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This paper addresses three events in the life of the author in relation to developmental psychology. In the first event, the death of the author’s mother, the author considers his development in light of Social Theory, specifically John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory. In the second event, the author relates experiences as an orphan begging in a train station to the Organismic Theory presented by Lawrence Kohlberg. In the third event, the author connects the effects of his step-grandfathers’ generosity on his psychological development as they relate to Environmental Theory, specifically Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. The author integrates the above theories into the events in question. The author relates the events in chronological order.
My Mother’s Death
When my mother passed away, I was two and a half years old. Because of her character and the way that she cared for me when I was an infant and toddler, (though I could not walk because of illness and malnutrition), I developed a secure base from which to live and to view the world. According to Bowlby, “Parents who respond sensitively and promptly to their infants’ signals tend to produce babies who at 1 year of age, are securely attached” (Crain, 2005, p. 59). In the brief time during which I was close to my mother, I formed a secure attachment which played out especially powerfully, as you will see, in the second event when I lived as an orphan and begged in a train station at eight years of age.
Many neighbors and my father told me that my mother was kind and lovable and that she greeted anyone who passed by our house. Even though we were poor, she would invite them in to have a cup of tea. She was very kind to everyone in my family. She was very attentive and sensitive to their needs, both sides, and everyone loved her, even on my father’s side. I have been told by my uncle’s wife, who loved my mother very much, that her many good characteristics included openness, tolerance, patience, reliability, and most importantly that she took very good care of her three, small children.
Her name was Sen which means lotus. This describes her. She could be in a poor, lower-class family, but she blossomed like a lotus. A lotus can be in mud and use the mud to grow a beautiful flower to offer to life. She was 28 when she died. I have an older sister, who is one year older than me, and a brother who is two years younger.
My father told me that, when I was an infant, I cried a lot and often my mother stayed up all night with me to comfort me in my illness. As Bowlby points out, “Crying also results in proximity between caretaker and child” (Crain, 2005, p. 47). In addition, in Vietnam being I am the first son, she would have been especially loving and close to me.
Bowlby’s theory of attachment explains why, even though I was so young when my mother died, I could have already formed a secure, solid belief in the basic goodness of the world. Had my mother died before my first year instead of when I was two and a half, I could have developed a different “working model.” Bowlby states the following:
The child’s attachment behavior also depends on variables such as the child’s internal physical state. If a little child is ill or tired, the need to remain close to the mother will outweigh the need for exploration.
By the end of the first year, an important variable is the child’s general working model of the attachment figure. That is, the child has begun to build up, on the basis of day-to-day interactions, a general idea of the caretaker’s accessibility and responsiveness (Crain, 2005, p. 51).
My mother was accessible and from the descriptions of neighbors and family, she responded quickly to my needs. In my country, children were mostly breast fed and mothers were physically close to their child for the first two years. Parents strapped their babies to them and mothers carried their babies on their backs or on a hip close to their body; there were no strollers. Mothers slept with their small children until the children were four or five years old. We slept on the floor close to each other.
My father said that, when I cried so much, my mother always came and fed me and that she comforted me until I went to sleep. Bowlby states, “As a product of evolution, a human child has an instinctual need to stay close to the parent, on whom she has an imprint. This need is built into the very fiber of the child’s being;” (Crain, 2004, p. 45).
I imagine that, because of her nature, my mother interacted closely with me from the time I was an infant, smiling, cooing, and rocking me. Bowlby found that, “Evolution has provided children with responses and signals that must be heeded if development is to proceed properly. If, for example, we do not attend to children’s cries, smiles, and other signals, they do not form the secure attachments that seem so necessary for later social growth” (Crain, 2005, p. 64). At that time, my father was fighting in the American army and absent a lot, so my mother was my primary caretaker.
She liked to work in the garden whenever she had time so that she could grow our food and be in touch with the earth: the trees, the dirt, the vegetables and flowers, and the grass. Whatever she touched, it grew. She had healing hands for both humans and nature, as I do also. When I go to pray for sick people, they get well. Loving kindness heals. My mother’s heart was genuine and loving, and the energy of love does a lot of healing. That is why our neighbors loved my mother.
All of this is not to say that it was easy for me when my mother went to the hospital or when she died. I don’t remember when she got sick or when she left our home. I remember that she was absent and I was wondering where she was. She was in the hospital for four months. My father was absent, too, as he spent nearly all of his time at the hospital with my mother. We were taken care of by our neighbors and our relatives. I missed my mother and wondered why she left for so long. I cried a lot because of missing her. Relatives and neighbors came and cooked for us. They left food for us. People would come for a while and then leave to do their own work.
Whenever my father came back, he brought something for us, like candy and food that we liked. I could see in his face a lot of worries. He seemed lonely. I watched him sit alone, thinking. When he came back we ran to him and held him, and he held us. I could see that he was crying, too. We felt his sadness when he held us, but as children we did not know how to express our feelings or what to do. We tried to be near him and we asked, “Where’s mom?” I don’t remember what he said. I just remember asking.
My siblings and I were together. We were all that we could hold onto, especially at night when we were afraid of the darkness and the noises. We did not have lights. We had only a candle and it could blow out any time because of the wind. That was very scary because we imagined that it could be ghosts.
After my mother’s death, other adults stepped in to help us. I became especially fond of my grandfather on my father’s side and later my step-grandfather who was my step-mother’s father. They were gentle and kind and very generous to us. I would explain my ability to remain somewhat secure, even in my grief, to Gesell’s belief that “intrinsic developmental mechanisms are so powerful that the organism can, to a considerable degree, regulate its own development” (Crain, 2005, p. 24). That, in addition to the secure base which I had developed from my attachment to my mother, have helped guide me throughout my life. I will demonstrate this further in the next story.
The Train Station
After my mother’s death, our family was in extreme poverty. My father had to sell everything we had, including all our furniture, to help pay for my mother’s hospital bills. As an eight-year-old boy, I experienced a situation which I survived partly because I was able to navigate my way through Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development. While he equates much of his study with a child’s age, I will make the case that, experiencing what was in many ways a life and death situation in a small, contained society, and without knowing the theory. I called upon Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development to make sense of what I was experience at a very young age. According to Kohlberg, “The stages emerge . . . from our own thinking about moral problems. Social experiences do promote development, but they do so by stimulating our mental processes” (Crain, 2005, p. 160).
About a year after my mother’s death, my father remarried. My parents had some conflicts and they separated. Because we were so poor, my father, my brother and I left the village to beg for food. Until this time, emotionally I was in what Kohlberg would describe as Stage One, “Obedience and Punishment Orientation.” I had obeyed my father and other elders pretty much without question. However, one day as we were begging, I became separated from my father and brother. I ended up in a train station. I joined the other children who were orphans and, in learning to survive, my ideas of “right” and “wrong” had to shift.
I had to adapt quickly to the situation and I moved into Stage Two, “Individualism and Exchange.” Kohlberg states, “At this stage children recognize there is not just one right view handed down by the authorities. Different individuals have different viewpoints” (Crain, 2005, p. 154). I sold iced tea on the train and slept wherever I was, often in a corner. Kohlberg goes on to say, “Although stage 2 respondents [to the Heinz-Steals-the-Drug interview] sometimes sound amoral, they do have some sense of right action. There is a notion of fair exchange or fair deals” (Crain, 2005, p. 155). I dealt with issues of stealing and trespassing, both of which my elders had taught me were crimes.
I made friends with the people I encountered. Not real friends, just pass-by friends. The other street children and I were really only interested in our own survival. Being part of a group, such as it was, provided a sense of security. For example, we let each other know when the police were coming. The police tried to kick us off the trains; we had no tickets. We had snuck aboard. The police tried to keep us out of the station. I never got caught; I had to be sneaky. We children watched out for each other. I would buy some tea and ice from the older children, whom I knew had stollen them from someone’s house. I did not steal. However, I bought the tea and ice cheap from the “gangsters” and then sold them on the train for double or triple what I had paid. I got the money to survive from begging and from selling the iced tea. I used the money for food and sometimes to buy clothes.
At this time, I also experienced Kohlberg’s Stage Three, “Good Interpersonal Relationships” in two different contexts. According to Kohlberg, at this stage children “believe people should live up to the expectations of the family and community and behave in ‘good’ ways. Good behavior means having good motives and interpersonal feelings such as love, empathy, trust, and concern for others” (Crain, 2005, p. 155).
Once, a lady who had very few possessions gave me some money. Though not much, she gave it with love. She said to me, “I give this to you, but be good. Don’t use this money to ruin your life. Use it for what you need.” She gave to me in a way that I understood that she cared about me. It was as if I was her grandchild, and she wanted her grandchild to be good. At that moment, I looked at her and thought of her as my grandmother. She reminded me of my father’s mother. I realized that there were people, even in this terrible place, who had good motives and feelings toward me and toward others.
I remember one family that had six or seven people. I went begging at lunchtime. They were sitting on the train station’s mud-compacted floor. They had young children. Each held a bowl of rice. They had almost nothing left and still they scooped some rice from each of their bowls and gave it to me, as if I were a family member. “Sit down and have lunch with us,” they said. They were very poor. I learned that even if you do not fill the whole bowl of rice, it is still a form of love.
Many times people treated me rudely. I went to one house where the people were very rich. They had a dog and a gate. Once they saw me, they let out the dog. I had to run for my life. I was simply going to ask for food. They did not want beggars to come to their house. So when you are a beggar, you encounter mostly unwholesome, traumatic situations in which you are vulnerable. You feel unwanted, feared, and hated. So that is what I learned; there are two sides of life. Some people are stingy and others are generous. Some people live with hate and others with love. At that time, I experienced more hate than love.
As a result of my experiences with generosity and stinginess, I became aware of Kohlberg’s Stage Four, “Maintaining the Social Order.” Even within this situation, because of the secure base provide by my early attachment to my mother, I was becoming “more broadly concerned with society as a whole” (Crain, 2005, p. 156). I wanted people to obey laws and respect authority (in this case, the simple authority of manners) “so the social order is maintained” (Crain, 2005, p. 156). Often, I stood at the sidelines and watched the people come and go.
One day I observed something that left a lasting impression on me and forced me to consider Kohlberg’s Stages Five and Six simultaneously. Stage Five is concerned with “Social Contract and Individual Rights” and Stage Six with what he calls “Universal Principles.”
The train station was always crowded. People stood in a long line to buy tickets. If you were strong, you could push yourself ahead. If you were weak, you would be left behind in the line. I watched many people pushed to the back. This disturbed me. Perhaps it was partly because I was small and had no one to push in line for me.
On another day, I was hanging around, watching people come and go in the middle of the day. Gradually, I moved toward the train tracks. I spotted an old lady about 75 or 80 moving slowly and carrying a heavy load wrapped in bundles on a pole across her shoulders. She was bent over. She was fragile and weak. Suddenly, a handsome, young man whom I did not know, came up and said to her, “You are old and weak. How can you carry these loads? Can I help you? It’s very tiring for you.”
The lady looked up and smiled at him. She said, “You are so gentle. So kind to come and help me.” She gave him her load. He was strong and could go quickly through the crowd. The old lady could not keep up with him. He pushed into the crowd and slowly left this woman behind. The woman lost him. She realized that she had been tricked by this young man. She looked and looked for him, and she cried and cried, “Oh, my God, this is all I have. These are all my belongings.” I could barely believe my eyes. How could someone do that to an old woman? I stood there feeling so helpless. I didn’t know what to do; I was just a street boy. Selling tea on the train that other boys had stolen from the rich, so that I could buy food to eat was one thing, but stealing from an old woman was quite another. In my own way, I asked, “What makes for a good society?” I asked this in the context of the small “society” as I knew it in the train station.
I asked myself the following: “Why did the young man have to take the old woman’s belongings?” “Why did he have to trick her?” “Why was his life this way?” “Why couldn’t anyone protect the old woman?” I was trying to “determine logically [as best an eight-year-old child could] what a society ought to be like” (Crain, 2005, p. 158). I felt sad for the old lady and for the young man as well. In my heart, I realized that I wanted to “treat the claims of all parties in an impartial manner” (Crain, 2005, p.158). At that moment, I realized that both the old woman and the young man, because of his actions, were vulnerable. I knew then that both were victims.
After that everything went back to normal in the train station. This had been just a passing moment. However, it left an imprint in my mind. Memories of my life as a street boy are with me always. Over time, my understanding of that period in my life deepens and, having learned Kohlberg’s Stages, I know that this was a critical time in my personal development. After a few months, my father found me and took my brother and me to the Vietnam Highlands where we farmed, sold our produce and saved some money. Later, we returned to our village. At that time, because of my illness and malnutrition I looked about eight, I was 13 years old and still impressionable.
My Step-grandfather Gives Us Food
The theory of Social Learning addresses some of the influence that my step-grandfather (and earlier my real grandfather) had on my development. In a study on Prosocial Behavior (in the chapter describing Bandura’s Social Learning Theory), Rushton (1975) exposed seven- to ten-year-old children to an altruistic model. Even though I was now 13, I had not had the chance to develop in a “normal” home. For example, my father, brother and I had worked in the Highlands from dawn to dusk in the fields and then in the evenings we caught fish to sell. I was probably somewhere between seven and eight in my emotional development.
Rushton’s children watched “an adult model play a bowling game and donate some of his winnings to a ‘needy children’s fund.’ Immediately afterward, these children played the game alone, and they themselves made many donations--far more than did a control group who had not seen the altruistic model” (Crain, 2005, p. 204).
When tested again after two months, the same thing happened. Rushton concluded that “Evidently, even a relatively brief exposure to a generous model exerts a fairly permanent effect on children’s sharing” (Crain, 2005, p. 204).
At first it was my step-grandmother who modeled behavior for me, behavior that I did not wish to copy. My step-mother’s family was not rich, but they were solidly middle class. My immediate family was still living in extreme poverty. I knew that my step-grandmother had a lot of rice which she stored for the winter. One time, my step-brother (her grandson) and I saw her in the kitchen preparing lunch. We could smell the food cooking. When she saw us, she was surprised. She pretended that she was washing dirty pans and that she was not cooking. She wanted us to think that she had already eaten. I said, “Oh, do you have any food, Grandmother? We are hungry. We are looking for food.” She said, “We are finished. I am cleaning up.” But I knew that they had not yet eaten.
On the other hand, if we came in and found our grandfather in the house alone (without grandmother), and we asked for food, he would smile and say, “Oh, let me see if we have anything left.” He would go down and look in a wooden cabinet, where they kept leftover food safe from mice, to see what was left --- any potatoes, fruit, or rice. He tried not to let our grandmother know that he had given us food. He knew that she would be unhappy, but he could not keep himself from being generous. Watching my grandfather was a form of socialization. I observed him closely, sometimes wondering what made him so generous to us and so unlike his wife.
Later, when I would be eating ice cream and my younger brothers would come up to me, I would say, “Here, you have it.” As children, we really liked ice cream. We lacked sugar in our diet and we needed the sweetness. I was hungry, too, but as an elder brother, I would give it to my younger siblings. I would remember the generosity my step-grandfather had modeled for me.
When I became an apprentice on my father’s fishing boat and we would return from a day at sea, many beggars would be on the shore asking for fish and shrimp. During the day, when we caught fish, I would hide some, and I always gave something to the beggars. I gave it to them without my father knowing it. He would have been angry. When I did this, I felt very happy. My heart was open. I gave as my grandfather had given to me. (Of course, as a former beggar, I knew what it felt like to ask for food. This coincides with Kohlberg’s Stage Three: I could empathize with the beggars.)
As I observed my grandfather, I saw that he attended the Buddhist temple regularly and that he was literate. I decided that I wanted to learn to read and write. I set these internal goals early in my life. Bandura speaks to this when he states, “People, . . ., do not learn out of a spontaneous interest in the world, but to achieve their internal goals and standards” (Crain, 2005, P. 215).
My grandfather was a quiet man; he never told us what to do. While not yet curious about Buddhism, I connected it with my grandfather’s way of being in the world. Simply by his example, he watered spiritual seeds in me that would grow years later. He had a great influence on my development and quite unwittingly showed me that, as “social learning theorists have stated . . . in the long run, we may do better simply to model generosity and helpfulness through our own behavior” (Crain, 2005, p. 212).
In researching and writing this paper, I identified ways in which, as a child, I learned to develop a secure base, as discussed in the study of Social Theory, especially Bowlby’s Attachment Theory. Coming to understand Organismic Theory, specifically Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development, I realized the real impact on my moral development during the time I spent in a train station as a small boy, alone and begging for food. While reading Environmental Theory, specifically Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, I realized the power of my grandfather’s and step-grandfather’s generosity to model beneficial behavior. I observed ways in which I learned to be compassionate with myself and others and how I learned to transform my beliefs and my living situations, just as my mother had --- turning mud into flowers.
Reference
Crain, W. (2005). Theories of Development: Concepts and Application (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
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