Disobedience by Children Characters in Books and Movies,

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“But then,' thought Alice. 'shall I never get any older than I am now? That'll be a comfort, one way--never to be an old woman--but then--always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that!” (Carroll, 1993 p 21). Did Alice want to grow up? No, but she was not willing to go through the struggles during the concrete and formal operation stages of emotional maturity. Authors and movie directors have long used children characters and actors to portray these inevitable childhood developmental stages of emotional maturity, one of which is the disobedience stage. This paper will discuss several evidence of disobedience by children characters. Sometimes the child's behavior in the story is obviously a disobedient behavior but sometimes you will need to analyze the story to identify points of disobedience displayed by a child character.

Piaget (1896–1980) came up with a theory called cognitive development, which occurs in four stages in every child's emotional development. The first two stages are from birth until the child reaches his or her seventh year of life where they will become aware of its environment by visual, touch and sound. During the third and fourth stage, which is the concrete and formal operations, the child will typically ask questions to better understand the complexions of things surrounding the child and to satisfy their curiosity and exploring mind. Children at these stages usually step out of their comfort zones and experiment new things. They develop different perspectives (Patient Teaching, Loose Leaf Library Springhouse Corporation, 1990). Here is where they are likely to display disobedience towards their parents or caregivers, usually people that are closest to them.

I believe that children commonly...

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...rents do not want to see their children suffer through anything but if children choose to disobey, they would probably understand life lessons better. It might be the cruelest but perhaps the most effective way for children to learn, such in the case of Alice where her body parts were out of porportions in the story. The famous Japanese Proverb, “fall down seven times, get up eight”(Moncur, 1994-2007) is true for many children. Children strive to experience things. Often when they fail, they will get back on their feet and figure another way to succeed. Alice confronted many kinds of struggles while she was in wonderland but she managed to navigate way through and she lastly got back to reality. Every child experiences disobedience behavior and every parent and caregivers experiences dealing with children's disobedience behavior. The cycle is most likely to repeat.

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