A Child’s Behavior

For my final project, I volunteered at the little badgers daycare. While I was there, I played with infants and a few kids. While I played with them, I observed their behaviors and observed how they interacted with other kids, myself and other volunteers, and the teachers that were there. I got to the little badger daycare right after they ate breakfast and stayed for their play time. While observing the kids, I was able to see a lot of behaviors that we discussed in class.

There was one day when I was in the daycare that a couple of the kids from the older group came into the infant lab. Because a couple of the older kids were in that room, a few of the other kids from the older daycare wanted to come into the infant lab as well. When I saw this happening, I thought about the bystander effect. This is because the kids didn’t worry about being in that room until there were other kids there.

Another day I went there, I was playing with two little girls. One of the girls come up to the upper level play area with a doll. Then the second girl noticed that she had a doll, she automatically wanted to play with that specific doll. I tried to offer other dolls and toys, but she would not accept any other toy instead of the doll that the other girl had. As I was observing these behaviors, I was surprised to see what kids were worried about. I noticed that there were a lot of factors that had to do with peer pressure. I found an article called “Peer pressure and risk taking behaviors in children” by Charles E. Lewis and Mary Ann Lewis. The article is about the Lewis’s study where they asked 771 students between fifth and eighth grade what problems they had the most concern with.

The majority of the kids in eighth grade said that they were most concerned with peer pressure. The article says that the Lewis’s had a discussion with these kids and asked if they had been dared to do anything in the past week. When they talked about dares, it wasn’t anything like running barefoot in the snow. They were issues like promoting other kids to smoke, vape, kissing and other sexual activity, and causing harm to themselves (Lewis and lewis, pg.582). My brother was recently dared to kiss this girl. After he did that, he was only dared to do more risky behavior. Once he said yes to one of his peer’s dares, it got a lot harder to say no to the other things he was told to do. The lewis’s were able to teach the kids how to say no as well. They had a discussion with the kids about some different ways to say no. They then went over the different techniques the peers have used to get kids to actually do the dares. “Some techniques reportedly were used more often for certain kinds of dares. Encouraging person risk was associated with name calling.

Cigarette smoking was promoted through the use of group membership, and bribes were more often used in dares to commit vandalism.” (Lewis and lewis, pg.583). Peer pressure is a huge problem in today’s society. When volunteering at the daycare one of the days, I was in the infant lab wearing a hoodie. There were a couple kids from the daycare for older kids in the infant lab for a little bit. One of the boys came up to me and saw the granola bar that was in my pocket. Before I could do anything, he quickly put his hand in my pocket and tried to take the granola bar. I was able to get it from him because he wasn’t supposed to have any snacks at the time. I explained to him that he couldn’t have the granola bar because he had just gotten done with breakfast and wasn’t able to have anymore snacks. As I was thinking about what had just happened, I quickly realized that the boy hadn’t fully known about folkways or sanctions. He still wasn’t sure what was socially acceptable or what the possible consequences of his actions were.

The article young children enforce social norms by Marco F. H. Schmidt and Michael Tomasello talks about the role that children play in social norms. Schmidt and Tomasello explain to the reader that children learn from their parent’s examples. This is also how kids learn about the rules of everyday behavior that they should follow, the rewards and the punishments that encourage norms, and any other behavior that they should learn to become a part of their society. This got me thinking about how ethnocentrism comes into play. Just as parents use ethnocentrism and judge according to their cultural standards, children do the same thing because they are following what the parents do. As children learn more about and participate in social norms, “They understand that part of this group identifications is that ‘we’ do things in certain ways” (Schmidt and tomasello, pg. 234). There are many different types of social norms. However, there are some that are not verbally ‘rules’, but they are still there. For example, it is an unspoken rule to wear pajamas to bed or to smile when someone smiles at you. I was able to volunteer at the little badger daycare for the service project. While there, I observed actions that the children did.

Children have a lot of stressors in their life, one big issue being peer pressure. A study was done by Charles E. Lewis and Mary Ann Lewis where they asked a large group of children what some of their biggest worries are. A lot of the older kids that were surveyed answered that dares were the biggest problem for them, which is often how they got wrapped up in bad situations. Although older kids are going through a lot, younger kids are still learning about what is socially acceptable. They often learn by the examples of their parents or even the older kids. Little kids look up to you and they want to be able to be just like you, so they learn from the way we act.

Did you like this example?

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