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Feb 8, 2003 This is a little simple title but it is one of the parts of kid’s behavior that I want to discuss in this article. I could just as well use a title like: Why kids start drinking and others do not, or why some kids become criminals and others do not? There have been numerous studies about this subject, but I do not want to use those. This article contains my opinion and I have no back ground of psychiatry. However, pure logic will help me to give a non-educated, yet reasonable vision. (I may even come up with something new… who knows?) First, the idea that social back ground has an effect on the behavior of our children, may be partially right, but does not help much because the only difference you will find is that kids from certain types of social back grounds are more likely (5%) to start smoking / drinking / crime. It doesn’t help you as a parent that you know that just because your kids have a good social background, the chance they start something bad is smaller. “Bad friends” is also a good one. When kids do something bad it is because of bad friends. Well, that could be true, but it still doesn’t explain why they have these bad friends. Everybody thinks they have bad friends but the kid has another opinion, and this opinion becomes stronger when he/she is told that they are bad friends. And so the list continues. Let’s try to find out how a kid’s mind works. It really is quite simple. The basic rule is: Try everything that you have not experienced your self yet, no matter what other people say. To illustrate this let’s look at the following thought process of a 3 year old: 3 year old: “Hmm, what is that? It has a funny light I never saw before and the air around it seems to move and rise. Let me touch it and find out!” Mommy says: “STOP IT do not touch it my son… that is HOT!!!” 3 year old (looking at mommy’s face): “Oh oh, she is upset. I can not touch it because it is HOT” 3 year old (looking around): “Can somebody explain what that means????? ... Nobody? Ok, then let me touch it…. AAAAUUUUWWWWWW!!!!!” The illustration is clear. Understanding comes after experience. The older we get, the more experiences we have and the more likely we will be more careful with trying new things. And then puberty shows up. The hormones start to mess up the body and the brain. Basically puberty sets our brains 10 years back and we have to try all kinds of things again with the ignorance of a 3 year old. Luckily by then we are able to use logic to determine what people say makes any sense. The hormones however do not make this very easy and tend to drive us in one direction only, forgetting about other possibilities. Maybe the speed in which puberty changes our body and mind has something to do with how distorted our logic becomes during puberty. I can imagine that when it goes faster and the chances are faster it effects us more. A last word of advice to help parents help their kids make the right choices in life (especially in puberty): It all comes down to standards and values. Make sure that these standards and values are very, very clear and simple. The more clear and simple the standards and values are to a kid, the less able he/she will be to use logic to undermine them. ------------ Peter Faber is Dutch and has recently moved to Brazil. Visit Peter's Advise the World. Email Peter: getting_there@uol.com.br Comment on this column in the forum. ------------ |
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