Family Matters: A child's journey into an adult world

Bandura agreed with the behaviourist idea that children learn when their behaviour is either rewarded or punished in some way (in simple terms punishment, remember, might be something like an immediate negative consequence such as a smack or the removal of something desirable such as attention).

However he argued that children do not actually have to perform the behaviour to learn it.

The key element we take from Bandura’s theory is the concept of imitation: children can learn from watching others do something.

This is quite different than both behaviourism and Piaget’s theory, both of which required children to actually do things in order to learn.

Basically Social Learning theory suggests that if children see another person/child doing something that is rewarded they are more likely to try and imitate the behaviour themselves.

Have you ever been in the situation where a friend won a decent amount of money in a lottery and did you start buying lottery tickets for some time after that?

The theory suggests that children are much more likely to try and imitate the behaviour if the model is someone they see as having status.

When we send sports stars around schools to talk to students about drugs we are using this theory: we hope that an anti-drug message is more likely to be heard if it is spoken by those the children think are pretty cool.

That is probably why we react with such disgust when sports stars are found to be doing the wrong thing – they are important models for our children.

Of course the ability of our children to copy what others do is bounded by their actual abilities.

We might dream of running as fast as our Commonwealth Games athletes but for many of us, no matter how hard we train, that is not going to happen.

Similarly, no matter how carefully our three-year-old watches Dad clean the fish he caught, the physical skills needed to do the job are just not there yet.

So learning by imitation has its limits – we might know what to do but not be capable of actually doing it.

This is where we can provide opportunities to develop the necessary skills. We use our skills of observation to identify Johnny watches Dad with great interest when he cleans fish.

We can use that interest to provide some fun games that offer him practice at the skills needed: cutting playdough with a play knife, scraping playdough off the table at pack-up time, making fish shapes out of slippery slime, catching magnetic fish floating in the water tray with a magnetic fishing line all combine elements that will catch Johnny’s interest.

There comes a time when children are simply expected to do the adult task, and to be capable of doing it at first attempt because they are expected to have learned all the elements of the task through being there.

In western culture we tend to segregate children from the adult world, and expect them to learn the skills needed to participate eventually in that world in their own separate world.

I sometimes wonder how children transfer what they learn from their children’s world into the world of adults given they are not often given opportunities to observe adults operating in the adult world.