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Betty was a single mom with three sons: Pol (the eldest), Chad (the second) and Mon (the youngest). When Betty came in this morning, she was narrating how Chad told him this: “Ma, come to think of it, It seem I’m actually the best student among the three of us (siblings) because I was the only who finished elementary and high school without repeating a level.”

The sad thing about this story is that Chad’s brothers are all low performers academically and he was comparing himself to them and actually feeling good and proud about his “supposed accomplishments” because the brothers are worser than him. Chad was also a low performer in school, he seemed bright but was a totally lazy student. He only graduated from high school because of the persistence and help of his mother who researched and accomplished all his assignments and projects aside from asking (and sometimes, begging) his teachers to pass him.

On the other hand, most Filipinos would remember how the son of infamous Senator Miriam Santiago, Alexander Robert (AR), committed suicide where some speculators believe it may be because of his feeling of failure to measure up to his mother’s achievements and expectations of other people of him to be like his mom.

In the case of Betty and her sons, it seem that Chad and probably, in the long run, even Mon, would not even try hard or maximize their effort to do good academically because their model,
Pol, was a low performer. In the case of Alexander, his mother was such a high-performer that the expectations set for him by others and probably, by himself, was too lofty.

Let’s take as an example the story of Ned, the husband who beat her wife when he’s mad or very drunk. Ned was reared by a father who’s also a wife beater and who somewhat molded him into believing that women are inferior than men, therefore, they have the right to do whatever they want.

In another case, Nice is the middle daughter of a single mother with two other siblings — Jay the eldest, and John, the youngest. Jay was a very wonderful son who’s both a good student and responsible at home. Nice feels that whatever she does, she can’t compete with Jay and she feels bad in believing that Jay is her mom’s favorite child. At 17, she got pregnant because she was rebelling from her mom.

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For parents and older siblings, let us be guided by some principles in social learning theory by Bandura. This was initially for social learning implications in education but I have modified it for the purpose of establishing the importance of modeling for parents and older siblings:

We all wanted our children and siblings to grow up properly so we should recognize our role in modeling to them behaviors that are indeed worth replicating.

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