We, humans, are animals that learn through imitation. Language, culture, mannerisms, art are all imitated first. Like Plato said in his Rhetoric, all art is an imitation, so are the formation of our expressions too. These expressions covert and overt, constitute our behaviour. Yes, our behaviour is conditioned, is the whole point.
Kids, when you observe, evidently show stages of conditioning and its manifestations according to the respected stage. The first five years of a human being’s life, as most of us know, is the time personality gets framed in its crudest form. It may vary with individual differences, with a year or two being delayed or late.
This is the time when social conditioning by certain factors or agents plays a role in sculpting one’s personality. The social agents are the family, school, media, religion, and the environment beyond the immediate one. They interact with persons at different levels and degrees, but all of them have a presence in the modern man’s life.
The Paradigm Shift in the Concept of Social Conditioning
Owing to the current pandemic, the aforementioned social agents have transformed their existence in people’s lives. To those who are fortunate enough to live with their families, it may be an unchanged factor. Come back to the case of kids, between the ages of 1-7; most of them will be in their early schooling, and many awaiting an admission. The social agent “school” has either come to a sudden halt or not entered some of the kids’ lives.
Say, the times when little ones were dragged to the school bus, bidding adieu with teary eyes, the thing called “physical classrooms”, friends, sharing and caring, pranks and games, and then coming back with a whole lot of the day’s tales – this is not the reality of the hour! The circadian rhythm of weekdays and then a free weekend has changed.
The way religion, as an agent of social change, has undergone a drastic change. Observing Sunday Shabbat, Holy Masses in churches, Namaaz in mosques, seasonal offerings, and adorations in temples, are all at a pause. The process of direct communication with the clergy, priesthood, and the worshippers, the transpersonal communication that happens with the deities in the altar/sanctum sanctorum which regularly took place yet, has involved a shift.
The non-immediate environment
including the extended family, neighbourhood, and casual friends/acquaintances
have been, in an “aesthetic distance”; it’s been a while you saw your kids
playing with the next-door kids. Since social distancing is the motto and the
virus spares no human in its vicinity.
The enormous advancement among all of the social agents is the medium. Or rather, it has become an all-encompassing agent that incorporates almost all of the above-mentioned social agents within it.
Education is online, meetings and conferences, religious
bodies giving sermons, masses, and adorations online, and the future seems
compatible with funerals and marriages telecasted or streamed. For adults who
are digital migrants, all these have to be learned, but to your kids, the
virtual life seems to be the norm.
So How Does the Switching of
Social Agents Transform Kids?
It is their blooming age, and their minds are like the modelling clay they play with. Several studies by child psychologists and social workers have already given the public an idea that the post-lockdown ambience has more adverse effects upon children. A sudden bifurcation from the normal social life will have its negatives, which is imaginable.
The basic idea of co-existence is learned from schools, playing with the neighbourhood, etc. These are channelized into one single track - the possible social interactions are done as interposed communication through new media.
Hence the child gets to know
the world sitting in one room, as a virtual world, and not a real, palpable
world. Therefore, the concrete idea of what the world is, the first impression
or primary conditioning that children get will be far different from what
adults have got.
Here, the question is how to mend children according to this novel circumstance. One key factor is that children of the age group 1 – 7 are digital natives and they don’t have to unlearn preoccupied conventions adults had to. The effort to be unconditioned from an age when everything was offline to an online age is only the adult’s barrier. So as kids are spared from this, why not consider it a scope!
This has many attributes within it. As in, the lockdown has conditioned kids to be confined to homes or comfort spaces in most cases. Nobody has any idea of the duration of this quarantine life, only that it will take time to get things back to place. Whenever there’s an opportunity too, most children will slightly stumble or thwart to socialize in the real world. This being negative, their intercommunication skills must be carefully groomed.
There are advantages to be
derived too! The time span of the COVID-19 pandemic is unpredictable. It is
assumed there is going to be a before and after to the world when the lockdown
is lifted. The future holds plenty of possibilities with virtual
communication. This is the right time you equip your kids in their formative
age itself, on how to excel being a netizen while being a real-worldly citizen.
This is a time you can train
children to:
- How to effectively communicate online, i.e. to
overcome the gap of direct interpersonal communication
- To develop warmth and rapport via online in the
absence of physical proximity
- Make use of multiple channels for effective
communication
- Introduce to, and condition with innovative
technologies like coding, artificial intelligence
- Accelerate the speed and pace of working online
(e.g. Typing speed, shortcuts), to multitask online.
- Virtual – real-life balance
“Or
what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?” sang the Bard of Avon
Shakespeare in his sonnet sixty-five. Yes, time’s foot is fast, so have to be
the humans, whose primary aspiration behind almost all inventions were to race
against time. For that, enlighten and condition your kids -tomorrow’s people!
Written by - Megha Prasad
Edited by - Aishwarya Khandekar
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