Different Explanations For Why Children Identify With Their Parents

Psychology Questions
Your Name
Your Institution of Affiliation
October 12, 2017
Define Identification, Give at least three different explanations for why children identify with their parents. For each explanation, provide an example.
According to Clifford and Bull (2017), identification is one of the concepts that have received the most debate in the field of psychology for the past few decades. This is because while some scholars and laymen believe that identification is a simple affair, through which an individual compares and similarizes himself/herself with other individuals, other perspectives believe that it is a much more complex and multidetermined process. More specifically, they believed that identification happens due to a multitude of external factors such as social, emotional, psychological, and even situational externalities. This then poses the idea that this concept could not easily be discerned and analyzed in “laboratory” or “experimental” procedures since it is also based on the “situation” of the events. Nonetheless, despite its complexity, some factors elicits a trend which much likely provides an explanation for this concept. In this article, the author would discuss three of these explanation as to why children identify with their parents. Although there are a multitude of factors that could affect a child’s identification, the author have limited his selection to three, namely; (1) rewards and punishment, (2) parental dominance (Hetherington, 2016), and (3) culture and parental belief systems (Sigel, McGillicuddy-DeLisi, & Goodnow, 2014). Before going deeper in this analysis, the author believes that despite the multiplicity of the reasons which could affect a child’s identification with his parents, the role of culture and child rearing presents the biggest effect towards a child’s identification process.
As stated earlier, the first reason why a child identifies with his/her parent are the rewards and punishment of doing so. More specifically, this reason is rooted from the beliefs of the Psychoanalytic theory and learning theory, respectively. Both of these frameworks realizes that there exist an external factor which “motivates” the child to identify with his/her parents. However, what differentiates them is that while the other one thinks that the main stimulus for this process to happen is through rewards, the other believes that the fear of experiencing punishment is much more effective in a child’s learning capabilities. Aside from this, another difference is that the psychoanalytic theory focuses more on the process of “operant conditioning”, while the other one is much more oriented on how “knowledge is absorbed, processed, and retained”. As an example of our first framework, we could focus on the picture of a typical household setting. In almost every family in the world, the parents would serve as the initial “mentor” and “guide” of the children as they learn various things in life, starting from “emotional control” during the toddler stage and to much more complex processes as the child grows up (Hetherington, 2016). In these setups we could easily notice that what happens when a child deviates from what he’s being taught, he could then experience a type of “sanction” (e.g. grounding or spanking) or some other type of negative reinforcement to ‘correct’ his behavior. Thus, deviant behaviors relative to the parent’s teachings and beliefs gets shunned, while those in line gets rewarded (Hetherington, 2016). In line with our second framework, we could say that even if its approach in understanding identification and value transmission differently, it also focuses on the positive effects of rewards on a child as he does and retain the positive behaviors that his parents teach him. Generally, for our first reason, the author of this paper believes that the reason why a child identifies with his/her parents is because of the “risks-rewards” of doing so.
Another reason why a child develops a sense of identification with his/her parents is parental dominance. More particularly, parental dominance is the difference in between the effects elicited by either one of the parents. Thus, maternal dominance refers to the mother as having much more influence on her children as compared to the father while paternal dominance means otherwise. According to Hetherington (2016), in cases where Maternal dominance happens during a “boy’s” development period, a “disruption of the formation of masculine sex-role preferences” happens as well as the reduction of “father-son familiarity”. In the case of girls, however, paternal dominance would not necessarily lead to the child’s preference of “masculine sex-roles”, but would still increase her similarity with her father as compared to her mother. In line with the concept of identification, this shows that the dominance of one parent over the other, causes the child to identify with that parent more than the other (Hetherington, 2016). Perhaps a good example of this would be children whose dads are soldiers who are spending most of their times abroad. According to some studies, boys who are living with their mothers while soldier fathers who are spending most of their time abroad are most likely to exhibit feminine gender-roles and devote time for tasks that are considered as “feminine” (e.g. cooking) (Wells, 2015). Although, this study refers to adaptation of gender-roles more than “identification”, by going back to the article written by Hetherington (2016), we could argue that this adaptation of gender-roles could also be regarded as identification with the more “dominant” parent, which is the mother.
Lastly, the author of this paper believes that “culture and parental belief systems” also provides a strong case for a child’s identification with his/her parents since the parents’ belief systems provides the initial and immediate foundations of a child’s values and beliefs. However, the reason why he added “culture” is that in almost every case, these belief systems are simply derived from the parents’ and their origin’s cultural systems. This idea, in contrasts to the others, is more external, which also presupposes the previous two because these specific belief systems also presupposes the kind of “risks/rewards in childrearing” as well as affects the type of “parental relations”, affecting who becomes the more dominant parent. An example of this would be the culture of the Chinese Mosuo, where they practice a matriarchal system in child rearing, where the children’s uncles (mother’s brother) would be regarded as having a greater responsibility towards the social, emotional, and psychological development of the child than their fathers (Yan, n.d.).
What roles can poverty play in the brain development and overall health of toddlers?
In general, poverty is defined as the state of being extremely poor. More particularly, poverty is detrimental for one’s health because it also entails food insecurity and lack of nutrition, which both affects an individual’s overall well-being. Nevertheless, these risks are even bigger for children who are only developing because nutrition is crucial for this process to happen. In their case, both their overall physiological ...