What are the fundamental drives in children?

What are the fundamental drives in children? What are the important motives directing their conduct? How are these developed or modified? Whence do motives come, or what are their sources? What is the relative importance of original nature and learning in motivation? What part do purposes, attitudes, ideals, and interests play in motivating childhood behavior? In what things are children interested at various ages from birth to maturity? These are important problems to which we must now turn our attention if we would secure a fruitful understanding of child nature.

Teachers, parents, and others who guide and direct the behavior of children can do so to best advantage, only if they really understand them. Obviously, such an understanding is dependent upon knowing why the child at a particular time does what he does.

A nine-year-old girl, large for her age, comes home with her best shoes not only covered with mud, but her stockings or socks are also covered with mud halfway to her knees, and splotches of mud are on her dress. The mother has told her "a thousand times" to keep out of the mud and has scolded and punished her for getting her shoes and other clothes muddy. To her the girl's behavior is perverse indeed, and the child may be punished severely for disobeying her mother's previous ultimatum, especially if the mother is crowded with work, has a headache, or is under some other strain. A boy of eight, going to school, takes a short-cut across the corner of a large newly seeded lawn, although he has been told repeatedly to keep out. He is a quiet, well-behaved boy, but persists in cutting across the lawn despite scoldings and threats to notify his parents and the police. Regardless of what is done to handle these two cases, the mother and the lawnowner probably can secure a more effective modification of behavior if they understand why the girl got so muddy and why the boy uses the much objected-to short-cut. The girl, taunted and teased by a young bully's remarks, finally in desperation gives chase through a muddy garden and settles the matter. While on his way to school when in the first grade the boy had been very badly frightened by a cross dog on the next street. He had cut through a vacant lot, and for two years had been going to school this way. A new house had been built and the lot graded and seeded. The boy was still using the accustomed way although the cross dog no longer lived on the next street.

Rational guidance and control of children are contingent upon understanding the motives which activate them.

Some of the earlier attempts at understanding human behavior postulated a series of entities known as instincts which acted as drives, or springs to action. Thus, an individual was said to have a drive or urge to do those things which led to selfpreservation because he had an instinct or instinctive urge of selfpreservation. He was said to want to be with other persons because of the drive from the gregarious or social instinct. If he tore things to pieces this was because of his instinct of destructiveness, or if he put things together in some way it was because of the constructive instinct! On the whole such attempts to understand human motives have not carried us very far. Part of the diffculty, but not all, lies in the fact that the term instinct has been used with at least two diverse meanings. Sometimes it means stimulus arousal of an activity, and sometimes it means a pattern or kind of activity itself. Thus it is used to mean the motivation of an activity, as in pugnacity, curiosity, gregariousnes, parental love, and the like; whereas in other cases it refers to the kind of activity, as when it was alleged that walking, manipulation, collecting, etc., were instincts.

Trying to understand complex human behavior by postulating such entities seems to break down in the study of actual cases. The discussion of mass activity in several previous chapters should make it clear that definite, clear-cut, specific, fixed-inadvance patterns of behavior are rare indeed, and that diffuse, non-specific mass activity is generally the rule, the former developing after experience, learning, or-habit formation has played its part in the infant's development. The definite patterns of response called for by the instinct theory are not found upon careful observation of infants during the first few days or weeks of post-natal life; neither does it seem fruitful to suppose entities (instincts or springs of action) concealed inside us, which, when stimulated, make us do this, that, or some other thing. Such a description of human motivation has little to commend it aside from tradition.