Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Surprise - Adults are role models.

According to this article, Children Don't Trust Each Other When It Comes To Learning The Rules, children believe and follow adults more readily than other children. Given our concepts of authority figures and role models, the outcome of their study is what I would expect.
Dr Rakoczy said: "The results from our study suggest that children prefer to learn from adults rather than other children when it comes to rule-governed activities like learning a new game. They also expect other people to learn and perform actions in the way that the adults do, demonstrated by the expectation that the puppet would also follow the adult actor's actions and not the boy's."
"These findings tell us that young children will accept adult's behaviour as being right, and that adults behaviour should be followed. This could have implications for wider social learning of both good and bad behaviour."

As the primary adults in our children's lives, my husband and I have the greatest responsibility of all in teaching and modeling good behavior for our children. Not to sound like a broken record, but I am very glad that I can stay home and be the primary caretaker of my own children.

1 comment:

  1. But it also adds to my guilt at sometimes not being on top of things - starting our day an hour late, not feeling like talking to my middle one when I'm trying to juggle other tasks, spending too much time on line. OTOH, my kids mentioned once that I was a good role model of working hard. I never meet my own expectations, but at least they see me pushing beyond my comfort zone. And i have to remember that as an 'accidental' homeschooler (homeschooling when schools failed us), I dont HAVE to be as exuberant as the ones who are home schooling as a chosen path.

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