1. I Read This Book on the Reader I Built Myself
Wu Zhihong’s “Why Home Hurts” (为何家会伤人), million-copy commemorative edition. The book had been sitting on my computer for ages, unread.
On October 2nd my WeChat Reading membership expired. I didn’t renew — spent half a month building myself an e-ink reader (wrote about it before). The first serious book I read on the new reader was this one.
Highlighting on my own app is just one tap — no wrestling with WeChat Reading’s two tiny handles — so I highlighted aggressively, burning through more than half a chapter in one evening. I’d assumed this was a book written for wounded children. About twenty percent in, I became increasingly restless: the type of parent the book criticizes most harshly looked more and more like me.
All those “I love you so much, therefore you must listen to me” things at home — I’ve done plenty of them.
2. I Brought My Work Playbook Home Unchanged
There’s a passage in the book I highlighted twice:
The rule at work is power — its operating mechanism is competition and cooperation, control and conquest. The rule at home is cherishing — the path to cherishing is understanding and acceptance. If you don’t understand the boundary between work and home, and bring the power rule home, you create a kind of “power contamination.”
I’ve been a wage worker for over a decade. My brain’s default setting is this playbook: set goals, break down tasks, track progress, evaluate results, review. Coming home, I discovered I used the same rhetoric with my child:
- “We agreed on bedtime at nine. It’s time.”
- “Either you eat now, or I’m throwing the food away.”
- “New toys come after you put the old ones away.”
I always thought this was having rules — being “kind but firm.” After reading “Positive Discipline” I was quite proud of myself, feeling I’d finally found the method.
Looking back now — where are the rules in that? Those were orders from me alone, just delivered in a slightly polite tone. Rules are a two-party affair; in my so-called “agreements,” my child never had a voice from start to finish. The consultation was fake; the notification was real.
The book also tells of an old general. He treated home as a battlefield, brought maps and binoculars back to the house, bossed around his wife and children. His most repeated phrase: “This is an organizational order. I’m a soldier, I operate by soldier standards. You are a soldier’s wife and children — so only obedience, obedience, and more obedience!” He ultimately drove his son to sever their father-son relationship.
I’ve never served in the military, and I’m not that extreme. But that flavor is all too familiar — “I’m doing this for the good of this family, so everyone does as I say.” Isn’t that just the family version of “organizational orders”?
3. All Those Things I Force My Child to Do — Who Are They Really For?
Next to the chapter “Parents Are Not Their Children’s Answer,” I wrote only one sentence: remember this.
Parents should not try to play the role of their children’s decision-maker, but should give children the freedom to explore independently — that way, even a young child can be “a person becoming themselves.”
I’ve forced my child to do many things. Finish your food. Bedtime means bedtime. Greet people when you see them. Put toys away. Write neatly. Wash hands when you come in. Taken individually, each has its rationale — not eating means hunger; sleeping late means can’t wake up; not greeting people means I have to explain to others.
But I have to admit: a considerable portion of the benefits from all this accrue to me. He doesn’t eat — I get anxious. He doesn’t greet people — I feel embarrassed. He doesn’t put toys away — what’s disrupted is my sense of order. When I push him, my mouth says “for your own good,” but actually I’m smoothing my own temper.
There’s a line in the book that should be pasted on every father’s forehead:
Remember: as parents, we should frequently ask ourselves: is this truly for the child? Or for myself?
And another passage that was painful to read:
Actually, all children start out as “people becoming themselves,” but caregivers insist on shaping their children according to their own will, so the child’s will gets suppressed, and ultimately they lose themselves to varying degrees. … Many parents play the role of “angels dispensing reward and punishment” in shaping their children — they require their children to meet certain conditions; if met, they reward; if not met, they punish. Thus the child drifts further from their own heart and gradually becomes a product of parental will.
“Angels dispensing reward and punishment” — harsh words, but that’s exactly what it is. Gold stars, stickers, rewards, no TV — I used to think this was a motivation system. Now I see it’s the same mechanism as KPIs: shifting a person’s attention from “do I want to do this” to “what do I get for doing it, what punishment for not doing it.” I was raised this way myself, and now I’m applying it unchanged to my child.
Last year reading “The Courage to Be Disliked,” it actually said the same thing — at the time I never connected it to parenting. The philosopher in the book says:
When we praise or criticize others, the only difference is “sugar or whip” — the purpose behind both is manipulation. Adlerian psychology so strongly rejects reward-and-punishment education precisely because it exists to manipulate children.
“Neither criticize nor praise” — back then I read it as workplace wisdom, wrote my notes (Reading Notes: The Courage to Be Disliked) and set it aside, never thinking it applied equally at home. Both the sugar and the whip are in my hands; the child has no choice but to receive whichever I dispense. Gold stars are sugar; no TV is the whip. Which one I use doesn’t matter — what matters is whose hand holds the rope.
Wu Zhihong calls this “power contamination”; Adler’s term is “vertical relationships.” Different names for the same thing — and I’ve committed both.
My daughter is still young, not yet at the age where I’d push her this way. But if that pattern takes hold, it won’t distinguish between boys and girls.
4. The Treatment I Received as a Child Is Replaying Through My Hands
I’ve written about my own childhood: beaten, scolded, whipped with bamboo sticks, made to kneel on split firewood, made to stand barefoot on scorching concrete in July sun. That “spare the rod, spoil the child” education beat me into increasing compliance and also made me unwilling to think for a long time — what’s the point, speaking up changes nothing anyway.
I swore: I will never hit my child.
And I haven’t. But I’ve done something else: when he won’t eat and repeated requests fail, I threaten him with a data cable until he cries (I wrote about this in my “Positive Discipline” notes — looking back now, nothing to be proud of). I thought that since the blow doesn’t land, it doesn’t count as violence. But I highlighted this line from the book:
If childhood is happy, we’re more likely to replicate happiness; if childhood is painful, we’re more likely to replicate pain.
Not using hands doesn’t mean no punishment. When my voice rises, he flinches first; when my face darkens, the dinner table goes silent. Children read this far more attentively than any textbook. What I feared most as a child wasn’t being hit either — it was that随时可爆 atmosphere at home. Now that atmosphere is one I create.
5. Don’t Measure Others with Your Own Ruler
The first half of this book covers dating and marriage. The phrase in the title is the one line in the entire book I most agree with.
Understanding between family members is difficult primarily because we habitually operate from our own coordinate system — speculating about, evaluating, even attacking another person — completely forgetting that the other person also has a phenomenal field, a coordinate system entirely different from our own.
The book breaks “failing to understand” into three things. I recognized myself in each: speculating, evaluating, giving advice.
With my wife, my most frequent offense is the third. She says work was exhausting; I say “then go to bed earlier.” She complains about something; I immediately start “you could do this, you could do that.” I think I’m helping. Actually she just wants to vent — but I insist on proposing solutions. The book puts it bluntly: most of the time, the other person is merely using the “problem” to unload frustration and doesn’t need your advice at all. Once advice is offered, it also signals I was too lazy to listen.
Same with my child. He says “I don’t want to go to kindergarten.” My first response is usually “why? Did you not sleep well yesterday?” — I’m looking for a reason rather than listening to what he’s saying. I highlighted this from the book:
Behind anything that seems absurd, there is always a genuine reason. If you think it’s absurd, it’s most likely because you don’t understand it.
Counselor Huang Jialiang’s words I copied into my notes: How the other person feels — that’s what’s real. What she wants isn’t for me to investigate the facts clearly; it’s for me to listen to the end first. This is the one I do worst.
6. I Claim “Child First” but Actually Put the Marital Relationship Last
What should come first in a family is not the parent-child relationship but the marital relationship. … The marital relationship is “the family’s stabilizing anchor.”
Reading this, I paused. My most self-righteous phrase these past few years has been “child first.” Conversations with my wife can wait; dinners just the two of us can wait; even arguments get shelved — the child’s matters can’t wait; ours can.
The book says: if the parent-child relationship overrides the marital relationship, what follows is a terrible mother-in-law relationship and a severe Oedipal attachment. I haven’t reached my parents’ stage yet, but the signs are there: 80% of what my wife and I say to each other daily is exchanging information about the child.
What hit harder was the “separation” section:
Parents in healthy families love their children deeply and raise them — not to share in the result for themselves, not to stay glued to the child forever, but to push them out the door, into a wider world, to live an independent and autonomous life.
“Refusing separation equals refusing growth.” Uncomfortable words. But much of what we call “reluctance to let go” is actually the adults’ reluctance. I say every day that I want my child to be independent; when the day truly comes that he doesn’t need me, I might not handle it.
7. Flash Marriages and Flash Divorces — I Found Some Answers in This Book
Divorce rates keep climbing. I’ve thought about this for years — even before getting married. Friends who married in a flash and divorced in a flash — married just months before splitting — I never understood: you both chose each other willingly; how does it reach that point in a few months?
In this book I read:
Actually, unconsciously we all treat romantic love as therapy — the purpose is to correct the errors of our childhood. The manifestation: our lovers are most often the ideal parents we’ve chosen.
The gist: many people, when marrying, are actually thinking of an ideal parent — someone who will accept me unconditionally, understand me, never treat me the way that person did when I was small. During the courtship phase, that’s indeed how it goes: the other person is willing to play the role, you’re willing to play yours, and both feel they’ve finally found “the one.”
The problem: ideal parents don’t exist in reality. Once daily life begins and the other person reveals their true self, many people’s first reaction isn’t “we both need to adjust” — it’s “I picked the wrong person.” Find someone new, perform romance again, be disappointed again. Among flash marriages and flash divorces, I suspect many follow this pattern.
I’m not saying this explains all divorces. I just used to weight “finding the right person” heavily; now I think rather than finding the right person, it’s better to get the couple’s positioning right.
The book says: if in a family the parent-child relationship overrides the marital relationship, what follows is a terrible mother-in-law relationship and an Oedipal attachment. I have some experience with this. When my mom first came to help with childcare, my wife was very uncomfortable — felt my mom was managing too much, involving herself in everything, squeezing our family’s own space. From my mom’s side, she meant well, thinking we young people didn’t know how to raise children; from my wife’s side, this home belongs to the two of us, and having someone daily directing operations next to us — anyone would find that uncomfortable.
Now, with time, everyone’s temperament is understood, and the household is reasonably harmonious — at least currently, my small family is at peace. But that awkward period taught me one thing: parents come to help, and helping is helping — it cannot become being the household’s master. Before marriage I wrote “My Views on Marriage and Family”, where I said both sets of parents should minimize involvement and childcare is the couple’s own business. Back then I thought this intuitively; now I understand why.
The old saying goes: harmony brings prosperity, a united family thrives in all things. I think that’s exactly what this means: the two people in the household must stand together — only then does life have direction.
8. I Don’t Agree with Everything in This Book
The preceding sections read like self-criticism, but I don’t want to treat this book as a standard answer, nor do I think “Positive Discipline” was wrong.
“Positive Discipline” teaches kindness with firmness, teaches don’t hit don’t yell, teaches letting children bear the consequences of their choices — I still agree with all that. Wu Zhihong’s book is valuable because it digs one layer deeper: much of the time when we say we’re “educating children,” we’re actually satisfying ourselves. The two books don’t conflict — one addresses attitude, the other addresses motivation.
But there are parts of this book I don’t agree with. It talks about unconditional love, freedom, parents not being children’s decision-makers — the principles are all correct. But in the concrete reality of daily life, sometimes adults do need to be firm. Agreed on ten minutes of tablet time, and when time’s up they refuse to put it down; wanting ice cream at midnight; throwing a tantrum on the mall floor. In these moments, just saying “I understand how you feel” and then caving — that’s not respect, that’s dodging.
On bottom-line matters I won’t budge: sleep is non-negotiable, school is non-negotiable, no hitting people, no taking others’ things, when the agreed time is up it’s over. Some of these relate to his body, some relate to others — none of them are things he gets to decide unilaterally.
The hard part is calibration. My thinking: firmness can only be applied to matters, not to the person — rules, safety, others’ boundaries: very little room for compromise here. But whether he must admit he was wrong, must conform to my preferred version of things — that line cannot be crossed. Firmness and physical force are also two different things; that’s non-negotiable.
As for viewpoints, I increasingly feel there’s no absolute right or wrong. The same situation, different family, different child — the answer may differ. What’s written in books is also someone else’s child. Books are books; the child is mine; ultimately I must make my own judgment.
9. A Few Small Things I Plan to Change
After all this talk, there must be some action. I’ve set myself these rules — whether I can follow them is another matter:
- Say “now” less. If he doesn’t want to eat, fine — tell him the next meal is at seven, no snacks in between. Don’t chase with food, don’t change my mind midway.
- When he’s telling me something, listen to the end first. Don’t open with “why”; don’t rush to propose solutions. These two are my most automatic habits — and the ones I most dislike about myself.
- Don’t trade rewards for behavior, especially don’t use cartoons as bargaining chips.
- Every week, say something to my wife that has nothing to do with the child. I estimate this will be the hardest.
- When my attitude was bad, own it — say “Daddy was harsh just now. I’m sorry.” He doesn’t need an infallible father.
10. Finally
This book is called “Why Home Hurts.” Reading to this point, my biggest takeaway: what hurts is usually not the absence of love — it’s loving incorrectly. In love’s name, choosing children’s friends, arranging their schedules, deciding what counts as meaningful — then turning around to complain they lack initiative.
The book says every child is born with their own path to walk; parents insisting on determining their child’s destiny are destroying that destiny. I copied this line down and stored it in the annotations of the reader I built.
As for that reader — I originally just wanted highlighting to feel smoother. Never expected the first book I’d seriously finish on it would highlight nothing but my own flaws.
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