Chapter 13: Social and Emotional Development in Middle Childhood

Due to experimentally designed games, researchers find that North American Children

Tend to adopt competitive strategies

Evidence suggests that the key to high self esteem is to feel

That one has some ability to control their future by controlling oneself and their environment.

Ego Oriented Goals

"I feel really successful when I can do better than my friends."

Task Oriented Goals

"I feel really successful when I keep practicing hard."

Harter and Robin Pike presented a study to 4-7 year olds to test their self esteem. They used pictures to help them describe themselves. What were the results?

Children judged their own worth in terms of competence and acceptance. Children who were held back a grade showed a low competence self evaluation. New comers to a school showed low acceptance in their self evaluation. Older children were more differentiated.

Study: should a school allow you to take your clothes of or hit someone

Children knew it was NOT okay to hit anyone because of their moral reasoning, but when asked about taking their clothes off they said it was okay because the Boss said to do so and he is in charge of the school. This shows that they know the difference between morals and what's appropriate

Selman argues that friendship valuing depends on

Childrens increasing capacity to take responsibility for their own contributions to the friendship, and to see the personal consequences of their actions for the relationship

Four domains of important self esteem

Cognitive competence, physical competence, peer acceptance, maternal acceptance

Aspects of children's social interaction appeared to distinguish pairs who became friendly from those who did not:

Common-ground activity, clear communication exchange of info, resolution of conflicts, reciprocity

Spending significant time with ones peers creates conditions for both

Competition and cooperation

What are social structures?

Complex organizations of relationships among individuals (dominance and popularity)

Female style play

Cooperative and prosocial forms of play (clapping and jump-rope games) <-----BS wtf

There is much more non hostile social comparison in the friendships of

Cuban and Costa Rican children

A current controversy among the developmental psychologists who study moral reasoning concerns

Cultural variations in distinguishing between the moral and social conventional domains

Cooperative learning programs

Focus on students working together on projects, sharing info, studying together for tests and developing respect for each others particular strengths - meant to foster childrens appreciation for their peers successes as well as their own

Japanese mothers expect their children to

Have emotional maturity, compliance and ritual forms of politeness

Children with divorced families tend to

Have problems in school, be depressed, unhappy and have low self esteem

Male style play

High levels of physical activity

Higher levels of reasoning =

Higher levels of PROsocial behaviors (that means not being a dick and helping other people even if its not convenient to you)

Children with high ego orientation tend to be

Hyper-competitive

What are the two forms of competition?

Hypercompetitiveness and non hostile social comparison

Cooperation Goals

I feel really successful when my friends and I help each other do our best."

Sigmund Freud described the years of middle childhood as a period of

Latency (during which the sexual instincts that drive development lay dormant and the child experiences relative stability)

Kohlbergs stage 4 is based on

Law and order morality and perspective of an individual in relation to the social group

Children whose parents monitor them are

More likely to engage in antisocial behavior and face rejection

Reconsidering Middle Childhood (summary)

New responsibilities Expectations for higher levels of independence, autonomy and self control Major context for development New cognitive capacities Become more capable of thinking about actions and consequences Learn to moderate their emotional reactions Biological changes --> new mental capacities (least visible change)

Cooperation is

Nurturing to relationships and a child's sense of belonging

What triggers the shift from heteronomous and autonomous moral reasoning?

Piaget's answer: it takes place in the context of peer activities: playing games, in particular (around age 7/8 children begin to play games based on RULES)

What is high self esteem in children linked to?

Satisfaction and happiness later in life

Social repair mechanisms

Strategies that allow friends to remain friends even when serious differences temporarily drive them apart ex: negotiation or disengaging before a fight arises

Harry Stack Sullivan (Ameircan psychiatrist) proposed that the formation of close, one one one relationships (chumships) is

The key to the development of social skills and competencies during middle childhood.

What is prosocial moral reasoning?

The thinking that is involved in deciding whether to share with, help, or take care of other people when doing so may prove COSTLY to oneself. (a drastic change occurs between age 5 and 10)

Kohlbergs stage 6 is based on

Universal ethical principles, perspective of a moral point of views from which social arrangements derive

The concept of self esteem is not

Universal. - different cultures have different views about it. Ex: Chicago makes self love a priority and the Republic of Angola has it listed as 8th important out 10 other priorities.

Girls face negative social consequences for hanging out with

Unpopular bullied peers and may abandon the new friends because they think their social status will be effective

A key characteristic of a lasting relationship is the degree to

Which two new friends are similar to each other at the start of their friendship. Similarity promotes equality.

Social conventional domains influence a

Child's interpretation of peer rejection and social expression

Self esteem has been linked to patterns of

Child-rearing

Around the age of 8, children's self evaluations begin to

Fit with the judgements of their peers and teachers (younger children usually have an unrealistically high evaluation of themselves but it becomes more practical with age)

Social comparisons

A non hostile, friendly competition with little emotional investment in who wins

Piaget believed that rule based games are

Models of society

Industry versus inferiority

(Eriksons theory) The stage when children judge themselves to be productive and successfully meeting the new challenges passed by adults at home/school OR inefficient and incapable of meeting such challenges

There is much more hypercompetitiveness in the friendships of

Canadian and Spanish children

What percent of marriages in the US end in a divorce?

40-50%

When does bullying peak for children who seek to prove their dominance?

6th grade

What percent of 12 year old children choose the same sex for a "best friend"

90

Coregulation

A form of indirect social control in which parents and children cooperate to reinforce the children's understandings of right and wrong, what is safe and unsafe, when they are under direct adult control

Once children begin to spend significant amounts of time among their peers, they must learn to create

A satisfying place for themselves within, greater appreciation of social rules, increased ability to consider other peoples points of view, learn to deal with issues of social status and deal with conflicts that may arise inevitably

Whereas Piaget argued for the existence of two stages of moral reasoning (H-->A), Kohlberg proposed

A sequence of six stages extending from childhood into adolescence and adulthood. These six stages are grouped into three levels of moral reasoning: preconventional, conventional, postconventional

Due to experimentally designed games, researchers find that Asia, Latin America and other cultures that emphasize interdependence tend to

Adopt cooperative strategies

Subjective view of responsibility

An understanding that responsibility depends on both intentions and consequences (older children usually have this perspective - they focus on the motive)

Objective view of responsibility

An understanding that responsibility depends on objective consequences (younger children usually have this perspective - they focus on how bad the outcome is)

William Damon and Daniel Hart asked children between 4 and 15 years of age to describe themselves. How did they describe themselves?

Appearance, activities, relations to others, psychological characteristics

Barry Schneider and his colleagues reasoned that a cultural emphasis on interdependence or independence would tend to be reflected at the individual level in children's

Basic social goals, and that these goals would influence the extent to which children were inclined to be competitive in peer interactions.

Children who have been maltreated are at risk for

Becoming aggressive and facing peer rejection

When do popularity issues start to happen?

Beginning of middle school

Once the dominant patterns have been fully formed...

Bullying diminishes (7th grade)

What is low self esteem in children linked to?

Depression, anxiety, and maladjustment both in school and in social relations

In many societies, when school aged children break the rules, parents are less likely to spank them, they will

Deprive them of privileges or ground them

Competition is

Detrimental to peer group relationships

American and Australian mothers expect their children to

Develop social skills and the ability to assert themselves verbally at a relatively early age

Rejected children show higher levels of

Difficulty in everyday life, higher levels of delinquency (twice as likely to be arrested), more substance abuse and psychological disturbances.

What is a common play activity that children take part in toward the end of early childhood and the first years of middle childhood?

Dress-up

The researchers divided goals into three types and to assess how strong each type was for the children they had them fill out questionnaires to see the extent of which they disagreed or agreed. What are the three types of goals?

Ego oriented goals, task oriented goals cooperative goals

Kohlbergs stage 1 is based on

Egocentrism and heteronomous morality (they consider their own interests and do not realize the other peoples interests are different)

In an extensive study of 10 to 12 year old boys, Stanley Coopersmith found that parents of boys with high self esteem...

Employed a style of parenting similar to authoritative parenting

The factors of friendship stability

Equality, similarity, positive reinforcement and cooperative interactions

Selman proposed that friendship involves three general spheres of influence that are affected by the development of perspective-taking:

Friendship understanding, friendship skills, friendship valuing

Kohlbergs stage 3 is based on

Good child morality and perspective of an individual in relationships with others. Ability to relate points through the Golden Rule

How do dominant children behave?

In reference to social hierarchies, those children who control resources such as toys, play spaces and determine the groups activities

Kohlbergs stage 2 is based on

Instrument morality and a concrete individualistic perspective - aware that other people have their own interests

What does Piaget say about moral development?

Involves a shift from heteronomous morality (right and wrong are defined according to objective consequences of behavior) TO autonomous morality (right and wrong are defined according to the persons internal motives and intentions) Shift: Heteronomous -----> Autonomous

According to moral reasoning of the theory of mind, how do children judge someones moral behavior?

May depend on their ability to understand the person's mental state.

What is self esteem?

One's evaluation of one's own worth

A chronic strain model of divorce recognizes

Ongoing hardships (financial insecurity, continuing conflict between parents)

According to Coopersmith's data, what are the three parental characteristics that combine to produce high self esteem in late middle childhood?

Parent's acceptance of their children, setting of clearly defined limits, respect for individuality

Coregulation is built on

Parent-child cooperation

There is a decrease of affection among

Parents and children

Very few of us pass through middle childhood without experiencing the sting of

Peer rejection

Children that have best friends tend to score higher on measures of

Self esteem and positive feelings of self worth

A sizable body of evidence suggests that as children move from early childhood to middle childhood and then to adolescence, their sense of

Self undergoes marked changes that parallel the changes occurring in their cognitive and social processes

Children tend to pick friends who are similar to themselves in

Sex, age, race, general skill level

Kohlbergs stage 5 is based on

Social contract reasoning and prosocial perspective. Aware of others values and rights

According to Kohlberg, as children get older what is egocentrism replaced with?

Social perspective taking

Nomination and rating procedure are techniques that are used to construct

Sociograms (graphic representations of each child's relationship to all others in the group)

Hypercompetitiveness

The desire to win at any cost as a means of maintaining feelings of self-worth, often aggressive behavior

How do researchers begin a study about social status and popularity?

The nomination procedure and the rating procedure

Thomas Dishion collected information on the social status of over 200 boys ages 9 and 10 by interviewing their teachers and classmates. Through interviews with the parents and the boys themselves, as well as home observations, he also obtained info about the family socialization patterns. What did he find about boys?

The ones who are exposed to coercive (pressure and force) family experiences at home were the ones most likely to be rejected by their peers at school. They were more aggressive!

What is social comparison?

The process of defining oneself in relation to others

Why are rule based games models of society to Piaget?

The rules remain the same as they are passed from one generation to the next and they only exist because people participate in them. It can help children give and take in negotiation of plans, settle disagreements, enforce and make rules, keep and break promises - they realize that social rules make cooperation with others possible. As a consequence, peers can become SELF GOVERNING

According to Freud's psychodynamic theory what part of the brain is developing when the child begins to internalize the rules of society and moral standards?

The superego

William Damon and Daniel Hart asked children between 4 and 15 years of age to describe themselves. What did they find in children between ages 8 and 11?

Their expressions of self concept include comparative judgements relating their own characteristics to those of others. Ex: I am bigger than most kids

William Damon and Daniel Hart asked children between 4 and 15 years of age to describe themselves. What did they find in children between ages 4 and 7?

Their self concept is expressed through categorical statements about themselves that place them in socially recognized categories. Ex: I am ___ years old and I have blue eyes

As a result of the changes that emerge during middle childhood, how do parents approach their kids?

Their socialization techniques become more indirect and they rely increasingly on discussion and explanation to influence their children's behavior

William Damon and Daniel Hart asked children between 4 and 15 years of age to describe themselves. What did they find in children between ages 12 and 15?

These children made interpersonal implications Ex: I have blonde hair, which is good because boys like blondes. OR I'm very shy so I don't have many friends

Nomination procedure

They ask children to name their friends or who they would like to sit with/play with

Rating procedure

They ask children to rank every child in the group according to specific criterion - popularity/desirability/teammate

Sokol and Chandler have different views about morals. What do they think? (This goes against what Piaget and Kohlberg had said)

They focus on theory of mind for moral behaviors. It's about childrens reliance on external consequences to their reliance on internal motives. Subjective vs. objective views

Once children have reached a subjective mental state it means that

They have become more competent at interpreting a person's behavior

Why is there a decrease in affection among parents and children?

They no longer see children as adorable. They expect them to behave themselves and perform appropriately. They should be more capable and responsible now.

Studies indicate that children begin to attribute stability to the psychological states of others at the same time they begin to

Think about themselves as have stable traits

Controversial children

Those who receive both positive and negative nominations. Tend to be even more aggressive than rejected children, but they compensate for it by joking or using other social and cognitive skills. They do not seem to be distressed about their lack of social success either.

Neglected children

Those who receive few nominations of any kind. These children seem to be ignored by their peers rather than disliked. They are less sociable and less concerned about their social status. Neither aggressive or overly shy.

The rejected children

Those who receive few positive nominations or low rankings from their peers. They can be shy or withdrawn but the most common reason is AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR. They are also likely to misinterpret the actions of their peers as being hostile if they bump into them on accident.

The popular children are

Those who receive the highest numbers of positive nominations or the highest ranking from peers (tend to be more physically attractive)

How do children establish dominance hierarchies?

Through fighting and arguing and then making up. Those who are skilled at managing the conflict-reconciliation pattern establish it. They control the resources such as toys, play spaces and determine the groups activities

A crisis model views divorce as a

Time-limited disturbance to which they have to adjust gradually

Children that have no friends tend to be

Timid, overly sensitive, at risk for later psychological problems

According to Erikson, what is the main challenge of middle childhood?

To establish a sense of competence

What is social control?

Ways of organizing behavior in relation to group life and society

Kohlbergs three stages of moral reasoning

preconventional, conventional, postconventional - categorized by ideas about what is right and the REASONS FOR doing right - this evolves as EGOCENTRISM DECLINES and is REPLACED by social perspective taking