Toddlers are usually curious, but there is no evidence to suggest that children have a natural tendency to self-development. Whether or not a child develops himself depends primarily on two circumstances: on the level of comfort surrounding him and on the participation of parents in his development.
Children develop best in comfortable conditions: light, warmth, loving parents, enough care and interesting tasks to test themselves for strength, skill and ability to overcome the difficulties of life. If everything is easy — it is not interesting, there will be no development, because there is no need. If there are only difficulties in a child’s life, he can freeze like a sleeping kidney or, conversely, begin to rebel and win back what he wants. The job of parents is to throw puzzles to the child, complicating them as the child grows up. And when the child grows up enough to listen to his parents — tell him about the difficulties and joys that you had at his age, expanding his ability to understand.
On the other hand, children develop worst of all when parents and other adults do not take care of them, and the children’s living conditions are as comfortable as possible. The better the child is in the absence of parents, the cozier and more comfortable his environment is for him, the worse he will develop. What for? The child has food, heat, water, light, and there is no need to move — in this case, the child, that is, practically the animal body of the child, does not have any incentives to move itself somewhere and somehow.
It is the participation of parents in the development of children that is the main factor in development. The evidence suggests that children ONLY develop when their parents develop them.
Quote: “It so happened that all spring and summer I went to the Orphanage, all in the same nice provincial town 200 km from Moscow. I did not notice any queues of adoptive parents besieging the head physician with a desire to immediately take the “gene pool” into the family. There are many children. The institution is thriving: excellent repairs, mountains of toys, one-year-old children dressed in expensive suits hang lifelessly in expensive walkers. And these are not disabled — quite healthy kids. They just don’t want to walk, because no one holds them by the hands, doesn’t call, doesn’t aunt, doesn’t kiss for every tiny step. Children do not play with expensive toys. They don’t play because they don’t know how. That’s what mom and dad are for.»
An interesting direction for the development of the child is the establishment of a living relationship with their parents or other adults. At least — as with live toys. So what? Under conditions of hospitalization, children show neither attention nor interest to adults even after 2-3 years of life.
In the early years of Soviet power, there were many abandoned children who were taken to orphanages. They were fed, but the adults did not take care of them, and the babies grew like vegetables in the garden. And they turned into vegetables. After some time, when adults approached them, took them in their arms, smiled at them and tried to talk to them, the babies in response to this expressed only their dissatisfaction: they were quite comfortable to exist without these external interference.
At the same time, it is worth the teacher to establish interaction with a child with a syndrome of hospitalism, as in a short time the children managed to move far along the path of development, to form an active attitude towards people and the world around them. Toddlers will want to develop if this desire is developed in them by adults. If adults do not develop this, the baby will remain only a vegetable.
Yes, dear K. Rogers believed that human nature is characterized by a tendency to growth and development, just as the seed of a plant has a tendency to growth and development. All that is needed for the growth and development of the natural potential inherent in man is only to create the appropriate conditions. “Just as a plant strives to be a healthy plant, just as a seed contains the desire to become a tree, so a person is driven by an impulse to become a whole, complete, self-actualizing person,” he wrote. How to treat his thesis? Doubly. In fact, this is a myth. On the other hand, the myth is useful, pedagogically expedient.
In summary: when a person does not particularly strive to develop, it makes sense to inspire him that every person has a desire for self-development. If we are raising children, then relying on this desire for self-development is naive. If you create and nurture it, it will be. If you don’t create a desire for a child to develop himself, you will get a child with simpler values, you will get what the Russian society around him will create for the child.