By Imitation and Not By Obedience

As a new parent, the hardest truth I had to swallow was that imitation is a powerful form of learning commonly used by children. As part of your parenting training, it is vital to be mindful of this fact. Parents need to be vigilant about what they do around children. It is not enough to simply ask children to be well-mannered; parents must also watch their behaviour around their children on a daily basis.I cannot even count the number of easy-to-imitate habits I had to rid myself of when I had my son. The main issue is that, when it comes to behavioural modelling, we as parents contribute hugely to our children; they look up to us in all we do. It is always better to avoid children picking up some unwanted behaviours than reaching a point where you would seek an intervention to try and correct these unwanted behaviours.To support this argument, we have looked into some empirical findings in Psychology and Human Behaviour. A study conducted in 2015 by Developmental Psychologist, Rebecca Williamson, suggests that imitation is in fact a rudimentary form of social pattern building, and further confirms the vital nature that pattern recognition plays in spatial learning. In fact, the researchers mention this form of learning as being very useful in everyday situations. They use the example of judging ripeness of strawberries by colour and being able to use this pattern to extrapolate judging the ripeness of other fruits in other seasons. The establishment of social imitation and patterns is vital to the survival of a species and to the development of a child; it plays an important role in our understanding of the social nature of human learning as a whole.The bottom-line is that your young ones are copying you. It is a nice add-on if they follow rules you set, but children, at the age where they would pick up unwanted behaviour, have a certain level of reasoning and could enquire about why they have to follow rules that you do not follow. If you would like your children to never raise their voice at you, then you always ensure to keep a calm tone, even in instances where you are being stern. That is just one example of many to help remind us that imitation is a powerful form of learning children adopt. We need to always remember this.

By Imitation and Not By Obedience

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