Product Design for Children's Life Education from the Perspective of Social Control Theory
Authors: Liu Miao , Qi Hongzhao 
Published: June 2022

Childhood is the beginning of life, and education during this period is crucial to a person's growth. Life education is an important part of the basic education system, and life education for children is conducive to establishing the correct values of life from an early age, learning to respect and care for their own lives and the lives of others. Life education has always been the weakness of the Chinese education system, and the lack of awareness of life education among children from an early age has led to many tragedies. Life education in China is still in the exploratory stage, and the research and development of life education products for children is still insufficient, so it is of great social value to study how to design better life education products.This paper studies the product design of children's life education from the perspective of the Social Control Theory, which is a long-established criminological theory that studies how to comply with social rules and prevent impermissible behavior. The Social Bond Theory in Social Control Theory holds that the four key elements of "attachment", "commitment", "involvement" and "belief", also known as social bonds, help people reduce their criminal tendencies. Social Control Theory has been widely used in the study of juvenile delinquency, but few researchers currently apply it to the field of children’s life education, so it is a novel perspective and method to apply Social Control Theory to children's life education design research. It brings forward social control from crime prevention to promoting children's education, this is relevant and reasonable.This paper first uses the interdisciplinary research method, integrates the multidisciplinary knowledge of sociology and psychology to study and summarize the Social Control Theory, and combines Piaget's cognitive development theory and other educational theories to study children's life education, summarizes the connection between social control and children's life education, and constructs the basic framework of life education system from the perspective of social control. In this paper, we used python crawler to collect data about children's life education products and summarize the current situation of children's life education product design. The questionnaire method was used to obtain the data of approval degree of parents of kindergarten children for children's life education and in the investigation of the attributes of children's life education products they value. Design suggestions for children's life education products are provided from the perspective of the four aspects of the social bond of social control theory: attachment, commitment, involvement and belief.This paper summarizes the connection between Social Control Theory and children's life education. From the perspective of social control, the continued development of life education deficiency is deviance and crime, and the purpose of children's life education is firstly to guide children to learn to comply with norms and to create values, and secondly to develop self-control from an early age and learn to cope with emotional changes. Social Control Theory provides a new perspective for the design of children's life education products, that is, from the four social bonds of "attachment", "commitment", "involvement" and "belief", make children cultivate good cultural values and positive personality, enhance their social participation and self-efficacy. Social Control Theory can help society, families and schools provide better life education for children, and help children learn about life more effectively, establish correct life values and have a better life.