Personality Of The Children

There are inherited determinants of personality which put limits on the molding that society can do. These, if anything, form the core of individuality in a person. But how is it that individuals show their singularity against a basic personality that is common to their own culture and different from other cultures?

Anthropologists have reported some of the most significant cases of such differences. Each sex had the personality characteristics that one would associate with the tasks allocated to it. In the neighboring tribe the pattern of tasks and of personalities was more akin to that in our own culture. As in these two cases, each society ensures that its members have a substantial degree of conformity in this respect, so that individual personalities fall within the permitted range. In this process the link between the community and the personality is the family.

There is a basic psychological need for the child to attach himself to others, especially to adults. The nature of such attachments is very general. The child loves its mother, not any of her specific acts. The loved adult becomes a model that the child will imitate. He will attempt to imitate all the different roles that the adult plays. These roles are structured differently in each individual, and the emphases put on different parts of the role structure are different from those in other individuals. The child internalize these systems of roles to lay the foundation of his own personality. Personalities come to differ because of varying inherited potentialities and because the experiences that are met, even in early life, are not common to all members of society. But the traits of personality that are common to anyone country can be understood to have their beginnings within the family.

There exist very few technically sound empirical studies by sociologists of the ways in which children in early childhood learn. This is probably because of the great difficulties of employing the usual sociological methods with subjects of this age. However, recently the results of research done in an underprivileged area of Sydney have supported the aptness of applying the model of mutual steering to the socialization of very young children. Mothers and their children aged three to five, some of whom were at nursery school, completed a number of tests to discover whether the children learnt certain values that their mothers held. The mothers were found to hold an integrated cluster of values that emphasized self-reliance, cooperation and compliance, as did the nursery school teachers concerned.

The children also held these same values in a similarly integrated way, but where their mothers held these values more strongly, and where the child went to nursery school, the values were held more firmly. In addition, the more accepting of her child the mother was, the more fully did the child appear to learn the appropriate values. It seemed also that the children developed a personality paralleling this cluster of values that they had learnt by conforming to the expectations of the valued others with whom they interacted. Here the personality of the pre-school child was being formed through a process of mutual steering.

Although the development of personality is a process that continues throughout life, the foundations are laid before the child goes to school. By the age of five or six the child has begun to learn within the family how to cope with the many tensions and frustrations that are inescapable in life with others; how, for example, to control his anger or how to postpone his immediate desires.

After the child goes to school, his teacher may become the model that is imitated and hence a potent influence upon the development of the child personality. In this respect teachers and the school once again can reinforce or conflict with the foundations laid in the family. Under modem conditions, however, there is one particular way in which the educational system can be of great assistance in the development of personality.

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