THE SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE YOUNG CHILD

Abstract

It is my purpose in this contribution to try to give to parents and teachers some conception of the vivid and highly emotional drama in which their preschool children are each playing a leading role. Anna Freud has said: Psychology will have achieved what education has a right to expect of it if, on the one hand, it describes the primitive nature of the child and, on the other hand, opens up new avenues for possible development and new techniques for the further expansion of the child's personality. These children whose education is now so much in the forefront are not static, crystallized, already formed personalities. They are plastic, dynamic young individuals in a state of constant change, or better, growth. Patterns of behavior or symptoms present this month may have disappeared to be replaced by other patterns of behavior or symptoms next month. Each one of these behavior patterns, whether socially acceptable or not, has significance as an expression of the child's effort to solve the conflict between the demands of his own instinctive life and the demands of his social environment. The aim of the nursery school and kindergarten teacher and the parent of today is to provide a setting for the preschool child where he can develop into a mature individual, whose instinctive needs are adequately satisfied and who, at the same time, is a socially responsible person. To put it in other words, we want our children to accept happily and without conflict the discipline which the community imposes on each of its members, in exchange for protection and social satisfactions. When we observe the newborn human infant we realize first of all that he is the most helpless and dependent of creatures. Alone he cannot fulfill his simplest of needs, but in spite of his complete dependence on society, he remains for the first few months of his life a completely asocial being. His mother, on whom he is so dependent, is not for him a personality with whom he has a relationship. She is merely an extension of himself, with the sole function of assisting him in the attainment of his bodily needs, pleasures and comforts. For the first months, even year, of his life these bodily needs and pleasures are related to the taking in of nourishment and sucking. The child's first conflicts with his social environment are almost invariably related to his desire to gratify his impulse to suck. The pediatrician's rigid feeding schedule does not allow him to be fed whenever he wants to be fed. Nurses, grandmother, aunts and friends all bring pressure to bear not to let him suck his thumb or his toys. Very early the young child discovers that the adults upon whom he is so completely dependent are at war with him insofar as gratification of his bodily desires is concerned. During the second year of his life the child again meets with considerable opposition from the adults of his environment. No longer is he allowed to wet and soil himself when and where he pleases. His mother is insistent that he become clean in his toilet habits and that he accept adult standards of what is nice and what is nasty, what is clean and what is dirty. Many things which the child during his second, third and fourth years discovers as sources of pleasant bodily sensations are forbidden him, often in threatening, frightening terms. He is told not to pick his nose, not to scratch his ear, not to make clucking noises with his tongue and particularly not to handle his genitalia or masturbate. His impulse to investigate everything within reach, to handle it and often to destroy it, meets with emphatic disapproval. Mustn't touch that, That's a no-no, You can't have that because you will break it.