Middle Childhood

Middle Childhood - Chapter 6

Development Overview

• During middle childhood, children:
  • Learn about rules and fairness.
  • Establish friendships and peer groups.
• Erikson's Stage: Industry vs. Inferiority
  • Children focus on mastering social and cognitive skills.
  • They measure their success against their peers.
• Child culture development:
  • Children develop their own culture within peer groups.
• Physical & Cognitive skills:
  • Experience greater development.
• Peer Interaction:
  • Increased interaction with peers becomes significant.

Biophysical Dimension

• Growth:
  • Slow and steady.
• Motor Development:
  • Changes in coordination, agility, and smoothness.
  • Elementary school children are fascinated with sports activities.
  • 7-8 year olds show increased interest in sit-down games due to enhanced attention span and cognitive abilities.
  • Boys are generally ahead in gross motor skills.
  • Girls are generally ahead in fine motor skills.
• Readiness:
  • The point at which a child's developmental maturity allows them to quickly learn a skill.

Biophysical Strengths & Hazards

• Physical Activity:
  • Declining, especially for girls.
  • Contributes to childhood obesity.
  • Older children are gaining weight and becoming more sedentary.
• Factors contributing to physical inactivity:
  • Video games and television.
  • Failure of parents and physical education programs to instill a lifelong exercise ethic.
  • "If you don’t train them while they’re young, they won’t exercise when they’re adults."
• Movement Skills:
  • Can influence the extent of participation in the culture.
  • "Movement competence" contributes to positive emotional development.
• Poverty and Nutrition:
  • Cretinism: Chronic disease characterized by physical deformity and dwarfism caused by a lack of iodine in drinking water.
  • Rickets: Permanent damage in the bones resulting in flat chest, deformed pelvis, and/or crooked back caused by Vitamin D deficiency.

Psychological Dimension - Cognitive Development

• Piaget: Concrete Operational Stage
  • Mental actions are reversible, but limited to real objects.
  • Children can pass the conservation task (number, mass, length, area).
  • Conservation: Recognition that the properties of a substance do not change when its appearance is altered (children age 7-8 vs. 5-6).
  • Able to coordinate information using thought processes governed by rules of logic.

Psychological Dimension - Emotional Intelligence

• Emotional Intelligence (EQ):
  • Includes the ability to delay gratification.
  • Encompasses the ability to perceive others' emotions and regulate one's own emotions (i.e., “people skills”).
  • Associated with being more confident, less likely to drop out of school, and better adjusted.
• Social emotional learning:
  • Improves academic achievement.
  • Increases prosocial behaviors like kindness, sharing, and empathy.

Psychological Dimension - Communication

• Metalinguistic awareness:
  • The ability to go beyond the given information.
• Uninformative messages:
  • Younger children struggle to clarify ambiguous messages.
• Bilingual education:
  • Children in bilingual programs typically outperform their counterparts in all-English programs on tests of academic achievement in English.
  • Children learning to be bilingual outperform on:
    • IQ tests.
    • Piagetian conservation tasks.
    • Language use.
    • Metalinguistic awareness.
    • Selective attention.

Psychological Dimension - Attitudes, Emotions, and Regulation

• Emotion regulation/competence:
  1. Recognizing the emotion.
  2. Expressiveness.
  3. Understanding emotions in others.
• Social Role-Taking:
  • Can infer others' thoughts, feelings, intentions, but still can’t assume another’s viewpoint.
  • Exposure to role-taking opportunities that involve an exchange of differing perspectives helps development.
  • Linked to social skills development.
  • Parallels moral development stage.

Psychological Dimension - Interpersonal Awareness

• Interpersonal awareness:
  • How the child conceives his or her own inter-personal relationships, particularly friendship and peer group relationships.
• Friendship stages (coincide with cognitive development):
  • Early childhood: Physical playmate.
  • Middle childhood: Cooperation (e.g., if I do something for you, you’ll do something for me).
  • Adolescence: Interdependence / intimate sharing.

Psychological Strengths & Hazards

• Self-concept:
  • Defined by traits (e.g., smart, shy) and seeing oneself as more unique.
• Self-efficacy:
  • A belief in one's own capabilities to achieve goals.
  • Associated with behavioral growth/outcomes.
• Looking glass theory:
  • Research shows that children’s evaluations for themselves resemble the way other people perceive them.
• Child Behavior Checklist:
  • Assesses externalizing and internalizing problems.
  • Externalizing problems: Acting out.
  • Internalizing problems: Inner state problem.
  • Two most common problems of middle childhood are ADHD and depression.
• ADHD:
  • Most common neurobehavioral disorder of childhood (8-10% of kids, 3 times as many boys).
  1. Excessive motor activity.
  2. Impulsiveness.
  3. Inattention.
  • Consequences: Poor academics, interpersonal difficulties, low self-worth.
  • Combination of drugs and behavioral therapy recommended.

Social Dimension

• Time allocation:
  • Time with peers increases (↑).
  • Time with parents decreases (↓).
• Peer groups:
  • Groups of age-mates that are durable and involve interactions based on an established set of social relationships.
  • Cooperative activities can decrease negative social behaviors that sometimes emerge in groups.
  • "There are three types of friends: those like food, without you can’t live; those like medicine, which you need occasionally; and those like an illness, which you never want.” - Gabriol
• Peer Groups:
  • Crucial to healthy development.
  • Boys: Larger social networks; relationships are less exclusive.
  • Girls: More close friends; relational aggression.
• Friendship:
  • A close, mutual, and voluntary dyadic bilateral relationship.
• Popularity:
  • Being liked or accepted by one’s peers.
  • Birds of a feather flock together or opposites attract?

Peer Relations & Child Development

• Poor peer relations are associated with discomfort, anxiety, and a general unwillingness to engage the environment.
• Children master their aggressive impulses within the context of peer relations.
• Sexual socialization cannot take place in the absence of peer interaction.
• Peer relations are related to role-taking ability, empathy, and moral reasoning.
• Children who are rejected by their peers are at greater risk for delinquency, school dropout, & mental-health problems.
• Friendships are critical because they provide opportunities for learning social skills & a beginning sense of group belonging.

Social Dimension - Parental Discipline Strategies

• 3 Parental discipline strategies:
  • Power-assertive.
  • Love withdrawal.
  • Induction.
  • Power assertion strategies increase children’s aggressive tendencies.
  • Love withdrawal is associated with excessive anxiety in children.
  • Induction is an important parental strategy because it helps children develop internal moral standards.
• Effective parenting training programs:
  • Behavior Modification/Social Learning.
  • Use concepts such as reinforcement, punishment, extinction, differential reinforcement of other behaviors, and stimulus control.

Social Dimension - Stressors and Divorce

• Stressors that occur with divorce:
  • Life Changes:
    • Hostilities between parents.
    • Distraught custodial parent.
    • Loss of relationship with non-custodial parent.
    • Parent dating.
    • Remarriage.
  • Consequent Effects on Children:
    • Sadness, anger, loyalty conflicts.
    • Anxiety, put in roles of parent, co-parent to custodial parent.
    • Self-blame, low self-esteem, depression.
    • Competitive feelings with parent’s new partner, fear of loss of parent’s affection, curiosity (for older children) about parent’s sexuality.

Social Dimension - Schools

• Schools:
  • 5 standards that promote positive learning outcomes for students:
    1. Joint productive activity.
    2. Language and literacy development.
    3. Contextualization, i.e., connecting school to students’ lives.
    4. Challenging activities.
    5. Instructional conversation.
  • Barriers that low-income and minority students face in the system:
    • Low parental and teacher expectations for school performance.
    • Lack of culturally relevant materials.