Examples Of Aggression And Aggression In Children

Register to read the introduction… This morality is how they will come to view aggression and violence. The early childhood years are when children begin to demonstrate their levels of aggression as well as violence. Aggression and violence are both very common during the preschool years. Many children display aggression but it is not always displayed in a violent way. There are two forms of aggression which are instrumental aggression and relational aggression. Feldman defines instrumental aggression as “aggression motivated by the desire to obtain a concrete goal” and relational aggression as “nonphysical aggression that is intended to hurt another person’s psychological well-being” (Feldman, 2008, pg. 276). An example of instrumental aggression would be a child who sees another child playing with a ball they want, this child then approaches the other child and physically takes the ball or manipulates the other child into giving the ball up. An example of relational aggression is when a child is intentionally mean to another just to hurt their feelings. Both of these forms of aggression could be observed dozens of times by merely sitting on an elementary school …show more content…
A child who often sees another child ruling over those around him by using aggression to get what he wants will learn that this method is affective. This child will in turn begin to act in this way to get what they want. However, according to Feldman (2008, pg. 277), “A good deal of research suggest that exposure to aggressive models leads to increased aggression, particularly in the observers are themselves angered, insulted, or frustrated.” This means if the child observes an aggressive act while they themselves are upset they are then more likely to act out in an aggressive way. This is the reason behind children who witness horrible acts of violence often grow up to commit the same type of …show more content…
Through the use of surveys researchers have been able to determine that there is in fact a noticeable difference in a male’s level of physical aggression in comparison to the aggression levels of females (Baillargeon, Zoccolillo, Keenan, Hong-Xing, Côté, Pérusse, Boivin, & Tremblay, 2007). However, even with this difference between the genders the researchers found that there is not a large difference in the magnitudes of aggression between males and females. This means those children that reach the peak of physical aggression differ only slightly between the genders