6/5/2014 Adults' Actions for Children

Last week, a car accident occurred in my hometown that caused several fatalities. One of my friends died in that accident which made me upset for the whole week. The driver who was drunk drove his car across the avenue, and ignored the red light. In China, drunk driving is a serious criminal act. The drunk driver’s criminal act ended several people’s lives, and caused several families much grief. The driver comes from a single family and his mother left them because his father always drunk.

According to a survey, many criminals come from single family or the family which has criminal record or background. As we know, education for children is a problem which caused a lot of argument recent years. In general, imitation from adults is an important part of the early childhood education. Children copy adults’ actions which just like the models to build their own thinking of this world. So in my opinion, adults should be more mindful of their actions when they are around young, impressionable children.

“Children have stronger study ability but weaker cognition ability than adults. They are too young to distinguish what is wrong or what is right” (Jonathan). However, most of adults don’t pay attention to their actions such as spitting, smoking, speaking loudly, speaking dirty, and doing so many other acts of incivility in public places when they are around young. They don’t realize that children can study both positive and negative information from others. Children can easily study the incivility from parents or other relations because they do not know what is right and wrong. The reason why I write "easily" is because children have strong study ability. Children like learning from imitating. According to an article titled "imitation"(Talaris Institute, 2011) said "Imitation is not a skill babies learn – it is an ability they are born with". Thus imitation is an natural ability. Children see and imitating adults..."This ability causes the Children to imitate the rude acts from surrounding circumstance unconsciously because they do not know what right and wrong is. One sentence from "Imitation"(Talaris Institute, 2011) also mentions "Children store in their mind both positive and negative images that may be imitated or tested at a later time" which also agree with me. It is obvious that the incivility is caused when we was young because we liked imitating both positive and negative acts during that time, so we can even say that adults’ actions which around young determines their whole life.

We learned the rude acts easily from adults when we were young, and the imitations then developed into habits which are hard to eliminate. Adults’ actions always leave a deep impression on children. Your kids will imitate youI want to use my personal experience to prove it is true. I can still remember that my little cousin liked imitating his father when he was a three year old child. At first, he truly just imitated his father's rudeness for fun. He imitated spitting in the public place, speaking dirty, and speaking loudly in public. His parents thought it was cute, and it was normal for a child to imitate adults, so they didn't pay more attention to their rude acts. They realized their acts was wrong when they knew my little cousin also did rude acts at school. However, it was too late. It already had developed into habit. They tried different kinds of methods to prohibit his acts of incivility. These methods could only ease the frequency of rude acts. It is obvious that the incivility is caused while children learned rudeness from adults when they were young. Then it causes this to become into the habits which are hard to eliminate in the future.

According to the Bobo doll experiment which was the name of a famous experiments conducted by Albert Bandura in 1961 and 1963 that studied children's behavior after watching an adult model act aggressively towards a Bobo doll, we can know “people not only learn by being rewarded or punished itself (behaviorism), they can learn from watching somebody being rewarded or punished, too (observational learning)” (Jonathan). These experiments are important because it proved how children can be influenced watching violent scenes. It is the same as influenced by adults’ actions because of watching.
Bobo Doll Experiment

Thus, adults should pay attention to their actions when they around young. It is because children are weak in distinguishing right and wrong, they like to learn from imitating, and it gradually develops to be a habit which is hard to eliminate and destroy their future. As we know, parents are the best teacher for a child, so I strongly recommend parents to care more about their children and be mindful of themselves, and stop their rude acts to become a good model for children.