Prejudice In Children Research Paper

Prejudice and discrimination can generate social and emotional tension amongst children and by not educating and teaching children the differences between other cultures and beliefs in a positive manner from an early age may lead to resentment and hostility in later life towards other cultures.

Prejudice is a kind of mindset that will lead to criticizing others who did not follow this mindset. A child that live surrounded by a society full of prejudice will definitely affect his/her views to the world. In the film Billy Elliot by Stephen Daldry , Billy the son of a coal miner who comes from a poor family lives in an oppressive environment that full with prejudice. It affects Billy a lot from pursuing his dreams to be a ballet dancer and put him through a hard time even though he is so passionate about ballet. This environment had an enormous impact on Billy as he is being stop from chasing his dream and causing him to view the world negatively. The prejudices that affects Billy’s life is the preconception to gender stereotype , society’s

Prejudice is an opinion or attitude about a group of people that is based upon lack of understanding or incorrect information. It is making assumptions about children and young people because they belong to a particular group. Prejudiced attitudes can all too often be found among children, even at a very young age. Research has shown that children are capable of holding prejudices and negative attitudes towards others from the age of three. There are so many pressures on children to fit in and to conform with expected appearances and behaviour that they may be discriminated against and bullied if they do not. Both discrimination and prejudice can take a range of forms and can take place for a multitude of reason and usually occurs through lack of knowledge and understanding of diversity, every childcare professional must be conscious of the fact that a child or young person will experience some form of prejudice or discrimination against them throughout their time in school. It is down to us adults to educate and teach children to understand and respect other peoples differences in order for them to grow into mature, respectful young adults, to do this, children should be encouraged to explore and discover other cultures, beliefs and the environment around them. We should be vigilant to ensure that children respect and embrace diversity. Children can experience prejudice and discrimination the same way as adults due to race, religion, age, sex, culture or ethnicity.

When a child has a different race or religion it can cause prejudice and discrimination

Children and young people can experience prejudice and discrimination from their earliest social encounters with others. Prejudice is an unreasonable or unfair dislike or preconceived negative view of individuals belonging to a particular group. Discrimination is the bigoted behaviour of singling out a particular person or group for different treatment than the others. Both of these unacceptable responses usually arise as a result of ignorance of the benefits of diversity and a primal impulse of ‘group mentality’.

People are not born prejudiced. “It is something that is learned". It can be learned in the same way other attitudes and values are learned, primarily through association, reinforcement and modeling. For example, children may learn to associate a particular ethnic group with poverty, crime, violence and other negative things” (2006 Anti-Defamation League). Also, prejudice in “children may be reinforced by listening to derogatory ethnic jokes, especially when others laugh along or think they're cool”. Lastly, children may simply imitate the prejudices of their older family members and popular friends. Prejudice is to pre- judge. “Prejudice is a baseless and usually negative attitude toward members of a group. Common features of prejudice

Whatever the age and whatever the reason, the impact and effect of discrimination and prejudice on children and young people can be extreme and can also have far reaching consequences for the sufferers – even following them into adulthood.

In this modern world, prejudice is still a universal problem we still have yet to overcome. Although it is true that our society is much less prejudiced than it was 40-50 years ago, we are still struggling to create racial harmony in a world that is so diverse in terms of racial group, sexual orientations, ethnicity, nationality, religions, and so on. I think the core of prejudice comes from stereotyping, which is the generalization of motives, characteristics, or behavior to an entire group of people. In the world where media propaganda is ubiquitous, often times most stereotypes are not formed on valid experiences, instead they are based on images publicized by the mass media, or even created within our heads after seeing and hearing examples from many different sources, like movies, or even hearsay. Stereotyping is more powerful than we think, because it allows those false pictures to control our thinking that leads us to assign uniform characteristics to any person in a group, without consideration of the actual difference between members of that particular group.

The Velvet Glove written by Jackman (1994) reflects on Sherif et al.’s 1961 Summer Camp studies. Sherif and his colleagues manufactured methods of intergroup hostility that resonated the violence of intergroup conflict in the real world. They presented that children with no previous history of hostility or prejudice could promptly acquire several of the hallmarks of prejudice if placed under the right conditions, including negative stereotyping, voluntary isolation, and verbal and physical aggression (Dixon et al., 2012). In my opinion, I agree with Dixon et al. (2012) that prejudice can be learned primarily through unconscious learning that a child obtains and incorporates the prejudices predominant in his/her society.

Prejudice and Discrimination are an all to common part of our cognitive social being, but many social psychologists believe that it can be stopped, but only with the help of social conditioning.

Prejudice form malignant results and create atrocious

According to the psychologist, Richard Brislin, there are four reason why prejudice is widespread. People hold certain prejudice because 1, they can read to reward. 2, do not want to believe unpleasant things about themselves. 3, they serve to reinforce aspects of life that are highly valued. 4, such attitudes allow them to organize and structure their world in a way that make sense to them. All of them can be applied to the

Discrimination can effect children in many different ways and sometimes you can find yourself judging someone without knowing anything about that certain person.

To begin, socialization or having one’s upbringing (family, media, etc.) teach and perpetuate prejudice. According to social cognitive theory, through direct instruction, modeling, and other social influences on learning, prejudice is viewed as an attitude that is formed as other attitudes are formed. For instance, the media,

Prejudice is the negative attitude based on false generalizations about members of different racial and ethnic groups. From prejudice, discrimination is born. We all are guilty of discriminating other people, but one can only speculate the factors that bring about this hatred towards one another. Although a single cause cannot account for the presence of racism, factors such as socialization, self-justification, and competition are a few human attributes that lead to acts of racial discrimination.