Understanding the children’s behaviour

Many parents have difficulties to understand their children’s behaviour. It will be helpful for parents to have the basic knowledge on human behaviour. There are two groups of psychological principles to explain the children behaviour.
One is referring to Individual Psychology, which is a view of people which recognises them as active decision makers, as purposeful and goal oriented individuals, free to determine their own behaviour, understood only within their social environment, and the other views on the nature of people exist, sees them as passive products of their environment, motivated by unconscious forces such as sex and aggression.
The parental relationship with their children has evolved from autocratic to democratic in today society, and the Individual Psychology principle provides a more acceptable approach for today’s parents to raise up their children in this relatively new changing society. Therefore, the following principles provide a framework for parents to understand their children:

1. 
   The desire of belonging, to be accepted, to contribute is the main motivators of a child’s behaviour. Children do not grow up in isolation. All of their behaviour skills like language, play, emotion are developed in some social settings. There is nothing more important in life than a child’s original family for it is there the basis of personality is formed. In their transactions within the family, children form ideas about life, themselves and others, ideas which form the guiding principles throughout life.
2. 
   View behaviour within the family. That is a very important concept and often being neglected one too. A child’s behaviour is developed and reinforced within family context. Alice is mean to her young sister, is because her big brother was mean to her sometime ago. Very often, parents however, deal with Alice’s mean behaviour alone without addressing her big brother’s problem. That will never solve Alice’s problem.
3. 
   All behaviour is purposeful. “Goal striving is the essence of personality” . The key is to identify the purpose and then act in such a way that the behaviour does not achieve its intended goal. Until parents begin to focus on the purposed of unsatisfactory behaviour, they will continue the ineffective approach of concentrating on the behaviours itself.

The above principles was summarized from “Become a better parents” by Maurice Balson
Becoming better parents