Everything starts winding down. In a blink of eyes, we have made it through another school year. My students are going to the next level of learning; some are changing uniform soon, stepping to what so called teenage-hood, starting their first year of high school. Am always anxious dealing with the ‘current’ teenagers. They are not exactly like what we used to be. Or so I thought.
However, looking at many of the students, I come to a conclusion that how kids turn up mostly depends on how they are being brought up. I have written it in another post about 2 types of parents. Here I would like to focus more on how the daily things can make a difference in the development of a child. I read about the cognitive development theory by Jean Piaget. It is stated that children go through 4 stages as they actively construct their understanding of the world. There are 2 processes underlie this cognitive construction: organization (how do they separate important ideas and less important ones) and adaptation (how do they adjust to new environmental demands).
The first stage starts from birth to 2 years where they construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with physical and motoric actions, then the second stage from 2 – 7 years of age where they connect the sensory information with physical action, e.g. to know how long a stick is compared to another stick, they will try to put them together and come to their conclusion. The next level is a concrete operational stage (7 – 11 years of age) where they can do internalized mental actions, e.g. they can now compare the length of stick by just imagining putting two sticks together, without actually doing physically. Lastly, formal operational stage that starts from 11 to 15 years of age, where they move beyond concrete experiences and think in abstract and more logical terms. In this stage, they might think about what an ideal parent is like and compare their parents to the version of their ideal parents (I guess this is why I always think that the children who are just stepped into their junior high school year is more difficult to handle, while those in their senior years are already more ‘stable’ – again, stable in a very unstable form.)
Anyway, I encountered an incident with my student who is about 5-6 years old who make me think “What if a kid doesn’t go through the above mentioned stages properly?”
I have a student who had been sent for tutoring class since a very young age, as parents put academic above everything and another reason for doing it is because impatience to handle their own kids. So the kid basically seems like to skip the whole first stage of Piaget’s theory! The kid does not know how to put the book in a bag properly (so that the bag can be zipped), the kid doesn’t know how to wash hand with soap and wash it off properly, the kid doesn’t know how to operate a scissor, the kid doesn’t know when the pants are not worn properly.
Though he knows how to write, recognize characters faster than any other kids.
If given the opportunity to observe, I really would like to know what kind of parenting works the better. It is too immature to tell right now, although I know that I got irritated more because a kid can’t do what he/she is supposed to be able to do at his age than being impressed with the ability to do what his/her peers can’t do yet.
Anyway, that’s just me being me!
For myself, we were growing up in different environment. We didn’t have much gadget to play with. We were outdoor a lot, we were super active physically, we were not on tuition class as much as the kids now, if we did, because we wanted to not because we needed to, our parents involved in our playing time too as much as they can, they were home a lot (we were privileged to have a shop just outside our house), we had our dinner together and we do not rush through it for homework or TV programme, we had seen a real cow, pig, turtle, goat, rabbit in our daily life, LIVE, not virtually through internet or TV.
So as a tutor I am still trying to understand many many things, try to understand how things have evolved.