It is often considered immature and overly childish if a child of certain age still wants mommy around all the time or wants to hold her hand. More so if you’re a male child, you just have to grow up faster than your age. You are not expected to still be crying for sweets at the age of four or still be crying because your baby sister wants to play with your favourite toy. Damnit you’re a big boy, just grow up already!
Emotional needs of children are mostly ignored these days because, I don’t know, times are changing and there is no place in the world for weak needy men? You’ve got to learn to be independent, little man!
And so from a tender age of four or five we require kids to ‘grow up’ and stop acting like sissies.
These kinds of behaviour towards, and expectation from these kids leave them emotionally scarred and consequently have damning effects in their adult life.
A kid that wants to be around mommy so much that mommy begins to feel irritated and thus starts scolding him would soon have developed in his mind that he is not worthy of mommy’s love…or worse, he is not worthy of anyone’s love.
Psychologist Harry Harlow performed a series of experiments that produced the Attachment Theory in which he separated infant monkeys from their mothers shortly after birth, and isolated them in small cages. When these baby monkeys were given a choice between a metal dummy-mother fitted with a milk bottle, and a soft cloth-covered dummy with no milk, the baby monkeys clung to the cloth-covered mothers even though they had no milk.
This showed that infants do not only require food, they have emotional needs that should be met to ensure their proper growth.
What was the outcome of the experiments? Since the cloth mothers were dummies and couldn’t respond to the affections of the poor infant monkeys, they consequently suffered from psychological and social problems, and grew up to be neurotic and asocial adults.
We are left to wonder if this explains why some humans are asocial and suffer a lot of psychological problems…just because mommy and daddy wanted them to grow up too quickly and be able to lead a normal life when they grew up.
See the irony?
Kids would definitely outgrow the stage of neediness–at least most kids would. Of course, a balance is required. I’m not saying over-pamper the kid. Just don’t be in too much of a hurry to want them to grow up.
Most parents after their children have grown past the needy age of childhood and they’d become teenagers often long for those times when their kids were willing to tell them everything and cry for something.
They’ll grow up. Just don’t rush them. Satisfy their emotional needs. Form an emotional bond with them at that tender age. They’ll grow up fine.
