Control work N 5 for the third course
on topic “Bringing up Children”.
I. Read & translate the text & be ready to fulfil the exercises below.
How to Raise a Child
(Some recommendations for parents)
(After “The Secret World of Kids” by Art Linkletter).
Do children really live in a secret world of their own, a world that grown-ups once knew but can never quite find again ? Sure they do ! It’s a strange & wonderful world, half fantasy, half reality. There’s love in that world, & selfishness, & violence, and sometimes fear. There’s logic, too, although it gets twisted at times. And magic. And more imagination than Jules Verne or Walt Disney ever dreamed of. And humor. You can’t describe this world in so many world. You have to listen for it, & watch for it.
Raising kids is just about the most exciting, maddening, rewarding, exhausting, puzzling & satisfying occupation there is.
Don’t expect too much of your children. This is both unfair & unwise. Unfair because very often they simply haven’t reached that level of achievement yet. & unwise because if you constantly demand more than a child can give, you damage his confidence & may even end by making him doubt his value as a human being.
Modern children fool you because they grow up physically & mentally so fast. They acquire rich vocabularies by the time they’re five, often just by listening to television programs. But their emotional growth is the same as it always was. The result of all this is that very often parents misjudge youngsters & tend to treat them as adults instead of kids.
Sometimes this tendency goes right up into the teens. Modern teen-agers certainly do their best to convince you that they’re grown up. But the’re not really mature. Behind the facade are all sorts of uncertainties & insecurities & appeals for help. They’re confused themselves, because part of them wants to stay in the nest and another stronger part wants them to become independent. But they are by no means as self-sufficient as they pretend to be, or would like to be, and it’s a mistake to think they are.
Consciously or unconsiously kids pattern themselves on their parents. So if you have certain personality features that you don’t want your children to inherit, the best thing to do is to get rid of those qualities in yourself. One of the most effective keys to child-control is self-control. Make yourself the most effective person you possibly can. That’s the best way to prevent in your children the handicaps that you dislike in yourself.
In any organization, discipline is essential. To establish discipline there must be authority - & respect for authority. This is equally true of an army, a business corporation, or a family. The less authority, the more confusion. When authority breaks down completely, the door is wide open to chaos.
A lot of European and Asiatic parents think that in this department of child raising we Americans have gone the limit. Some years ago, a foreign visitor was asked what impressed him most about the United States. “I think”, he said politely, “it’s the way parents obey their children”.
A wise old doctor told me once that the secret of discipline, where kids are concerned, is to remember that a child never does anything unless he is getting some kind of satisfaction out of it. Kids are not born “Bad”, & they do not act “badly” unless they’re getting something out of it. If the parent can find out what that sometimes is, & provide it in some other way , then the “badness” will disappear.
Give your kid the right amount of love. This isn’t as easy as it seems. Almost every parent will tell you that he loves his child. But “love” is a big word. It means different things to different people. Certainly children need love & protaction. A friend of mine who worked in a big hospital told me once about a baby of three months that had convulsions. The doctors could find nothing physically wrong. But they learned that the mother hadn’t wanted the child had ever carried it in her hands or played with it. When the nurses in the hospital began giving the child normal affection, the convulsions stopped. They were a protest, the most violent one the kids could make, against being deprived of love.
Such a mother, fortunately, is very unusual. In most parents the love-instinct is so strong that the main danger is that it can spoil the child. You can tell when a kid is getting the right amount of love by the way he acts. If he’s happy, enthusiastic, he is all right. Another good indication is how much affection he gives back to the world in general - or to you. If he likes to be with you, runs to meet you when you come home don’t have much to worry about.
Kids are born different. Parents must realize this , & deal with each child as an individual. Study your child. The better you know him, the more you will be able to help him. Some youngsters are slow to develop: they’re unsure of themselves; they need to be encouraged & guided. Others seem to know right from the start exactly where they’re going, & the best thing the parent can do, probably, is jump out of the way.
Everybody admits that the years between thirteen & seventeen are tricky. What teen-ages want more than anything else is to be grown-up. So naturally anything that symbolizes adulthood becomes attractive to them. When a teen-ager wants to do something that is against the family rules, they usually say: “But Mother, everybody else is doing it !” It may be hight heels, lipstick, or dating (свидание). It may be smoking. It may be drinking. It may be going steady (дружба мальчика (юноши) с девочкой (девушкой). Most youngsters are reaching for these things much earlier than their parents did. & tis can easily lead to tension & misunderstanding in a family. Let’s face it, in a lot of families it takes the form of a silent war between generations.
If you’ve been teaching the kid honesty & responsibility in all phrases of life from the beginning, he’ll apply those standards when it comes to sex, drinking & the like. If not, not. If parents can foster this sense of responsibility in the child, plus a kind of family pride that certain things just aren’t done by this kind of family, the problem will be solved. The main thing is what you have put into his or her character during the first fourteen or fifteen years of life.
2. Read the title of the text & write how you can paraphrase it.
3. Explain the meaning of the following words & word-combinations from the text, giving English-English equivalents. Use them in your own sentences:
to raise ( a child), to damage one’s confidence, to misjudge smb, youngsters, to treat smb, mature (age), self-sufficient, to pattern oneself on smb, to prevent handicaps, to be deprived of smth, an individual.
4. Look through the contents of the text once again & outline your own plan of the text, entitle each item of the plan. Ask 2-4 key questions to each paragraph.
5. Imagine you to be a psychologist, you give pieces of advice how to bring up children in the Cosmopolitan. Put down recommendations for parents briefly using the text “How to Raise a child” this way : 1... 2..., etc.