Aggressive behaviourChildren learn what is modeled [Archives:2004/793/Community]

By Yemen Times Staff
Taiz Bureau
What makes a child move toward violence and aggressiveness, either with family members at home, with neighbours' children or with colleagues at school?
Is this violence considered a natural instinct or a casual state of some children at a specific age or, else, a feature stuck to all ages? Do the behaviors of the family play a role in the way of dealing with its desires? What is the role of the school and community? What about media, and TV in particular, in shaping the child's culture?
All the above questions were shot against those who have direct relations with children.
Suppression breads aggressiveness
Abdullah Saif thinks that suppression and not listening to children contributes to creating an atmosphere of violence and makes children accordingly more aggressive. That's a substitute for their expressing themselves, which they were deprived from when being younger.
The majority of fathers would like to appear harsher and much more severe in front of their children. They are actually building a thick wall between them and children that are in a pressing need for who listens to their ideas and speech. Abdullah suggests that the solution to the aggressiveness of children is to treat a child in a way of respecting its abilities, its style of thinking and not limiting it to orders. Boosting its self-confidence and making it speak freely are of the suggestive solutions. Our Prophet Mohammed set a good example for us when he descended the platform while speaking to an enormous crowd in order to kiss his grandsons, al-Hassan and al-Hussein.

Acquired behavior
Abdulaziz, a teacher, says aggressiveness of children is an acquired behavior. Its reasons are the way of treating them among the single family. A child that is subjected to punishment and beating will act out in community and school.Ameen Saleh, a teacher, summarizes the children's aggressiveness as follows:
1. the parents' quarrel in front of their children who tend to imitate them and transfer that to others either through insulting talks or beatings.
2. the severe corporal punishment committed by some fathers.
3. the community where a child lives may be full of abnormal and aggressive people. Therefore children learn from them the abnormal behaviors and affect their peers in turn and that's because parents don't observe their children.
4. not punishing a child in certain cases is wrong. Sometimes parents laugh at the behaviors of their children without telling them that they are wrong. Thus children repeat such behaviors.
5. the role of media, TV in particular, which because they have a dangerous role in creating the aggressiveness of children throughout what they watch of imaginary series and action films planting the seeds of evil in their hearts. They try then to practice what they watched in and outside their houses.
Teacher Amin concluded his talk with saying that this phenomenon is acquired not inherited. There's a prophetic saying that a child is born with a pure instinct (without having any religion) but its parents later may make such choices for the child.

Bad treatment
About the role of the family in the children's aggressiveness, Mohammed's mother said: “The bad treatment of the family to the child, such as beating it severely, neglecting its ideas and little troubles, and trying to shut it up is not good for the child as some people think. What is more harmful is punishing, or insulting, it before its friends and peers. All these reasons contribute to child aggressiveness with others in streets, houses and schools.”
She added that the more aggressive the parents towards their children are, the more aggressive the children will be. The aggressive child will surely be an aggressive father when it grows up.
Some families don't understand their child's emotions and don't realize that they direct them towards deviation, she also said.

Looking after children
The solution to this problem as Mohammed's mother thinks is that the parents should understand their children's problems. They should listen to their talk and let them feel that the care about the children. There shouldn't be any kind of discrimination between them under pretexts like intelligence and childish desires.

View of sociology
Sociologists say that a part of the personality is inherited while the other is acquired as a natural result of the child interaction with the surroundings and the degree of effect on it.
The second part is completely related to different effects of relative and teachers and their personalities. The child's behaviors go hand in hand with the influence of brothers and friends. The aggressive family can't but affect the child to be as aggressive as they are and vice versa.
Psychologists in turn confirm that the child life is specifically shaped depending on the circumstances particularly in its early three or four years. When a child meets its basic needs of food, drink, rest, love and kindness since its first weeks and months of its life, it will live in happiness when it grows up.
There is a psychological belief that the psychological problems of adults come out of childhood experiences. The states of worry, anger, aggressiveness, and failed marriage are results of what happened in childhood. Other social diseases, such as selfishness, isolation, divorce, distrust, and terrorism rises from the early years of a child, especially the first three or four.
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