Mayall's Argumentative Essay: Are Children Free?

We can question to what extent can it be argued that children are free? Some developmental psychologists would categorize children as: “the legitimate objects of adult attention, rather than persons in their own right.” (Mayall, 1994, p2). Suggesting that children are not really free. Subsequently, what are the implications of this for the ways children are treated by people in different roles, for example: parents or teachers? We can focus on this question by drawing on certain perspectives including: philosophical, genetically and the reasoning’s behind why some young children commit crimes. As humans, we like to think we have a certain philosophical notion of “Free Will”: This can be defined as: “the power of agents to be the ultimate creators

If determinism is true then we can argue a weakness of the argument is that humans are not responsible or have control for what happens to them, according to Young (1991), some even go as far as to say “if we are not free agents then morality itself becomes of no account”. This causes problems for human acts of unkindness, how do we punish a criminal, if he has no moral responsibility for the murder he just committed? Moreover, some approaches in psychology see the source of determinism as being outside the individual, a key position known as environmental determinism. Otherwise known as the Social learning theory. This is the theory that people learn new behaviour through reinforcement or punishment or via observation. People learn through observing others' behaviour. If people observe positive, desired outcomes in the observed behaviour, they are more likely to model, imitate, and adopt the behaviour themselves (Nixon, 2016, Psychological Determinism Lecture). An example which highlights this is the work of “Bandura (1961), he found that children who observed aggression against a bobo doll were more likely to imitate that aggression and to be more aggressive generally in their play.” (Slater and Paul, 2014). In addition, if the children usually observed their parents being violent then Bandura concluded that those children in turn would become violent parents themselves through observation and