The Association of Business Owners of Southern Spain, Cesur, is organizing a series of events on educational innovation. At yesterday’s event in Seville, Luis Gutiérrez Rojas , a psychiatrist at the PTS Hospital in Granada and a lecturer at the University of Granada, spoke  .

For him, one of the fundamental pillars of education—and he spoke not only as a psychiatrist but also as a father—is using common sense. “We have to motivate our children and help them face difficulties; we’re raising kids who are very neurotic, very immature, who crumble at the slightest challenge,” Gutiérrez told this newspaper, adding that ” this is because we, as parents, want our children to avoid suffering, to have a hard time, to have everything they need, and this creates individuals who haven’t faced frustration .”

“We say that people,” the professor continued, “  have little tolerance for frustration, and the way they cope with it is by experiencing frustration ; that is, how do you overcome things in your work, personal, or family life? Whether it’s a breakup, a pay cut, or a boss assigning something yesterday, stress, or someone picking on you, it makes you stronger, tougher, because you have to face it.  And all of that terrifies us; no, we don’t want our child to suffer, we don’t want anything to happen to them . And if you add to that the fact that they’re surrounded by everything, as the Andalusian song says, that they lack nothing. Children are surrounded by an aura where they have everything, and without having earned it. We’re creating a very weak generation because we haven’t given them the opportunity to be strong. We need to take the drama out of it.” “Children have to get used to ‘no,’ to what they lack, so they don’t become weak,” he added. “This creates increasingly weak or demotivated individuals. A curious phenomenon is occurring: people who start university and keep repeating degrees because they don’t like any of them,” the professor said.

Incorporate humor

The title of the presentation given by Luis Gutiérrez Rojas at Cesur’s “ideas lab” was  “Educating with Humor in School .” For an hour and a half, in an entertaining way, Luis Gutiérrez Rojas explained how incorporating humor into the education of young children can have a positive impact.

At this meeting, Gutiérrez Rojas presented his simple solutions to complex problems. Among them, he emphasized  the importance of self-knowledge and humility , since, according to the psychiatrist from Granada, “only those who know their own flaws and problems are capable of showing understanding towards others; otherwise, they become unbearably intolerant.” He also raised the need to learn to put things in perspective and prevent “unimportant things from deeply affecting us because we dramatize them or overthink them.”

In his analysis of the current state of society, also known as “liquid society,”  Gutiérrez Rojas criticized how social media fosters the conditioning of our happiness  on others’ perceptions of us, the overabundance of information, and the lack of decisiveness that citizens experience. The event was introduced by Fernando Seco, vice president of Cesur.