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Most people can agree that humans imitate other humans and our parents are our first human examples of how humans behave. In this post, I will offer a personal example of a child imitating the behavior of an adult and why it’s so important to mind our own behaviors as parents.
Children mirror the behaviors of adults. It’s not always a direct imitation of them but more learning from their parents’ behavior to emulate them. Children often imitate or copy their parents.
I haven’t found a study that indicates that a child’s behavior is determined by the parents’ behavior but more along the lines that children imitate and emulate their parents’ behaviors as they grow.
A parent is a role model that a child looks to in order to learn how to interact with the world around them.
What happens when a parent models an undesirable behavior? A child generally gets in trouble for acting out or misbehaving. What children need most is a good example of how they are expected to behave.
A child may come to believe that they are simply a bad person. Many people seem to believe that children only copy simple adult behaviors like making faces, gestures, and language.
That’s not the limit to what a child imitates. A child will often emulate the parents behaviors too. Children copy their parents’ social behaviors such as how a parent yells at her spouse and others including how the adult interacts with the child.
Learning through imitation is a human quality therefore it is a normal human behavior for a child to learn how to act from watching their parents. We are all wired that way.
How does that affect a child’s behavior? The child begins to mirror the parent’s behavior and if the behavior of the parent is an undesirable behavior from the child, the child will get in trouble without understanding why.
My mother would say “Do as I say, not as I do“. By the time I became a teenager, my mother’s undesirable behaviors such as cussing and smoking were at the forefront. Although I didn’t start cussing until after I was an adult, there were plenty of bad habits I learned from her and my father that I got punished for.
Example of how a child may imitate parental behavior.
It was 1972. The Vietnam war was winding down. America was divided because many people were against the war and it wasn’t being called a war back then. The young veterans that were coming back were being spit on and treated like crap. Many that came back alive came back with PTSD from the horrors they saw. It was a time of civil unrest, just like in 2020.
Five-year-old Little Tina spent every morning actively watching children’s shows such as Sesame Street and The Electric Company. She would practice reading every chance she got. sounding out letters and then words. She learned and imitated what she saw on the show and from her mother and older siblings who would read to her.
Little Tina saw Mommy’s Reader’s Digest Magazine on the coffee table. Mommy reads that every afternoon and Little Tina wanted to be just like Mommy.
Tina asked Mommy for permission to read her book. Mommy said it was alright as long as Tina was careful with it. Everyone in the house saw little Tina with the book in her hands but never thought anything about it.
Then little Tina started asking how to pronounce big words and what they mean. Mommy thought little Tina was watching adult stuff on television but when she checked it, the television was set on cartoons or some other child-friendly show. Mommy didn’t expect little Tina to read yet.
Little Tina began to read these stories and with the help of her older siblings and Mommy, her comprehension grew quickly. Little Tina enjoyed these stories every day.
It was almost time to start kindergarten when her older sister and Mommy discovered she could read. It was too late. Little Tina was already being influenced by the stories along with the influence from her family to create stories.
Since Daddy told stories when Tina would ask questions like, “how did we end up in California?” Daddy said, “We got lost and ended up here and we will never find our way back home so we have to live here.”
Tina thought that’s what people are supposed to do. The art of story telling is a good skill to have and little Tina was already on the road to telling stories.
She watched her family tell stories too. Mommy told stories about her life and that is how little Tina learned about story telling.
Tina followed that example of how to interact with others and made up a story. Little Tina was a very creative little girl. She decided to try her hand at making up a story about little Mary. This story had the influence of the triumphant stories in the Reader’s Digest.
Little Tina read fantastic stories about adoption. First there has to be a tragedy then a triumph.
Little Tina created the story that the real Mary died and their parents found the Mary we have in the gutter and brought her home then adopted her and that is how she came to live with us.
The family was very upset at little Tina for making up such a story. But little Tina had no idea why that story was bad. Daddy tells made up stories and people write stories all the time. Little Tina told true stories about her dolls’ lives such as her favorite doll Elizabeth who survived horrible things with little Tina such as the ongoing sexual abuse and traumas such as the house fire. Tina didn’t make up any more stories about the family but she took what she learned from the Reader’s Digest about how to tell her real-life stories.
This made up story was not a desirable type of story but because the adults and older siblings made up stories with the added influence of outside stories, little Tina created a story that was equal to the adult stories. Little Tina didn’t understand the difference between true stories and made up ones and she didn’t understand lies yet.
Little Tina wasn’t trying to cover up something and she wasn’t trying to be deceptive. She was simply copying her parents’ behavior of reading and telling stories then she emulated them.
What is Parental Modeling?
Parental Modeling is basically the behavior of the parent that is seen or experienced by the child.
Parental Modeling is being a role model. Children watch and listen to everything a parent says and does. My mother used to point out how we were imitating others with that saying “Monkey See, Monkey Do”. It’s more like “children do what children see“.
At what age do children learn to imitate others?
Babies respond to parents at just a few weeks old. By 15 months infants show some signs of imitation but in studies done on infants seem to be more on the study of emulation.
“Emulation is for example where a child may learn from watching a model that the door on a doll house can be opened and the subsequent behavior may match that of the model, not because his goal is to reporduce her actions, but because he too wants to open the door,” says Susan S. Jones on ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
What we understand here is children learning how to interact with the world around them by watching the behaviors that are modeled by the parents.
The child learns from this observation but a child also learns how to socially interact by how parents interact with them which is how children seem to emulate parents in a noticeable way.
Sometimes this emulation and also imitation is seen as acting out but it really is an opportunity to help the child learn how to express their feelings and socially interact in socially acceptable ways while the parent is trying to modify their own behaviors to teach their children how to behave in an acceptable way. It is a very human trait for humans to learn this way.
Why It’s important for Parents to be aware of their own behaviors.
children are said to be like sponges. I’ve been told that since I had my first baby. I think it’s true in the way children learn and develop. We teach our children what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable by how we interact with them and how they see us interact with others.
Children are learning not only how to do things but they are also developing their self identity and where they fit in the world. If a child learns how to interact in unhealthy ways, the child will struggle with social interactions.
With untrue stories in little Tina’s life from her family when she asked questions like all children do, Tina was not only confused about why and how the family ended up living in California, but she learned how to read and tell stories just like them.
If you want your child to behave in specific ways, it’s important to be the role model of that behavior or set of behaviors. Be your child’s example of desired behaviors.
