CH16 HU BE

Social Development

Learning Outcomes

• After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
  • 16.1 explain the importance of attachment in early development
  • 16.2 describe the socialization process
  • 16.3 describe the role of peer relationships in social development
  • 16.4 explain how social cognition develops across the life span
  • 16.5 distinguish between the different theories of moral development
  • 16.6 describe how social development continues throughout life.

Concept Map

Attachment

• Attachment refers to the enduring emotional ties children form with their primary caregivers; it includes a desire for proximity to an attached figure, a sense of security derived from the person's presence and feelings of distress when the person is absent.
• Four patterns of infant attachment: secure (seek comfort from attachment figure), avoidant (shut off their needs for attachment), ambivalent (have difficulty being soothed) and disorganized (behave in contradictory ways that reflect their difficulty predicting or understanding the way their attachment figures will behave).
• Attachment security in infancy predicts social competence as well as school grades from preschool through to adolescence.

Socialization

• Socialization is the process by which children learn the rules, beliefs, values, skills, attitudes and behavior patterns of their society.
• Four parenting styles: authoritarian parents (place high value on obedience and respect for authority), permissive parents (impose minimal controls on their children), authoritative parents (enforce standards but explain their views and encourage verbal give-and-take) and uninvolved parents (consistently place their own needs above the needs of their child).
• Cultural practices affect virtually every aspect of socialization, such as the relative importance placed on independence and autonomy.
• Among the most powerful roles into which people are socialized are gender roles, which specify the range of behaviors considered appropriate for males and females. This is based on the assumption of gender as binary, however, individuals can identify at any time as male, female, agender or another non-binary identity or combination of identities.

Development of Social Cognition

• Children develop in their social cognition - their understanding of themselves, others and relationships - over time.
• Throughout early childhood, children tend to think of themselves and others in relatively concrete ways, such as their age, gender, group membership and possessions. Around age eight, they begin to think more about enduring personality attributes. By adolescence, social cognition is more subtle and abstract.
• Perspective-taking - the ability to understand other people's perspectives or viewpoints - increases steadily throughout childhood and adolescence.
• Gender constancy - knowledge that a person's biological sex is generally fixed and permanent and is not altered by changes in appearance or activities.
• Gender identity is a person's internal sense of their gender and the binary categorization of oneself as either male or female. However, gender identities can be non-binary, and people can have gender identities outside the gender binary of male and female (e.g., gender fluid, agender, non-binary).

Moral Development

• Cognitive theories, including those of Piaget and Kohlberg, stress the role of thought and learning in moral development.
• Other theories, including the psychodynamic theory, emphasize empathy or feeling for another person who is hurting.
• Moral development probably reflects an interaction of cognitive and affective changes that allow children to understand and feel for other people as well as inhibit their own wishes and impulses.

Social Development Across the Life Span

• Erikson proposed a model of psychosocial stages - stages in the development of the person as a social being. At each of eight stages, the individual faces a developmental task, a challenge that is normative for that period of life, as follows:
  • Basic trust versus mistrust - infants come to trust others or perceive the social world as hostile or unreliable.
  • Autonomy versus shame and doubt - toddlers come to experience themselves as independent sources of will and power or feel insecure in their newfound skills.
  • Initiative versus guilt - young children develop the capacity to form and carry out plans, but their emerging conscience can render them vulnerable to guilt.
  • Industry versus inferiority - school-age children develop a sense of competence but may suffer from feelings of inadequacy.
  • Identity versus identity confusion - the task in adolescence is to establish a stable sense of who one is and what one values.
  • Intimacy versus isolation - during young adulthood the task is to establish enduring, committed relationships.
  • Generativity versus stagnation - middle-aged individuals attempt to pass something on to the next generation.
  • Integrity versus despair - people look back on their lives with a sense of satisfaction or sadness and regret.
• In all likelihood, 'crises' in both adolescence and at midlife depend on individual differences and cultural and historical circumstances. Although older age inevitably involves many losses, the realities appear far better than the negative stereotypes of aging seen in many technologically developed societies.

Central Questions

The Nature of Social Development

• Genetics influence the way people develop and change in general and it also influences the way people differ from one another. Consider how biology, culture and experience interconnect to shape the developing social person.
  • What are the roles of nature and nurture in social development?
  • To what extent does social development depend on cognitive development?

Opening Case

• Raising children is a big challenge for everyone. The problem for parents is that there is no universal instruction manual on how to bring up kids, especially as they grow older and turn from loving youngsters into teenagers starting to assert their independence.
• Some parents are extremely strict and impose many restrictions. Think of the movie Footloose where the local pastor leads the push to ban the town's teenagers from dancing within the city limits.
• Others have few rules and allow their children plenty of freedom. Let's face it - how did Peter and Kate McCallister manage to leave their son Kevin behind in the movie Home Alone in the first place, let alone do it again in Home Alone 2?
• In between authoritarian and hands-off, there are many variations along the parental control continuum. But which is best? And how do different parenting styles impact the way children develop?
• A comparison of differing parenting styles was the subject of an Australian television series that aired in 2021. The show, Parental Guidance, involved 10 sets of Australian parents with different parenting styles, including the following.
  • Attachment parenting, involving early skin-to-skin contact after birth, breastfeeding, keeping the baby close in a sling and co-sleeping.
  • 'French' parenting emphasizes clear boundaries between adults and children.
  • Tiger parenting involves an authoritarian style, where parents invest highly in their children's success, especially in their education. This method was popularized by Chinese-American author Amy Chua (see Chua, 2011).
  • Helicopter parenting involves parents over-protecting or 'hovering' over their children to keep them safe.
  • Free-range parenting believes over-protection is not good for development and that children should be encouraged to 'roam freely' and engage in outdoor play unattended.
  • Strict parenting involves an authoritarian approach, where the parents are the boss, and their rules are strictly enforced (Francis, 2021).
• On the show, parents and their children were put through a series of challenges to compare the outcomes of the differing approaches. This included situations such as whether a child would agree to go with a (pretend) stranger, or what would happen if children were left alone with no adult supervision for an evening with no rules.
• The show aired on a commercial network, so it was geared towards attracting viewers rather than scientifically addressing the issues. However, it was praised for generating debate on important issues such as smacking children and managing screen time on devices (Francis, 2021).
• It is clear that parents take many different approaches to raising their children, and they all have their pros and cons. However, an important question is why do different parents take different approaches? For example, why do some take a very strict approach while others let their children have free rein?
• Are there innate differences between cultures? As well as being one of the styles featured in Parental Guidance, the Asian 'Tiger parent phenomenon is also the subject of the 2020 book Aspiration and Anxiety: Asian Migrants and Australian Schooling by Christina Ho, which delves into the motivations that underpin the approach (Verghis, 2020).
• Ho, an Associate Professor of Social and Political Sciences at UTS, says the Asian migrant juggernaut has fundamentally transformed Australian classrooms over the last 20 years. For example, in New South Wales, just 5 percent of people have Chinese ancestry, but students with Chinese surnames comprise almost 25 percent of high achievers in the High School Certificate (Verghis, 2020).
• Associate Professor Ho says children of Asian migrants are disproportionately successful in Australian schools, outperforming others in standardized tests and achieving higher rates of admission to university (Verghis, 2020).
• Is the reason simply cultural differences in approaches to parenting, especially around the importance of achieving highly in education? 'It's just their culture', some non-Asian parents might say (Verghis, 2020). Associate Professor Ho believes the answer is not that simple. She says the twin forces of aspiration and anxiety give rise to the Tiger parent phenomenon (Verghis, 2020). That is because many Asian migrants lack the 'cultural capital' that other people enjoy, such as local knowledge, contacts and social networks.
• They fear their kids will be locked out of opportunities that others take for granted, so see educational achievement as the key to upward mobility and career advancement (Verghis, 2020).
• Whatever the motivations, parenting styles are one of the key early factors that influence our social development - changes in interpersonal thought, feeling and behavior throughout the life span - which is the focus of this chapter.
• We begin by discussing the earliest relationships - between an infant and their caregivers - and consider how, and how much, these relationships lay the groundwork for later relationships. Next, we examine how children learn the ways of their culture. For example, how and when do children take on the attributes expected of their gender?
• Then we explore children's relationships with friends and siblings, their changing conceptions of themselves and others, and their developing capacity for moral judgment and action. We conclude by expanding the focus to the entire life span.
• Although the range of topics may seem enormous, what unites them is a focus on the types of relationships people form throughout life, from intimate attachments in infancy through to adulthood, to sibling and peer relationships; the development of beliefs and feelings about themselves and others; and the way these beliefs and feelings are expressed in different social contexts.
• Throughout, we will address two central questions. The first, raised in chapter 15, has provided a consistent thread across psychological research for over a century: the question of nature and nurture. What are the relative contributions of innate characteristics, culture and experience to social development? How do evolutionary, biological and social pressures converge to create a social person?
• The second question is what is the relationship between social development and cognitive development? To what extent does the development of children's experience of friendship, morality or gender depend on their cognitive development?

16.1 Attachment

Learning Outcome 16.1 Explain the Importance of Attachment in Early Development.

• In the middle of the twentieth century, psychoanalysts observed that children reared in large institutional homes, with minimal stimulation and no consistent contact with a loving caregiver, often became emotionally unstable, lacking in conscience or mentally impaired.
• Now, many of these children would be classified as suffering from reactive attachment disorder. These observations led to recognition of the importance of attachment, the enduring ties of affection that children form with their primary caregivers (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970; Bowlby, 1969).
• Attachment includes a desire for proximity to an attachment figure, a sense of security derived from the person's presence and feelings of distress when the person is absent.
• Attachment is not unilateral; rather, it involves an interaction between two people who react to each other's signals.

Making Connections

• Bowlby's model of attachment relies on the concept of homeostasis - the tendency of biological organisms to monitor variables relevant to survival, detect deviations from these goals (feedback) and respond with corrective mechanisms (chapter 13).
• The child's goal is to remain physically close to the attachment figure. When this goal is threatened, as when a toddler's mother leaves the room, the child experiences a feedback signal: distress. Distress motivates the child to cry or search for their mother. If either behavior is successful, the child receives a sense of security that temporarily deactivates the attachment system. A similar system operates in adults.
• For example, social anxiety is viewed as an interrupt mechanism, alerting individuals that they are behaving in ways that may jeopardize the degree to which they are included with (i.e., attached to) others.

Attachment in Infancy

• For many years, psychoanalysts and behaviorists were in rare agreement on the origins of attachment behavior, both linking it to feeding. Psychoanalysts assumed that the gratification of oral needs led infants to become attached to people who satisfy those needs. According to behaviorists, mothers became secondary reinforcers through their association with food, which is a primary (innate) reinforcer (chapter 9).
• Unfortunately, the two theories were similar in one other respect: they were both wrong.
• Definitive evidence came from a series of classic experiments performed by Harry Harlow (Harlow & Zimmerman, 1959).
• Harlow reared infant rhesus monkeys in isolation from their mothers for several months and then placed them in a cage with two inanimate surrogate 'mothers' (chapter 5). One, a wire monkey that provided no warmth or softness, held a bottle from which the infant could nurse. The other was covered with towelling to provide softness, but it had no bottle, so it could not provide food. Baby monkeys spent much of their time clinging to the softer mother. They would also run to the softer surrogate when they were frightened, but they virtually ignored the wire surrogate except when hungry.
• Harlow's findings established that perceived security, not food, is the crucial element in forming attachment relationships in primates; he referred to the ties that bind an infant to its caregivers as contact comfort.
• Some infants and children are raised with little or no human contact. These children, called feral children, basically raise themselves in the wild, often with the help of wild animals, and show predictable deficits in physical, social and language development. They derive their name from the suggestion that some of these children are 'adopted' by wolves, or other animals such as monkeys or wild dogs, and raised with them.
• Interestingly, these children also develop physical and behavioral traits of the animals that 'adopt' them. One of the most famous instances of feral children is Victor of Aveyron (the Wild Boy of Aveyron).
• There are about 100 further cases of feral children documented in recent history. Among them is 'John' who survived for 3 years in the African jungle with the help of monkeys, after fleeing his home at the age of three when he witnessed his mother's violent murder at the hands of his father. He was found at age six, and remarkably learned not only to speak but to sing and is now touring the world with a UK-based African choir.
• John, and other children like him, are a testament to the resiliency of children and to the plasticity of neurological stages of development. Sadly, however, many of these children do not go on to function successfully in society, and many spend their time in hospitals or treatment facilities without adjusting to life among humans. Indeed, many never learn to speak or even to eat