What can parents and teachers do so that their children and pupils develop integrated personality? Personality integration depends on many factors such as maturation, inheritance, culture, health, knowledge, home and school influence – yet it is possible to deduce a few general principles for guiding personality integration. These are as follows:
(a) Children should be encouraged and helped to set themselves well-defined goals and objectives which they can hope to achieve. Goals which are too high to reach may cause frustrations. Let us give them experiences that engender in them feelings of success rather than of failure and humiliation.
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(b) The home and school environments should be stimulating and secure so that chances of frustration, anxiety, fear and uncertainly are reduced as much as possible. Encouragement, praise and appreciation are more effective than fault-finding, reprimand and scolding or ridicule.
(c) Life in homes and schools should be so- planned that children are able to express themselves fully, and they know they belong to parents and to teachers. Feelings of belongingness and acceptance are great antidotes to disintegration of personality functioning.
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(d) Children should be helped to build their self esteem, to develop a sense of worthiness and a positive ego-image.
(e) Their desire to make friends, to like people, to think well of them, to do good to others and to share common interests should be satisfied through encouragement.
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(J) For proper personality integration, development of self-knowledge, self-understanding and self-acceptance is very much needed. Correct self-knowledge and self-understanding will give them an idea of realistic goals and tasks, what they can achieve and thus avoid unhappiness and frustration due to too high goals and consequent failure.
In short, our children, from infancy onwards to adolescence, should have satisfactions of two types, (i) affectionate, warm, security giving satisfactions (ii) self-enlarging, ego building, and adequacy giving satisfactions. Equipped with these satisfactions the possibility of their succumbing to behaviour deviations and emotional disturbance will be reduced to a minimum and the possibility of personality integration will be increased.