Excellent Family Leadership

For over twenty five years I have taught about how children develop, grow, and mature. It has been one of the best experiences of my life. The college students were smart, interested, and fun to teach. The knowledge base of developmental psychology is extraordinarily interesting. It also brings to one’s awareness many other things about human life. For one thing there are several types of growth. These include emotional, mental, physical, language, social, and moral development. All these are studied during infancy, childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. Specialists work in each of these areas and often live their entire professional lives researching and teaching about them. When the thousands of studies are finally published and available to anyone it is possible to see the enormous effort that is and has been underway to understand our children. When I had the opportunity to read widely and deeply in some of these areas something happened to me that I had not expected. The knowledge I acquired about development led to a perspective I have come to value a great deal and would like to share.

Imagine that you can see something from its beginning, along the way, and until its final stage. Jean Piaget, for example, is a famous cognitive psychologist who observed his own children and created a most remarkable view of how children’s mental processes develop. He identified four stages including “sensory-motor” where children learn from their senses and integrate senses with movement, “preoperational” where children think and reason without much logical mental organization, “concrete operations” where children think about physical parts their world, and “formal operations” where adolescents think and reason with logic and well-defined mental processes. Hundreds of people have studied his theory which has brought to light support as well as questions.

Suppose now that you understand his description of development from beginning to its final stage. One day, as I did, you will likely look at all of it and ask about the value of knowing this information. You might have a flash or two of insight like I did and make the following conclusions. For one thing, it would occur to you that if you know how the natural development takes place you might be able to make it more successful for your children if you provided the right type of parental leadership. Leadership in this case means that you have some idea where children are developing to and you do things which help them be successful rather than allow chance or some unhappy event increase the possibilities they will be unsuccessful in their efforts. For instance, if you knew how children grow mentally you could provide extra sensory (sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch) stimulation to them in the early years of their lives. You might put chocolate pudding on the kitchen cabinet and let a three year-old finger paint in it because it will stimulate creativity and brain growth.

If you knew the importance of social and emotional growth you would make certain you were predictable, caring, warm, comforting, and interesting during the first two years of your children’s lives so they could form secure emotional attachments with you. Attachment, secure or insecure, might be the basis of all other relationships children have the rest of their lives. You might also develop a teaching model of parenthood where you take your kids out and around talking to them and showing them the world in sight, sound, and touch. This you might do instead of a using a punishment or neglect model where you simply react to what your children do. You might make certain you laugh with them, have fun with them, and communicate every positive emotion such as love, warmth, tenderness, gladness, cheerfulness, and happiness just so their brains will learn many more positive then negative emotions.

After doing all this you watch your developing children imitate you and then it might occur to you that you need to be whatever you most want them to be. So you use adult rather than childish language when you talk to them, avoid displays of unstable anger, use wisdom instead of rashness when making decisions, and speak to them about the best things life has to offer. You will read for yourself and to them, you will display creativity so they will, and you will demonstrate optimism because you want them to know about it. Plus, you will encourage them to come along with you and find life as a great adventure. In short, you will have provided excellent family leadership.