9 The child transitions to a predominantly competitive, selfish state

Within the following extracts a timeline describes a predominantly co-operative, selfless state in the child approaching the tipping point:

‘By mid-childhood (7-8 years old) the conscious mind is sufficiently able to make sufficient sense of experience to successfully manage and thus plan activities for not just minutes ahead, but for hours and even days—a development that empowers the individual to be both outwardly marvelling at, and demonstrative of, its intellectual power. It is at this stage of active self-management that the results of some experiments in self-adjustment begin to get the child into trouble.’

(An example of the child receiving a birthday cake and not sharing it is described between these extracts in the original text.)

‘But despite the nasty shock from all the criticism [of his selfish behaviour] and his desire to not make such a mistake again, the boy, while unable to explain his actions, does feel that what he has done is not something bad, not something deserving of such criticism. In fact, by this stage in the child’s mental development, he has become quite proud of the effort he’s taken during his early happy innocent childhood stage to self-manage his life, successfully carrying out all kinds of tentative experiments in self-adjustment—drawing attention to his achievements with excited declarations like ‘Look at me, Daddy, I can jump puddles’, and so on. So the child is only just discovering that this business of self-adjusting is not all fun and that ‘playing’ with the power of free will leads to some serious issues. Indeed, the frustrated feeling of being unjustly criticised for some of his experiments gives rise to the precursors of the defensive, retaliatory reactions of anger, egocentricity and alienation; some angry, aggressive nastiness creeps into the child’s behaviour. Furthermore, in this situation of feeling unfairly criticised, it follows that any positive feedback or reinforcement begins to become highly sought-after, which is the beginning of egocentricity—the conscious thinking self or ego starts to become preoccupied trying to defend its worth, assert that it is good and not bad. (Author underlined) At this point, the intellect also begins experimenting in ways to deny or deflect the unwarranted criticism, which, in this initial, unskilled-in-the-art-of-denial stage, takes the form of blatant lying.’ (Griffith, J., 2016, para. 726) 

The conflict caused by an individual’s co-operative selfless thinking and competitive selfish thinking, and the criticism each receives - the ‘human condition’ - has already taken shape and develops into adolescence:

‘Throughout childhood … the frustration with being criticised for searching for knowledge continued to increase until, in late childhood, the child’s exasperation and resentment caused him to angrily lash out at the ‘injustice of the world’. What happens at the end of childhood is that the child realises that physical retaliation doesn’t make any difference and that the only possible way to solve the frustration is to find the reconciling understanding of why the criticism he is experiencing is not deserved … So in the final stages of childhood it was not only the issue of the imperfections of their own behaviour that so troubled children, but also the issue of the imperfections of the human-condition-afflicted world around them—a psychological collusion that sees children mature from frustrated, extroverted protestors into sobered, deeply thoughtful, introverted adolescents.’ (Griffith, J., 2016, para. 740)

‘… the extreme distress experienced by an adolescent confronting the issue of the imperfection both of the world at large and within themselves became so great it led to a state of such unbearable depression that it forced the adolescent to resign to living in denial of the issue of the human condition and to never again thinking about anything that brought that issue into focus, which … was almost all thinking—an agonising process that resulted in the psychotic (psyche/soul repressed) and neurotic (neuron/mind repressed) state of extreme alienation … with this stage being the one that school teachers described as "the most difficult to teach. The adolescents seem to be at complete odds with what is expected of them."’(Griffith, J., 2016, para. 742)

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