Midterm - The Literature of Children and Adolescents

How was child development viewed before the 20th century?

limited attention given

• children seen as mini adults

• minimal formal education

scientific progress and changes in social values → growing interest in child development

Why did children’s literature develop?

Increased social mobility + notion that literacy holds the key to future success for children

The Ancient World (700 BCE - 500 CE)

few works of imaginative lit for children’s enjoyment

• oral tales

• Aesop’s Fables (6th c. BCE)

Medieval Times (5th-16th centuries)

• Folklore told to a mixed audience of adults and children

• Magical thinking, superstition, and traditional beliefs

• Great cathedrals as 3D bible picture books

The Renaissance/Reformation

• printing press (mid-15th century) - mass literacy as a result

• only book most people had at home was the bible

17th century ideas of childhood

• Original Sin

• John Locke’s theory

Original sin

Puritan belief a child is born stubborn, willful, inclined toward sin, and must be saved

• Harsh, restrictive child-rearing practices

• Childhood self-reliance and self-control emphasized as virtues

• Curiosity and imagination put down as dangerous vices

John Locke’s ideas of childhood

Locke believed experience “furnishes” a person - believes nurture (not nature) shapes a person

Locke’s position: children may be taught to read and engage creatively with things like books and exploring the world. Through that, they will learn

• Interested in how children in this world learn and grow

  • Disagreed with puritan belief  

  • Believed humans are a blank slate, not good or bad

Orbis Sensualium Pictus

“The Pictured World,” one of the first illustrated children’s books (Nuremberg, 1658)

• Multi-lingual picture encyclopedia

Little Pretty Pocket (1744)

first book published by the man credited with founding England’s children’s book publishing industry

• Author John Newbery was inspired by Locke’s ideas that a good children’s book should entertain while instructing

• Children’s book illustration begins to emerge as an art form

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

First developmentalist

• Natural state of humans from birth is not sinful or neutral but good

• Children actively seek out their environment

  • Nature plays the primary role

  • Book learning is of secondary importance

• Society (adults) “corrupts” the normal developmental path

• Early experiments with a child-centered approach to education

What did the 19th century look like for child lit?

• Children’s literature flourishes in English and northern Europe, inspired in part by Romantic Movement

• Brothers Grimm publish Household Tales (1814) in Germany, their first collection of traditional fairy tales

  • They didn’t write the stories themselves but collected them

• Hans Christian Andersen publishes his first self-consciously literary fairy tale collection in Denmark in 1835

• Rise of nonsense and fantasy as an antidote to moralism and literal-minded approaches to teaching - Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

• Adventure stories, especially aimed at boys, give a sense of entitlement to the world at large (ex: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)

• Mischief is presented as a positive trait associated with nonconformity and heroism

• School stories for boys - Tom Brown’s School Days, domestic stories of girls - Little Women, Anne of Green Gables

Charles Darwin’s contributions to development

• 1887: published “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant”

  • Systematic observations of child development

• Child follows same general plan and evolution as the human species

National Congress of Mothers 1897

• Largest advocacy organization in the nation at the time, founded by Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst

• Pro-women’s right to vote, children still working in factories, etc.

• Goal: to eliminate threats that endangered children

What contributions did Luther Emmet Holt add to development?

• pediatrician and chief of babies hospital (1855-1924)

• Feeding schedules - every two hours during the first month

• Weighing - before and after meals

• Toilet training - easily by the third month

• Crying - necessary for health; it’s the baby’s exercise

• Playing - never until 4 months; they are made nervous and irritable

JB Watson

behavioral psychologist who warned parents against being overly affectionate with their children

• Puritans would agree with this

What did child lit publishing look like in the early 20th century?

Dramatic Expansion in Children’s Book Publishing

• Initially little attention paid to children by American publishers

• After WWI, new system arose → new positions, new literary prize

• National book week → push to inspire book ownership and have books in the home

• In 1919, 433 new books for children were published in the US; a decade later, annual output had doubled to 931

1920s

• Edward Stratemeyer: author and published

  • 1926 ALA survey - 36k children, 98% said his books were by him

  • His books were in such high demand that he started a “fiction factory”

  • Commercialization intersected with the culture of childhood (scorned by librarians)

Anne Carroll Moore

• 1906 - became first director to work with children at NYPL at a time when the idea of children being allowed into libraries was brand-new

• Moore oversaw the central children’s room in the library’s flagship building on 5th ave

• Leading figure in popular children’s books in the first half of the 20th century and had modern methods

  • Scheduled children’s story hours

  • Encouraged any children who could sign their names to check out a book

  • Trained librarians drawn from a range of backgrounds, then sent them into a city of immigrant children to talk about reading

• Tastemaker whose NYPL-branded lists of recommended children’s books could make or break a book’s fortunes

  • Other libraries around the country looked to the NYPL and if she didn’t buy it, they didn’t buy it

• A steadfast believer in the role of magic and innocence in children’s storytelling

Bank St and Lucy Sprague Mitchell

• Moore’s classical taste in books opposed a progressive wave in children’s lit stemming from the early childhood research of the Cooperative School for Student Teachers (on Bank St in Greenwich Village)

• Bank St School was also a preschool and the teacher training facility where Margaret Wise Brown enrolled in 1935

• In 1930s, Bank St was the setting for an innovative social experiment—trainees worked beside psychologists, educational reformers, anthropologists, and artists; all had regular contact w the children and staff of the nursery school

Bank St Assumption

To teach children effectively, you must first understand how they experience reality at every stage of development

• Part of the progressive education movement, maintaining that children have legit interests and needs, apart from the 3 Rs

Here and Now Story Book

a collection of simple tales set in a city, focusing on skyscrapers and streetcars by Lucy

• A rebuttal to Moore’s “once upon a time” taste in children’s lit

Where the Wild Things Are (1963)

• Maurice Sendak wanted to show childhood in all its messiness, had scrappy characters, lots of emotion

• Realistic depiction of childhood anxieties and rebellious behavior at a time when many stories for young readers presented a sugar-coated version of life 

20th Century Child Lit Themes

Rise of illustration as an extraordinarily rich and varied art form created for children’s books

Diversity is the main theme of the century’s books → poetry, fantasy, realistic fiction, nonfiction

• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Charlotte’s Web, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Common Sense book of Baby and Child Care

Benjamin Spock (1948), trust your common sense, show love and affection to children rather than constant strict discipline

• Criticism: the U.S. was paying the price of two generations that followed the Dr. Spock baby plan of instant gratification of needs

Recent developments in child lit

• #OwnVoices: kidlit about diverse characters written by authors from that same diverse group

• Only 7% of new children’s books in 2017 were written by BIPOC authors

• Only a small amount of books featuring diverse characters are written by authors w a shared identity

Reflexes

the infant’s first coordinated movements

Voluntary movements

the motor milestones

Newborn reflexes - primitive behavior (1 mo)

Eye blink, root, suck, swim, moro, palmar grasp (fingers automatically curl on object in palm), tonic neck (‘en garde’ position), stepping, babinski

primary

simple motor habits centered around the infant’s own body - limited anticipation

Good toys

crib mobile, rattles or other noise making toys, songs and lullabies

Birth - 6mo progress

• Pathways in the brain connect perception to action

• Motorically babies have a drive to repeat actions to learn about the physical world and construct an understanding of “reality”

• direction of growth - cephalocaudal and proximodistal

• Mouth, tongue, lips have twice as many sensory connections and are first to develop

4-8 mo

• Actions aimed at repeating interesting effects in the world

• Imitations of familiar behaviors - begin to adapt behaviors

• Easily recognize voice and face of parent

• Trapped in the here and now

• Good toys: squeeze toys, nesting cups, clutch balls, floating bath toys, picture books

8-12 mo

• Intention or goal directed behavior

• Search and find for hidden object

• Improved anticipation of events

• Imitation of behaviors slightly different from those usually performed

• Drive to be independent

• Toward latter end of this age - begin to walk!

Gross Motor Skills

crawling (7mo), standing (11mo), and walking (11-12 mo)

• Movements start off as gross, diffuse activity, and move toward mastery of fine movements

Motor Development in Infancy + Toddlerhood

• Allow babies to master their bodies and the environment in new ways

• Gives infants new perspective on the world

• Reaching allows babies to find out about objects by acting on them

• Impact on social relationships

18-24 mo: gross motor

• Body becomes more streamlined and less top heavy

• Center of gravity shifts downward, toward trunk

• Balance improves

• Takes 18-24 months for the gait (manner of walking) to be smooth and rhythmic

Motor development in early childhood

• Center of gravity shifts downward and balance improved greatly

• Arms and torsos are freed to experiment (throwing, catching balls, steering tricycles)

Fine Motor: reach and grasp

• 3-4 mo reaching appears purposeful

• 5-6 months can reach for object in dim room, suggesting that baby doesn’t need vision to guide the arms and hands in reaching

  • Movement is governed by proprioception: our sense of movement and location in space

• Reaching improves as depth perception advances and as infants gain greater control of body posture and arm and hand movements

• Once infants can reach they modify their grasp (by 8-11)

Depth perception

the ability to judge the distance of objects from one another and from ourselves

• Visual cliff

• Motion: clue to proximity

• Binocular depth cues: blending of images from each eye

• Pictorial depth cues: clues that objects are not flat

Pencil grasp

Between ages 3-5 children acquire pencil gripping skill

Letter formation

• Distinguish writing from non writing by age 4

• Confusion of letter patterns are common up until age 8

Fine Motor Development

By age 6 most children can print the alphabet, their first and last names, and 1-10. Writing is large, using strokes involving entire arm

Motor System’s Assembly

Motor skills are not hardwired into NS, but softly assembled by exploration and experience

• Each new motor skill is the joint product of:

  • CNS development

  • The body’s movement capacities

  • The goals child has in mind

  • Environmental support for the skill

• Skills are mastered through repetition and exposure (ex: set of stairs at home)

  • In learning to walk, toddlers practice 6 or more hours a day

Physical Growth and Sleep Patterns

• Physical growth

  • At birth, avg newborn weighs 7½ lbs

  • Infants double their weight by 5 months

• Sleep patterns

  • During first month, newborns spend ⅔ of their time sleeping, waking every 3 hrs

  • REM sleep accounts for 50% of newborn sleep time

  • Variations in parent approaches to sleep

    • Sleep training → co-sleeping

Growth Spurts

intervals of growth and stability

• 1 month intervals until 5mo, then spurts at 8, 12, and 20 mo

by 6, avg North American child weight 45lbs and is 3½ ft tall

Over next few yrs, children will add 2-3 in. and 5 lbs each year

physical growth in infancy and toddlerhood

heredity, nutrition, emotional well-being

• 25% of infant’s total caloric intake is devoted to growth

Physical development - early childhood

pituary gland releases:

• growth hormone (GH): necessary for development of almost all body tissue

• thyroid-stimulation hormone (TSH): prompts release of thyroxine which is necessary for brain development and for GH to have its full impact on body size

emotional well-being

• stress suppresses the release of GH

• extreme deprivation = psychosocial dwarfism

Factors related to physical development in early childhood

Sleep Habits

• Gh is released during sleeping hours

• 2 and 3 year olds sleep 11-12 hrs on average

• American children stop napping between 3-4 yrs

• Sleepwalking and nightmares are common, night terrors in 3% of children

Nutrition

Infectious Disease

Value of shared book reading with young children

• home literacy environment

• socio-economic factors

• shared book reading interventions

Home literacy environment

shared book reading

• Amount of time spent listening to stories at 1-3 associated with teacher ratings of language skills at 5 yrs old and reading comprehension at 7 yrs old

• Significant relationship between the frequency of parent-preschooler reading and children’s reading, spelling, and IQ scores at 13

• Significant relationship between the reported age of onset of shared reading and children’s language scores at 4

Socio-economic factors

• Typical middle-class child enters school with 1000-1700 hours of shared book reading vs 25 hours for the average low-income child

• 47% of public-aid parents report no alphabet books in the home vs 3% of professional parents

• Children from low-income homes start 1st grade behind their peers in language ability, phonological sensitivity, and print knowledge

Dialogic reading

child becomes storyteller while adult is active listener and coach

• 3 core techniques

1. “What” questions

2. Open-ended questions

3. Expanding upon what the child says

• Children whose teachers and parents were trained in dialogic reading gained significantly in emergent writing, print knowledge, and language

What was the audience like for Carle?

When book was first published, libraries didn’t see it as part of their job to serve children and their parents

During 1970s, day care centers and preschool were becoming common

• These developments created the first audience for Eric Carle’s work

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

Shared Book reading and language

• Amount of time spent listening to stories at 1-3 associated with teacher ratings of language skills at 5 years old and reading comprehension at 7 years old

• Significant relationship between the frequency of parent-preschooler reading and children’s reading, spelling, and IQ scores at age 13

• Significant relationship between the reported age of onset of shared reading and children’s language scores at 4 years old 

Socio-economic factors

• Typical middle-class child enters school with 1000-1700 hours of shared book reading vs 25 hours for the average low-income child

• 47% of public-aid parents report no alphabet books in the home vs 3% of professional parents

• Children from low-income homes start 1st grade behind their peers in language ability, phonological sensitivity, and print knowledge

Importance of oral vocab skills

• Strong oral vocab helps children acquire print vocabulary

• NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (2005)

  • 1st grade oral vocab skills were the second most valuable predictor of 3rd grade reading comprehension

• Risk factors for delayed oral vocab

  • Developmental disability

  • Parent with a learning disability

  • Non-native language speaker

  • Household with infrequent exposure to written or spoken language

Dialogic Reading

child becomes the storyteller, while the adult is an active listener and coach

• 3 core techniques

  • Open-ended techniques

  • Expand upon what the child says

  • Provide praise and encouragement

  • Build on children’s interests when selecting stories 

Dialogic Reading Outcomes

• Children whose teachers and parents were trained in dialogic reading gained significantly in emergent writing, print knowledge, and language

• Dialogic reading can be implemented in daycare setting, low-income households, or head start classrooms

Two-Prong Approach

Teacher reads the book with a small group of children (no more than 5) 2-3 times, using special prompts and procedures

• Teacher trains the parents to read the book with the child at home repeatedly, using Dialogic Reading techniques

Development of attachment

• Earliest attachments are usually formed by 7 months

• Nearly all infants become attached

• Attachments are formed to only a few people

  • These “selective attachments” appear to be derived from social interactions w attachment figures

• They lead to specific organizational changes in an infant’s behavior & brain function

Attachment

emotional bond between parents and infants, from which infant derive security

• Harlow’s Monkeys - Harlow studied monkeys to determine their preference in infancy for food or parental comfort

Synchrony

mutual, interlocking pattern of attachment behaviors shared by a parent and a child

• ex: a baby smiles when a parent smiles

Transitional object

any material object (typically something soft) to which an infant attributes a special value and by means of which the child is able to make the necessary shift from the earliest oral relationship with the mother to genuine object-relationships

• ex: tweety - commonly referred to as a “security blanket” - soft, warm, predictable

• One’s first friend 

• Coined by 1951 by Donald Winnicott 

• Adopted between 4-12 months

• Thought to aid in separation anxiety

• Often associated with soothing and falling asleep 

• Take important role in preschool years

John Bowlby on attachment in humans

• The importance of a secure base

• Bond between an infant and caregiver is a relationship that promotes survival 

• Infant create different internal working models of their relationships with parents and other key adults and recreate this model in each new relationship

Attachment theory

Effects of the quality of our early relationships on adult life

• Insecure or disturbed attachments in childhood frequently lead to deficits in: 

  • Self-esteem 

  • Emotional stability

  • Intimate relationships

  • Capacity to achieve in later life