ADVERTISEMENTS:
The emotion and emotional expressions are inherent in human being. But it is necessary to control primal behaviour so that socialized behaviour can emerge. Learning from experience is the major process by which uninhibited responses can be channelized.
Childhood behaviour is channeled to a large extent by numerous immediate external constrains: the expectations of others, parental reward and punishment, and peer pressures, self- imposed standards, to name few.
Thus they learn self-control. Self-control is a term that refers to behaviour in which the child monitors his or her own actions in some way in the absence of pressures in the immediate situation. There are related aspects of self-control, the ability to resist temptation, the ability to tolerate delayed gratification and imposing a standard of achievement upon oneself.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
In its broadest definition, a resistance to temptation refers to refraining from the opportunity to engage in a socially prohibited but otherwise tempting act, such as cheating, stealing etc. The self-control, in this case depends upon the disciplinary measures taken at home or at school.
The disciplinary measures may involve physical punishment for breaking the social standard or psychological techniques like reasoning, withdrawal of love, portrayal of suffering by the parents or teachers and so on.
The physical punishment may be effective in very young age, when children are not amenable to reasoning, but with intellectual sophistication and development in age psychological techniques become more effective. The studies on child-rearing practices (cross-cultural) show that reasoning and explanation play a very important role in the development of self-control among children who are older and with the youngers punishment and reasoning combined was considered to be effective.
The second aspect of control is to learn the delay of gratification, which means that the children learn to postpone immediate gratification for the sake of more valued outcomes that will come with patience and effort. Now we shall see how a child learns the delayed gratification and also we shall consider the underlying psychological processes. It is an important aspect of socialization. The self-control, in this case, takes places after a series of trainings undertaken.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Such trainings suppose that delaying gratification involves two steps: an initial decision that one wishes to wait and then an effort to maintain one’s resolution and bridge the waiting time.
Walter Mischel, who has done pioneering experimental work on delay of gratification, has also conceptualized the underlying psychological process involving these two steps and showed that the steps are influenced by somewhat different factors of which the decision- process needs attention.
In situations where the child must make a choice between accepting or not accepting the frustration of delay for the sake of earning a superior outcome, he or she probably considers the subjective values of both the immediate and delayed rewards and the probability of obtaining them.
In most life-situations,, attaining delayed rewards involves not only simply waiting but also engaging successfully in some required activity. Therefore, decision-making depends on the child’s confidence in being able to perform the activity. The child’s decision also depends on this consideration of the degree or extent or intensity of difference between immediate and delayed reward or risk involved.
The rational choice would be to take immediate reward if the risk involved is considered to be great, on the other hand when the subjective value is considered to be substantial and when obtaining delayed reward is not too risky the rational choice would be delayed reward. Nevertheless, waiting cultivates tolerating the frustrating time-span.
The third aspect, achievement standard and striving states that the self-control is learned easily if the set achievement standard is easy to attain. All people come to set standards for themselves, in general, higher the standard more effort must be expended to attain it, otherwise the situation becomes quite frustrating, children’s self-imposed standards or personal standards differ from person to person depending on the stringency of the standard and amount of effort put .to achieve it. Self-imposed standards of achievement and self-reward are largely products of socialization.
Effective socialization can be considered to be prime factor in self-control, particularly when the self-imposed standard is based on intrinsic motivation i.e. when where is no external socializing agent is present. Now setting the self-imposed standard depends to a great extent on modelling of an adult in life situations, children are exposed to many models, including mother, father, teachers and playmates, and thus they may observe discrepant standards of achievement.
This may cause problem for the child to set self-imposed standard for him. But in spite of it the achievement standards set by children for themselves are strongly influenced by the kind of behaviour they observe around them reinforcing self-control. The children learn to develop during their early years, a set of values or principles regarding correct, appropriate or good behaviour.
They are either taught by the socializing agents to self-control or they teach themselves from experience. Self-control is a trait to be cultivated, to be learned throughout the life-span.