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This article throws light upon the three phases of social behavior of a child. The phases are: 1. Social Behavior During the Pre-School Years 2. Social Behavior during Middle Childhood 3. Social Behavior during Adolescent Social Patterns.
Phase # 1. Social Behavior During the Pre-School Years:
With increased age between 6 and 25 months, interaction proceeds steadily from initial indifference toward the partner (for social interest) cooperative play situations.
Infants between 6 and 8 months of age are generally observed to ignore each other.
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Babies between 9 and 13 months of age show some interest in partners.
The social contacts are limited to looking, smiling and grasping the partner. Between 14 and 18 months, attention to the partner increases considerably and, gradually, the social contacts and cooperative play become far more personal and friendly.
Social development is markedly accelerated during the nursery school period when a child’s contact with peers become more frequent and intense. The study with nursery school children show that as pre-school children grow older they spend less time in relatively non-social activities and more advanced types of social behaviour become increasingly frequent. The most rudimentary from of social interaction, parallel play (each individual child playing with his/her toys only), is characteristic of two-year olds, but relatively uncommon among children of four or five years of age, who indulge in more associative or cooperative play. –
Many factors account for these modifications in social behaviour. With greater maturity, a child’s greater physical and intellectual abilities enable him to participate in more complex and cooperative activities. Moreover, older children have been rewarded more frequently for outgoing and friendly responses and at nursery schools and on playgrounds, cooperative socially oriented responses bring further satisfaction; hence, these responses become stronger and are more apt to be repeated. At the same time, spending time without activity and merely observing are discouraged by parents and teachers, so they become weaker responses and tend to drop away.
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In the pre-school stage the number of social conflicts and quarrels decrease and friendly contacts become more pronounced as age increases. During first two to five years children form their first friendships—generally, but not exclusively—with others of their own sex. Friendship partners change characteristically and markedly with age, and the number of friendship increases.
A socially-oriented and responsive preschool child seeks out companions and has variety of contacts with them. In the course of learning the modes of social interaction, such a child has both satisfying and frustrating experiences and, consequently, show contradictory behaviour at times. For example, the boy who grabs a toy from a playmate and shows aggressive behaviour at one moment may run to comfort a crying unhappy child the next moment.
Popular children and leaders can be distinguished as early as the nursery school period. Some children are continually being sought out as playmates, others are consistently shunned and avoided by their nursery playmates or classmates. Some youngsters ordinarily assume a dominant role in their relationships with peers, while others are passive followers.
There are great individual differences in responses to social conflicts, but the average nursery school child between two and four years of age is involved in some sort of conflict every five minutes. In general; boys tend to fight, make more attacks, whereas girls tend to argue more. These sex differences are more pronounced among older nursery school children, reflecting more firmly their sex-tying behaviour.
In general the inter-activeness of preschool youngsters are more characteristically cooperative and friendly than unfriendly, hostile or competitive. Aggressiveness tends to be a fairly stable characteristic, the frequency of a child’s conflict is carried to the next higher stage.
Competitiveness appears as early as the age of three or four. Those between the ages of four and six compete with considerable intensity, grabbing things from each other, disregarding other child’s feelings and intentions and refusing to give help or materials. By this age competitive motives are strong enough to produce improvement in performance when the child is competing with some other.
As children advance in age, they become acutely aware of the prevalent attitudes of culture, and consistent reward for competition—hence they adopt competitive values and motivations.
Boys are more competitive than girls, and lower middle class children are noticed to be more competitive than the upper middle class ones. Aggressiveness and competiveness are not usually connected with each other in nursery school children but are associated in older children and adults.
Phase # 2. Social Behavior during Middle Childhood:
Social relationships of the school years are more extensive, more influential and more enduring than those of earlier years. The major social developments of this period reflect children’s increased socialization, more firmly established sex-typing and stronger social pressure for conformity to group standards.
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Preschool friendship, being casual, unstable and transient, probably have relatively few important or enduring effects on child’s personality. In middle childhood, the situation is different Besides his/her parents and teachers, the child’s close friends are probably their most important “socializers” and they have direct and powerful impacts on his/her personality and social development.
From roughly ages 7 to 12 the youngsters are strongly concerned with their gangs, an informal group with rapid turnover in membership. Later on, with age, the group becomes more structured and sometimes highly organized. The social relationship of these years (from 10 to 14) may have far- reacting influence.
The child’s choice of extracurricular games, reading, choice of books, movies, radio, television programmes can be swayed by his/her peers’ opinions and suggestions. This media, in turn may provide new identification models and new evaluation of certain types of values, attitudes, characteristics and behaviours.
The elementary school children, in choosing their friends, prefer members of their own sex, particularly at the sixth, seventh and eighth grades. Most boys between the age of 6 and 8, however, ignore sex and girls are included in the group, and vice versa. The boys choose girls as freely as they choose boys, and it is same with the girl’s choice.
In eastern culture the cutting age is lower than the other advanced countries. But by and large, everywhere, at the age of eight, approximately, attitude seems to change and associations with members of the opposite sex decrease sharply. By 11 or 12 boys and girls are completely segregated from each other in play groups and social gathering. In 1939 Compbells observed: “This stage of segregation began with haughty aloofness, became apparent contempt, and active hostility, and then changed to shy withdrawal which seemed to mark the end of this period and the beginning of adolescent heterosexuality and puberty”.
The segregation of the sexes is probably related to the cultural pressures on children for sex-appropriate behaviour to be adopted. The nature of play is also sex-typical—boys interested in playing vigorous, competitive games involving muscular skills and dexterity, whereas girls are generally engaged in more quiet, sedentary activities.
With increasing age, reading interests also differ. Boys prefer adventure, exploration, travel, biography, mystery and science stories and fictions, whereas the girls prefer fairly-tales and romances. Friendship in middle childhood is fairly unstable. Since interest fluctuate rapidly at this time, there occurs additional new friendships, sometime along with the old friends and sometimes old friendship is terminated with new substitutions. With advancing age interests become more and more stable and enduring.
Phase # 3. Social Behavior during Adolescent Social Patterns:
Adolescent social relationships are more complicated than young-age friendship patterns. Adolescent’s social situation is a particularly difficult one, since he/she lives simultaneously in the two worlds of children and adults, in a kind of marginal or overlapping status, not knowing where he or she belongs.
All at once he/she has many new urgent conflicting demands put on him/her. For a boy, for example, at this stage, is expected to choose a professional line of education, making himself fit for a vocation and to achieve some independence from his family. In addition, his sex-drive increases as a result of hormonal changes, and he must cope with strong, forbidden impulses.
Finally, since he has greater mobility, his social world broadens and he can maintain friendships over a wider geographical area. Earlier, most of his peers and friends are from his own neighborhood and social class group but, in high school, he is likely to meet boys and girls from other parts of his community and from other ethnic and cultural groups. From them he may learn new attitudes, customs and value system.
Among his peers, the most noteworthy influence on the development of social behaviour comes from the immediate groups of peers or cliques. They generally are the members of his own small, select group and come from the same socioeconomic class background, tend to be alike in personality and interests and share common purpose and values. Cliques are generally based on personal compatibility, congeniality and close ties of affection and mutual admiration.
Mutual interests tend to bring people together. In early adolescence shared preferences and the ability to do exciting things together are central in the formation of friendship, but, in later adolescence, acceptability to members of the opposite sex—particularly among girls—becomes a more important criterion.
Friendships are also related to similarities on social maturity, in mental age, sociability, criticalness of self and others, extroversion, degree of conformity or rebellion, social skills and knowledge.
The function of the peer group is very important in shaping an adolescent’s social behaviour. This is the period when the adolescent seeks independence from his family and seek more and more dependence on his peer group. Acceptance by peers become an ardent necessity and, therefore the adolescents put premium in getting along with others, on being popular and friendly.
Their company and suggestions become surpassingly important to him. His peer group actually serves the purpose of a teacher to an adolescent by helping him to learn social skills and attitudes and assisting him in adopting the adult standards. He is likely to adopt the fashions, values, beliefs, and fads, style of life of the peer group in conformity with their standard and status—thus giving rise to generation gaps.
Some adolescents are swayed by the peer group’s value systems—accepting them without examination, uncertain about how to achieve it—he feels reassured if he behaves as others do. In fact, he worries if he feels that he is different from others.
The social behaviors that give rise to moral behaviour and value system that individual adolescent member adopts are greatly influenced by his peer group at the adolescent period. An adolescent peer group ordinarily reinforces and strengthens the values that members have acquired from parents, approved by the social class and community.
Generally, the group rewards what it regards as positive social and moral values and severely punishes antisocial and disapproved values and behaviors. The peer group appears to be less an originator than a reinforce of moral values and behaviour patterns developed in the family. “Adolescents as a whole, prone to admire, respect and reward very much the same moral behaviour as do the respectable members of the adult community: their parents, their teachers etc.”
This is how the external value systems of any society perpetuates with a few exceptions at times or sometimes roll on in cyclic order. Barring very few socially deviant adolescents, the development of social behaviour among adolescents assume the normal adult pattern of the society and culture.