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Turning on the television set can turn off the process that transforms children into people... It is primarily through observing, playing, and working with others older and younger than himself that a child discovers both what he can do and who he can become — that he develops both his ability and his identity.
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More Quotes by Urie Bronfenbrenner
In order to develop normally, a child requires progressively more complex joint activity with one or more adults who have an irrational emotional relationship with the child. Somebody's got to be crazy about that kid. That's number one. First, last and always.
In today's world parents find themselves at the mercy of a society which imposes pressures and priorities that allow neither timenor place for meaningful activities and relations between children and adults, which downgrade the role of parents and the functions of parenthood, and which prevent the parent from doing things he wants to do as a guide, friend, and companion to his children.
No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.
Witness the American ideal: the Self-Made Man. But there is no such person. If we can stand on our own two feet, it is because others have raised us up. If, as adults, we can lay claim to competence and compassion, it only means that other human beings have been willing and enabled to commit their competence and compassion to us--through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, right up to this very moment.
The primary danger of the television screen lies not so much in the behavior it produces as the behavior it prevents-the talks, the games, the family activities and the arguments through which much of the child's learning takes place and his character is formed.
In the planning and designing of new communities, housing projects, and urban renewal, the planners both private and public, need to give explicit consideration to the kind of world that is being created for the children who will be growing up in these settings. Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children both older and younger than themselves.
"In the United States, it is now possible for a person eighteen years of age, female as well as male, to graduate From high school, college, or university without ever having cared for, or even held, a baby; without ever having looked after someone who was old, ill, or lonely; or without ever having comforted or assisted another human being who really needed help... No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations, and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.
Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children with persons both older and younger than themselves.
Development, it turns out, occurs through this process of progressively more complex exchange between a child and somebody else- especially somebody who’s crazy about that child
Thus if we know a child has had sufficient opportunity to observe and acquire a behavioral sequence, and we know he is physically capable of performing the act but does not do so, then it is reasonable to assume that it is motivation which is lacking. The appropriate countermeasure then involves increasing the subjective value of the desired act relative to any competing response tendencies he might have, rather than having the model senselessly repeat an already redundant sequence of behavior.
