Introduction
Relationships constitute a significant part of students’ social development. Good relationships contribute to positive development of personality. Students who display healthy personality traits are considered to be mature and able to develop intimate relationships with their friends. They have the ability to deal with problems surrounding them with wisdom. In today’s learning environment, students are required to be involved in mature relationships with their peers, parents, and instructors as part of the learning process. This is important for their positive development into adulthood. However, the ability to develop mature and intimate relationships among students is becoming a problem and therefore a need for concern. This paper discusses the causes for developing mature and intimate relationships and ways in which it may affect students’ development.
Development theories that are directly linked to the issue of students’ development of mature and intimate relationships include: the theory of attachment, behavioral, cognitive and social cultural. According to attachment theory, students develop positive intimate relationships with their peers throughout their lives when they had a sense of emotional attachment with their primary caregivers. The theory has been known since history but has recently been developed by psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Ian Suttie. The attachment begins at infancy and eventually shapes the development of the infant’s brain. It is through the attachments that social perception of a child is influenced to enable abilities of developing, sustaining and maintaining good relationships.
Infants do have a lot of emotions to express. These early emotions include anger, joy, and fear. Primary care givers help babies express these emotions and as a result they develop skills of interactions. Such students are also unable to understand feeling of others and develop see situations from the point of view of others. Consequentially, they cannot interact positively with anyone and therefore substitute emotional attachment to objects rather than people. It therefore implies that students who have the ability to develop mature and intimate relationship with their peers and elders had good emotional attachments with their primary care givers. Display of mature and intimate relationships can begin to become obvious in student’s behavior as early as elementary school level.
Behavioral theory can also be used to understand the causes of development of mature and intimate relationship in students. This theory asserts that a student’s mind is similar to a machine and therefore responds to external forces in order to develop. Past experiences are sufficient to make the mind absorb knowledge for future behavioral display. Knowledge is therefore absorbed and not constructed. This implies that a student’s development is measurable in quantitative terms. For a student to have intimate and mature relationship, he or she must have absorbed knowledge of good relationships through past experiences. Watson (1930) is the proponent of this theory where he says that, it is possible to control or predict behaviors of animals and humans scientifically through reinforcement or punishment. Watson also asserts that at teenage, most lifetime behaviors are developed and therefore behavior change occur at this age.
Through the experiences that students go through in school, they are able to develop mature and intimate relationships which other people. Classroom and learning activities that mainly involve interaction of students are the stimuli that students would respond to positive social skills for mature and intimate relationships. If a teacher keeps on reinforcing behaviors that lean towards development of mature personality especially during teenage, then the student would display good relationships with peers and elders.
Cognitive theory also brings another perspective that explains students’ development in terms of mature and intimate relationships. According to this approach, people develop behaviors through internal and perpetual construction of knowledge. Knowledge construction occurs as the student interacts with his or her environment. A past events or experiences helps to develop fresh knowledge in the minds of students. Students who display mature and intimate relationships according to this theory have must have developed the concept of good relationships from previous experiences that they have gone through. These experiences could either occur at home or in school.
Social cultural theory introduces the idea of cultural and social background of the student in shaping how they relate with other people. According to the proponents of this theory, it is hard to separate a student from his or her historical context. The theory also suggests that people’s social skills and thoughts are directly influenced by culture. This means that, students who can develop and maintain mature relationships with other people, have a cultural background where people in that society are very friendly. Different cultures give different provisions for the way people do things and interact with others.
Effect of mature and intimate relationships on students’ development
Mature and intimate relationships give students the skill to interact positively with other students as well as their teachers. They gain an ability to understand and empathize with others and easily provide good advice to problems relating to social skills. Relationships as mentioned earlier are an everyday part of students’ lives. They are forced to develop and polish social skills through interactions with others in school. There are numerous classroom and learning activities that require students to interact and relate with maturity according to their age. Full learning experience can only be attained when the students have developed positive intimate relationships. Students with mature personality traits usually show certain characteristics in their interaction with other people. They are able to expand their personal feeling and develop concern for other people.
Insecurity is a negative effect that student develop when they fail to have mature and intimate relationships. On one extreme end, students would begin to feel uncomfortable in a group and always want to be alone. This effect can be made worse when no attention is given to the student by either his or her peers or the teachers. They always feel the need for attention in order to begin to express their emotions. Unlike students who are developed in terms of having mature relationships, those underdeveloped seek for validation and feedback from other people of their personal worth. Self confidence and self esteem are adversely affected in emotionally immature students. On the other extreme end, students can seek attention in a more pronounced way; by becoming violent and unruly. This too is an effect of immature intimate relationship. Such students may begin to bully others in order to get attention from their peers. They may become uncontrollable in class so that teachers give them attention.
Immature emotional development therefore can affect students’ all-round development. Since they experience emotional imbalance, their learning can be affected. Positive development into adult life can become a problem according to behavioral theory. The critical age upon which people change and develop behaviors is during adolescence. This means that if a student is unable to control his anger before his peers and begins bullying others then such a student would have problems obeying authority in his adult life. Developing intimate and mature relationships would be a problem because of the inability to balance emotions.
Intimate adult relationships are built on the experiences that students have with others during class. Stable relationships depend on how mature a student becomes in terms of dealing with his or her emotions. Positive development into adulthood becomes interrupted by the negative social experiences that students are exposed to. Attention is necessary and both parents and teachers have to provide the attention which students need for their positive social development.
Group activities are an essential part of the learning process that requires students to have good social skill including the ability to develop and maintain intimate relationships with peers. Group activities help develop social skills such as sharing of ideas and building other people’s ideas. These skills can easily be expressed by students who can develop mature and intimate relationships. During group activities, it possible to notice students who cope easily and those who get carried away over minor things. Ability to develop mature and intimate relationships is helpful in interaction of students and teachers. It is quite easy for a student with self confidence and high self esteem to approach a teacher for any assistance
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