How to raise caring, helpful, effective children. Part I.
Parents, teachers, family members, peers, neighbors
If we can raise children to be caring, effective people, who engage with the world in a constructive way as they grow older, we can create a better world. A world with less hostility, less violence. With less division between us and them, less hostility between subgroups of society and toward outside groups. A world in which people care about and support each other more.
Right now, children are endangered, by the political and social confusion in our country, and by policies that increasingly deprive them of social and educational opportunities, including learning about important aspects of our history. President Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to eliminate funding for Head Start, a crucial program that helps children from poor families have a decent beginning to their education.
Children, of course, cannot raise themselves. It is adults, teachers, grandparents, peers, the world around them that have to raise them in a constructive way. This is in place of the often destructive ways that some of them are raised, either through negative socialization, violence and abuse, significant poverty that impacts them and their families, or the problematic impact of the world we live in. So in addition to their direct socializers and their immediate life circumstances, we also have to consider the culture that surrounds and affects them, and the currently chaotic and problematic political world which affects people and everyday life.
Babies and young children need other people to be responsive to them, to fulfill their needs not only for food and shelter, but very much also for touch, affection/love. Without affectionate holding, touching, interaction, many infants won’t thrive. Of course many adults and siblings provide such positive experiences. But many children are neglected and even abused. Research shows that neglect, lack of affectionate connection, has almost as negative effects as abuse. Some young children deprived of these positive experiences may show an extreme reaction: failure to thrive. Their physical growth is diminished.
Young children are very sensitive to both nonverbal and verbal engagement. Even how an adult holds a newborn infant while feeding becomes part of babies’ repertoire, the way they adjust to their environment. Cognitive stimulation is of course also extremely important. By the age of four, children who have had limited verbal interaction with adults, who talk to or read to them very little, show a significant limitation in their vocabulary, in their verbal/cognitive capacities. Without corrective experiences, they can have a life-long deficiency and disadvantage. It is pretty cavalier to say that people create their own destiny, when a lot of kids start out with limiting experiences.
From an early age, in addition to affection and verbal stimulation, children need guidance. Providing rules, and values on which the rules are based is crucial. Adults also need to make sure that children follow important rules and values. Otherwise they learn to ignore what they are told. But adults need to move them to positive action mostly in a loving way, which requires explanation and discussion of why certain rules and values are important. Saying, “you must do that because I say so,” in an authoritarian manner, or severely punishing children is contradictory to love and affection and undoes their benefits.
Obviously, doing all this is a somewhat complex matter. One useful technique is to point out to children the consequences of their actions on other people. Sometimes parents get understandably upset about something a child is doing. It can be all right for the parents to be upset and angry at times as they explain such consequences. But if it is done too harshly, its benefits are lost, the child is affected by the parent’s intense emotion rather than taking in what parents, or other adults including teachers, are guiding them towards.
I am originally from Hungary, from which I escaped after a revolution was put down by the Soviet army. When I first returned 10 years after my escape, now a US citizen, one of my childhood friends had a baby. For some reason, he started to worry about the baby’s weight—he was an engineer and measured the baby’s weight all the time—although nobody else saw a problem. Perhaps because of their worry about him, he and his wife allowed their son, as he was getting older, to do all kinds of problematic things: in a restaurant to take a salt shaker and pour salt on the table without the parents saying anything; to kick his mother, father, and grandmother. Over the years, the son developed serious psychological and behavioral problems.
Physical or verbal abuse of children, or even seeing parents physically or verbally abusing each other or siblings, can give rise to serious problems. One of these is aggression toward others. A child learning to defend himself or herself can be beneficial. Learning to stand up for others who are harmed, especially doing so in a non-violent way, also teaches children to be more generally active bystanders. But learning to see a challenge everywhere and responding aggressively is destructive. “An estimated 558,899 children (unique incidents) were victims of abuse in the U.S. in 2022,” the most recent year for which there are data, from the National Children’s Alliance.
When aggressive boys are shown pictures of boys playing soccer and one boy, while trying to get the ball away from another kicks the other, they assume that the kick was intentional. Non-aggressive boys do not. Aggressive boys believe that the proper action is retaliation. Aggression toward others is especially likely if in addition to being physically harmed by adults, or bullied by peers and not receiving support and protection, parents (often the abusers) encourage children to respond aggressively to any challenge from other children or adults. Children whose parents are not aggressive toward them but are emotionally withdrawn, or children who don’t receive the care they have a right to and parents have an obligation to provide, also develop a variety of problems.
I will continue writing about children, young and old, in my next Substack piece.