Child Behavior: Stages Of Development
What affects a child's behavior between the ages of one and four?
At birth children, babies, infants think the sun rises and sets on them, and that they ought to have whatever they want whenever they want it and they have people in total service to them for a good long time. So, if you, I like to ask my parents, when you bring a baby into a household who's the boss, and they say the baby's the boss because the baby's calling all the shots, wakes up in the middle of the night you get up and you take care of that baby. So it's all about the baby. Now why would any healthy person ever think it shoud be any different than that? You got everybody running and waiting on you. Anything you need, there's the bottle, anything you need, you're getting your diaper changed, everything. People are in total service to children, right? So why would a child ever think it should be any different? The parent doesn't teach them the discipline of how to get along with others. So permissive parenting comes from that. 'Cause the child thinks I ought to have whatever I want, and if the parents don't set basic, normal, healthy boundaries with the children, then that continues on into adult life, and these people are miserable, they're miserable to get along with, they make horrible relationships, they're miserable. Nobody likes them because they don't know the give and take.
What do children learn between the ages of 4-11 that will affect their behavior?
When children start elementary school and even a little before, 'what's fair' gets to be a really big thing. Prior to that, what is fair is “I get what I want, when I want it, and if you don't give me what I want, I'll have a fit and I'll fall in it and I'll embarrass you, and you'll give me what I want”. This is the setup for permissive parenting; where you don't want to go. So, in elementary school, children learn that they can't have what they want, whenever they want it, all of the time. They have to share. They also learn what the rules are, what cheating is, what playing the game in a fair way is, and also what to do if somebody else cheats and how that doesn't work right. This is preliminary to the law and order stage; the fairness stage is very vital. Children who are in sports learn about being a good sportsman, what a good sport is, about winning and losing, and how to handle that. That's a tremendous value for being socialised into how to fit into the society.
What affects a child's behavior between the ages of 11 and 18?
What do children learn between the ages of eleven and eighteen that will affect their behavior? In terms of development, once children leave elementary school and they're starting into their young teenage years, and teenage years, the socialization task is to learn about the society at large. So what children learn then is that there are some rules that are so important they're actually laws. Because they're taking history classes and civics classes and such, they learn that every civilization has laws which keep the civilization together, that define the civilization, and that if you break the laws, there are serious consequences for breaking the law. That's necessary in order to have a civilization at all. So their world view gets expanded in junior high and high school, that there's a bigger world out there, and how to be socialized to fit into the society is a huge thing. So social relationships with teenagers is very, very vital because they're going to run into people that are not okay, and they're going to fall in love, and out of love, and a lot of socialization goes on in the teenage years. It's very, very vital for their ultimate success.
