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Paper -12 ELT-1: The fundamental needs of the child


The Fundamental Needs of the Child


Name:- Krishna K. Patel
Roll No. :- 16
Batch :- 2018 – 2020
Enrolment no. :- 2069108420190035
Course :- MA English
Paper :-   12 ELT 1
Topic :-  The Fundamental needs of child
Submitted to :- Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English MKBU



The Fundamental Needs of the Child
Every society and every generation uses children for its own purposes. It is significant that today we are beginning to speak of the needs of the child as a basis for his nurture and education. Contrast this emerging conception of the child’s nature and needs with the practices all over the world among so- called civilized people and so-called primitive people. The nurture and education of children are dictated by religious, ethical, and moral ideas, by political and economic requirements by social class lines indeed by an extraordinary variety of ideas and purposes all more or less remote from the child himself. The children in all these cultures are moulded by the dominant ideas and beliefs and by the group purposes into greater or less conformity in which they may sacrifice much or little.
Child Rearing Practices Imposed on  Children to Make Them Conform to Social Patterns
Consider the variety of practices in regard to the physical make up or form of children. Among certain Indian tribes , the infant’s head is flattened to a board. Among certain African tribes, the lios or ears may be stretched or the neck encased in coils of brass. Every one is familiar with the ancient Chinese practice of binding the feet of female infants. As children grow older, many people have puberty rites involving tattooing,  skin incisions, various forms of multilation of the male and female genitals, and the inculcation of rigidly prescribed motor patterns of action that may involve anatomical deformities. The catalogue of practices that deform, desort, or otherwise manipulated the physical structure is endless. All are regarded by those who use them us assentially necessary to make over the child into the image prescribed by the culture as the only right form for a man and a woman. In their cultural context these practices and beliefs may be purposeful and valid.
Not only is yhe physical structure of the child made over into the patterns of the culture, but so are the physiology functions, as we see in the diverse standards imposed upon the young child by different societies. In the matter of nutrition, for example, every group teaches the child to like the food of its traditional choice, which means developing an appetite for an incredible array of foodstuffs, or supposed foodstuffs, and abhorring other foodstuffs of equal or greater nutritive value. Many of these food choices represent a wise, economical use of available anima and vegetable resources, while others are obviously dictated by various beliefs in sympathetic magic, by rigid taboos, and by religious convictions that have little or no relation to the nutritional requirements of the growing child or even of the adut.
Every society, again, imposes some kind of training upon children with respect to elimination. In some cultures the requirements are minimal, but in others they may be so severe and so rigorously imposed upon the very young child as to create life long impairment of physiological efficiency. Even breathing, in some cultures, is subject to special training, and sleeping patterns, peculiar to each group, are inculcated at an early age.
Significance of Recognizing Children’s Needs as a Basis for Nurture and Education
When we reflect upon these various beliefs and practices that are imposed upon the child to make him conform to group sanctioned patterns, we can being to understand how extraordinarily significant it is today that we are discussing the needs of the child as a basis for his nature and education. We can also see how questions of education and training become the focus of bitter conflicts, as contending factions in a society struggle to direct the nurture of children in order to control the group life.
As we consider the young child in the home and in the nursery school, we are not concerned merely with questions of technique and procedures, with this or that pedagogical device. We are faced with the major issues of the future of our culture and the direction of our whole social, economic, and political life, since an effective programme of early childhood education based upon the needs of the child will inevitably change our society far more effectively than any legislation or other social action.
Any one who is prepared seriously and fairly to consider the question of the child’s needs must begin by training to be honest about his or her own personality bias and beliefs, emotional attitudes , religious loyalties,and social economic and political leanings, because these often unconscious feelings and values play so large a role in our attitudes toward the child and in our willingness to recognize some of his needs or our strong denial of them.
The Child’s Need: To be Protected from Unnecessary pain, Deprivation, and Exploitation:
Probably, the most general statement that we can make about the child’s need is that he should be protected from unnecessary pain, deprivations, and exploitations by adults parents, teachers and nurses, physicians, psychologists and others engaged in dealing with children.
It is difficult to realize the extent of these often subtle coercions and pressures exerted upon the child. Before the infant is born, the parents may have built up a picture of the kind of child he or she is to be, with a pronounced bias toward the male or the female sex, or toward a certain kind of temperament, physique, and ability. The infant, having within him the genes of countless previous generations as well as the characteristics of his parents, enters into a family situation that even at birth may be threatening and out of harmony with his peculiar, idiosyncratic tempera – mental make up and needs. Parents who are eager to minister to the infant’s need for warmth, food, and safety may be doggedly determined to deny the child’s sex and his many personal, temperamental characteristics, which give rise to needs as important and urgent as the need for physical care.

The Child’s Need: To be Accepted as a Unique Individual:
It is not without reason, therefore, that we stress this primary and inalienable need of the child to be accepted as a unique individual, or if the parents cannot or will not accord that acceptance the need to be protected and reinforced against the destructive, warping influence of these parental biases.
Every child suffers to a greater or less extent from this denial of his own personal, temperamental individuality, because even the most emancipated parents are not wholly free from the desire to see their children conform to the images they have constructed. Moreover, every teacher has these partialities, often unconscious, which incline her toward one child and away from another. Further, the child himself is subject to the strong desire to be like the parents, however out of harmony with his own make up such an identification may be. It is interesting to see how the recognition of individual difference is resisted even by professionally trained persons, such as teachers. They will accept the fact of such differences with respect to mental capacity , as shown by standardized mental tests, but deny  it with respect to personality, temperament, tempo of living, physical maturity, and other obvious characteristics.

To Be allowed to Grow at his Own Rate
The processes involved in living and growing create needs for warmth, nutrition, and bodily care concerning which we are gaining more knowledge and technical competence. Much of the research in the field of nutrition and its results are still in terms of uniform standardized rule based on pure strain rat colonies. No allowance is made for individual differences in vitamin and mineral requirements, so that in the name of scientific, standards, we may create serious deficiencies in the individual child as contrasted with the standardized laboratory animal. Even rats in the same litter differ, as Streets has shown, in their susceptibility to rickets.
The nutritional and other physical needs of the individual child are to be viewed dynamically, not statistically , in terms of continuing growth and development rather than fixed height weight standards which are purely statistical averages. Moreover, these needs should be viewed in terms of physiological functioning, not merely of structural size and shape, since it is functional efficiency, not structure that is important.

Emotional satisfaction in Feeding during infancy
If we are to gain a better understanding of the child’s needs in terms of the life tasks he faces we should envisage the physiological processes involved in what we call socialization. First, in order of impact upon the infant is the regularization of feeding, involving a fixed interval of three or four hours between food intake, to which the infant must adapt despite individual differences in the reduction of blood sugar that creates hunger and in the capacity to endure hunger. Prolonged hunger and crying , often while the mother keeps her eyes on the clock to see when the precise minute for feeding arrives, create in the child a condition of tension that may in some cases in initiate persistent personality difficulties. Feeding the baby when hungry is recognized as more desirable.
By many students of personality, it is said that if the infant is given adequate breast feeding and affectionate cuddling, his future attitude toward the world will be outgoing, generous, and trusting, whereas if he is denied these satisfaction, he will be suspicious, niggardly, and resentful. Dr. David Levy is quoted with approval by Dr. James S. Plant as stating that satisfactory breast feeding experiences do more than whole dictionaries of later words in the establishment of security in the family group what Dr. Plant calls belongingness.

References
(Sharma)

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