Family involvement in early childhood social and developmental growth

Family-Centered Approach in Child Development

Family centered

Child Development: Importance of Family Involvement

Family plays a vital role in the upbringing of a child. A child has not developed his/her senses at the time of his birth. Senses are present from the time of the birth and give the child enough potential to step out in the practical world. Apart from five basic senses i.e. taste, smell, touch, sight and sound, there are countless of other senses that are fed by the family. Ideally a person must be able to utilize every resource he has in him but this does not happen. Einstein being the world's genius person utilized his potential up to 11% approximately which means 89%of his brain was left unexplored. Similarly a lot of other people can do better if their family helps them to explore their personalities while growing up. This research will investigate a family's involvement in a young child's social development and will discuss some of the key issues related to the topic.

Importance of Family in Child Development

A mother, someone with whom the child spends most of his/her time during the early stages has a highly critical role to play in the personality development of a child. When the child starts developing his/her personality according to his or her gender orientation, the male parent, which is the father, also becomes an equally important source of personality grooming for a child. As he grows older a lot of other people get associated with his/her life in the form of teacher, friends, and colleagues but the initial grooming is provided by the family. There are certain key factors that need to be focused on in a child's grooming.

Attachment

An attachment, in its literal meaning, is a knot. While in adult and mature relationships, this term is often used to refer to mutual devotion and emotional bonds shared among two partners, in theoretical context it refers to the need of safety, security and protection (Prior & Glaser, 2006). This context is quite relevant to child development as a child's attachment to his/her immediate family and with the parents in particular is mainly based on the fact that s/he feel secured with his/her parents as the caretaker(s).

A child is initially attached to his/her mother because of the fact that she keeps him/her in her womb for a period and feeding process after birth, this develops a natural attraction towards mother. However, when s/he realizes that the mother cannot fulfill every need then s/he slowly switches on to other members that are helpful in his/her upbringing. These other members can be his/her father, brother, sister or teacher.

Self-help skills

Children love to do things for themselves. It helps them learn and develop self-help skills. Eating, toileting, washing, grooming, dressing, and undressing are daily tasks that a child masters as s/he grows. Small children show an interest in learning these skills, but they need parent's patience, help and encouragement but as they grow older, parents make them feel comfortable by talking to them on different matters and opening their doors to new confidants such as school teachers and other siblings. Children are attracted to colors and teachers play a major role by exploring their creative side and making them used to drawing, painting, music and crafts. It has been observed and has been highlighted by many researchers that children who are two pampered by their parents and elder siblings tend to be less self dependent. This seemingly 'caring' but negatively over protective attitude of parents has negative implications on child's personality as s/he grows up and begins to encounter the outer world.

Empowerment

A child needs empowerment in many areas while growing up. They are self-confidence, building up a healthy personality, fighting their weaknesses etc. In essence empowerment is greatly dependent on the degree to which a child is self-dependent, a trait which is developed as his or her self-help skills.

Self-confidence is very important to build up a strong personality in children. This can be built up by encouraging a child for little acts he/she does on daily basis. Making a child feel that he/she is an important part of the family: consulting them in casual family matters, building up decision power in them etc.

Empowering of a child's literary skills can be done by reading story books and in the end concluding the stories in a positive manner so that he/she could learn lesson from them.

The responsibility of developing the reading habits among children is greatly attributed to parents. Researchers have proven that children who get exposure to reading material at early stages develop not only effective linguistic skills, but also develop stronger mental and analytical skills. (Britto, & Brooks-Gunn, 2001). This empowerment makes a child utilize his/her brain in a better way and think critically. Not only that, but it also strengthens a child's decision making skills. Children who grow with lesser degree of independence have been observed to come out as shy people with poor confidence levels. Such children face immense difficulties in socializing with others and expressing their opinions and thus suffer in various aspects of life. Moreover such children are also known to get bullied at school.

Pro-social skills

Pro-social behavior occurs when someone helps another person by having no other motive than to help a fellow human. The qualities that involve this act are being courteous, generous, helpful and comforting.

Pro-social behavior refers to the urge to provide assistance to someone in need without the motivation to gain any personal benefits. This also involves the ability to identify and understand what the other person feels or needs (Hojat et al., 2002).

Before teaching this, parents will have to decide whether they themselves are pro-social or not. The genes transferred to their children are of the same type and if they are not pro-social in their own behavior then they will have to implement this nature first in order to teach their offspring. This is important because a large part of a child's cognitive development is inherited from his/her parents.

Pro-social behavior requires feelings to be developed in children in order to distinguish between happiness and pain. Parents motivate their children to do community services and help them with it. Many researchers have also shown that children who are exposed to care taking of pets at home tend to grow up as more pro-social then children who do not keep pets. Taking care of pets instills in them, the skills of identifying and anticipating the need and emotions of others and acts accordingly in order to help them.

Self-esteem

Self-esteem, a highly important personality trait, refers to the value that one attributes to one's own self and admires his or her own achievements. People with high degree of self-esteem tend to acknowledge their hard work and achievements and learn from their failures without the feeling of insecurity from success of others.

Many parents place the importance of positive self-esteem in their children on top of the list. They try to make their children realize the importance of self-esteem setting up examples and giving them equal importance they deserve. Self-esteem comprises of inner self-esteem and outer self-esteem.

Inner self-esteem. It is based on children's self-evaluations derived from their competencies and behaviors. If inner self-esteem is strong, then a child feels strong and motivated. Children with inner self-esteem have "outgrowing" minds. They are flexible thinkers and tend to be open to incorporating all kinds of new experiences into their self pictures. Such children are confident to voice their personal opinions to others on grounds of their belief system that they have a right to have and express an opinion, even if another person disagrees with it (Owens, 1995).

Outer self-esteem. It is based on children's evaluation to what others think about them. Outer self-esteem is important for those whose inner self-esteem is not much of help. Children who are more inclined towards outer self-esteem often affiliate themselves with opinion of others.

Children develop their self-esteem very early. It is then parent's job to align them to a particular path: nourish them with qualities such as being Independent, leadership skills, Curiosity, Talkative, Helpful and Confident. Again, children with little or no self-esteem are shy and frightened and tend to perform poor in academics. They are also less socially participative.

Importance for Educators to Understand Behaviors

A few years after spending time at home, a child is ready to step into a preschool environment where further development of personality becomes the responsibility of educators. Unfortunately, what many educators fail to understand is that each child has his or her own pace of learning and each child has his own perception (Davies, 2010). This is because a child's family is his or her first exposure to environment and first source of learning and the fact that each child gets a different kind and degree of exposure at that stage makes every child greatly different from one another (Mercer, 2009).

For example, children who are bullied by older siblings at home or are exposed to domestic violence or any other kind of exposure towards violence are likely to be rowdy and aggressive or too shy and isolated at school.

Similarly children who get a strong exposure towards reading material and are encouraged to participate in discussions tend to be much more participative with string linguistic and social skills. Therefore it becomes the responsibility of the educator to understand the different personality of each child and train him/her accordingly. This is immensely important and preschool is an ideal ground to do that considering that it is one platform where the child is away from the family individuals with who s/he shares an 'attachment' and is exposed to a group of new people with who s/he learns to socialize. Children with low esteem and little sense of empowerment are likely to turn out as shy and in isolation and such are children that reflect poor academic performances and a low level of Intelligence Quotient. Although it has lately been a debate whether IQ or Intelligence Quotient is an efficient way to judge a child's mental capability, it is nevertheless an established observation that academic participation and performances of kids with little self-esteem and sense of empowerment is much lower than their other more confident counterparts. If this area of child's personality is ignored at an earlier stage of education, this is most likely to be carried forward at later stages and the child is likely to face failures at later stages of life and would feel even more insecure. Unfortunately, at later stages the problems becomes too difficult to address and a psychological help becomes necessary. Moreover, researches have shown that children, who are shy, isolated and are subjected to bullying or ignorance at home and/or school may become schizophrenic and might get develop problems such as drub abuse, eating disorders and other various psychological disorders. In order to address all these issues, a highly comprehensive curriculum is immensely important at preschool level.

Apart from that, since the fact remains that at least in the early stages of schooling, the child still spends more time at home than at school, the school management and the educators must make it a point to educate parents about how to handle their children at home in order to aim at strong personality grooming of their children (Mercer, 2009). Parents must be educated about how they can give more confidence to their children, develop their reading skills and linguistic skills and make them more self dependent.

Activities must be made part of the curriculum in which children get a chance towards healthy socialization with each other, and learn to understand each other's feelings and emotions that target to develop their pro-social skills. As stated by various reaches, children should be exposed to caretaking of pets both at home and school in order to develop their sense of understanding the needs and of others and motivation to help others without expecting a personal benefit.

Educators at early stages must ensure to give a personalized and one to one attention to their students and must give special attention to children that are identified as shy and isolated. They must especially be encouraged to participate in the class and other more confident students must be taught to respect and appreciate others. Likewise, children who are identified as rowdy and bullies must be attended with respect and care rather than with equally violent reaction, and must be made to learn how to show respect towards other.

On the most important side, it is important for the educators to try and identify and address the root cause of the problems that the child faces with respect to his or her personality development (Davies, 2010). That is only possible if parental involvement is encouraged in schools. Over a period of time parental involvement in schools, especially in urban centers have declined for various reasons which has also hindered the personality development of children to a great extent. It is important to note that personality development of children is a mutual responsibility of both parents and educators and for that matter, effective communication between the parents and the educators is very important.

Conclusion

While it is true that it the personality of every child comprises of the above discussed behavioral traits, however the degree to which each child develops these traits vary to a great extent. Therefore, the responsibility then lies on the shoulders of the educators, particularly to the preschool teachers, to understand the individual personality of each child and then develop a curriculum that focuses on enhancing each personality trait on an individual level.