Behavior of a Child

It is often said that “Your behavior is the mirror of the values you have in your home”. It is where we nurtured our individuality based on our parent’s philosophy in life. As a kid, I don’t have control on how to change my behavior for the better. I surrender to my parents how they will cultivate me for my individual learning and behavior. I am sure they want me to be a good, well-behaved member of the society.

As Young Entrepreneur

When it comes to how they influence my behavior, let me justify where I had gotten my inclination as a young entrepreneur, a business kid, if you like. Because my parents are both business minded people I could not hide the fact that they have a big influence on how I became like them too. They also condition me to follow their steps. The primary example of their imparted behavior to me is when I became self-reliant.

At a young age, they showed me how to raise chicken in our backyard as a past time. For me, it’s not a big deal. It has been just like a game to play, the more chicken I raised, the more exciting the game. When the chickens grow old, they will offer me a toy and most of the time we raided our kitchen to have some good food. That has become a regular activity for me and it was imprinted in mind that if I want to have a new toy, or something in return, I need to raise chickens. That’s when the chicken games begin. Every time I see chicken, I see an opportunity to have a new toy. Until such time, that I became self-reliant. Before, they were the one who instructed me to do everything. But because of the nurtured behaviors, I learned to raise chicken, sell the chicken and buy my own toys. It was not hard to sell it, they, themselves, were the buyer. Lesson learned? They taught me how to become self-reliant. This is a valuable behavior they contributed to my life.

But not “all is well”, ends well. I had also misgiving about this experience.  I want to cite consequence of being an enterprising kid. By enforcing on me their own values, my free will to do what I want to do suffer. Instead of playing with other kids, I thought raising chicken is the same with playing. This affects my socialization activities. Well, I look at it as playing as they told me so. I knew I was not acting like a normal kid. I suppose to have my freedom as I don’t know much about everything. It’s the kid inside that is wanting.

Now, to relate my childhood drama to our topic behaviorism. My story was an example of Classical Conditioning where learning behavior is done by association. However, because Classical Conditioning emphasizes the importance of learning from the environment, and supports nurture over nature, it is deterministic in its approach. This means it does not allow for any degree of free will in the individual.

Finally, with all the experiences are the lessons learned. My parents have their own unique experiences that factors in on their parenting styles. Now that I am a parent too, I want to change some mistakes on behavioral approach in parenting. Since kids don’t have a full understanding of everything, I, as a parent, should balance my approaches. I want my kid to behave according to the positive lessons I gained from behavioral approaches. I will guide my kid according to my principle of what is right and wrong, the consequence of every actions, self-determination and FREE WILL.

JEREMY C. ORTEGA

–Inside JCOs Mind 3rd Blog—

Reference:

            https://www.simplypsychology.org/classical-conditioning.html