Around the end of the year 2020, a news report caught the attention of many netizens in China. It was about a 14-year-old middle school student jumping to his death after being publicly slapped by his mother for playing card games in the classroom. Although the discussion about youth suicide in China had always been taken seriously, this new increase of attention initiated more reflections on youths’ academic stresses, family relationships, and mental health. According to Annual Reports of China’s Education, family conflicts took the highest ratio in the main causations for students’ suicides.
With a focus on this social issue of parent-child communication in China, and an attempt to help relieve this difficulty, this project includes a set of workbooks that aids a positive communication process between teenagers or young adults and their parents who have had difficulties previously. It guides both youths and their parents to sit side by side, reintroduce and open up themselves to each other, equally and respectfully reflect upon past conflicts, learn to understand the changes in their own emotions during a communication process with each other and express them in a clearer and non-violent way. With this set, families will also have access to helpful resources and be able to keep future communication experiences on the record.