Adlerian Theory (Based on children)

Adlerian Theory (Based on children)

Introduction

Understanding the why of human behavior has led many people to establish theories. Alfred Adler introduced the Theory of Individual Psychology to describe a particular view of human beings. Alfred Adler is an important personality theorist who is credited with the construction of Individual Psychology (Watkins, 1983). As a child, Alfred suffered from rickets, which kept him unable to walk up to four years. Alfred Adler chose the term individual psychology to his conception of personality because he was interested in investigating the unity of the person.

Adler's theory argues that to understand a particular individual we need to understand his/her attitude and relationship with the world. Therefore, for Adler, the human beings are as a social and cultural thing rather than as a criaturasexual. According to Adler human beings are motivated by social interests. Adler noted that many people respond to these organic inferiority with compensation. He argued that the conduct of the person always have a purpose, a goal. The purpose of behavior ultimately is to seek satisfaction. It also states that people have physical and psychological inferiority. However, the human being must not be controlled by these inferiority or internal forces such as instincts, impulses or unconscious. These factors will influence but not determine behavior, because it considers the person as a free being in the sense that it has the ability to choose their behavior. In this paper we are going to focus on children. The purpose of this paper is to let readers know about the importance of this theory and how and what Alfred Adler argued on children. According to the birth order theory of Adler birth order of a child is one of the significant elements in life as it helps others to predict the kind of a person (Adler, 1998). According to him each position in the family has positive and negative however it depends on the way children respond to that position.

According to Adler there are different types of birth order positions, the eldest daughter or son is supplanted by youngest children that can lead to positive attitude towards responsibility or increase insecurity which is a negative thing. Those born in the middle are the most difficult to categorize because they are grouped in unusual situations. Usually they are good team players, reliable, consistent and fair. But do not feel as comfortable when making decisions as the firstborn. One of the interesting paradoxes about them is that while they tend to be mediators and negotiators, all birth orders generally are more discreet, keeping things to themselves. They are experts at seeing both sides of a problem and always wanted to make everyone happy. On the negative side, have difficulty setting limits. They tend to blame themselves when others fail.

Children in middle position having older sister or brother to model their behavior after can lead negatively to rebellious behavior or healthy ambition positively; again it depends on the personality or the adult sister ...