It is very interesting to study children's psychological activities, and you will be addicted to it no matter what aspect of this matter is exposed to. Perhaps the most obvious fact of this is that it is necessary to understand the entire course of children's life in order to understand a particular behavior. Every behavior of a child expresses its entire life and personality, so it is difficult to understand certain behaviors of a child without understanding this life background hidden in his behavior. For these behaviors we call "unity of personality."
This unity development is the process of coordinated and unified behavioral expressions into a single model, which begins in childhood. The needs of life force children to respond with a unified model, and this unified model of coping with the environment not only constitutes the child's personality, but also personalizes all their behaviors, thus distinguishing them from other children. The fact that personality unity is usually ignored by most schools of psychology. Even if it has not been completely ignored, it has not received the attention it deserves. As a result, we can find that psychological theory and psychiatric practice often isolated a special gesture or a special expression for research, as if it was an independent existence. Sometimes such gestures or expressions are called complexes and they are assumed to be isolated from the individual's overall behavior. But such a process is actually similar to picking a note from a whole melody, and trying to put aside the whole melody and only understand the meaning of this note. This approach is obviously inappropriate, but it is widely spread. Individual Psychology has to stand against this widely spread mistake, because if this mistake is applied to children's education, it will cause great harm to children. This is particularly evident in the theory of punishment for children.
What usually happens if a child does something that causes punishment? Indeed, in a sense, people will consider the overall impression left by the child's overall personality, but people often consider more about the child's shortcomings. Because if a child repeats the same mistake multiple times, the teacher or parent will look at him prejudice and think it is hopeless. But if a child performs well and makes occasional mistakes, then people will not punish him so severely based on the overall good impression left by the child. Nevertheless, these two examples do not touch on the root of the problem, that is, we should explore the root of these mistakes based on a comprehensive understanding of the unity of children's personality. This misunderstanding is like we try to understand the importance of a single new note, but isolate it from the entire melody.
When we ask a child why he is lazy, we cannot expect him to recognize the root cause we want to understand, and this reason is crucial for us to understand his overall personality. Again, we can't expect him to tell us why he lies. Socrates , which has a profound understanding of human nature, has a proverb that has been passed down for thousands of years, and it still often sounds in our ears, namely, "It is so difficult to understand yourself." In this case, what right do we have to ask children to answer such complex and profound questions? Even psychologists may find it difficult to answer these questions. In order to better understand the importance of an individual's behavior and its significance, we must first use methods and theories to understand the overall personality of children. This does not mean describing what the child has done and how he does it, but rather understanding the attitude he takes towards the problems he faces.
The following example shows us the importance of understanding the overall living environment of children. There is a 13-year-old boy here and he has a sister. Before he was 5 years old, he was the only child in the family and his parents cared for him very much, but his sister was born at this time. Everyone around the boy was very happy to fulfill every wish. The mother also undoubtedly spoiled him.At the same time, his father is a gentle and kind person who likes quietness and enjoys his son's dependence on him. Because my father was an army officer who had been away for many years, naturally, my son and my mother were closer. His mother is a smart, kind woman who always tries to meet every requirement of this strong and stubborn son. Even so, she would often be annoyed by her son's uneducated and threatening gestures. As a result, their relationship began to become tense, mainly manifested in the fact that the son wanted to constantly oppress his mother - he ordered her and made fun of her. In short, no matter where he was, he clearly showed his unhappiness to attract his mother's attention.
Although the boy's behavior annoyed his mother, because he did not have a particularly bad nature, his mother still tolerated him, such as helping him organize his clothes and tutoring his homework. The boy always believed that his mother would help him out of any difficulties he was in. He is undoubtedly a smart kid, received the good education he deserves like his peers, and his grades were pretty good in elementary school. But until he was 8 years old, he had some obvious changes that made his parents unable to bear the relationship with him anymore. Not only did he completely give up on himself and be cynical to control his mother's emotions; but he would pull his mother's hair once he couldn't get what he wanted. He would never give his mother a moment of peace, he often twisted her ears or broke her hands. He also refused to give up on his pranks, and because of his sister's growth, he stuck to his behavioral patterns. Soon, his little sister became his new target for pranks. He wouldn't really hurt his little sister, but his jealousy was obvious. His bad behavior began with the birth of his sister, because from then on, the sister was in a good position in the family and attracted everyone's attention.
needs to be emphasized in particular that if a child's behavior begins to become worse or some new bad behavior begins to appear, we must not only consider the time when the situation begins, but also consider the reason for it. The word "reason" here can only be used barely, because people generally don't understand why the birth of a sister is the reason why the brother becomes a problem child. Although people don’t understand it, this situation still happens often because the brother has a wrong understanding of the existence of his sister. This is not a causal relationship in a strict physical sense, because we cannot assert that the birth of a newborn child will inevitably lead to the depravity of an older child. Perhaps we can say that when a stone falls to the ground, its speed and direction of falling are certain. However, through the investigation and research given by individual psychology, we have a certain right to claim that in terms of psychological "degenerate", these strict causal relationships do not play a big or small role. Instead, the mistakes of various sizes made by individuals are at work, and these mistakes will affect their future development.
