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
Comments
Post a Comment