Week 3 - Learning to Trust (Making a Home in the World)

What do babies do?

• Babies demonstrate what they know when they: cry, vocalize, make facial expressions, move

• All mental activity is inferred from what a baby expresses

• It is the pathway for us to understand them

Personality

focus on how conscious and unconscious thoughts influence behavior and development

Human Psyche Theory

The mind consists of 3 basic components that are constantly in conflict:

• id: primitive instincts, completely unconscious, operates on pleasure principle

• Ego: rational thoughts, operates on reality principles

Superego: ethics, morals, conscience, operates on moral principle

Freud’s 5 stages of psychosexual development

• oral (0-2)

• anal (2-3)

• phallic (3-7)

• latency (7-11)

• genital (11-adult)

Oral Stage (0-2)

infant seeks oral gratification by sucking, biting, and babbling

Anal Stage (2-3)

potty training helps toddlers balance their needs for anal gratification with society’s demand to be clean and neat

Phallic stage (3-7)

unconscious desire for the opposite-sex parent is controlled by identification with the same-sex parent

Latency stage (7-11)

sexual urges are repressed and the child prefers same-sex companions

Genital Stage (11-adult)

with puberty sexual urges reappear, and the adolescent learns about mature relationships

Oedipus and Electra conflicts

• During the phallic stage

• Unconscious sexual desire for parent of opposite gender

• To avoid punishment and maintain the affection of parents, children give up on this desire and adopt the same-sex parent’s values

Result: superego is formed and they adopt gender-role standards of their society

Freud: a critical evaluation

• Good at explaining, but not predicting behavior

• Unscientific theory

  • Non-representative sample (mostly housewives)

  • Confirmatory bias (gathered data to prove what he believed)

• Why do we still teach his theories?

  • Founding father of psychoanalysis

  • Identified impact of childhood events on adult personality

  • Introduced idea of stages in child development

Erik Erikson

• Follower of Freud (neo-Freudian)

• Psychosocial theory

• First 5 stages parallel Freud

• Addition of last 3 adult stages - becoming one of the first to recognize the lifespan nature of development

Erikson’s 8 Stages of Psychosocial Development

1. Infant - Trust vs Mistrust

2. Toddler - Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt

3. Preschooler - Initiative vs Guilt

4. School-Age Child - Industry vs Inferiority

5. Adolescent - Identity vs Role Confusion

6. Young Adult - Intimacy vs Isolation

7. Middle-Age Adult - Generativity vs Stagnation

8. Older Adult - Integrity vs Despair

Stage 1 - Trust vs Mistrust

• Birth-18 months

• From warm responsive care, infants gain a sense of trust that the world is good

• Mistrust occurs if infants are neglected or handled harshly

• Healthy outcome does not depend on amount of food or oral stimulation offered but rather on the quality of caregiving

  • Relieving discomfort promptly and sensitively 

  • Holding the infant gently

  • Waiting patiently until the baby has had enough to eat

Stage 2 - Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt

• Toddler age

• “No!” “Do it myself!”

• Resolved favorably when parents provide suitable guidance and reasonable choices

• Meet his assertions of independence with tolerance and understand

  • Ex: “Okay, you don’t have to,” “Five extra minutes, then clean up”

• Overcontrolling/undercontrolling leads to shame and doubt

Stage 3 - Initiative vs Guilt

• Preschool age

• Initiative develops when parents support their child’s sense of purpose

• If parents demand too much self-control, children experience guilt

• Ex: a preschooler initiating a game with friends, playing with toy blocks or legos, imaginative play

Stage 4 - Industry vs Inferiority

• School age

• Children learn to work and cooperate with others at school

• Inferiority develops when negative experiences at home or school lead to feelings to incompetence 

Psychoanalytic Perspectives - Freud

• Emphasized the symbiotic relationship between the mother and young infant, in which the two behave as if they were one

• A gratifying nursing period followed by a balanced weaning period led to the infant’s development of a sense of both attachment to and separation from the mother

Psychoanalytic Perspectives - Erikson

• Nursing and weaning are important, but they are only one aspect of the overall social environment

• Responding to the infant’s other needs is just as important

Ethology

the study of the behavior of animals in their natural environment

• Imprinting (Konrad Lorenz): Upon coming out of their eggs, they (ducklings) will follow and become attached (socially bonded) to the first moving object they encounter

• Critical period (limited time span) - animals

• Sensitive period (boundaries less well-defined) - humans

Ecological Systems Theory - Bronfenbrenner

• 1st level: Microsystem

• 2nd level: Mesosystem

• 3rd level: Exosystem

• 4th level: Macrosystem

Microsystem

environments the child is directly in

Mesosystem

The culture the child finds themselves - home, school, neighborhood 

• Teachers are telling parents about their child, parent is communicating back to the teacher

• The connections between the microsystems

Exosystem

social settings that don’t contain the child but affect them

• Extended family, friendship networks, government, workplace

Macrosystem

Values, customs, laws, resources

Personality

the pattern of responding to people and objects in the environment (a combination of temperament and life experiences)

Temperament

Temperament is the ‘personality-to-be’

• Temperament predispositions, such as activity level, that are present at birth form the foundations of personality (often thought of as stable traits)

• dimensions: easy, difficult, slow-to-warm-up

Easy temperament

playful, regular in bio functions, adapt to new situations

Difficult temperament

irregular in bio functions, irritable, respond intensely

Slow to warm up temperament

low activity level, withdraw from new situations, require more time to adapt to change

The Nine Dimension

1. Activity: is the child always on the move?

2. Rhythmicity: is the child regular in his eating and sleeping habits?

3. Approach/withdrawal: does she shy away from strangers?

4. Adaptability: can he adjust to changes in routines?

5. Intensity of reaction: does he react strongly to situations (positive or negative)?

6. Quality of mood: does she have a negative outlook?

7. Persistence: does she give up quickly?

8. Distractability: is she easily distracted?

9. Sensitivity: is he bothered by external stimuli (e.g. loud noises/bright lights/food textures)?

Goodness of Fit

involves creating child-rearing environments that recognize each child’s temperament while simultaneously encouraging more adaptive functioning

• Temperamental attributes become developmentally consolidated and incorporated into a stable personality structure

• The influence of temperament on personality or adjustment depends on the “goodness of fit” between temperament and environmental demands

Goodnight Moon background

• Books for babies and toddlers were a new idea when MWB wrote picture books during 1930s/40s

• Brown studied at the Bank Street College of Education

• Bank Street’s founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, believed that children wanted stories about the world they knew from their own experience, not the world of once-upon-a-time

  • Mitchell believed that for a very young child, a good book might simply consist of things from that child’s everyday world (ex: clock, a comb)

  • Mitchell thoughts of books and toys as part of a continuum - the best toys were those that left plenty of room for the child to exercise their own imagination

Interest in Children’s Language

• Observation of young kids’ interest in the rhythm, sound quality and patterns of sound (Mitchell)

• Flair for rhythmic language