The Psychology Of The Little Red Hen

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Jennifer Aldrich Choosing a Developmentally Appropriate Story The popular children's story, The Little Red Hen, retold by Florence White Williams is appropriate for both preschoolers and first and second graders. We can determine that the story is appropriate for these age groups by examining both Freud's and Erikson's theories of personality development, Piaget's theory of cognitive development, and Kohlberg's theory of moral development, and applying their theories to the characters in the story. Freud believes that there are three different forces that develop within us and shape our interactions, the id, the ego, and the superego (Freuds). The id is the part of our personality that “doesn't care about reality, about the needs of anyone else, only its own satisfaction” (Freuds). It cares solely about pleasure. The cat, the rat, and the pig in The Little Red Hen can be considered to be driven by their id. They have no desire to help the hen to nurture the wheat that she finds, they just want to eat, nap, and go about their own business. This would make these characters appeal to preschoolers as they are still in that stage of development themselves. The hen, on the other hand, has a developed ego and superego. The ego is “based on our reality principle” and “understands that other people have needs and desires and that sometimes being impulsive or selfish can hurt us in the long run” (Freud). The superego is the moral part of our personality and helps us decipher the difference between right and wrong. These parts of our personality are developed around the age of five. The hen demonstrates that her ego and superego are developed because she cares very much for her children, not just herself. She also shows that she is unselfish when the story reads, “Her attention was sorely divided between her duty to her children and her duty to the wheat, for

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