Doubting Socially Accepted Reasons for Children’s Mischief

Parents often assert that the reason why children behave mischievously, which they claim to be similar to rebelliousness, is simply due to their desire for attention. Yet to my current knowledge, I am not aware of any scholars of psychology specializing in child behaviour maintaining the attention-desiring hypothesis in academia. In fact, I have not seen any paper that states that attention seeking is the absolute reason for mischief. I have to suspect that parents’ assertions about their unfounded hypothesis if guided by the media and popular cultures – sources that most likely to perpetuate hypotheses that are only most appealing, not truthful, to its targeted audience.

The attention-seeking hypothesis is a myth. It has no grounds on the truth of the matter and is only claimed to be true based on testimonial evidence and the appeal to the psyche, meaning unfounded upon hard objective evidence – note, however, that most conspiracy theories and religious hypotheses are also based on such unreasonable types of evidence too. These hypotheses are believed to be true only because of the parents’ supposedly childhood and parenting experience. I see no grounds to believe such claims because of the principles of the evaluation of testimonial evidence. The first principle of truthfulness, that is, if the source has reason to lie, has an obvious answer, no, since the individual may sincerely want to spread personal knowledge to another – if such a myth is to be considered knowledge at all. The second principle of the evaluation of such evidence is reliability. The individual may be somewhat reliable, but the listener may reasonably doubt the individual’s proposition. Here we have to wonder if the individual imparting the knowledge is well read in the field of psychology, who is specially interested in child or adolescent behavior. Ironically, most people are not well read about many important issues, and to put that further into context, over 90% of the human population are not critical thinkers. Leading from reliability is the principle, or the question of expertise, that is if the individual is an expert in child or adolescent behavior. As I had just mentioned, according to my current understanding, I have not yet seen any scholar in psychology propose the hypothesis that children conduct mischievous acts are in fact seeking attention. Rather, non-scholars of psychology mostly assert this proposition. In conclusion, if the average individual proposes such a hypothesis, and is unable to reasonably justify their belief and produce scientific evidence in support of their proposition, one would do better to cast doubt on their claim.

An alternative explanation that seems more plausible to explaining children’s mischief is their need for constant assurance, or re-assurance, and mental security. This proposition I hear most from experts of Psychology. Children do not develop logical thinking abilities until a slightly older age, about seven to eleven years old. Thus, children younger than that do not typically have such a level of intellectual alertness, and often drift in their own world – their perception of life. Often there is a lot of experimentation at the younger stages of their lives, sucking balls or eating dirt, and do not typically think of the consequences or significance of their actions. They are often blind to conflict, not conflict among others but conflict that is being propagated by them, seeing a world that seeks experimentation and full of discovery. When something goes wrong, not according to what they conventionally believe, they react quite terribly, crying loudly or beating other (reactions to unpredictable events are usually characterized by the ways in which parents themselves deal with stress). When children disobey orders, those younger than seven years old, they are not necessarily in a revolt, but are simply are result of their inability to understand the significance of that type of conformity. Sometimes even clinginess is in fact a sign of their diminishing mental security, or self-confidence, that can be characterized as feeling threatened about their sense of belonging to close ones. It is precisely because of their small thinking capacities that most psychologists use a method called Behavioral Modification to fix children’s mischief, where if the child displays a desired behavior or acts according to orders, rewards are giving. This gives children a sense of authority over their won rewards and another sense of mental peacefulness, knowing that the world in their little perspectives still needs more discovering and personal experimentation.

Therefore, I would like to end my argument by re-stating a more popularized proposition that is asserted by experts of Psychology, that is that children’s mischievous behavior is due to a lack of mental security and re-assurance. The hypothesis contended by non-scholars of psychology, that attention seeking is the absolute reason for mischief, is simply a myth, and reasonable doubt should be cast upon such unfounded claims – unless research findings are presented and conclude the contrary.