Behavioral Influences: How Technology Shapes Childrens Social and Cultural Development

Abstract

Social and Cultural Influences on Children Advancement in technology over the past few decades has defined significant changes in the way people interact, live, learn and view issues. Technology has defined ease in communication, enabling people to interact more freely and at ease compared to five decades ago. To this effect, one can argue that advancement in technology has enhanced the development and acquisition of new behaviors based on the social and cultural influences children encounter in their development. However, cognitive and behavioral theories play a significant role in explaining such developments in human behavior from childhood through adulthood. Nevertheless, though both approaches agree that behavior becomes acquired through learning, they differ significantly on how the behavior becomes fully learned (House, 2017). To this effect, this essay will focus on behavioral perspective while analyzing the social and cultural influences on children that determine their behaviors in the long run. The behavioral theory analyzes human behavior by examining the person’s environment and learned association. Behaviorists explain the process of learning behavior in terms of the stimulus-response relationship whereby the stimulus and response must work continuously for learning to occur. They assume that environment influences behavior whereby people's behavior remains defined by their interactions with the environment (Kim-Knauss and Lang, 2021). Children/people become molded or conditioned to respond in a particular manner based on their responses during their interactions and developments. To this effect, learning and acquisition of behavior become described through stimuli and answers, which remain well expressed through observable/physical changes/events rather than events inside a person’s mind/head. Based on the behavioral approach, the changes in behaviors that children currently express are physical and real; thus do not require any analysis of their mind to determine the extent of the effect that the social and cultural influences have on them. Most behaviorists conducted their experiments using animals with classical conditioning posing as the most notable experiment that expressed how behavior becomes acquired by considering the physical changes that the victim expresses. For example, suppose a dog became conditioned using a bell and food and developed a new physical behavior. In that case, this theoretical perspective proves potentially able to define how advancement in technology plays a significant role in determining powerful social and cultural influences on children today and the days to come. According to behaviorists, peoples behave or act in response to stimuli that occur naturally or because of a learned response. Behavior can be observed without consideration of thoughts and feelings, which best explains why children any issue that the child encounters during their development may affect them at current and in the future. Divorce and stepfamilies are problematic issues that can lead to changes in child behavior. Parents respond differently in divorces which, if negative, impacts the Child's behavior negatively. For instance, an extrovert child whose social activeness has remained vibrant for years may experience an increase in antisocial behavior, anxiety, and depression upon exposure to a divorce/stepfamily environment. The child may become aggressive as the new life may prove unbearable or so comfortable for them in that they feel no control over them. However, depending on how parents handle the divorce process, the child's feeling acquired and expressed physically may quickly end or become permanently acquired. The child responds directly to the physical outcomes of their parents' actions. Single parents tend to nurture their children so much to the extent of spoiling them. Most single-parented children are associated with discipline problems as they feel less authoritative powers to control their behaviors than children with both parents. Single parenting becomes a challenge when children copy their independence and employ it on their personality. Such kids end up becoming uncontrollable in the future. When a mother works outside the home, the children tend to acquire...