10 Things Every Parent Needs to Know by Justin Coulson

Author:Justin Coulson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-12-19T05:00:00+00:00

Don’t follow the crowd

Over the past several decades, fascinating studies have shown that as humans, we are an ultra-social species. We see what others are doing and we want to belong so badly that we will choose to give up our own identity to be a part of the crowd.

In his classic psychology studies from the 1950s, Solomon Asch found that people would say things that they knew were blatantly wrong in order to be accepted. In his studies, a participant entered a room where there were up to 11 other people. Each looked at three parallel lines. The lines were of different lengths. The differences were obvious. A fourth line was shown to the people in the room and they were asked to judge which of the three lines was the same length as the fourth line. The first 11 people would intentionally say the wrong thing (because they were conspiring with the experimenter to see what the real participant would say). In close to 40 per cent of cases, the participant would reluctantly and uneasily agree that they were right when it was obvious that they weren’t. What would your kids say or do? What would you say or do? Are we following the path of least resistance? Are we bowing down to the god of Popular Opinion? Or do we know who we are?

Stanley Milgram is another psychology researcher who shocked the world with his obedience studies from the 1960s. He found that simply telling people to do something unethical was enough to have them abandon their morality (reluctantly and under pressure) to follow his instructions. His participants believed that they were electrocuting another participant to death, and two-thirds of them carried out his instructions anyway. The shocks weren’t real, but the participants didn’t know this. And so they delivered these shocks over and over again. They did so reluctantly, remorsefully and repeatedly. Again, what would you and your kids do? Stand for what’s right because you know who you are? Or follow the crowd, be obedient and go down a path you don’t want to because of the pressure?

Study after study shows that our children follow the crowd under fairly normal conditions. They succumb to peer pressure. They are not willing to think independently if it may cause them to stand alone.

We can support our children to be themselves by encouraging independent thought. To help our children become who they really are, I love the idea of taking a proactive approach where we play with hypotheticals. We can sit with our child in the car or at bedtime and ask, ‘What would you do in this instance? Why? What other ideas do you have?’ We can ask them, ‘What if everyone else was doing this? What would you do?’

As we take our children through challenging scenarios in the safety of our presence, they can prepare for similar scenarios that might occur without us being there. And we can adapt real-life circumstances for pre-arming conversations as well.

Parent:

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