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Parenting
with Gary & Anne Marie: Toddlers
Toddlers - Learning Environments and Personality
With both heredity and environment,
children are recipients. Regarding the environment, the home has the dominant
control. Mom and Dad provide the environment for the most impressionable years
of life. The difficulty (if not the downfall) of laissez-faire parenting is
not realizing how education shapes the habits of the heart and in so doing weds
genetic propensities with right stimulation. The positive forces of heredity
do not always find a healthy and nourishing environment. When good capacity
is denied the right environment, the legacy is at best less than a child's full
potential and at worst a generational disaster. What can a reader glean from
this fact? One supreme thought-the decisions you make today, the beliefs that
drive your decisions, and the parenting assumptions you hold dear can and will
affect generations to come.
Personality
Energetic Noah does everything big. He'll march into a room, all smiles, and
give Grandma a great big hug. Hopping to the room's center, he delights his
eager audience with an impromptu performance. Finally, in his grand finale,
he drops to the floor rolls himself out the door. When Mom calls him to sit
beside her, he cries, and staying true to the end, his distress and resistance
are huge. Is his high-flying, crash-and-burn style a sign of a testy temperament,
or are we now in the personality zone? What's the difference anyway?
Let's take a look. Few words
used in contemporary theory of child development are as ambiguous as the term
personality. It suggests a variety of meanings to different investigators. We
have all heard the expression "He's a chip off the old block," implying
that personality is inherited and not subject to change. Not so on both accounts.
We provide a very simple
definition for the sake of continuity. Personality is a composite of three variables:
heredity, environment, and temperament. Temperament (inborn into human personality)
speaks to the general categories of uniqueness, which greatly influence a child's
perceptions and reactions. You can distinguish between a child's temperament
and his personality by saying that temperament traits are inborn while personality
traits are the result of nature and nurture.
Heredity is what your genetic
history brings to personality; environment is what the home and society add;
and temperament is the child's contribution. If that sounds confusing, then
take relief with this bit of news. Your child's personality is the last thing
you need to worry about. That's because personality is the sum of each influence
pressuring the formation of our being. It is not one definite, specific attribute;
rather it is the quality of the individual's total behavior. You cannot change
the whole without changing the parts, and some parts cannot be changed.
For example, you cannot
change your child's temperament any more than a leopard can change its spots.
You can understand it and cooperate with it, but you cannot alter it. You cannot
alter the hereditary influences on your children, but you can minimize negative
propensities, strengthen areas of weakness, encourage areas of strength, and
maximize areas of giftedness.
The only area you have enormous
influence over in the formation of personality is in creating the right educational
environment for your children. Education impacts personality. The intelligence
environment fostered will make all the difference in the world for your toddler.
When we speak of education,
we do so in the broadest sense. This goes way beyond textbook learning. Learning
and schooling are not synonymous, but both are vehicles of education. Most of
your parenting will be devoted to educating your children in three vital areas
of life until they achieve mastery: morality, health and safety, and life skills.
Your child's personality
is greatly shaped by your educational fervency. You will teach your child to
be kind, good, caring, patient, generous, and responsible. You will also help
him form healthy habits-how to brush his teeth, take a bath, and manage his
personal care. Accenting these educational goals is more education, teaching
the child how to think, make sound judgments, and apply logic and reason to
his life.
Article
by Gary Ezzo / Anne Marie Ezzo
