“We all come from childhood” - of course, everyone has heard this phrase, but sometimes it just doesn’t occur to us to connect it with the problems that surround us in adulthood.
However, most of them came from an early age. To prevent this, it is necessary to take into account that all stages of childhood involve certain needs of the child.
Formation of human personality
The process of personality formation is the emergence in an individual of historically formed human qualities. What quality will manifest itself in a person depends on several factors.
Personality formation factors:
- Education in childhood and self-education in adulthood
The role of the family in the formation of personality cannot be overestimated. The educational function is the main function of the social institution of the family.
In full-fledged and prosperous families, harmoniously developed individuals grow up. Unresolved childhood problems become factors that prevent a person from developing. The child learns to be a member of society by listening and copying his parents.
Children copy the styles and patterns of behavior, roles, strategies, habitual types of thinking and expressions of feelings of significant adults. Values and ideals, positive and negative (for example, anxiety and suspiciousness) qualities are unconsciously adopted from parents.
Later, parental instructions turn into an “inner voice”, and such moral qualities as conscience, honor, morality and others are formed (or not formed). Becoming an adult, a person uses the knowledge given by his parents about socially approved and acceptable behavior and develops new ones.
- Genetics
People are different because no one person has the same set of genes. A person receives some of the characteristics and components of individuality at birth with a set of genes.
The child experiences and is able to express basic emotions from the first days of life; temperament is determined from birth. Regarding the genetic factor, the role of the family in the formation of personality is no less important than in education. Some mental illnesses are genetically transmitted.
Social influence of reference (significant) groups, relatives, friends, colleagues and other people from the close environment.
- Life experience
Every event that happens to a person affects his inner world, especially if it is a significant incident. Individual experiences can change the course and direction of life. A person develops willpower, character, develops abilities, finds or loses motivation under the influence of events that have happened in his life.
- Mentality and culture
The mentality is influenced by the environment and climate in which representatives of a particular nationality live. Mentality can be defined as the “character” of a people. For example, in southern countries, people are usually active, emotional, and temperamental.
Culture, moral values and morality prevalent in society are instilled in people from birth and guide the process of personality formation. In some cultures, people behave more freely, naturally and casually, while in others, restraint is cultivated, and the need to strictly adhere to the rules of behavior.
Personality formation factors influence it whenever a person finds himself in a new sociocultural environment. The formation of a personality, in essence, is a series of a person’s entry into a new social community and the result of staying in it. How individuality is formed and manifests itself in a particular environment depends on the success of the three phases of development.
Phases of personality development:
- Adaptation
The formation of personality occurs through its acceptance of norms and forms of activity in a social community. The individual strives and to some extent becomes the same as all other people.
- Personalization
At the second stage, a person, realizing that he is “like everyone else,” searches, finds and shows his individual characteristics, actively strives for personalization.
- Integration
This phase determines not only the formation of personality, but also the development of the society in which a person operates. An individual must successfully harmonize his individuality with society and demonstrate those unique distinctive qualities that are useful for people. By benefiting society, a person develops.
If these stages of personality development are not completed, disintegration occurs and the person is not accepted by society. He is either forced out, or he himself isolates himself from people. The formation of personality during disintegration stops and can be reversed. If a person returns to earlier stages of his development, his degradation occurs.
Personality development in preschool age
Stage 1 - Infancy
The period of infancy begins from the first minute of birth and ends at two years.
In addition to a set of reflex abilities, such as: eating, feeling pain and danger; Soon after birth, babies may react to:
- visual images, including the human face;
- sound, including the human voice.
By the middle of the third month, the child recognizes his mother simply by seeing her, and perfectly senses the tone of voice in human speech (for example, he gets scared when someone swears).
It has been established that children under one year of age are able to perceive distance, shape, direction and depth. And by the end of the first year, they distinguish a person from an animal, a toy from a food product.
Infants quickly develop cognitive memory, increasing their ability to anticipate the consequences of any action and events happening around or to them.
The awareness that there are external objects that can influence him encourages the baby to move from simple reflexive movements to coordinated actions. Moreover, he repeats these manipulations intentionally, because they are interesting to him or because he understands that with their help he can achieve the desired goal (for example, pick up a toy).
By 18 months, the child can already mentally imagine certain events and the results to which they will lead. He does not need to experiment and act by trial and error.
By three months of age, the infant exhibits behavioral responses indicating emotions appropriate:
- surprise;
- experience;
- relaxation;
- joy;
- excitement.
Read more: 5 qualities of a successful person
And conditions such as anger, sadness and fear begin to appear in the first year.
The emotional life of all infants is centered on attachment to the mother and other family members. Through interactions with loved ones, babies learn to love and trust them.
From two months, babies smile in response to any affectionate voice, but by six months they accurately distinguish the voices and faces of familiar people and begin to smile only at them. This psychological development of infant personality forms the basis for emotional health throughout childhood.
Stage 2 - Childhood
The second important stage in human development is childhood, which begins at the age of two and continues until the age of 12–13.
The first years of typically developing children are marked by enormous gains in understanding and using language.
In general, children begin to understand speech several months before they utter their first words.
The average child clearly reproduces the first word at 12–14 months, and by the 20th month knows about 50 words.
At first, the baby, even having the maximum number of words in his vocabulary, uses a bunch of “two words.” Three-word combinations are then added. Development progresses and conjunctions and prepositions are added to a sentence consisting only of a subject and predicate.
By the fourth year of life, most children reproduce participle and participial phrases in sentences, and are at the stage of mastering complex rules of literate speech.
In their cognitive abilities, children, to complete logical tasks, cease to rely solely on physical sensations and begin to navigate the world of symbolic images.
By the age of seven, the child no longer needs to control the environment with the help of symbolic thinking or language, he becomes capable of solving new types of logical problems and begins to use mental operations as an elementary, primary form of cognition.
At the age of 7 to 12 years, qualification of ideas, understanding of numbers and time are added to logic. Children develop self-awareness.
Read further: The process of social development of personality
At the age of 10, a child knows exactly what action he will take will cause pain or entail punishment. He needs not only the love of his parents, but also their support, respect and approval. In addition, children of this age are able to control their emotional state and understand the emotional state of other people. This means that at this stage they understand the feelings and point of view of other people, and how they react to this predetermines their moral development in the future.
At 12–13 years old, thoughts about life begin, some begin to feel guilty and/or self-rejection, which means the transition to adolescence.
Stages of development
An active and active person is capable of development. For each age period, one of the activities is leading.
The concept of leading activity was developed by the Soviet psychologist A.N. Leontyev, he also identified the main stages of personality formation. Later his ideas were developed by D.B. Elkonin and other scientists.
The leading type of activity is a development factor and activity that determines the formation of the individual’s basic psychological formations at the next stage of his development.
“According to D. B. Elkonin”
Stages of personality formation according to D. B. Elkonin and the leading type of activity in each of them:
- Infancy – direct communication with adults.
- Early childhood is an object-manipulative activity. The child learns to handle simple objects.
- Preschool age – role-playing game. The child tries on adult social roles in a playful way.
- Primary school age - educational activities.
- Adolescence – intimate communication with peers.
"According to E. Erickson"
Psychological periodizations of individuality development were also developed by foreign psychologists. The most famous is the periodization proposed by E. Erikson. According to Erikson, personality formation occurs not only in youth, but also in old age.
Psychosocial stages of development are crisis stages in the formation of an individual’s personality. The formation of personality is the passage of one after another psychological stages of development. At each stage, a qualitative transformation of the individual’s inner world occurs. New formations at each stage are a consequence of the development of the individual at the previous stage.
New growths can be both positive and negative qualities. Their combination determines the individuality of each person. Erikson described two lines of development: normal and abnormal, in each of which he identified and contrasted psychological new formations.
Crisis stages of personality formation according to E. Erikson:
- The first year of a person’s life is a crisis of confidence
During this period, the role of the family in the formation of personality is especially important. Through the mother and father, the child learns whether the world is kind to him or not. In the best case, basic trust in the world appears; if the formation of personality is anomalous, distrust is formed.
- From one year to three years
Independence and self-confidence, if the process of personality formation occurs normally, or self-doubt and hypertrophied shame, if it is abnormal.
- Three to five years
Activity or passivity, initiative or guilt, curiosity or indifference to the world and people.
- From five to eleven years
The child learns to set and achieve goals, independently solve life problems, strives for success, develops cognitive and communication skills, as well as hard work. If the formation of personality during this period deviates from the normal line, the new formations will be an inferiority complex, conformity, a feeling of meaninglessness, futility of efforts when solving problems.
- From twelve to eighteen years old
Teenagers are going through a stage of life self-determination. Young people make plans, choose a profession, and decide on a worldview. If the process of personality formation is disrupted, the teenager is immersed in his inner world to the detriment of the outer world, but he is unable to understand himself. Confusion in thoughts and feelings leads to decreased activity, inability to plan for the future, and difficulties with self-determination. The teenager chooses the path “like everyone else”, becomes a conformist, and does not have his own personal worldview.
- From twenty to forty-five years
This is early adulthood. A person develops a desire to be a useful member of society. He works, starts a family, has children and at the same time feels satisfied with life. Early adulthood is a period when the role of the family in the formation of personality again comes to the fore, only this family is no longer parental, but created independently.
Positive new developments of the period: intimacy and sociability. Negative neoplasms: isolation, avoidance of close relationships and promiscuity. Character difficulties at this time can develop into mental disorders.
- Average maturity: forty-five to sixty years
A wonderful stage when the process of personality formation continues in conditions of a full, creative, varied life. A person raises and teaches children, reaches certain heights in the profession, is respected and loved by family, colleagues, and friends.
If the formation of a personality is successful, a person actively and productively works on himself; if not, “immersion into himself” occurs in order to escape from reality. Such “stagnation” threatens loss of ability to work, early disability, selfishness and bitterness.
- After sixty years of age, late adulthood begins
The time when a person takes stock of life. Extreme lines of development in old age:
- wisdom and spiritual harmony, satisfaction with life lived, a feeling of its completeness and usefulness, lack of fear of death;
- tragic despair, the feeling that life has been lived in vain, and that it is no longer possible to live it again, fear of death.
When the stages of personality formation are experienced successfully, a person learns to accept himself and life in all its diversity, lives in harmony with himself and the world around him.
