Ch 10 Middle Childhood: Social and Emotional Development

Peer rejection and acceptance

- Acceptance or rejection by peers is important in childhood because problems with peers affect adjustment later on

Teachers on student performance

- Achievement is enhanced when teachers expect students to master the curriculum, allocate most of the available time to academic activities, and manage the classroom effectively. - Students learn more in classes when they are actively instructed or supervised by teachers than when they are working on their own. - The most effective teachers ask questions, give personalized feedback, and provide opportunities for drill and practice

School setting: Research summaries (Kaplan & Owings, 2015; Patrick et al., 2016) indicate that an effective school has the following characteristics:

- An active, energetic principal - An orderly but not oppressive atmosphere - Empowerment of teachers; that is, teachers participating in decision making - Teachers with high expectations that children will learn - A curriculum that emphasizes academics - Frequent assessment of student performance - Empowerment of students; that is, students participating in setting goals, making decisions, and engaging in cooperative learning activities

Preventing Learned Helplessness (Carol Dweck)

- Attribution retraining - intervention where helpless children persuaded to attribute failures to lack of effort rather than lack of ability

Contributing self-esteem factors

- Authoritative parenting apparently contributes to children's self-esteem * Children with a favorable self-image tend to have parents who are restrictive, involved, and loving. * Children with low self-esteem are more likely to have authoritarian or rejecting-neglecting parents. - Social acceptance by peers is related to self-perceived competence in academic, social, and athletic domains * Parents and classmates have an equally strong effect on children's self-esteem in middle childhood. * Friends and teachers have relatively less influence but also matter

Evaluation of parents

- Because of their developing cognitive ability, 10- to 12-year-olds evaluate their parents more harshly than they did in early childhood - But throughout middle childhood, children rate their parents as their best source of emotional support

School setting

- Certain aspects of the school environment are important as well. * One key factor is class size. Smaller classes permit students to receive more individual attention and are particularly useful in teaching the "basics"—reading, writing, and arithmetic—to students at risk for academic failure

Twenty Statements Test

- Children are given a sheet of paper with the question "Who am I?" and 20 spaces in which to write answers. - Consider the answers of a 9-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl: * They both list their competencies * 9-year-old lists several physical characteristics but focuses on preferences - rudimentary psychological traits - but tied to the concrete * 11-year-old included relationships, descriptions now include dispositional qualities, or traits - truthful, helpful, Less positive in their descriptions and increasingly compare themselves to others * 9 year old lists his age and address, discusses his family, and focuses on physical traits, such as eye color, in his self-definition. Mentions his likes, which can be considered rudimentary psychological traits, but they are tied to the concrete, as would be expected of a concrete-operational child. * 11 year old struggle to bolster her self-esteem—her insistence on her musical abilities despite her qualms about her attractiveness—shows a greater concern with psychological traits and social relationships.

Coregulation

- Control is gradually transferred from parent to child - Children begin to internalize the standards of their parents.

Peer relationships

- Families exert the most powerful influence on a child during his or her first few years - But as children move into middle childhood, peers take on more importance - Peers help with: * practicing cooperation * relating to leaders * coping with aggressive impulses * appropriate impulses

Development of the self-concept in middle childhood

- In early childhood, children's self-concepts focus on concrete external traits, such as appearance, activities, and living situations. - cognitive developments of middle childhood create more abstract internal traits, or personality traits, begin to play a role. * Social relationships and group memberships take on significance - An investigative method called the Twenty Statements Test bears out this progression

What are some of the ways that teachers can help motivate all students to do their best?

- Make the classroom and the lesson interesting and inviting. - Ensure that students can profit from social interaction. - Make the classroom a safe and pleasant place. - Recognize that students' backgrounds can give rise to diverse patterns of needs. - Help students take appropriate responsibility for their successes and failures. - Encourage students to perceive the links between their own efforts and their achievements. - Help students set attainable short-term goals.

Peers and Socialization Influences

- Parents can provide children only with experience relating to adults. - Children profit from experience with peers because peers have interests and skills that reflect the child's generation - Peers, like parents, help children learn what types of impulses—affectionate, aggressive, and so on—they can safely express. - Children who are at odds with their parents can turn to peers as sounding boards - They can compare feelings and experiences. - When children share troubling ideas and experiences with peers, they realize they are normal and not alone - Peers are more influential than family during middle childhood.

Peer rejection and acceptance on children

- Popular children tend to be attractive, mature for their age, and successful in sports or academics, although attractiveness seems to be more important for girls than boys - Socially speaking, popular children are friendly, nurturant, cooperative, helpful, and socially skillful. They also have high self-esteem. - Children who are aggressive and disrupt group activities are sometimes rejected by peers * some aggressive children are popular; there is apparently no general rule

Mixed studies and teacher expectations

- Some studies have found support for the Pygmalion effect (Madon et al., 2001; Sarrazin et al., 2005a, 2005b). Others have not. - Teachers who expect less may spend less time encouraging and working with children.

Learned helplessness

- an outcome of low self-esteem - a learned belief that one is unable to control one's environment or obtain rewards that one seeks - "Helpless" children tend to quit following failure, whereas children who believe in their own ability tend to persist or change their strategies - "helpless" children believe that success is due more to ability than effort and that they have little ability in a particular area. Consequently, persistence seems futile. * Helpless children typically obtain lower grades and lower scores on IQ and achievement tests

Entry into school

- children must master these tasks when they start school: *new academic challenges, new school and teacher expectations, fitting into a new peer group, coping with extended separation from parents, and developing increased self-control and self-help skills. - Some children enter school less well prepared than others. * Kindergarten teachers report that many students begin school unprepared to learn - children often lack the language skills needed to succeed. - Poor health care and nutrition, and lack of adequate parental stimulation and support, place many children at risk for academic failure before they enter school.

Gender differences in self-esteem

- emerges in mathematics - when girls are performing as well as boys in math and science, they have less confidence in their ability - parents hold the stereotype that girls have less math ability than boys despite their daughters' demonstrated skills.

The school

- exerts a powerful influence on many aspects of the child's development - Schools, like parents, set limits on behavior, make demands for mature behavior, attempt to communicate, and are oriented toward nurturing positive physical, social, and cognitive development. - influence children's IQ scores, achievement motivation, and career aspirations - Schools also influence social and moral development - Schools are also competitive environments, and children who do too well—as well as students who do not do well enough—may incur the resentment or ridicule of others.

Parent-child relationships

- interactions focus on some new concerns during middle childhood. They include school-related matters, assignment of chores, and peer activities - Parents do less monitoring of children's activities and provide less direct feedback than they did in the preschool years. - Children and parents spend less time together in middle childhood than in the preschool years. - Children spend more time with their mothers than with their fathers. - Mothers' interactions with school-age children continue to revolve around caregiving; fathers are relatively more involved in recreation

Teachers

- like parents, set limits, make demands, communicate values, and foster development. - They are powerful role models and dispensers of reinforcement. - children spend several hours each weekday with teachers. - Teachers with high expectations influence achievement. - Students learn more when actively instructed. - Negative responses such as criticism, ridicule, threat, or punishment impede learning. - Children learn best in pleasant, friendly atmosphere.

student achievement

- linked to the emotional climate of the classroom - Students do not do as well when teachers rely heavily on criticism, ridicule, threats, or punishment. - Achievement is high in classrooms with a pleasant, friendly—but not overly warm—atmosphere.

Children's self - esteem

- self-esteem declines throughout middle childhood, reaching a low ebb at 12 or 13. Then it increases during adolescence * decline during middle childhood, in part because they come to evaluate their physical appearance and their performance in academic and social domains more realistically. - By middle childhood, children can compare themselves with other children and arrive at a more honest and critical self-appraisal - Girls tend to have more positive self-concepts regarding reading, general academics, and helping others than boys. - Girls tend to have more positive self-concepts regarding reading, general academics, and helping others than boys.

Teacher expectations: Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968)

- teacher expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies. * Teachers expect high performance - child performs accordingly * Teacher expects low performance - child performs accordingly - gave students a battery of psychological tests. - informed teachers that a handful of the students, although average in performance to date, were about to blossom forth intellectually in the current school year. - The purpose of the experiment was to determine whether enhancing teacher expectations could affect student performance. It did; the identified children made significant gains in IQ scores.

Self-Esteem

- •How children evaluate themselves changes over time - As children enter middle childhood, they evaluate their self-worth in many different areas - Preschoolers tend to see themselves as generally "good at doing things" or not - 5-7, children are able to judge their performance in seven different areas: physical ability, physical appearance, peer relationships, parent relationships, reading, math, and general school performance. * They also report a general self-concept

Dweck on learned helplessness - (1975) tested effectiveness of attribution retraining

-Group of children had become "helpless" after failing series of difficult math problems •One group given "success-only therapy" -Received tokens for success in problems they could solve •Other group given "attribution retraining" -Told they had not concentrated/worked fast enough and should have tried harder after failures -Children again presented with difficult math problems -•Carol Dweck has conducted more recent research on growth mindset and fixed mindset. •The Learning Mindset

School readiness - 3 critical factors, How well prepared are children to enter school?

1) The diversity and inequity of children's early life experiences 2) Individual differences in young children's development and learning 3) The degree to which schools establish reasonable and appropriate expectations of children's capabilities when they enter school

More on peer acceptance and rejection

•Acceptance or rejection very important in childhood -Problems with peers affect later adjustment •Because peer rejection has such an important developmental impact, there is research aimed at creating interventions to improve social skills of less likable children -Reinforcement and Modeling Therapies -Cognitive Approaches to Social Skills Training •Coaching •Role-taking skills

peer acceptance and rejection occurrence's

•Children more likely to be rejected by peers -display behavioral/learning problems -are aggressive -disrupt group activities •Rejected children tend to remain on the fringes of the group instead of conforming