theme is not overemphasized. But as soon as the son has the feeling that the mother-child relationship is significantly influenced by this issue, he will feel abandoned by his mother. He will perceive her as a Trojan horse, who has infiltrated the school into his native territory. When he learns with his mother, he has, consciously or unconsciously, the feeling that he is facing an enemy force, with the consequence that he is more focused on fighting than on learning.

In order to defend his territory, over time he will build a knight’s armor to protect him from enemy attacks. He will enjoy watching his mother bite his teeth in vain. When she loses her nerves more and more often and gets involved in the game of mutual hostility, he has won a decisive battle.

He successfully averted a Trojan attack with an effective firewall. Although he also suffers from the daily hostility, but this negative price is sweetened by two positive achievements: First, he has averted a hostile takeover, and second, he has made his mother’s decision, him because of his sub-optimal academic efforts and achievements to refuse or to love him in spite of everything.

In most cases, the mother finally gets rid of her love-proof in a subtle form, because she also needs compensation for the annoying hostility. It comes to reconciliation with his own son, be it that he himself pats demands or his mother granted them voluntarily. Even if she occasionally can not resist the temptation to punish her son in one form or another for his opposition and unfocused work, elsewhere the more powerful the mother instinct will be to show her son how much she loves him.

This diabolical game can only end when the mother sees through it and finds more suitable means of expressing her natural need for a helpful promotion of her son. It will be crucial to set up and work through the learning resistance of the son, regardless of whether this succeeds on his own or through the support of third parties.

5. With two children everything went smoothly, but then Julian suddenly has problems .

N these three main resistances there are numerous specific resistances, which depend on the individual situation of those involved in inner-family learning support. I would like to restrict myself here to an example in which some typical resistances occur.

A mother has decided to give up her job after the birth of her third child in order to be completely there for the family. By the time she first encounters serious academic problems with one of her children, her daughter has just graduated and her eldest son has attained upper secondary school. Her youngest, 12-year-old Julian, is in the same school and has just moved to sixth grade. Although he had on his last testimony no five, but each twice the grade "Sufficient" in major and minor subjects.

While she had sporadically helped the two older children with their homework, working with Julian proved to be a big and protracted challenge. Initially, the boy gratefully accepted the maternal help and was glad that his grades were slowly but steadily improving. But just in the last half of the year before the end of the trial stage, they deteriorated suddenly and dramatically.

The mother was mystified because her son seemed motivated and there was no indication that he was not mastering the material when preparing for class. Also Julian was always in good spirits after the work and expected corresponding results. But an unusual accumulation of clerical errors pushed the ratings on average by one or two notes down. Just because he had worked out a cushion at the beginning of the school semester, Julian survived the test stage paper-thin. When the negative trend continued at the beginning of seventh grade, his mother contacted me on suspicion of having trouble concentrating.

A quick check revealed that the boy was able to concentrate well. It was not until the simulation of a difficult examination situation that sudden blocks of thought emerged, as a result of which his ability to perform deteriorated rapidly and sustainably. This result was a first explanation why the clerical errors accumulated in his work especially at the end. But there was no explanation for the sudden appearance of the thought blocks that had now assumed the character of classic blackouts. A questioning of mother and son remained without result.

When certain programs consume a computer’s main memory, it is called a high CPU utilization, or central processing unit. In the extreme case, a single operation can load the main memory in such a way that the PC crashes, so that it virtually comes to a computer blackout. The human brain works similarly. Excessive burden on individual central processing units can lead to blocks of thought that complicate concentrated learning and are responsible for blackout auditing situations. Fears, existential doubts, and strong, unmet needs are the most dangerous triggers for psychosomatic processes that can paralyze parts of the brain.

While traveling together through Julian’s interior worlds, three themes emerged, which constantly went through the boy’s mind and put a heavy strain on him emotionally. On a scale of minus ten to plus ten, he was able to assess how the individual points felt for him. At minus nine, he rated a physical humiliation that a student of the same age had committed on him three months earlier. He rated days with ten plus days for friends to spend the night with him. For giving his mother sadness, he gave the value minus seven.

As it turned out when working with Julian, there had been a fatal overlap of the three topics in recent months. He had concealed the humiliation of his mother because he was ashamed of it and because he did not want to incriminate her further. In an exercise in which he would reminisce about his mother’s faces in various scenes in his mind’s eye, it had come out that she always looked happy when she was with his siblings and that her expression was mostly sad and worried when she looked at him. In desperation, the mother had temporarily banned overnight stays with friends and restricted her son’s computer use. She had hoped Julian would be able to concentrate better if he were less distracted.

The fact that this shot backfired, however, was related to the fact that Julian’s conclusion of the last months was: I am worth nothing, and everything that I enjoy is forbidden to me. Outwardly, his school motivation did not seem to have suffered because he spent just as much time doing homework and preparing for class work as before. Internally, however, strong resistance had built up, which meant that what he had learned was stored only to a limited extent in his long-term memory and therefore limited in class work. As soon as he registered this during exams, thought blocks built up, which additionally reduced his concentration and efficiency. This mechanism was hardly known to him because of the tension in class work, so he was regularly confronted with worse results than he had expected.

Even the mother was initially unaware that she not only helps her son with her troubles, but even harms them. My fitting saying is:
"Those who are worried are giving their worries power."
Andreas Tenzer in: Sigrid Engelbrecht, Let go, what worries you, Munich: Gräfe und Unzer Verlag, 2013, p. 11.
After realizing that Julian was in a pleasure hole that could not be filled with fancy withdrawal, that he was already worried enough about himself and could use anything but an additional external caregiver, she changed the way she interacted with her son at a central location. She practiced a combination of letting go and new attention. The daily joint learning sessions were suspended and the prohibitions lifted. In turn, Julian promised to contact her if he needed her help, and to seek the assistance of others to solve the pent-up problems.

Even more than the external changes, the mother’s willingness to let go inwardly was important. During our conversations, she had become aware that the clinging to her son had something to do with her own life situation. As long as Julian took her time extensively, she could postpone the decision to return to her old job. That suited her because of her indecision on this issue.

When she suddenly had the time, she rejected the re-entry and was temporarily in crisis because of the unplanned time. Eventually, though, she had some interesting new assignments, and when she did not have much time left for her son, Julian was again looking for her closeness. He occasionally volunteered to study material from her, worked much more concentrated and efficient, and was more in the mood for joint ventures with his parents.

For Julian it was especially important that he no longer felt like a problem child. He no longer felt that he had to emotionally misjudge his mother. His inner magnetism was gaining more and more power, which had a positive effect on his ability to concentrate and self-assemble, without the need for special concentration-enhancing exercises.

Although it took him more than a year to regain his old school performance, two things made him feel that time was not a burden. For one thing, the positive trend in his school grades gave him confidence, but above all, he no longer felt like a plaything, but was happy to be able to play with the balls again. This was literally seen in his tennis tournaments, where he had been able to transform spasms into relaxation.

I deliberately chose a case study that temporarily resulted in a mother-son problem even though the mother did (almost) everything right. Of course, no one can say with complete certainty what is right or wrong in education. I suggest to every mother and father that they want to accompany their children to the best of their knowledge and belief.

However, this also means that you put yourself to the test when a child fails at school and / or is unhappy. If a parent believes that they have made a mistake, it is not helpful to feel guilty about it. It is all about breaking new ground when you realize that the old ones are misleading.

6. Mother types – or how sons respond to particular part personalities

If you would like to recognize yourself in one of the mother types, which I briefly outline below, then I ask you to consider that you never fully correspond to this type. At best, it is a partial personality of yours, which can be dominant in a certain phase of life, but which also takes a back seat if you give more weight to other part-personalities.

The unhappy mother

Typical reaction of the son: My mother is unhappy. I do not want to be unhappy. So I always have to do the opposite of what my mother wants.

The dominant mother

Typical reaction of the son: My mother wants to control me. I do not want to be enslaved. So I have to oppose my mother wherever I can.

The mother clinging

Typical reaction of the son: My mother wants to devour me. I do not want to be devoured. So I have to flee from my mother.

The anxious mother

Typical reaction of the son: My mother is afraid. I do not want to be scared. So I have to shut up in front of my mother.

The overprotective mother

Typical reaction of the son:

  1. My mother does everything for me. That’s great. So I do not need to worry about anything.
  2. My mother wants to fix everything for me. That’s comfortable, but it also makes me dependent. So I’ll show her how much I hate her for that.

Single mothers have two types of reactions that are particularly common:

If the mother is consciously or unconsciously assigned the blame for the separation, the son can develop a strong need to punish her for it. The more the mother makes him understand how important school is, the more inclined he is to focus his opposition on the school front. Once he realizes he can touch his mother at this point, he will use every opportunity to annoy and disappoint her in school matters. He has no guilty conscience, because he understands his behavior consciously or unconsciously as a just revenge campaign.

If a boy identifies more with his uneducated father, and has less contact with him than he wishes, he may be tempted to play the male role opposite his mother. If the mother then treated her son like a partner, she loses her authority as a parent. The boy then has an easy time defying inconvenient demands by the strategic use of his charm, or reacting with love withdrawal, if he can not enforce his will.

When I confront mothers with their initial assessment that they have a decisive influence on how their child thinks, feels and acts, they react very differently to the hint. Some see it as a reproach that they reject, others blame themselves for having failed. Both are unhelpful and are not at the heart of the matter.

The great influence that mothers have on their sons is both opportunity and risk. It is all about using the positive design options and minimizing the risks. The only thing you need to do is to be willing to face the real causes of children‘s educational and family reality.

7. What does my son think? What does my son feel??

It is popularly said that one can look people in the head, but not in the head. Luckily, it is possible for a human to look into his head. Very few are able to do that, but it would be necessary to be able to grasp problems at their root. For example, when a boy is attacked by a blockade during a class work, it is nothing more than a reflection of his physical, mental, and emotional state during the 2,700 seconds it usually takes to put something learned into a class paperwork.

The key question is: what does he think, what does he feel and how powerful is his body during the performance review phase? Only if it succeeds in raising these processes beyond the threshold of awareness is there a chance to steer them in the right direction. The same applies to the concentrated learning at home, because the constitution of the body-mind-soul system determines the quality of the storage of information and thus indirectly also on the quality of retrieval in performance reviews. More detailed information can be found on the bottom of Homework Motivation and Concentration.

For these reasons, the study of interior worlds plays a central role in my work. The students learn to observe their thoughts, feelings and physical sensations first and then to steer them within the given possibilities. So it is quite possible to look someone in the head.

So that this process is not misunderstood as mind control, I urge students to share only thoughts that they fear will not be sacrificed to them. Nevertheless, in order to realistically assess their specific CPU utilization, I offer you the option of having very personal information "X" To name and to indicate a value, how often the corresponding thought goes through his mind and with what emotions he is connected. This has proven to be a solid basis for trusting cooperation.

On my website gewahrsein.net you will find detailed information and specific exercises on this topic.

Especially those with strong inner pictures and emotional impulses "blessed" Student type, the
I like to call it a nectar-driven butterfly type, I’d love to always bloom
fly to him now opens and gives it to him right now.

It is a important step towards growing up when the butterfly type experiences, that it is sometimes worthwhile to approach the laborious way to a more distant blossom to take.

This works well in my experience on the way of self-observation, the
Awareness increases in every moment of life.

Trust also includes my assurance that they will only give their parents the information they have released. As a rule, there are only a few points that they want to be treated confidentially, so that through this detour parents also get insights into which of the innumerable thoughts that go through their children‘s minds every day appear frequently and are associated with strong emotions are.

Some mothers think they know exactly what’s going on in their sons’ heads, but if we’re honest, we do not usually know that about ourselves. All we have to do is ask how many of the tens of thousands of thoughts we’re seeing each day go to the head, are still aware of us at the end of a day. When you consider that every single thought contains an impulse for action, it is no exaggeration to say that the head is the kitchen in which the meals of life are cooked.

8. Relaxation or cramp – That’s the question

This is true not only for your favorite dishes, but also for negative thoughts that put a strain on our nerves like millstones. Mothers should not want to know everything that happens in the minds of their sons, but they should know what their own thoughts, gestures and actions do to their children. This applies to everything that is good for one’s own child as well as to the negativity that one imputes to him.

As mentioned before, the mothers’ worries are the forces with the greatest potential for destruction. Sons interpret these worries as a sign that something is wrong with them. Whenever they rebell or oppose their mother in any way, they are usually only defending themselves against becoming entangled in a sentimental structure. And conversely, the relaxed mother is a source of power, from which the son derives a large part of the elemental energies that he needs for a concentrated and self-determined life.

Sometimes mothers show me the last testimonies of their sons, report difficult circumstances in which they find themselves, and ask me how they could be relaxed in the face of this situation. Of course, in every life there are periods of extreme tension, in which the hint to relax, sounds like sheer mockery. But once you realize that the tension only increases the existing problems, you can at least check whether there are certain areas from which you can take some tension out.

But above all, as long as you are under great strain, you can heed the principle of refraining from everything that is not absolutely necessary, since negativity inevitably generates negativity. It’s best to wait until you’re comfortable with yourself, and then share the positive energies with your son. Things that were previously associated with great resistance, then usually go easily from the hand.

9. What can mothers do? – Ten simple tips

If your son had everything in the green, you probably would not read that line. The fact that children get bigger problems at some point during their school career is more the rule than the exception. If you do the right thing then there is no real problem. In principle, the solution is quite simple, which does not mean that it is always easy to implement. But if you go the following way, you can be confident in my experience that things will improve there for the better, where there is need for correction:

Understand why your son is unfocused and can not fully reach their potential.

  • Make a note of the strengths and weaknesses that you see in your son.
  • Try to estimate your own share in it.
  • Evaluate your son on a scale of 0 to 10 for self-esteem, self-esteem, and self-responsibility, and assess your positive or negative impact.
  • Define the deficits that have nothing to do with you, changeable and unchangeable.
  • Divide the former into things that your son can change for himself and avoid his influence.
  • Negotiate with your son how he can contribute his own contribution to positive change.
  • Support your son as much as possible in the negative conditions that are wholly or partially beyond his control, such as the relationship with specific teachers or students.
  • Allow him to benefit from support measures, provided that certain deficits can not be worked out on their own.
  • Get qualified external support for any questions you can not solve yourself.
  • When you have done all this, go into a relaxed observer role, knowing that you are doing everything in your power for your son.

10. Conclusion – stagnation or river

What a student thinks and feels determines whether he is relaxed or cramped, and most importantly, whether he can turn his potential into good or bad performance. As a relaxed mother, they make a hard to overestimate contribution that the former applies to your son. However, if you manage to discover and eliminate external causes of lack of concentration, either on your own initiative or through third party support, then you have really given your son everything he needs for his spiritual development and emotional balance.

And then there’s no reason for you or your son to worry about anything. If this conclusion seems too simple to you, I can assure you from the experience with hundreds of mothers and sons, that is especially important this Job decides whether things at home and at school will falter or flow.

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