Сборник материалов международной научной конференции студентов, магистрантов, аспирантов

У.А. Левданская, М.О. Нестерович

Республика Беларусь, Брест, БрГУ имени А.С. Пушкина

Научный руководитель – И.Н. Бахур

RAISING A MORAL CHILD

What does it mean to be a good parent? We know some tricks how to teach kids to achieve their goals in life. For example, some researchers suggest that when parents praise effort rather than ability then children become more motivated.

For some parents their children’s success is not the № 1 priority. They are much more concerned about their children’s becoming kind, compassionate and helpful. Surveys reveal that in the United States care is far more important for parents from European, Asian, Hispanic and African ethnic groups than achievement. These patterns are common all over the world: When people in 50 countries were asked to report their guiding principles in life, it was care not achievement.

However, teaching children to care about others is not a simple task. In an Israeli study of nearly 600 families, parents who valued kindness and compassion frequently failed to raise children who shared those values.

By the age of 2 children experience some moral emotions – feelings triggered by right and wrong. To reinforce caring as the right behaviour, research indicates, praise is more effective than rewards. Rewards can make children be kind only when they are given a gift, whereas praise communicates that sharing is intrinsically worthwhile for its own sake. But what kind of praise should we give when our children show early signs of generosity?

Many parents believe it’s important to compliment the behaviour, not the child. In this case the child learns to repeat the behaviour. The researchers assigned the children to receive different types of praise. In one experiment the action was praised: “It was good that you gave some of your marbles to those poor children. Yes, that was a nice and helpful thing to do.” During the second one they praised the character of the child: “I guess you’re the kind of person who likes to help others whenever you can. Yes, you are a very nice and helpful person.”

Praise appears to be particularly influential in the critical periods when children develop a stronger sense of identity. When the researchers praised the character of 5-year-olds, any benefits that may have emerged didn’t have a lasting impact: they may have been too young to internalize moral character as part of a stable sense of self. And by the age of 10, the differences between praising character and praising actions vanished: both were effective. Tying generosity to character appears to matter most around the age of 8, when children may be starting to crystallize notions of identity.

Praise in response to good behaviour may be half the battle, but our responses to bad behaviour have consequences, too. When children cause harm, they typically feel one of two moral emotions: shame or guilt. Despite the common belief that these emotions are interchangeable, research reveals that they have very different causes and consequences.

Shame is the feeling of being a bad person, whereas guilt is the feeling of doing a bad thing. Shame is a negative judgment. Shame makes children feel small and worthless, and they respond either by aggression or escape. In contrast, guilt is a negative judgment about an action, which can be corrected by good behaviour. When children feel guilty, they tend to experience remorse and regret to the person they have hurt and they want to correct the situation.

In the study under the supervision of a psychologist Karen Caplovitz Barrett parents rated their toddlers’ propensity to experience shame and guilt at home. The toddlers received a rag doll to play with. While they were playing with the toy its leg fell off. The shame-prone toddlers didn’t confess that they had broken the doll while the guilt-prone toddlers tried to fix the doll and explained to their parents what had happened.

If we want our children to care about others, we need to teach them to feel guilt rather than shame when they misbehave. In the research on emotions and moral development the psychologist Nancy Eisenberg suggests that shame emerges when parents express anger, repress their love or try to assert their power by threats of punishment. In this case children may believe that they are bad people. Some parents fail to establish discipline at all when they are afraid of developing the feeling of shame in their children.

The most effective response to bad behaviour is the feeling of disappointment. According to independent reviews by Professor Eisenberg and David R. Shaffer to raise caring children parents should express disappointment at their actions and explain why the behaviour was wrong, how it affected others, and how the situation can be corrected. This enables children to develop standards for judging their actions, feelings of empathy and responsibility for others, and helps become a helpful person. The expression of disappointment is good because it shows the disapproval of the bad behaviour and at the same time gives the potential for improvement: “You’re a good person, even if you did a bad thing, and I know you can do better”.

Raising a generous child is more than waiting for opportunities to react to the child’s actions. Parents want to pass their values to the child. Yet many of them do this in the wrong way.

In a classic experiment a psychologist J. Philippe Rushton gave to 140 elementary and secondary school children tokens for winning a game. Children could either keep the tokens or donate some to the children in poverty. Firstly children watched the teacher playing the game either selfishly or generously, and then the teacher preached to them the value of keeping and donating. The adult’s influence was significant: actions spoke louder than words. When the adult behaved selfishly, children did the same. The words didn’t make much difference – children gave fewer tokens after observing the adult’s selfish actions, regardless of his words. When the adult acted generously, students gave the same amount of tokens regardless whether generosity was preached or not. When the adult preached selfishness, even after the adult acted generously, the students still gave more tokens. Children learnt to be generous not by listening to the words but by observing the behaviour.

To test the effects over time, two months later researchers observed the children playing the game again. They wanted to check what would influence children more – actions or words.

The most generous children were those who watched the teacher donating tokens while not saying anything. Two months later, these children were 31 percent more generous than those who observed the same behaviour but also listened to the adult’s speech. The message of this research is loud and clear: if you don’t demonstrate generosity preaching may not help either in the short or in the long run. Preaching is less effective than acting even if you don’t say anything while acting.

People often believe that character determines actions, but when we are speaking about bringing up moral children, we need to remember that actions also shape character. The psychologist Karl Weick liked to say: “How can I know who I am if I don’t see what I do? How can I know what is important for me if I don’t know where I go?”

1. 
   Кенжаев, Ш. Х. Роль нравственного воспитания в формировании всесторонне развитой личности / Ш. Х. Кенжаев, А. Ж. Душаев, Х. Т. Суванкулов // Молодой ученый. – 2013. – № 5. – С. 731–733.
   

В статье рассматриваются результаты исследований учеными поведения детей в зависимости от оценки их усилий или способностей. Ученые пришли к выводу, что оценка усилий повышает детскую мотивацию и приводит в конечном итоге к формированию более устойчивого положительного поведения.