Socioemotional Development in Early Childhood

Emotional and Personality Development

• Children’s developing minds and social experiences produce remarkable advances in the development of:

  • The self

  • Emotions

  • Morality

  • Gender

The Self

• Erikson’s 3rd psychosocial stage of development is initiative vs guilt

  • Occurs in ages 3 to 5 years

  • Children use perceptual, motor, cognitive, and language skills more

  • At this stage, children tend to move out into a wider social world on their own

  • The great governor of “initiative” is conscience

    • Initiative and enthusiasm may bring guilt, which lowers self-esteem

Self-Understanding

• There is an increase in awareness at this stage

• Self-understanding is the representation of self, the substance and content of self-concepts

• Early self-understanding involves self-recognition

  • Children describe the self by material characteristics: size, shape, and color

  • They distinguish themselves from others though physical and material attributes

    • “I am different from Jennifer because I have brown hair, and she has blonde hair”

    • “I am different from John, because I have a red bicycle”

Later Stages of Self-Understanding

• At around 4-5 years of age, children will begin to use psychological trains and emotions in their own self-descriptions

  • “I am not scared. I am always happy”

• Young children’s self-descriptions are typically unrealistically positive

• This largely because they cannot distinguish their desired competence vs their actual competence

  • Confuse ability and effort

  • Do not engage in spontaneous social comparisons

  • They compare their present abilities with what they could not do at an earlier age

• Overestimation of their attributes helps protect young children from negative self-evaluations

Understanding Others

• Huge advancement can come from their understanding of others and children’s capacity to learn from others

  • At around 4-5 years, they start perceiving others in terms of psychological traits

    • “My teacher is nice”

  • Children begin to understand that people make statements that aren’t true to obtain something they want or to avoid trouble

    • “If your aunt calls, tell her I’m in the shower”

    • “When we get to the gate, pretend you’re 3 so they don’t charge your ticket”

Emotional Development

• Self-conscious emotions appear once self-awareness occurs

  • Pride, shame, embarrassment, and guilt

• During early childhood, pride and guilt become more common

• These will be especially influences by paren’t responses to children’s behaviors

  • A young child might experience shame when a parent says, “you should feel bad about not sharing with your sister”

Understanding and Regulating Emotions

• One of the most important advances in emotional development in early childhood is an increased understanding in emotion

• They become aware that:

  • Some situations are likely to evoke particular emotions

  • Facial expression indicate specific emotions

  • Emotions affect behavior

  • Emotions can be used to influence other’s emotions

• Emotion regulation helps children manage the demands and conflicts involves in interacting with others

Families

• Families are probably the biggest social influence on young children’s development

  • Parenting

  • Child maltreatment

  • Sibling relationships and birth order

  • The family dynamics in a changing society

Parenting

• To understand variations in parenting and child outcomes, consider:

  • The styles parents use when interacting with their children

  • How they discipline their children

  • The dynamics of coparenting

  • The impact of COVID-19 on parenting and nurturing children

Sibling Relationships

• Important characteristics of sibling relationships include:

  • Emotional quality of the relationship - positive, negative, or mixed feelings

  • Familiarity and intimacy of the relationship - knowing each other well can allow for mutual support or teasing and undermining each other

  • Variation in sibling relationships - some describe the relationship as more positive than others

• Birth order

  • Whether a child has older or younger siblings has been linked to development of certain personality characteristics

  • Compared with later-born children, firstborn have been described as more adult-oriented, helpful, conforming, and self-controlled

    • This could be attributed to parentification and adultification

Peer Relations

• Peer relations can provide a source of information and comparison to the child about the world outside their family unit

  • Good peer relations can be necessary for normal socioemotional development

• Basic lifestyle decisions by parents can determine the pool from which their children select possible friends

  • At this stage, their peers may include neighborhood children at daycare facilities, and the children of the parent’s friends

Play

• Observinf a child playing can provide important context for their development of language and communication skills

  • Sensorimotor play - behavior by infants that lets them derive pleasure from exercising their sensorimotor schemes

  • Practice play - involves repetition of behavior when new skills are being learned

  • Pretense. symbolic pla - occurs when child transforms their physical environment into a symbol (e.g., a stick becomes a wand/sword).

  • Social play - involves interactions with peers

  • Constructive play - combines sensorimotor and practice play with symbolic representation

Media/Screen time

• Screen time describes the amount of time individuals spend using electronic devices

• Although television continues to have a strong influence on children’s development, children now use other types of media as well:

  • Television

  • Mobine media on smartphoens/tablets

  • Video games

  • Computers

Parenting in a changing society

• The American