What is self-development exactly? Well in the simplest terms it is when someone’s personality or characteristics are evolving, and of course developing. The person that we become in life is because of the social interactions that we make. These social interactions shape who we become and can always change, this is where we get ‘self’. Self is a person’s identity that comes from past social interactions that have shaped the person. For someone to identify their self they have to be able to see themselves from a different perspective.
George Mead was one of few contributors to the sociological perspectives of self-development. George studied self, being able to engage in this process wasn’t something that any of us were born with. (Mead 1934) Interaction helps us to learn to view ourselves from other perspectives. When we do this, it allows us to become self-aware. It is crazy how we can go from being tiny little babies to humans that are now self-aware. Mead believed that there was a path that we all took when it came to development.
Small children who are only capable of imitation would be in the stage which is known as the preparatory stage. During this stage children cannot grasp the concept of being able to imagine things. They are only able to copy the interactions that they are familiar with. After this stage is another stage called the play stage. During the play stage older children like to begin to try and take on a role that another person might have. For example, a child might try to play the same video games that their older siblings always play just to get a feel for what being the older sibling might be like. After this is the game stage, during this stage children understand that there are more roles that they can have, and they begin to understand how these roles interact with other roles. As an example, a child that is in stage could be aware of the different responsibilities that people who work in a school might have. Being able to understand the idea of the generalized other, which is behavioral expectations that we have in our society, is the final stage that we all go through. This is the stage where one can truly imagine how they are viewed. They understand what it is to have a self.
Lawrence Kohlberg was trying to get his doctoral degree at Harvard University when he became interested in the moral development of children. To study his theory of moral development. Kohlberg interviewed 72 young white boys, from lower and middle class, asking them all a question that would show what their morals were: Would it be acceptable for a poor man to steal medicine for his dying wife? The response Kohlberg got from the boys is what gave him the foundation of his six-stage theory of moral development.
In the first and second stages of Kohlberg’s work, which he claimed to be preconventional, the children are developed believing that “right acts” are acts that abide by the law. On the contrary, in the third and fourth stages, which he called conventional, “right acts” are believed to be acts that are of the approval and rules of society. Finally, in the fifth stage, which was postconventional, the children recognize that they should respect the laws and the moral rules, despite possibly acknowledging these rules as invalid (Kohlberg, 1981). The sixth stage is one that Kohlberg says isn’t always achieved, and is in fact rare when it is achieved.
Conclusion
In conclusion there were many contributors that gave us a better understanding on self-development and I only shared a couple of people that were a huge influence in this topic. George Mead provided us with his theory of self-development and taught us that there is a path that we all take when developing our own “self.” Lawrence Kohlberg taught us moral development and also shared a path that we take when developing our morality. While writing about these two I learned a lot about how social interactions shape the person that we become and I have become more informed about the topic in general.