Kagan points out it is “the child’s knowledge, moral evaluations, and inferences about the causes of his or her current mood” that form his or her interpretations to each “emotionally significant experience”, such as family violence (1984, pp. 275- 276). Therefore, the results of this process turn out to be various. The worst situation would be the diffusion of negative interpretations. The author of the article Orchids and Dandelions reports that “careful epidemiologic work by one of my doctoral students and a former postdoctoral fellow has found that in nearly 34,000 children from Manitoba, Canada, five-minute Apgar scores were predictive of teacher-reported developmental vulnerability at age 5 for a variety of developmental dimensions”. In general, these experiences impede the ability to learning skill, as it also does to the mental and physical health throughout our lifetime (Boyce, 2019, par 3, 10). Although Boyce mentions “a variety of developmental dimensions”, his paper mainly focuses on the “emotionally significant experience”. As we acknowledge from Boyce’s article and interpretations from all the work above, a child with a lack of emotional support has difficulties leading life and overcoming challenges.
Fortunately, not every child ends up the same. There are possibilities that children who are “about one in five”, also written in the article, have remarkably susceptibility to “highly sensitive to adverse events”. With this biological privilege, they can achieve success in nurturant (Boyce, 2019, par 5, 6). This resilience seems to be a perfect stimulus for the development of the reasoning system in these “orchid children”. In general, during the unfortunate event, with a strong emotional basis, other positive forces have opportunities to win the child’s mind. To those whose genes do not cover resilience, we can train them to be persevering. The reason is the process of being resilient includes the perseverance. Perseverance is known as a trait of facing and overcoming difficulties.
According to the article The "Batman Effect": Improving Perseverance in Young Children, from May 2012 to January 2013, the result from the experiment studying the relation between role play and perseverance in children supported the view that the perseverance is “a skill that is accessible to even very young children”. In this experiment, the children were asked to participate in a hard-working and helpful but “was modified to be long and boring”. When the children wondered if they "were being a good helper", the authors assume, “this reflection was most successful when it involved impersonating a character” (White, Prager, Schaefer, Kross, Duckworth, Carlson, 2017). To conclude, a child's favourable characters affect his or her attitude. Since then, they mirror and learn the trait intrinsically. By linking the model to the child’s cognitive process, it becomes reasonable to learn. Then it goes from all the work of the reasoning system to the child’s behaviors.
References:
Boyce, W. T. (2019, January 2). Orchids and Dandelions. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201901/orchids-and-dandelions.
Kagan, J. (1984). The nature of the child. New York, NY, US: Basic Books.
White, R. E., Prager, E. O., Schaefer, C., Kross, E., Duckworth, A. L., Carlson, S. M. (2017, September/October). The "Batman Effect": Improving Perseverance in Young Children. Child Development, 00093920, 88(5). Retrieved from https://web-a-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.greenriver.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=dabcfa35-c22e-4929-ac42-9a252b24d38d%40sessionmgr4009&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=124970333&db=tfh.
Eurus Thach.
