Children personality development is depending on the both side good and bad experience.

he university of life has ups and downs for children to experience to become firm personalities bad experiences are great lessons to be conveyed. they should understand the value of moments whether sweet or bitter.

Children personality development is depending on the both side good and bad experience.

Thank you Sivanathan Sivarubana.

Thank you all, dear Colleagues, who have answered to the question up to now. I can agree with all given opinions in general. My own experience is that we as parents tend if there are conflicts which also affects the children, say to ourselves (if we cannot resolve the conflict): The child must learn to deal with disappointments.

I think that is correct in principle, but in everyday practice we say this far too quickly - and again and again without being aware of it. Especially conflicts with siblings are very difficult to solve for parents, because many things happen without our having direct control over them. I think that the good processing of negative experiences only succeeds if a few conditions are fulfilled:

The child's emotional trust in the parents must not be damaged (and this trust is damaged very quickly if the individual child has several negative experiences). Only when his self-confidence and self-esteem are high enough can negative experiences be coped with.

So it would be cruel to expose the pre-school child to negative experiences with the hint: You have to learn how to deal with it. This destroys trust in the parents and in oneself.

Dear Hein,

You ask the follwing; "Should a child's upbringing have the aim that only good, but not bad experiences are conveyed by the parents?"

As I see it, the child's development greatly depends on his/her experiences with the physical and social milieu wherein they are born and grow up. Two of the most important senses a child has to develop and learn is his/her ability to deal with frustration and his/her ability to delay gratification. Needles to say, one's daily life is full with examples where we have to delay gratification (e.g., to study a lot and for a long time to get an academic degree) and to deal with experiences wherein we have to deal with situations of psychological frustration (e.g., to lose a beloved relative). So, for a child's psychological development to be harmonious and healthy, she has to learn how to deal with situations of frustation and situations that imply the delay of gratfification. Of course, in his/her development the child's has to develop a sense ot the true, the good, and the beautiful. As such, during his/her ontogenetic development, the child should be be prrovided with example of the good cominng mainly of his/her teachers, parents, and peers.

Best regards,

Orlando

Orlando M Lourenço

Hi Orlando! You said that a little better than I could. I think so too - theoretically. Practically, I know of many small conflicts among the children, in which it is about role dominance / role subordination, which were difficult to manage - for example in the constellation: The older one is smaller and speaks much faster than the younger one, which is much slower, but also much more precise. In this constellation the younger person has no chance to speak; he has then developed another technique to achieve a victory over the older one: He hid something that belonged to the older sibling which he needed. He has become a great artist and nature observer in his life and can paint wonderfully.

With girls who also fight for role sovereignty at close age intervals, I experienced in two of my daughters (both now have four children, some of whom are adults), and also in arguments with one of the brothers: When the younger one was a girl, she always started screaming very loudly. Even when it comes to clarification and justice as a father or mother. My experience in dealing with my own children taught me: If she screams louder, she don't necessarily have to be right about the matter, but she usually gets right with the parents coming to the quarrel Thus, children develop possibilities to bring conflicts to a decision in their own interest.

Best, Hein

Dear Hein,

As you could see by the previous answers, the child's daily life faces his/her with good and bad experiences. So, if even such expeiences were not provided by parents, the child would encounter them. Both are necessary for the child's harmonious psychological development. Bad experiences teach, as I mentioned, children how to deal with situations of frustation. Good experiences teach children to see, for example, that to help needy others is much better than hurt them.

I want to point to an important issue that is generally ignored in the child's upbring even though it has crucial implications for his/her development and education. I am refering to what I call the sense of contingency, that is, the idea that for one to get something s/he values s/he has to deserve it, or, in other terms, to act in a certain way. To my understanding, children's current upbringing does not generally develop this sense in children. Because of this, children are led to think that they can get almost everything they want without, say, doing nothing. The lack of a sense of contingency on the part of children is one of most dangerous realities in the educational field. Please, those of you who are educators do not forget to foster the sense of contingency in your children or pupils. Not to do this, is, as it were, to commit a serious mistake in children's psychological dvelopment and education.

Best regards.

Orlando

Dear Orlando,

thank you for your thoughts. It is very interesting for me to hear from you the idea of contingency in education - and, indeed, I can't remember that this idea directly has been taught in familiy pedagogy or preschool education (but I have no firm knowledge about this). However, I had much to do with the principle of contingency in N. Luhmann's system theory, its, as you know his basic view that modern life is contingent life, that means, things can happen, or not.

But in the conceptions of New Education 100-120 years ago contingency was - if i see right - indirectly introduced: The principle of traditional command-obey-model in education, strict controlling all variables of teacher-pupil-intervention, has been replaced by open learning opportunities that occur in a situation a) that the teacher has prepared but no longer fully controlled because the child can choose, b) Accordingly, it is no longer safe either, but rather contingent what the children have actually learned when they have a choice of different work tools - for example when they have worked on a specific topic in a small group work and later present the results of the class.

Here, the teacher's learning controls are particularly important. Montessori-Material has kinds of self-control in the material itself. Such situations can be found in Montessori pedagogy, Jenaplan pedagogy, the Dalton Plan, project learning and other concepts of classical reform pedagogy.

Here, of course, social processes, decision-making behaviour, model-based learning and much more are promoted. Whether this kind of learning is more successful than the normal school with the learning of knowledge, about it has not been made until today, in time of PISA no clear judgement, if I see that correctly.

Hein Retter

Dear Hein,

Thank you very much for your elaborations on the principle of contingency. Thank you also for providing me with information I ignored.

Yes, in this postmodernist world in which we cannot say, for example, that one's truth is more valid than another's doubt, schools and families do not pay due attention to children's learning of the principle of contingency, a principle that states that, for instance, children's attainment of certain goals (e.g., to perform well at school or family) depends on, or is contigent to their efforts, engagements, and commitments. The idea that we can get almost, if not everything, we want without effort, hard work, and so forth is a pervasive idea in many families and schools. I think that children's lack of the sense of contingency is doomed to having dramatic consequences in their learning and psychological development. I would dare to say that not to foster children's sense of contingency amounts to committing a fundamental education error. Note that if we look around, we can easily see that all that happens in any domain depends on the occurrence of previous events.

Best regards,

Orlando

We do not have that amount of effect on our children's lives. We give support, love and advice. That is it. The bigger world takes care of the rest.