Module 9, Theories of Social Development

Social Development

• The development of children's understanding of others' behavior, attitudes, and intentions, their understanding of the relationships between the self and others, and children's understanding of how to behave and interpret in their social world.

  • So much of the time and the cognition that we do in day to day life has to do with how we interact with others or how we see ourselves fitting into our social world.

• When we're talking about social development, we're looking at all the different manifestations of that understanding and all the development that children are going to see in these many areas.

• Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development is one of the early very influential and very suspicious theories put forward by perhaps the world's most famous psychologist.

Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Development

• When Freud was talking about the unconscious, what he was really saying is that people's experiences are often influenced by underlying psychological drives.

  • The reasons that people want the things they want and do the things they do might not always be perfectly accessible to them at the time.

  • They may think they know what's going on, but really there might be these underlying drives that are motivating people to do the things they do and want the things they want, feel the things they feel.

• According to Freud, the unconscious would bubble up and these drives would be manifest in weird metaphorical ways.

  • For Freud, for example, dreams were one way in which these underlying drives for our behavior are manifest and we experience them consciously or we experience them subjectively.

  • That's why dream interpretation was an important thing for Freud's early therapy and research.

Another important concept to understand is the way Freud conceptualized how our conscious mind and our unconscious mind interact is through a triarch structure that he called the _____.

Id, the ego and the superego.

• The metaphor we often use for this is like an iceberg. The conscious is what's going to be up on top and the unconscious is going to be everything that's below the surface.

Id

Unconscious pleasure seeking drives that tell you to capitalize on all of your desires (e.g., eat the cookie, you want to grab the marshmallow off the table and eat it).

• It's not thinking about what is morally right or what is pragmatic. It's just thinking, "how do I satisfy all of my desires?".

Ego

The conscious, rational, problem solving part of your consciousness that is trying to sort everything out to balance the impulses of your id and also the influence of the superego.

• As far as Freud was concerned, the it’s job is to play the middle man and to try and balance the desires of the id and these expectations and standards of the superego.

Superego

Your internalized morality and standards.

• This is like everything you think about when you think about what is right, and what is wrong (i.e., what you should do and what you shouldn't do, what people expect you to do and the many ways that you don't live up to that).

Psychosexual Developmental Stages

• Another important thing that Freud thought of when he was thinking about how we go from being very simple children into the very complex motives and desires and behaviors of adults.

  • He thought that people in development go through psychosexual stages of development.

• This is the idea that as children age, they begin to seek pleasure from different erotically sensitive areas.

• Freud thought that as children were developing and kind of their sexual drives start to play implicitly latently, they kind of influence children's behaviors and their motivations in ways that are not explicitly sexual at the time for children, but may later be manifest in different ways.

  • These erotically sensitive areas that kind of come online as children move through their development, as far as Freud thought, he referred to as erogenous zones.

• There are five stages and five sources of pleasure in Freud's psychosexual developmental theory.

Psychosexual Developmental Stages: Oral

• Basically a young infant, most of your source of pleasure is going to be from your mouth.

  • You're going to be eating or you're going to be breastfeeding, which is the main thing that babies do.

• Freud posited that people who have oral fixations (e.g., people who need to smoke or always fidgeting something or biting their nails) or seemed to have a lot of like mouth centric, instinctive habits, has to do with maybe some turmoil they experienced during the oral stage.

Psychosexual Developmental Stages: Anal

Children use the bathroom a lot, and they become toilet trained and that becomes one of the challenges they have to overcome.

Psychosexual Developmental Stages: Phallic

During which children become aware of their genitalia.

• This is around the middle childhood ages (i.e., 5-7).

• They start to realize that there are sex differences between people and they've become aware of their own sexual organs. Things like gender roles are starting to become apparent to them.

Psychosexual Developmental Stages: Latent

• Freud then said that there was a latent period, during ages 7-11.

• It was a period of calm where all these desires kind of go away.

Psychosexual Developmental Stages: Genital

• This is when people start hitting purity and they hit sexual maturation and adolescence.

• This is where everything kind of starts rearing its ugly head and people become explicitly sexual beings.

Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development

• He built on Freud's ideas, but in a different way. He put less emphasis on the sexual aspects of children's development, and focused more simply on the social conflicts, and processes that children go through as they age.

• The spark notes of his psychosocial theory is that, child development goes through eight developmental stages, and each of these stages is characterized by a challenge/crisis.

• That child needs to figure out how to navigate that crisis. Whether or not they successfully or unsuccessfully navigate that crisis, is going to have, in Erickson's view, longstanding impacts on the individual's psychological functioning.

• He was amongst the first to note adolescence as an important period of development.

Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development: Trust versus Mistrust

• In early stages of development, Eric posited that the crisis children were faced with, or in infants were faced with, was that of trust versus mistrust.

  • This is the ability to build trust and intimate relationships. Can I trust my caregivers to support me, to be there for me when I need them? Can I put faith in other people to rely on them?

• If children are able to develop these trusting relationships with others, that would be passing the crisis, or successfully navigating the crisis.

• Whereas, if children were in an environment where their needs weren't being supported, the mistrust that they would develop in their caregivers, in Erickson's view, would continue throughout the lifespan.

Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development: Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt

• Now we're in the two to three, four year old range. This is where children are starting to grow a little bit in their independence, getting potty trained, etc.

• The crisis Erickson saw here was, can children learn to be autonomous, to be on their own, to be independent and strong, or are they going to feel shamed for trying to be independent? Are they going to learn to be doubtful in themselves and in their abilities, because when they try to be independent, people either prevent them from doing it themselves, or shame their attempts to do so.

• This is all about fostering independence. Were they able to foster some independence? Were they supported in gaining this independence, and then became more autonomous? Or did they encounter struggles that may follow them throughout their life, with regard to feeling shame or doubting their own abilities?

Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development: Initiative versus Guilt

• This is in the four to six year range. Children are becoming little people now.

• They're learning a lot from their parents, and the adult models they have around them. And they're trying to learn about, and internalizing those roles that people have in society.

• They're also trying to balance having their own goals, their own goals about achieving things in the world, doing the things that they want to do. But without stepping on other people's toes, or without doing things that are socially unacceptable.

• This is about balancing their own initiative, with feelings of guilt about pursuing those initiatives.

• For Erickson, this has to do with balancing, or developing a sense of conscience, about what is right, what is wrong, and how do I act in the world in line with, and without violating the codes of my conscience.

Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development: Industry versus Inferiority

• This is when children are in the elementary school and middle childhood years.

• This is where the kid is starting to ask themselves, "Can I contribute to the world? Can I do things that are contributing to the world that I live in, that I can create things, or do good work, or things like that? So, I'll be industrious, or be progressive, and create things that are positive." Versus, "Oh, maybe I'm not good enough to contribute to the world."

• Developing what you might call, and you've probably heard this before, an inferiority complex. The fear that the things that you're doing, or the things that you're creating, are not good enough.

• This is where children are learning whether or not they can contribute to the world in good ways, or whether they have to be worried about not being good enough to contribute to their world.

Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development: Identity versus Role Confusion

• Now we're getting into later stages of middle childhood, and getting into pre-adolescence or adolescence.

• Questions such as, who am I, where do I fit in? What makes me different from other people? What are the true things that are core to my character and my feelings that I identify with?

• These are almost the stereotypical things that adolescents are faced with in adolescence.

• And Erickson was pretty unique in recognizing the importance of this question.

Learning

Any durable change in behavior or knowledge due to experience.

• e.g., Studying and memorizing a new definition, a cat comes running when it hears a can opener, your heart starts racing when you hear a tattoo needle, etc.

• It is not just these conscious, big observable behaviors that we do. It could be something as subtle as a learned autonomic response.

• “My past experiences have led me to learn something and that's going to influence my future behavior.”

Instinctive Reflexive Behavior

However, if you pull your hand back when you get burned and instinctively pull your hand back, this is not learning because this was not a learned behavior.

• This is an innate thing that humans just do when presented with a certain stimulus that is not reliant on past experiences to develop that behavior pattern, that is not learning. That's a reflex.

Watson’s Little Albert Experiment

• An orphan was studied by Watson in his lab to really look at how you could condition a child to have emotional responses to virtually anything. It's all about learning.

• In his famous Little Albert study, he took this little orphan boy Albert and showed him a white lab rat. Initially, this was a neutral stimulus. Little Albert had no fear of the rat whatsoever.

  • Eventually he would pair the rat with a loud gong sound. Obviously, this unconditioned stimulus of a loud gong sound would result in Little Albert feeling fear.

  • Quite quickly, he learned to associate the presentation of the rat, now a conditioned stimulus, with the feeling of fear, a conditioned response. Watson argued that he had conditioned Albert to feel fear of rats.

  • Albert also became fearful of similar stimuli. Watson argued that this fear generalized to white things like other animals, like rabbits, fur coats, other things that were furry, and even like a fluffy Santa Claus mask.

    • He called this stimulus generalization. This is when your conditioned response extends to other stimuli that are similar in some way to the original conditioned stimulus.

• In reality, this is not the case. Poor Albert was, likely, just traumatized.

  • His fear probably "generalized" to everything in his life, given his treatment.

  • This was not a case of stimulus generalization to similar stimuli. This poor little guy was just being tortured. His fear was probably just a very generalized response he had to everything.

• Note that this was totally unethical, obviously an evil, evil thing to do and, even beyond that, isn't a very informative study.

  • The study of Little Albert, while famous, doesn't actually teach us very much at all. All we really learned was that if you traumatize a child, that child will be traumatized.

Classical Conditioning

• The learning of an association between two previously unrelated stimuli.

• The clearest example of that is Pavlov's dogs. Pavlov was an early proto-behaviorist who stumbled on the idea of conditioning.

  • You have a dog and you present it with an unconditioned stimulus such as food. This is a stimulus or a thing that naturally evokes a behavior without previous conditioning.

  • The dog is going to have an unconditioned response and it's going to start drooling.

  • The neutral stimulus is a thing that initially doesn't elicit any response (e.g., yelling “dinner” every time we present the dog with food). Initially the dog wouldn't know how to understand the word dinner at all. That sound wouldn't mean anything to the dog.

  • A conditioned stimulus is a stimulus that while previously neutral now evokes a conditioned behavior (e.g., if you pair you yelling out dinner with the presentation of food enough, eventually you're going to evoke a conditioned response in the dog, such that your dog is going to have associated or as it will have been classically conditioned to associate that formerly neutral stimulus, yelling dinner, with this outcome, which is getting food).

  • Now, the dog is going to have a conditioned response to that stimulus, which is to start drooling when you hear dinner.

Operant Conditioning

• The idea that whether a behavior occurs is largely dependent on its perceived consequences.

• An example of this is reinforcement through reward. This is anything that increases the tendency for an organism to make a response.

• Consider a mouse in a box with two buttons and a graph that's going to be documenting the mouse's behavior. On the Y-axis is the number of responses it makes, and the X-axis is the time that passes.

  • The mouse is just sitting in the box. Time is passing. It hasn't really discovered the buttons yet, until one moment it happens to step on the blue button. Cheese appears out of a hole in the ground.

  • So maybe the mouse keeps going about its business until it accidentally walks on the button again. Then another piece of cheese appears.

  • Really quickly, the mouse is going to, as we would describe it, associate an outcome with this behavior, and suddenly it would start spamming that button. We would see a really sharp uptick in the number of times it's pressing that behavior, because the mouse likes cheese, and it has learned, or has been conditioned to believe that pressing that button will get it this cheese.

    • We are reinforcing this behavior.

  • The opposite of reinforcement is, of course, punishment. This is anything that decreases the tendency for an organism to make a response.

  • The same situation, but this time, the most accidentally steps on the red button, and what happens? A shock is applied through the floor of the box. The mouse does not like that, obviously.

  • Really quickly, is the mouse going to be pressing the button again? No, not at all. That button is going to be avoided. It may take a couple mistaken presses before the mouse learns this, but very quickly the mouse is going to learn, through punishment, to avoid the red button.

Positive Reinforcement

Giving someone a good thing to reinforce their behavior (e.g., giving cheese to the mouse).

Negative Reinforcement

• Let's imagine there was just a continuous current that was going through and shocking the mouse.

• When the mouse pressed the blue button, that removed the shock. This was the removal of a bad thing.

• Similarly, the mouse is going to learn ​​to keep pressing this blue button to keep that shocking stimulus away.

• We reinforced this behavior by removing a bad thing.

Positive Punishment

Giving a bad thing (e.g., when the mouse presses the red button and gets shocked).

Negative Punishment

Removing a good thing.

• Let's imagine the mouse had lots and lots of cheese, all the cheese it could want, until it accidentally pressed the blue button, and then suddenly the cheese was taken away.

B. F. Skinner advocated the use of _____ in parenting, and in the teaching of children.

Operant conditioning.

• Basically you want to reward good behaviors, and you want to punish bad ones.

• They're going to learn from the schedules of reinforcement, or the schedules of punishment that they're raised in. So if you want a kid to do something, reward it. If you want a kid to stop something, punish it.

Parental Attention and Reinforcement

• Sometimes kids are doing things to get attention, and even if you don't know that you're rewarding them, just by giving them your attention, you are rewarding their behaviors.

• So one of the natural consequences of this would be that if I remove my attention to the child, that'd be a good way of discouraging behavior, or punishing behavior.

• A common application of attention would be timeouts. This is an example of negative punishment. You're removing the good thing, which is your attention, and that's a good way of punishing the child.

• Another example of attention as a reinforcer in infancy is what's known as Ferberizing infants. This is the idea of letting children cry it out or sleep training them.

  • Infants in their first year of life are often going to be crying in the middle of the night. Some parents will, every time their infant cries, go and they'll soothe them, and try and help them get back to sleep. What you're doing in going to tend to the baby every time they cry, is more or less rewarding the crying behavior.

  • The notion of Ferberizing is saying that, okay, you still want to make sure that your infants needs are being met. So you want to check on them in a planful schedule, but what you're not going to do is always go and run to the baby the moment they start crying.

  • You want to be really planful, and in doing so, you're not going to reward crying behavior, and you're going to encourage them to self-soothe, and to explore other options for me dealing with their negative emotions in the middle of the night.

  • In case you're wondering, there don't appear to be any really negative outcomes associated with Ferberizing. At the same time, it's not the one cure-all strategy that necessarily all parents should be doing, but the data supports that it's a fine thing to do if you want to try it.

Intermittent Reinforcement

Refers to only reinforcing or punishing a behavior some of the time, rather than all the time.

• It may seem counterintuitive, but actually increases the resistance to extinction. If a behavior is only being rewarded some of the time, all those times the behavior occurs and it doesn't get rewarded, isn't really going to throw up a red flag for the child.

• On the other hand, if a behavior was rewarded every single time, the first few times that behavior occurred and it didn't get rewarded, the child will just stop doing that behavior altogether.

• Intermittent schedules are powerful, because they are more resistant to extinction. In the absence of a single instance of reward, the behavior is likely just to continue, because who knows? Maybe the next time I do the behavior, I'll get rewarded.

Behaviour Modification

Involves changing reinforcement contingencies to encourage adaptive behavior (e.g., reinforcing social engagement while ignoring withdrawal).

Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory

• He was really interested in observational learning. He noted that most human learning is actually social in nature.

  • There's lots of rewards and punishment and lots of classical conditioning that occurs.

  • But a lot of the ways we learn doesn't have to do with our own experiences necessarily, but also just from learning from others and being told about their experiences or observing their experiences.

  • While directly receiving reinforcement and punishment is important for learning, humans and especially children as well as some other animals can actually learn through observation and imitation.

• The idea here is that if you witness reinforcement and punishment administered to another organism, even if you aren't the recipient of that reinforcement and punishment yourself, you can still learn to alter your own behavior accordingly.

  • This is learning. This is a changing of your behavior due to your experiences, but even when you aren't actually on the receiving end of the reinforcement or punishment yourself.

Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll Study

• With regard to observational learning in humans, Bandura conducted what is maybe the most influential studies with regard to observational learning still to date. And this is known as his Bobo doll studies.

• In Bandura's Bobo doll studies, preschool kids watched videos of an adult assaulting this little bouncy doll called Bobo. They would hold him down and punch him and kick him and throw the doll around.

• There were three different groups.

  • One group watched this video and then watched the adult being rewarded for beating up poor Bobo.

  • Group two then saw the adult being punished for beating up Bobo.

  • And the third group saw no consequences at all.

• Bandura was interested in what children would then do when they had the opportunity to interact with Bobo.

  • When they were left alone with Bobo, children in groups one and group three were the ones who acted the most violently. This was similar for boys and girls in the model rewarded and no consequences group.

  • However, in the model punished group, so kids from group two were less violent overall.

    • There's an effect here where boys were more aggressive in general than girls, but it was lower overall compared to the other two groups.

• This shows children were engaging in vicarious reinforcement, so they were learning from someone else being rewarded or punished.

• However, Bandura went one step further. Regardless of whether you saw the adult rewarded, the adult being punished or no consequences, following the adult at all, Bandura then offered children a prize if they could reproduce what they saw.

  • All groups acted violently, so even the kids who watched the adult originally getting punished, when they were incentivized to do it themselves, they could suddenly reproduce the violent behavior exactly like the other kids could.

Implications of the Bobo Doll Study

• Even the kids who didn't spontaneously act violently had still learned from their observations.

  • You don't need to be rewarded or need to be punished, or don't even need to see the adult being rewarded or punished to observationally learn from what you're seeing.

  • You are observing the punishment and the reward may alter your likelihood of doing it yourself spontaneously. But that doesn't mean that kids didn't learn from it.

• This has implications for things like what children are seeing in the media, even if we see a cartoon character doing something bad and then getting in trouble, that doesn't mean that the kid watching didn't observe the cartoon character doing this bad behavior and couldn't under certain circumstances, reproduce it themselves.

  • Exposure alone was enough for them to learn from it.

  • This had big, massive effects for how we interpret the media, how parents go about modeling things for their children or choosing what their children are exposed to.

Vicarious Reinforcement

In which children learn from watching someone else being rewarded or punished.

Self-Socialization

Children actively shape their own social development through preferences, friendships, and goals.

Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking

Role taking is the ability to understand another person’s perspective.

• He theorized that this understanding develops in stages.

Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking: Stage 1 (6–8 Years)

Children realize others may have different information but misunderstand their perspective.

Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking: Stage 2 (8–10 Years)

Children can consider another person’s point of view.

Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking: Stage 3 (10–12 Years)

Children compare their own and another person’s perspectives systematically.

Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking: Stage 4 (12+ Years)

Adolescents assess perspectives relative to a “generalized other” or societal norms.

Dodge’s Social Information-Processing Theory

• In ambiguous social situations, some children will interpret events as accidental.

  • e.g., Imagine someone spilled coffee on a pile of papers, maybe it was your homework. Some people would say, "Oh, that person made a mistake. They accidentally tripped up and spilled some of their coffee on my homework. No big deal, mistakes happen."

  • Other kids would interpret this very same event as intentional (i.e., that person intentionally tried to spill their coffee on my papers). They would assume negative intent.

  • So the exact same stimulus can be interpreted two different ways. How the child processes that event and what attribution we'll say, they tie to that event, is going to totally influence what they walk away from and what they think is going on, and what they think about that other person.

• This is what Dodge calls, a hostile attribution bias, or HAB.

Hostile Attributin Bias (HAB)

This is the tendency to assume that people's ambiguous actions stem from hostile intents, as opposed to more benign intents, or accidental intents.

• This is associated with reactive aggression. Children who are likely to assume that when people engage in a certain behavior, that they did so intentionally and they did so with a hostile intention, are associated with children who are more reactively aggressive.

• e.g., If you're in this situation and someone spilled their drink on their homework, a child who has a tendency to make hostile attributions, that same child might actually be reactively aggressive. They might try and start a fight or go get revenge somehow, etc.

Carol Dweck’s Mindset Theory

• She noted that kids vary in their achievement motivations.

  • Some kids seem really motivated by performance goals, so they want to succeed at things so they can receive praise and get good grades and really have all this positive feedback on their performance. At the same time they want to avoid failing so they can avoid feeling bad about themselves. They can avoid the outcome of a failure, and that failure would be really negative for them.

    • It's all focusing on the outcomes of their achievements.

  • Dweck also noted that other kids seemed less focused on the outcomes and more focused on the process itself. They seemed to be motivated by improving themselves, improving their skills, getting better at something, trying and mastering new tasks. Trying something new is going to be really fun for a kid who's motivated by learning goals, because it's just the opportunity to learn something new.

• Recognizing these two distinct kinds of motivations, Dweck put forward that there are two kinds of orientations that children might have that influences their motivation.

  • She called them entity orientation and incremental orientation.

Carol Dweck’s Mindset Theory: Entity/Helpless Orientations

Children attribute outcomes to innate abilities and individual differences.

• It's an entity insofar as it's focusing on your stable inner traits. What are the characteristics that you have as a person? The outcomes of your endeavors are going to be reflections of your inner traits.

• If you were to succeed at something, a child with an entity orientation would say “I must be pretty smart”.

• On the other hand, if they failed at something, their conclusion would be, “this is a reflection of who I am, so if I failed, I must be dumb”.

Carol Dweck’s Mindset Theory: Incremental/Mastery Orientations

Children attribute their outcomes to hard work, persistence and commitment.

• When a child with an incremental orientation succeeds, they don't think of it as a reflection of these stable traits about themselves, they say “I worked hard. I earned this. It was my persistence and my commitment that led me to achieve this outcome. It's an action about me, not a trait, but it was my actions that led to this”.

• On the other hand, if they fail, it's not a reflection of some unchangeable characteristic about themselves. They would say, "You know what? I should try harder next time. I should work harder next time.”

Entity/Helpless Theory of Intelligence

On the other hand, children who have an entity orientation, so who draw a lot of motivation from getting good grades or avoiding failure, they're more likely to have an entity theory of intelligence. They're likely to believe that intelligence is an innate and unchangeable thing.

• They would think, “I'll never be able to do this. If I'm struggling with this now, that must mean I'm dumb and I'm going to be dumb forever. So if I'm having a hard time with this, then I'm never going to get better at it.”

• This is actually associated with no change in math scores relative to the rest of their peers over the course of two years.

Incremental/Mastery Theory of Intelligence

A child who thinks that hard work pays off and your outcomes are due to your hard work and your persistence and not due to your inherent traits, they're likely to develop an incremental theory of intelligence. This means that they're likely to believe that intelligence grows with practice and experience.

• They would think, “This is really hard. This new math class I'm taking, it's really challenging me. But you know what? If I practice, I'll get it.”.

• They're beliefs about where they can draw value and worth and how to interpret their social outcomes or their goal outcomes is going to influence how they even think about something like the stability of their own intelligence.

• This is actually predictive of children getting higher math scores over the course of two years.

Parental Investment Theory

Looks at how, from an evolutionary perspective, it's really important that parents invest time and energy in making sure that their infants are able to survive.

• That makes humans a lot different from say something like some reptile species. Humans will literally take care of their infants. One infant for 14-16 years, at minimum, from an evolutionary perspective, if we go back to the origins of humanity.

• Versus, if you think about fish or some reptiles, you lay eggs that become fertilized and they fend for themselves. The difference here is that you can lay so many different eggs, or fertilize so many different eggs, that you really don't need to be fostering the development of those.

Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Model

An ecological model that kind of takes a really broad scope in thinking about all the different influences that can impact a child's social development.

• In Bronfenbrenner's model, you start with the child in the middle. This includes all the individual characteristics that are associated with that child, such as their genes, their gender, their age, their temperamental traits, any aspect of their phenotype, etc.

• Radiating outward each circle within this model (because Bronfenbrenner breaks it down into different concentric circles that kind of radiate outwards) each circle shows a new level of influence on the child's development.

• The farther from the center means the influence is less direct on the child. As we go further and further outward, we're becoming more broad, more abstract. But that being said, still important.

Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Model: Microsystem

• Focuses on the child themselves, so right here in the middle.

• This is the immediate environment in which the child participates.

• This is their family, their friends, their teachers, all the sports they're engaged in, the arts they're engaged in, any religious activities they're engaged in, etc. These are the aspects of a child's social life to which they are directly involved.

• The microsystem influences the child and the child influences the microsystem too. Some of the themes we always talk about in this course is that of the active child. Not only does the child receive influence from the world around them, but they also influence the world as well.

  • For example, parents put their kid into softball, the kid loves it, dedicates a ton of effort and time, and suddenly softball becomes a shared passion for the whole family.

  • For this kid, being on a softball team is part of their microsystem. It's part of their immediate environment that they engage with on a day to day life.

Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Model: Mesosystem

• The connections and interactions between different aspects of a child's microsystem.

  • For example, parents are becoming involved in a sports team or friends supporting the child's academic success.

• The important thing here is almost two different aspects of the microsystem that are colliding and how exactly those interact.

  • How does the child's interactions with their parents influence their interactions with their sports team? Or rather, how do their parents and their sports team interact? Or how do the friends that a child interacts with influence their academic success at school?

• When aspects of this level don't mesh, outcomes are not as positive. The mesosystem is optimally all about harmony, all about the different aspects of a child's microsystem working together in a harmonious way to help the child, help guide the child's social development.

  • For example, if a parent were to discourage a child from being engaged in art classes, this would be kind of a clashing of the microsystems.

  • Another one, rather than your friends supporting your child's academic success, it could be friends encouraging the skipping of school.

• It's important just to consider what the mesosystem is all about, considering how different aspects of a child's microsystem or the different kinds of things they immediately interact with in their social world, how they interact with each other.

Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Model: Exosystem

• The environmental setting that the child does not directly experience, but can nonetheless affect the child indirectly. We're getting at the stage now of indirect environmental settings that influence the child's life.

• Importantly, the child isn't going to directly influence, get involved with any of this. his is part of the exosystem in that these are all indirect effects.

  • This is stuff like their parents' income. The child doesn't directly do taxes or see bank statements, but the parents' income is definitely going to interact with and influence the child's life.

  • Also things like the parents' work environment. If the parents' work environment is supportive and pleasant and offers them lots of support, that's great. However, if it's adding lots of stressors to the parents' life, that's not going to be so great.

  • Things like school funding cuts are another one. So if your school's funding gets cut, your school's going to have less money. That means there's going to be less things for the child, less resources for the child to learn with.

Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Model: Macrosystem

• The beliefs, values, customs, and laws of the society that affect all the other levels in which the child is embedded.

  • e.g., If you're a child growing up in Canada, what are some of the dominant ideologies of the time that you're living in? What are some of the laws and customs that you have to deal with? What are the cultural or subcultural values that your life is entirely enmeshed in?

• And importantly, that's going to impact lots of different levels.

  • That's going to impact your parents and their functioning, that's going to impact all the different interactions with your different involvements in your microsystem. It's going to impact the child's emergent values themselves.

• This includes subcultures, subcultures, social class groups.

  • This could influence your beliefs about child rearing, for example. A child isn't going to directly at the age of two or three understand or have any access to the beliefs that their culture has about child rearing, but they're absolutely going to be influenced by it.

  • These abstract beliefs that are shared across social groups across the culture are going to influence the world the child grows up in

  • Another thing is like access to resources. The beliefs and the values that the particular government has had for the years preceding the child's birth even, is going to have an influence on the resources the child has at their disposal.

Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Model: Chronosystem

• It's the consideration of how even historical changes (e.g., changing of a government), can influence a child's life that led to the addition of a fifth system that wasn't present in Bronfenbrenner's original model.

• It reflects that all of this occurs over the passing of time, both in the child's own life and also more broadly in historical time.

• It describes historical and developmental changes that influence the other systems. This reflects the beliefs, values and circumstances specific to the times during which the child is developing.

  • Nothing of this works in, happens in a vacuum, nothing is permanent and unchanging. Things are always evolving both in the individual's own life and on a more societal level.

• This reflects shifts in societal values, technological advances or global events, etc. All of these things can influence an individual child's life. All depends on when exactly they were growing up and also it is important to consider at what stage the child was in when they were going through each of these events.

• As children age, they take on a more active and independent role in their environment.

  • A two year old and a 14 year old growing up during the same moment of time, even if they're growing up in the same household are going to be influenced differently by the historical events that they're living through based on their stage of development.