Title: Helping Children Build a Conscience
Headings: Helping Children Build a Conscience
Helping Children Build a Conscience
When Does One's Conscience Develop?
The Process of Identification
Instruction and Training
Interactions with the Environment
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Content: It has to do with the way the parents relate to the child. For example, if parents are primarily attentive, respectful, and nurturing, the child will internalize these characteristics as the way in which he should relate to others. Actually, growing up with a young child is very often like looking in a mirror in many ways. " But my child is very different from me," you say. Your children definitely have their own temperaments and personality characteristics, some of which can be quite different from yours; but how they learn to relate to others, how they learn to operate in the world, how they learn to conduct themselves around others - all of these are developed through the process of identification with parents, especially during the earlier years between birth and 8 or 9. If you think about it, that is a very sobering idea. It means that who you are and how you relate to your child will have a profound effect not only how they form a conscience, but on how they develop overall. The statement "Do as I say, not as I do!" can never hold up.