Essay Sample on The Need to Belong: Human Connections for Emotional Wellbeing

Introduction

From the connections created by family, friends, book clubs, academic groups, and workplace teams among other cohorts formed by people, human beings often tend to seek belongingness with the people they surround themselves with and coexist around. The need to belong is a pervasive drive that human beings hold towards the creation and maintenance of a minimum quantity of interpersonal relationships that are significant and positive. The quality of social and emotional life that human beings have is often graded by the amount of positive, meaningful relationships they can form and maintain. These interpersonal relationships have to be temporally stable, frequent, and affectively pleasant. The need to belong has been explored by various theories and psychologists, with Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs highlighting the criticality of this need. The hierarchy of needs is composed of five basic levels of needs from the psychological needs as the basic of all needs, followed by safety needs, and in the third level is the need for love and belonging which entails the relationships formed through intimacy, family, and friends, and thus the attainment of a sense of connection (Hopper, 2019). The need to belong is exhibited by infants, children, and adults alike, and it is thus crucial to assess these needs and how it manifests in children versus in adults.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Development and the Need to Belong

The social behavior and motivation of children are usually a product of the connections they form around them. Over (2016), explored the aspect of the need to belong as a phenomenon that relies on two primary concepts, including the frequency of the connection that is positively balanced as well as the creation of long-lasting emotional relationships and links to other people's welfare. The aspect of belonging, in this case, is considered as a developmental process, commencing the child seeking affiliation and interaction. At week eight, infants often smile to the caregivers as an attempt to create and thus seek interactions with them, and by week 12, they are able to communicate via protoconversations.

In some cases, these attempts extend to other individuals apart from the caregiver connoting to the general pleasure of interaction sought by the infant. Affiliation is developed later in infancy through imitation and attention-seeking. Prosocial behaviors by infants often point at their need to form social interactions with others. The age of three to five years entails the active engagement of children, and thus the presentation of choice for them to work in cooperation with others, or alone. Children then start forming meaningful friendships and maintain long-term bonds. These interactions are often characterized by frequent positive cooperation and interactions, including talking, and the involvement of preferential treatment and favorable behaviors towards the people they view as friends (Over, 2016). The need to belong is thus considered as a motivation to form interpersonal relationships.

Individual Differences Regarding the Need to Belong

The need to belong, like all the other humans, needs exhibits in varying intensities and urgency, and therefore, some individuals express this need more direly than others. According to this, individuals who have a stronger need to belong have to work harder to attain it, while those who do not value this need as critically do not have to strive a lot to fulfill this needs of belongingness. Pillow, Malone & Hale (2015) assessed this premised by utilizing two instruments, the Need to Belong Scale (NTBS) and the Sense of Belonging Instrument-Antecedents (SOBI-A). The NTBS was designed to assess the magnitude of the desire of belongingness experienced by people, with those scoring high for this test exhibiting constant worrying of belonging and acceptance. The higher a need to belong one feels, the harder they will try to create meaningful, frequent and long-term interactions and relationships with the people around them, but it is also accompanied with a threat of insecurity once this need is unmet. The SOBI-A instrument was, on the other hand, created to measure the value attached to the attainment of belonging. The analysis was conducted on the adults' need to belong, and it included 869 undergraduate students from a university in Southwest USA. The NTBS was thus positively related to neuroticism and anxious attachment style, and low self-esteem while the SOBI-A was connected negatively to the avoidant attachment style and positively to extraversion and self-esteem.

Adolescent's Sense of Belongingness

Adolescent forms a grace period between childhood and adulthood, and thus possesses a more critical role in their social and cognitive development. Schall, Wallace & Chhuon (2016) explored the need for teenagers to fit in and gain peer acceptance, as one that supersedes their academic goals in the high school level. Therefore, the need to belong, for these individuals determined not only their social interactions and cooperation, but also their academic outcomes. Like the approach taken by Pillow et al. (2015), these authors explore this need to belong using individual differences that teenagers possess in terms of their need to belong. The locus of control is, therefore, the unique difference explored in this case, with the different meanings that teenagers who are highly socially connected and those who are leas socially connected regarding the value of their lives. This research aims to fill a gap that exists in research as most of them are often adult-centric, thus neglecting the uniqueness of the need to belong as experienced by adolescents.

School, more so high school, forms a pillar upon high adolescents forms their identities. In many settings, schools, parents, and teachers often overemphasize the academic attainments and expectations from the students, and thus under-fulfilling the social aspect of the school. Therefore, it is through the interactions formed by peers and the information from these interactions thereof that teenagers form their normative identities (Crosnoe, 2011). While the academic setting often creates an environment dominated by academic success as the ultimate sense of belonging. However, the locus of control provides the personal degree of expectation an individual perceives an outcome of an action or a social reinforcement as a depiction of their own behaviors and characteristics. In a study that involved adolescents from various public high schools and youth programs in St Paul, Pennsylvania, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Pittsburgh, the locus of control of the adolescents was matched with their perceived acceptance or fitting in with their peers. Adolescents with low social contact felt little personal control regarding their abilities to fit in and instead relinquished this control to external factors such as the willingness of their peers to accept them while those with a perceived higher social contact exhibit higher locus of control. An external locus of control was thus associated with low social contact and acceptance, while an internal locus of control was correlated to a high level of social connection and fitting in.

Bullying As a Desperate Cry to Belong

As a need, belonging is often considered as a critical achievement to individuals, and one whose failure might lead to limiting social and personal growth. Bullying is thus usually considered as an outcome of a failure to fulfill the need to belong. In a study conducted in western countries, children who engaged in bullying ranged between 4 and 9%, while 9-25% of school-going children were bullied in their school life (Menesini & Salmivalli, 2017). With the onset of technology, cyberbullying has also emerged, with the rates of cyberbullying and victimization being at 15% while traditional bullying taking pace at a prevalence of 35%, as explored in a study that involved a sample of 335,519 youth (Menesini & Salmivalli, 2017). In many cases, bullying occurs where there is an imbalance in perceived power between the offender and the victim, and therefore, the offender manipulates their superiority to minimize the relevance of the victim. Racial minorities, overweight and obesity, sexual minorities including the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender and social-economic statuses are often the aspects considered to grade the perceived power of the victims as opposed to the mainstream culture and thus domination of the offender.

Security Operations in Belongingness

From the time that children learn to walk, talk, and socialize, they often engage in physical acts that harm others around them. These activities may range from biting, kicking, shoving, and hitting to socially isolating them, spreading rumors, and manipulating friendships. These aggressive behaviors often develop into bullying. Bullying can be traced as a ripple effect that children suffer due to the lack of parental support and socialization, lack of empathy, social skills, emotional control, and difficult temperament. Large physical size and moral disengagement have also been cited ass causes of bullying Underwood & Ehrenreich (2014), however, explore the possibility of bullying as a result of the desperate need to belong. When individuals lack the fulfillment of this need and thus experience social exclusion, they usually engage in aggressive actions and behaviors against others, exhibit self-defeating behaviors, and in some cases, inflict physical pain on those around them. The authors here, therefore, explore the issue of bullying as a repercussion stemming from a threat posed to the perpetrator's need to belong. This threat thus often pushes them to lash out and hurt others, targeting their sense of belongingness.

Sullivan (1953) explored the various developmental stages of children with their corresponding need to belong. From the time they are infants, children often crave for tenderness from their caregivers, and they grow to attain the preschool going age, they often require play partners. Preadolescents often desire intimate relationships with peers of the same sex, while adolescents usually crave for sexual involvement. Through these stages, the characters and personalities of individuals often arise from the ways in which they cope and manage to meet the need to belong. An inability to meet this need often triggers a defense mechanism accompanied by anxiety and, thus, the involvement in defensive actions, often leading to bullying and harassment. These defensive actions are referred to as security operations. Disparagement, as Sullivan explains, is one form of a security operation that includes the acts of speaking derogatorily to others with whom they are a threat of comparison. Therefore, when adolescents and children alike feel the danger to be compared in terms of life achievements, looks, and academic performance, they often engage in social aggression as a way to declare their legitimacy for superiority and likeability. Bullying is thus considered a security operation that involves the harming of other people's sense of belongingness as a way of protecting the need to belong by an individual. The anxiety from the need to belong might, for example, force an overweight girl to shove a cheerleader down the stairs as they might perceive the latter a threat to their need to be part of the team. However, with time, this girl might come to understand that their consistent harmful acts might even make the extent of likeability diminish significantly. Bullying is thus correlated to the need to belong, with most of the children involved in bullying having lower senses of belonging that those not involved in bullying (Goldweber, Waasdorp, & Bradshaw, 2013). The remedy for bullying might thus be conjured from the attempt to create a sense of belonging to the bullies, and the...