Home » Child development (Page 50)
Category Archives: Child development
Angels in the Early Morning Stand at Your Gate
When you do not get everything you need, the deprivation can help you become very resourceful by learning some great survival skills, like not passively waiting for someone else to provide for you. Generalization of a sentiment allows a person to make sense out of a new relationship by analogy to a more familiar one. Compassion, liking, shame, and other sentiments in adulthood are generalized from childhood primary group relations. Religious sentiments are generalized from family clan relationships, so that a deity (God) may be imputed moral authority, perpetual dependence by worshippers, and will be visualized as exacting but benevolent, like elders to a child. No person can be saved, accord to the words of God, save they shall have faith in his name; wherefore, if these things have ceased, then has faith ceased also; and awful is the state of humanity, for they are as though there had been no redemption made. However, if a person has faith one must also have faith; for without faith there cannot be any hope. Pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that you may be filled with this love, which he has bestowed upon all who are true. So, when God shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as he is pure. Amen. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
When individuals are pushed into a place where one has to keep oneself alert to avoid being hurt, one often develops excellent observation skills and survival instincts. These individuals tend to see what is going on around them faster then those who grew up protected by the adults in their lives. If one has witnessed a lot of dysfunctional behavior, it may have helped the individual learn how to avoid potentially harmful situations and people. If one’s parents were harsh and not protective, it may cause individuals to have strengthened their determination to be healthier in one’s own adult life. The selective combination of person symbols into a sentiment may cumulate across many relationships. Romantic love, for instance, may incorporate a selection of emotional reactions from previous relationship. As a composite of previous loves, romantic attraction is felt when a partner is found who reintegrates favorite aspects of family members, friends, and earlier romantic lovers. Romance’s intensity is increased by the sudden discovery in one person of these formerly separate, desired qualities associated with previous lovers. This discovery evokes the set of earlier love responses simultaneously. Religious feeling may develop similarly through summation of different sensations, memories, and other affective elements into a sentiment. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Religious sentiment builds from a merger of feelings experiences in collective singing, esthetic responses to music and religious adornments, emulations of the service leader’s example, the facial and gestural expression of other worshippers, and other sensations and impressions across many episodes of worship. “Pray for those who are lost that repentance may come unto them. However, behold, I fear lest the Spirit has ceased striving with them; and in this part of the land they are also seeking to put own all power and authority which comes from God; and they are denying the Holy Ghost (Moroni 8.28).” You may have many more strengths that you are not aware of because of having been less fortunate than other children in how you were nurtured and raised. Keep in mind that within our vulnerabilities is structure that has been erected by the architect of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid, its compartments are beautiful, as well as useful; its arrangements are full of wisdom and order and its defenses are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality, if the individual may greatly aspire to such a title. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
In addition to consistency and personal symbols of sentiments, a child learns to apply a sentiment as an interactional technique and resource. The strategic effect of its expression become part of the sentiment’s social meaning. For example, shame or guilt are often learned as defensive tactics that deter punishment when they are displayed. Sentiments are learned not only as ideals, but also as practical resources for interaction, depending on how others respond to the child’s various attempts at strategic expression. Children’s humor is initially a private enjoyment of incongruous symbolic relations among familiar objects. If people are responsive and socially rewarding, children learn to initiate joking and clowning as a social affective resource. Sentiments are socialized to some degree outside the primary group, through impersonal media such as books, films, and music. A content analysis of manners books found that books addressed to the youngest children stressed polite overt behavior and the ideal outcomes of friendships. Greetings, honesty, and other overt, ideals means to build friendships were described. In contrast, books for adolescents emphasized social techniques and less ideal outcomes. Selfishness and jealousy were portrayed as facts of human nature. The books recommended pretenses, concealment of eagerness, skillful avoidance of undesired friends, and other strategies as effective for friendship and romance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
The best love is the kind that awakens the soul; that makes us reach for more, that plants fire in our hearts and bring peace to our minds. It is fairly common to react to old memories by lapsing into old, dysfunctional forms of trying to protect yourself. When you were a vulnerable little child, you may have tired to protect yourself from your pain, fear, or stress by one of the universal, instinctive responses to danger; that is, to become defensive, try to escape, or become numb. Now that you are an adult, your tactics of self-protection many not be as obvious as your childhood responses were. Impersonal media are especially influential in a complex, literate society such as ours, but are not a new socialization process. The influential love films, Love Triangle (a Markiss McFadden film), Home Again, Romeo Must Die, and Queen of the Damned, Stuck in Love, Fear and Legally Blonde socialized audiences into turbulent suffering and ecstasy to be experienced in courtly love that is compressed into two hours on the screen. Stages of love—hesitation, pleading, acceptance, and love service—were described. A list of love’s rules was followed by case studies of happy and ill-fated love affairs. These films have become the paradigm for modern romantic love. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Impersonal media socialize a diversity of sentiments. Lovelorn advice columns, religious tracts, guides to living, and other media are directed to shape our definition and expression of sentiments. Popular psychology books instruct us how to open up to grief, overcome shyness, read others’ body language for erotic attraction, and how to say no without feeling guilty. Most popular songs like I Refuse by Aaliyah, Unusual You by Britney Spears, Stars are Blind by Paris Hilton, Halo by Beyonce, Faking It by Calvin Harris, Cry for You by Marilyn Manson and Korn, Number One by Dev, We’re All We Need by Above and Beyond featuring Zoe Johnston, Angel by Anita Baker, If Only You Knew by Pattie Labelle and Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller are just a few examples of the many popular songs about love. Their lyrics provide love’s vocabulary and the symbols through which it can be recognized. Music arouses appropriate moods as one hears how falling in love feels and what course love follows. Novels like House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and So You Call Yourself a Man by Carl Weber depicts vividly how sentiments begin, develop, and end in a relationship. “My love, do you know that your eyes are like stars brightly beaming? I bring your and sing you a moonlight serenade (Midnight Serenade by Glenn Miller).” #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Stop Running from Maturity
It is curious that common people so thoroughly enjoy such smutty talk, and that it is a never-lacking activity of cheerful humor. Shame, sorrow, and other sentiments in a cultural vocabulary become abilities and resources of individuals through socialization processes. How do people learn to interpret sensations and gestures as a sentiment, as a socialized feeling which has been raised by thought and intercourse out of its merely instinctive state and become properly human? Affective socialization had been neglected by sociology and psychology. Empathy is not only the simple emotional contagion, but also a self-conscious effort to share and accurately comprehend another person’s feelings, thoughts, and their causes. Because family and friendship groups promote entering into sharing the minds of others, sentiments are socialized within primary groups. Intimacy, self-disclosure, small size, and enduring interaction facilitate empathy among members. A rudimentary empathy can be observed in newborn infants who will cry upon hearing another baby crying. An emotional contagion of crying often sweeps through maternity wards and nurseries. This arousal is an unself-conscious empathy. Infants have not differentiated self from other people; therefore, they respond to crying as though they themselves were in distress. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Newborn infants hearing tape-recorded crying were most likely to cry when the recording resembled their own cry. This developing empathy is important in the emotional contagion, and probably also is a basis for spontaneous feeling within enduring sentiments. By one year of age, the child is cognitively aware of other people as distinct physical entities, but self remains merged with others affectively. The toddler who encounters a crying child may seek to be comforted by his or her own mother instead of trying to help. If the toddler does help, he or she egocentrically offers whatever he or she oneself finds most comforting, such as a favorite toy or bringing over his or her own mother. The toddler’s interest in the other child is transitory and inconsistent. Children express their growing self-control by climbing, touching, exploring, and trying to do things for themselves. Parents can foster a sense of autonomy by encouraging children to try new skills. However, the child’s first efforts can be made crude. Often, they result in spilling, falling, wetting, and other accidents. Wetting the bed might be normal for a child, but as an adult it is considered a dishonorable discharge. Thus, parents who ridicule or overprotect their children may cause them to doubt their abilities and feel shameful about their actions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
The looking-glass self includes the imagination of our appearance to the other person, the imagination of the child’s judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification. Leo, who just turned one a few months ago brushes his own hair on occasion. In addition, the vestiges of guilt first appear at four or five years of age when children use speech—first aloud, then covertly—to discuss and regulate their own actions. A child’s first fears are over darkness, loud noises, and other material threats, but these are supplanted by social fears, such as shame and embarrassment. Self-feeling becomes extended to objects as a sense of appropriation organized around concepts of mine and my. This sense of possession is basic to the development of jealousy and envy as self-related sentiments. As children view themselves as someone who arouses definite feelings and thought in other people, the child reflects upon one’s impulses and thoughts. The child considers how others would react to them when expressed, and shapes them so as to arouse a desired response from the other. Introspection develops from this selective communication with a view to the other’s response, while also reacting one’s own impulses and thoughts from the other’s standpoint. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
The child gradually learns to take into account the relations that other people have with one another. This occurs by playing organized games, in which the child has to keep in mind the roles of all other players, including their potential responses toward one another. The parallel affective development is the awareness that the other person has sentiments in life circumstances that transcend the immediate situation and that may differ from the child’s own sentiment. Thus, the child can understand that two of his or her best friends dislike each other, or that his or her sibling is jealous about a new romantic relationship. Heightened capacities for imagination and reasoning allow the adolescent to feel sentiments toward abstract objects, such as patriotism for nation, reverence for a deity, or compassion for the plight of a class of people. Children may also feel sentiments for persons with whom they have not interacted. However, young children cannot comprehend the irreversible permanence of death, or the special tragedy of permanence, reversibility, and contingency. Persons who fail to develop a sense of identity suffer from role confusion, an uncertainty about who they are and where they are going. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
A child learns sentiments be learning to see them as social objects from the standpoint of other person in the family or friendship groups. One process is a complex type of learning in which one aspect of a sentiment (such as a gesture or feeling) is learned as being consistent with other aspects (such as a situation or the sentiment’s name). To be told “You do not sound like you are sorry,” or “Now that is acting more like a friend” can be gradually inferred. We know our own emotions by observations of our gestures and actions, but more importantly, perhaps, by what other people observe and report to us, directly or indirectly by their responses and gestures to the gestures we have made. There is a quality called generativity, which is expressed by caring about oneself, one’s children, and future generations. Generativity may be achieved by guiding one’s own children or by helping other children (as a teacher, clergy member, or coach, for instance). Language allows us to convert the brute quality of feelings into conscious emotions. Only as emotions are presented through some symbol system do they become communicable and hence social. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Childhood amnesia, our lack of memory about many early experiences, may result from our lack of language in our earliest years. For want of categories, affective and other experiences are soon filtered out of memory. A person who has lived fully and responsibly develops a sense of integrity (self-respect). This allows people to age with dignity. No one wants to regret previous life events because they will experience despair (heartache and remorse). Life is not supposed to feel like failure nor a sense of knowing it is too late to reverse what has been done. Aging should not become a source of fear and depression. That is why people who are not able to do what they want in life, at the moment, find things to focus on so they are being productive and can look back over their time and see it as a period of enrichment. If we follow the Holy Spirit, we will become humble, meek, agreeable, patient, full of love and able to endure suffering. Having faith on the Lord; having a hope that you shall receive eternal life; having the love of God always in our hearts, that we may be lifted up on the last day and enter into his rest. And may the Lord grant unto you repentance, that you may not bring down his wrath upon you, that you may not be bound down by the chains of hell, that you may not suffer the second death (Alma 13.29-30).” #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Randolph Harris II International Institute 