I'm currently reading, Teach Your Own and have been really blessed by the simple truths in it.  After 10 years of homeschooling, I am learning new things through this book and adapting new techniques and mind sets. 

The chapter I'm currently on is discussing 'Living with Children' and is speaking about behavior.  I wanted to share a few paragraphs on the subject which are quite interesting.

"....children so reared very quickly notice what people are doing around them and want to join and and take part as soon and as far as their powers permit.  No one has to do anything in order to "socialize" the children, or make them take part in the life of the group.  They are born social, it is their nature.  One of the most peculiar destructive ideas that "civilized" people have ever invented is that children are born bad and must be threatened and punished into doing what everyone around them does.  No continuum culture expects children to be bad as a matter of course, to misbehave, to make trouble, to refuse to help, to destroy things, and cause pain to others, and in cultures with long traditions of child-rearing, these common (to us) forms of child behavior are virtually unknown.

Some years ago a group of American child experts went to China to study Chinese children, child-rearing, and schools.  To their Chinese counterparts they eagerly asked what they did when their children had tantrums, fought, teased, whined, broke things, hurt people, etc.  The Chinese looked at them with baffled faces.  The Americans might as well have asked, 'What do you do when your children jump three hundred feel straight up in the air?'  The Chinese could only say over and over, 'Children don't do those things.'  The American visitors went away equally baffled.  It never occurred to them to suppose that one reason Chinese children are not bad in the way so many of ours seem to be is that nobody expects them to be.  Being small, ignorant, inexperienced, and passionate, they may now and then stray off the path of good behavior.  But correcting them is only a matter of patiently pointing out they have strayed, that here we don't do things like that.  No one assumes that their deep intent is to do wrong, and that only a long hard struggle will break them of that intent and force them to do right.

In short, the problem children in the affluent Western world are as much a product of our culture as our automobiles..."

I found it so interesting that what Mr. Holt was saying was that here in the Western world we have the expectation that our children will misbehave..we expect them to do wrong.  While we know they will indeed misbehave because of their inmaturity, we should not expect it.  More so, they are a product of their surroundings.  So then we must ask ourselves, how much of our children's behavior good or bad, is a product of their surroundings, us?                Food for thought!