By early adolescence, however, a child "can see clearly
many alternatives to parental directives, and a parent must be able to defend
rationally, as she would to an adult, a directive with which the adolescent
disagrees. . . . The adolescent cannot be forced physi- cally to obey over any
period of time." Gentle Threats As they try to discover more and more
about human behavior in general and in particular child behavior and the
influence of training upon it, psychologists report interesting findings.
Often, these cannot be considered definitive, clearly established; for that,
there must be many repetitions of the experiments and confirmation of the
findings by many workers. But sometimes a finding is of a type that, even
though not definitively established as valid, is provocative, worth thought,
and possibly even worth trial by parents. One of these is a finding that if you
want to instill values in children, speaks softly and carries a small stick.
Big sticks may control behavior but small sticks change attitudes.
This thesis
comes from Dr. Elliot Aronson, a University of Texas psychologist, who induced
children to turn their back on toys they really liked and to decide they didn't
like them after all. The technique used was request, followed by a mild
threat-which meant that the child had to build his own internal justifications
for not playing with the toys in order to comply with the request. Dr. Aronson
and his colleagues first spent days playing with the chil- dren and building
rapport. Then, picking out a favorite toy of each child in one group, an experimenter
said, "If you play with this toy, I will be a little cross with you."
The experimenter then left the room. In another group, the children were more
severely threatened with possible loss of all the toys plus the friendship of
the experimenters.
The results were quite startling. Very few children under
mild threat played with the interdicted toy. But many of the severely
threatened did. And two months later the first group still ignored the toy.
That the effect lasted for 60 days is "absolutely phenomenal," Dr.
Aronson says, and it indi- cates a long-term attitude change. He sees no reason
why the same effect would not work when dealing with more important values.
Preventing Self-devaluation There have always been self-devaluative individuals,
those who have a feeling of being unacceptable to them.
