Middle Childhood: Psychosocial Development

Nature of School-Age Children

  • Industry vs. Inferiority

    • 4th of Erikson’s 8 psychosocial crises

    • Characterized by tension between productivity and incompetence

  • Children

    • Attempt to master culturally valued skills and develop a sense of themselvs as either industrious or inferior, competent, or incompetent

  • Self-concept

    • Contains ideas about self that include intelligence, personality, abilities, gender, and ethnic background

  • Effortful control

    • Ability to regulate one’s emotions and actions through effort, not simply through natural inclination

    • Reduced by unrealistically high or low self-esteem

Resilience

  • Involves capacity to adapt well to significant adversity and to overcome serious stress

  • Suggests differential sensitivity

  • Can be dynamic

  • Positive adaptation to stress

  • Adversity must be significant

Cumulative Stress

  • Repeated stress

    • Makes resilience difficult

    • More devastating than isolated major stress

  • Coping measures reduce impact of repeated stress

    • Interpretation of family situation

    • Development of friends, activities, and after-school stuff

    • Involvement in community, church, and other programs

Family Function

  • Families help children

    • Provide basic material necessities

    • Encourage learning

    • Help them develop self-respect

    • Nurture friendships

    • Foster harmony and stability

  • No family always functions perfectly

  • Nuclear family

    • Consists of a father, mother, and biological children under the age of 18

    • Tend to be wealthier, better educated, healthier, more flexible, and less hostile

  • Single-parent family

    • Consists of only one parent and his or her children under age 18

    • Has children who fare worse in school and in adult life than most other children

    • Often low-income and unstable, move more often and add new adults more often in single-mother households

  • Extended family

    • Consists of parents, their children, and other relatives living in one household

    • Includes 1 in 6 US families in 2010; particularly common when children are small

    • Is less costly and more common in low-income households