Mikhail Kokorin: “You shouldn’t be afraid to hold your baby more often. This has never made anyone feel bad.” Mikhail Kokorin is a psychotherapist with 15 years of experience, Candidate of Medical Sciences, Associate Professor Northern State Medical University, as well as the author of the method of integral psychotherapy. Mikhail agreed to give an interview for the newspaper “Next to Mom” and answer questions that interest many parents. Mikhail, the newspaper “Next to Mom” is aimed at parents, for those who love children and strive to understand them better. Alas, not always and not everyone manages to find a common language with children, and I would like to help adults with this. What advice could you give to those who have difficulty communicating with children? Difficulties in communicating with children are experienced by those people who do not understand children. And in order not to understand children, a person must forget about the time when he was a child, his childhood experience. That is, the person felt bad in childhood, and he really wanted to grow up. As a result, childhood passed him by. He didn’t even understand why it existed; he treated it as a forced necessity, a period of life that must be endured in order to quickly become like adults. So he tried to grow up quickly and... become the same as the adults who surrounded him and, most likely, did not understand him. After all, he was not comfortable with them. From them he learned not to understand children and himself, who was a child. The result: an “adult” who finds it difficult to communicate not only with children, but also with himself. Such an adult usually treats everyone around him too parentally. He is too dogmatic, conservative, irreconcilable, not cheerful, tense, and in general he does not feel very good himself. Here we can only advise one thing - to find a child in yourself who is still not comfortable and, despite your habit of not loving him, still learn to love him. And this is easiest to learn from children. You just need to start trusting them, putting yourself in their good hands. They will teach you to enjoy life and communicate with anyone. How did your parents influence your position in life? After all, in childhood, and even in adolescence, it is hardly possible to react correctly to certain events and phenomena. My parents influenced me very strongly and in different ways. Many of my mother’s actions can be considered pedagogical masterpieces. For example, seeing my interest in smoking at the age of 5-6, when I began to pick up cigarette butts on the street and pretended to smoke, she did not scold me. On the contrary, she said that if I want to smoke, then I better buy good cigarettes. She bought a pack of Cosmos and at home began trying to get me to smoke for real, and not for fun. I tried it and didn't like it. As a result, this incident discouraged the desire to smoke for the rest of my life. True, she later had problems with teachers in kindergarten, to whom I told that “my mother forced me to smoke.” There were other examples of parental influence, which resulted in the formation of not very useful habits. But, most importantly, my parents did not discourage me from constantly studying and learning something new. That's why I'm interested in life all the time. True, sometimes they criticize me for getting carried away into various adventures. Here you already have to hide something from them in order to be able to “try” everything and satisfy your childish curiosity, and in fact gain new experience. The question of parental authority often arises when children are still very young. They do not listen and do not respond to comments. What to do in this case? Be fair to children and admit your wrongs and mistakes. Lack of response to parental criticism is a symptom of misunderstanding and misconceptions of parents, which they do not want to admit and deal with. In your opinion, is it possible to punish children? If possible, then how? In my opinion, it is possible to punish children. But it is imperative that children UNDERSTAND what is happening: understand that at this moment they are being punished; understood that they were being fairly punished. And if it's unfair,Then they realized that the parents had problems, they themselves could not cope with them, so they came up with the idea of ​​​​punishing the child out of powerlessness. The people who have the most problems are those who were punished in childhood “for unknown reasons.” In such moments, people usually get stuck for a long time until they understand what happened and why they were treated so incomprehensibly and unfairly. It is no secret that, unfortunately, good and loving parents sometimes allow their children to be treated rather harshly, and then regret it. Please advise how to restrain yourself and not yell at your beloved child. There are two problems here: having really “lost it,” some parents (who have a conscience) begin to feel sorry for the child and feel guilty before him. And this also has an unhealthy effect, because the child begins to unconsciously begin to blame his guilty parents. Ideally, of course, you need to be ruthless, but not cruel. But if the nervous system is not balanced, then it is better after such a breakdown to explain to the child that you are also “not made of iron”, to apologize, but not to make excuses and not to humiliate yourself. The child will at least understand you. If you don’t admit your weaknesses, “put a good face on a bad game,” then you will either confuse or deceive the child, and he will have problems in life. If he is not so naive, he will stop respecting you. Both are bad. But holding back and not screaming will cause your throat to hurt or something else. If you constantly want to scream and can’t do anything about it, then it’s better to turn to a psychotherapist. The problem of misunderstanding between fathers and children is still relevant in our society. How to prevent it while the child is still trusting and open with his parents? The problem of “fathers and sons” is not only in society, but also within each person. Everyone is their own parent and child. If the parent is distrustful, then the child is most often insecure. And vice versa, if the child is insecure, then the parent cannot fully trust him. This problem is one of the main vicious circles of humanity. The question is how to learn to believe in ourselves, to believe in people, even when they let us down, deceive us, or behave helplessly and incompetently. Jesus said about this: “Love those who hate you.” You have to believe in people and your child. This breaks the vicious circle of mistrust and misunderstanding between fathers and children. There is an opinion that all or almost all human illnesses have a psychological basis. It turns out that you can recover from any disease if you solve some of your internal problems? For me, this is not an opinion, but a proven fact. A person’s illnesses depend on his attitude towards himself and the world around him. This fact is confirmed every day by work with patients, work at trainings and the result of this work. Why then do children get sick and how to help them? Children get sick for the same reasons as adults, but their illnesses are very often associated with their parents. I worked as a school psychotherapist and often achieved positive results by engaging in psychotherapy not with children, but with their parents. Now this has grown into a belief - in order to cure a child, you need to influence the parent. Children are very closely interconnected with those who raise them. There is such a concept as an emotional and mental umbilical cord. That is, during childbirth, only the physical connection between mother and child is broken, and not immediately. In the first year of a child's life, it is important to hold him in your arms when he has such a need. Until 11 months, children cannot maintain a constant body temperature on their own. They need to learn this. Often a child cries not because he wants to eat or peed himself, but because he wants our human warmth. At the same time, he develops his own immune system. If during this period he does not receive sufficient physical contact, then later he will have big problems with physical health, immunity, and so on. Therefore, there is no need to be afraid to hold your child in your arms more often. This has never made anyone feel bad. And after a year, up to 5-6 years, emotional contact, normal sincere emotional relationships are very important. If the child has not learned to feel on his own, if.