Experiencing the Lifespan - Settings for Development

Home (part 1)

• Parenting styles (Baumrind):

  • Authoritative parents

  • Authoritarian parents

  • Permissive parents

  • Rejecting-neglecting parents

Home (part 2)

• Classic critiques of Baumrind’s parenting styles:

  • Parenting styles can vary from child to child.

  • More evocative and bidirectional than Baumrind proposed

  • Parenting styles can vary depending on one’s society.

  • Acculturation

Home (part 3)

• Global research confirms that children with authoritative parents were more academically successful, well-adjusted, and kind.

• Forces that permit authoritative parenting in real life:

  • Parents become authoritative when they are comfortable with their ethnic identity.

  • Parents become authoritative in caring, trustworthy communities.

  • Collective efficacy

Home (part 4)

• How much do parents matter?

• Resilient children:

  • Often have a special talent

  • Have proficiency in emotional regulation and possess a strong faith or sense of meaning in life

  • May have a genetically determined hormonal profile that supports biological resistance to breaking down under stress

  • Have at least one close, caring relationship with a parent or another adult

Home (part 7)

• Spanking:

  • Corporal punishment may create strong, polar opinions on its use.

  • Today, child corporal punishment is banned in 60 nations; there is no ban in the United States.

  • Illegal in many (not all) U.S. schools and day-care centers

  • Many U.S. parents spank; not the most-reported frequent child punishment

  • African American parents and adults who were spanked as children most likely to spank

  • Most research indicates corporal punishment detrimental to children

Home (part 9)

• Child maltreatment:

  • Physical abuse

  • Neglect

  • Emotional abuse

  • Sexual abuse

• Risk factors:

  • Parent personality problems

  • Life stress and social isolation

  • Child vulnerabilities

Home (part 10)

• Consequences of child maltreatment:

  • Child internalizing and externalizing problems

  • Impaired theory of mind abilities and brain development

  • Peer rejection

  • More physical problems in adult life

  • Higher risk of entry into abusive love relationships and child maltreatment

SES & School (part 1)

• Unequal at the starting gate

• Children from low-income families:

  • Lag several years behind in basic academic skills

  • More likely to attend poor quality kindergartens

Intelligence (part 1)

• A broader view of intelligence

• Spearman:

  • IQ test scores and g; summary measure of cognitive potential for all life tasks

• Sternberg:

  • Three intelligence types (analytic, creative, practical)

• Gardner:

  • Multiple intelligences (eight or nine types of intelligences)

  • How might each of these theories be used in the classroom?

Intelligence (part 2)

• Ensuring all students have equitable opportunities to learn.

• Successful schools:

  • Set high standards

  • Have teachers who believe that every child benefits from challenging work

  • Reach out to support each teaching community member

  • Excel in collective efficacy

  • Albert Bandura explains that “a group's confidence in its abilities seemed to be associated with greater success” (Bandura, 1977, as cited in ASCD, 2018)

  • Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.

  • ASCD. (2018, March 1). The power of collective efficacy.

School (part 1)

• The problem: Many children dislike school

  • Intrinsic motivation is eroded.

  • Extrinsic motivation is increased.

• The solution: Making extrinsic learning work

  • Make extrinsic learning tasks more intrinsic

  • Offering relevant, child-focused class materials

  • Fostering relatedness

  • Providing choices about how to do work; autonomy

School (part 2)

• Communities matter in children’s success.

• Better communities:

  • Promote upward mobility; social variability varies by racial makeup

  • Have less concentrated poverty, higher percentage of two-parent families, less crime

  • Have a lesser degree of dramatic income inequality; low-income children’s economic strides do not come at the expense of relatively affluent peers

  • Have more high-ranked schools