Social and Personality Development in Middle Childhood

Social and Personality Development in Middle Childhood

• The Developing Self
• Psychosocial Development in Middle Childhood: Industry Versus Inferiority

 According to Erik Erikson, middle childhood encompasses the industry­versusinferiority stage, the period from ages 6 to 12 characterized by a focus on efforts to attain competence in meeting the challenges presented by parents, peers, school, and the other complexities of the modern world.

• Understanding One’s Self: A New Response to “Who Am I?”
• The Shift in Self­Understanding From the Physical to the Psychological
  • During middle childhood, children begin to view themselves less in terms of external physical attributes and more in terms of psychological traits. Whereas before, they may have described themselves in terms of height and physical abilities, now they are focusing more on psychological differences between themselves and others.  This is because they are more capable of abstract thinking than younger children – so their descriptions of the self become more abstract. o Children realize they are good at some things and not so good at others.  Their self­concepts tend to fall into 4 main categories:
    • Academic self­concept – their abilities in different subjects
    • Social self­concept – how they relate to their peers and other significant people in their lives
    • Emotional self­concept – the different emotional states they experience, and their control over those states
    • Physical self­concept – their personal appearance and physical abilities
  • Social Comparison
    • Children use social comparison, comparing themselves to the abilities, expertise, and opinions of others. When we are trying to measure our abilities in some area, we tend to compare ourselves to others who are similar.  If I want to know if I’m good at yoga, I’m not going to compare myself to the instructor – I’m going to use other students to make those comparisons.

o There are 2 kinds of social comparisons

• Upward social comparisons – comparing ourselves to someone better than we are on a particular skill. I might compare myself to one of the better students, to give myself something to reach for.
• Downward Social Comparisons ­ Sometimes children make downward social comparisons with others who are obviously less competent or successful to raise or protect their self­esteem. I’m not a particularly graceful person, so I might compare myself to someone who’s just starting, so I can feel better about myself.

 

Self­Esteem: Developing a Positive—or Negative—View of Oneself

• Children in these years are developing self­esteem—judgments about themselves as being good or bad overall, and in particular arenas. Whereas self­concepts are more dispassionate, fact­based evaluations, self­esteem tends to be more emotionbased.  Obviously, our different evaluations of the self can affect our overall sense of self­esteem; however, not all evaluations are considered equally important.  For example – I have the grace of a deranged rhino.  However, I don’t really put a lot of emphasis on physical ability, so that negative self­concept doesn’t really affect my overall sense of self­esteem.
• Change and Stability in Self­Esteem
  • Self­esteem develops in important ways during middle childhood. Children increasingly compare themselves to others.
  • Children are developing their own standards.
  • Self­esteem becomes differentiated. Earlier in childhood, our sense of selfesteem is fairly global.  If we feel good about ourselves, we tend to think we’re good in all different areas.  The same is true for if we feel bad about ourselves.  But in middle childhood, we start to differentiate our different selfconcepts, and rate ourselves in different areas.
  • For most children, self­esteem increases during middle childhood. We tend to see a drop in self­esteem around age 12.  They are leaving the relative safety of elementary school, and entering middle/junior high schools.  Classes are becoming more difficult, and they are usually introduced to more different types of kids – social situations become more difficult.
  • One’s self­esteem, good or bad, can become part of a self­fulfilling prophecy.
  • Children with low self­esteem may become enmeshed in a cycle of failure that is difficult to break. If I think I’m stupid, I don’t try as hard in class.  If I don’t try, I don’t do well.  If I don’t do well, it validates my feeling that I’m stupid.
  • Kids w/ high self­esteem are more likely to keep trying when they experience adversity. Because they keep trying, they are more likely to succeed, which validates their higher sense of self­esteem.
  • Using authoritative child­rearing practices may help break the cycle of low­self­esteem. If you show your kid that you value them, that you love them, but that you still have high expectations for their performance, they tend to live up to those standards.

 

 Race and Self­Esteem

• Early research showed that the self­esteem of minority groups was lower than that of majority groups due to prejudice and discrimination. However, more recent research shows that it’s not that simple.

o Social identity theory suggests that if minority members feel that the discrimination and prejudice against their group can change, and if they blame society instead of themselves for that discrimination and prejudice, their self­esteem will not be affected by their minority status.

• Relationships: Building Friendship in Middle Childhood
• Stages of Friendship: Changing Views of Friends

 Friendships are becoming more important to kids as they move into middle childhood, partly because the nature of friendships starts to change.

• Friendships influence children’s development in several ways. o Friends provide information about the world and other people. o Friends provide emotional support and help kids to handle stress. o Friends teach children how to manage and control their emotions. o Friends teach about communication with others. o Friends foster intellectual growth. o Friends allow children to practice relationship skills.

• Stage 1: Basing Friendship on Others’ Behaviors
  • Ages 4–7
  • Children see friends as like themselves.
  • Children see friends as people to share toys and activities with. They basically consider anyone they spend a good deal of time with to be a friend.
  • Children do not take into account personal traits – they are paying more attention to overt behaviors.
• Stage 2: Basing Friendship on Trust
  • Ages 8–10
  • Children now begin to take others’ personal qualities and traits into consideration.
  • Friends are viewed in terms of the kinds of rewards they provide.
  • Friendships are based on mutual trust. Kids take whether or not someone is trustworthy very seriously. In Stage 1, disagreements could be smoothed over by continuing to play with each other.  Breaches of trust will require discussion and a formal apology to heal the relationship.
• Stage 3: Basing Friendship on Psychological Closeness
  • Ages 11–15
  • Friendships become based on intimacy and loyalty. Mutual disclosure makes friends feel closer to one another.
  • Friendships involve some level of exclusivity. We start to form groups of people we consider our friends, which excludes others from that circle.

 

• Individual Differences in Friendship: What Makes a Child Popular?
  • Children’s friendships typically sort themselves out according to popularity. It’s almost like SES – if you’re rich, your friends tend to be rich.  If you’re popular, your friends tend to be popular.  If you’re unpopular, your friends tend to be unpopular.
  • More popular children are likely to form cliques, groups that are viewed as exclusive and desirable.
  • More popular children tend to interact with a greater number of other children.
• What Personal Characteristics Lead to Popularity
  • Popular children have social competence, the collection of individual social skills that permit individuals to perform successfully in social settings. If you are particularly awkward in your social interactions with others, you aren’t likely to make that many friends.
  • Social Problem­Solving Abilities
  • Social problem­solving refers to the use of strategies for solving social conflicts in ways that are satisfactory both to oneself and to others.

o Kenneth Dodge suggests that kids go through 6 stages when trying to solve a social problem.

• They recognize a problematic event
• They analyze the social cues that come with the problematic event
• They formulate a goal of how they would like the problematic event to be resolved
• They formulate strategies on how to reach this goal
• They evaluate the potential success of each of the strategies they came up with
• They pick the best strategy and then enact the behavior

Kids who are better at these steps tend to be more popular.  Unpopular children tend to exhibit a  hostile attributional bias. He explained that children with this bias tended to search for evidence of hostility directed at them (often on the defensive and appearing to be initially hostile themselves) and due to self­fulfilling prophecy generally found it­ supporting their initial and often erroneous bias.

1. Gender and Friendships: The Sex Segregation of Middle Childhood

 Avoidance of the opposite sex becomes very pronounced during middle childhood.

• Children’s friendships are almost entirely sex­segregated. In a lot of cultures, this is due to differing requirements and expectations for the genders.  But even when gender roles are not as strictly enforced, this gender segregation still exists.
• When the sexes interact it is called “border work,” is has romantic overtones

– like threatening to kiss each other.  It helps emphasize the clear boundaries between the sexes.

• The nature of boys’ and girls’ friendships is different. o Boys have larger networks of friends than girls do.
  • Boys have a strict dominance hierarchy, which is composed of rankings that represent the relative social power of those in a group hierarchy.
  • Boys attempt to maintain and improve their status in the hierarchy, which makes for a style of play known as restrictive play where interactions are interrupted when status is challenged. All play stops while the boys work out their status – usually, with some sort of physical confrontation.
  • Girls focus on one or two “best friends” of relatively equal status. They aren’t focusing on the dominance hierarchy that boys consider important.
  • Conflicts among girls are solved by compromise, ignoring the situation, or giving in. Their goal is to smooth over the problem, and get interactions back to normal.
  • Girls, however, can be confrontational with other girls not their friends or with boys.
  • Girls’ language is less confrontational and direct than boys’. Boys tend to demand or make flat statements (Give me that ball), whereas girls tend to be more diplomatic (Would you like to trade dolls for a while?)

 

• Cross­Race Friendships: Integration In and Out of the Classroom

 Cross­Race Friendship appears to change when children reach the age of 11 or 12. Before this time, we play together in a pretty color­blind way, unless our parents are particularly racist.

• This is when most African American children are more aware of prejudice and discrimination and tend to form ingroups – groups we see ourselves as belonging to and outgroups – groups we do not feel we belong to

.

• Research shows that ongoing integration efforts by schools in promoting equal­status interactions among members of different racial groups can lead to improved understanding, mutual respect and acceptance, and a decreased tendency to stereotype.

 

 

Bullies

 About 160,000 U.S. schoolchildren stay home from school each day because they are afraid of being bullied. o Eighty percent of boys and 85 percent of girls report being harassed at some point during middle school.

o About 10–15 percent of students bully others at one time or another.

• Kids who are frequent victims of bullies tend to be loners, passive, cry easily, and lack the social skills to defuse a bullying situation.
  • Half of all bullies come from abusive homes, tend to watch more television violence, and misbehave more at home and at school than do non­bullies. They are also more likely to commit crimes as adults.  They tend to show little remorse when confronted about their bullying.
  • Bullying can be stopped by teaching victims some specific strategies, like refusing to engage when provoked, speaking up when bullied, or talking with adults to get help with persistent bullying

III. The Family

1. Families: The Changing Home Environment

 Middle childhood is a period of coregulation, a transition stage during which children and parents jointly control the children’s behavior.

• One of the basic challenges facing children and their parents is to navigate the independence that increasingly characterizes children’s behavior during middle childhood.
• During this period, children move from being almost completely controlled by their parents to increasingly controlling their own destinies. Parents are issuing fewer specific orders – they are moving more towards general ideas of behavior. It will be up to the kids to make more specific decisions in their daily lives.  They are spending more of the day away from their parents, with their friends and peers.  They are more in control over their social interactions.

1. Family Life

 During middle­childhood, children spend significantly less time with their parents, but parents remain major influences in their children’s’ lives.

• Siblings, an important influence on children during middle childhood, can provide support, companionship, and a sense of security, but they can also be a source of strife.

o De­identification: the desire to be different from an older sibling.  I know all about this one – my older brother was not a very dedicated student.  Teachers often got very frustrated with him, because they knew he was intelligent, but didn’t perform up to his potential.  I am a born applepolisher – as a child, I really thrived on approval from adults.  So when I got to teachers who had previously taught my brother, I went out of my way to show that we were very dissimilar.

• Sibling rivalry – siblings competing with each other or just generally fighting, can be intense when siblings are similar in age and gender. As a parent, try to not make this worse.  Parents often intensify sibling rivalry by comparing siblings to each other.  Don’t do that.  They are individuals.  o Sibling relationships, especially cross­gender ones, tend to improve later in life.  My brother and I can now have whole conversations without descending into an argument.  Sure, it takes a lot of concentration, and I think it’s probably shortened my lifespan, but at least Thanksgiving is easier to get through.
• Only children miss out on the benefits siblings can bring, but they are as welladjusted as children with brothers and sisters. Because they tend to spend more time in the company of adults, they may show some intellectual advantages, particularly in vocabulary.

 

• When Both Parents Work Outside the Home: How Do Children Fare?
  • Like most things, this depends on how it’s handled. As long as parents make appropriate arrangements for childcare, and give their kids lots of love and attention when they are home, their kids are likely to be fine.
  • Self­care children who fend for themselves after school may develop independence and a sense of competence and contribution. We used to call them latchkey kids.  I was a latchkey kid in elementary school.  I walked home about 20 blocks by myself, went into the house, usually fixed a snack, did my homework, and then played outside.  It made me feel grownup and proud.
  • The good adjustment of children whose mothers and fathers both work relates to the psychological adjustment of the parents, especially the mothers.
  • Mothers satisfied with their lives tend to be nurturing toward their children.

Mothers are especially likely to feel guilty about working.  Keep in mind that your child’s emotional adjustment will depend a great deal on your own emotional adjustment.  If working gives you a sense of purpose and pride, and your kid is well­taken care of when you aren’t there, you have nothing to feel bad about.  Studies show that girls whose mothers work outside the home tend to have higher levels of self­esteem than girls whose mothers don’t work outside the home.  If you feel good about yourself, your child is more likely to feel good about themselves.

• Divorce

 Immediately after a divorce, the effects on children in the middle childhood years can be serious depending on the financial condition of the family and the hostility level between spouses before the divorce.  You tend to see the worst effects of divorce, like acting out, depression, drops in school performance, in the first 6 months to 2 years after the divorce.  On average, it lasts about a year.

A lot of the negativity can be traced to a significant drop in income.  Most kids of divorce end up living with their mother.  Women tend to make less money than their husbands.  Even with child support (which may or may not be paid), there is usually a significant drop in income.  That adds stress to the household.

Also, kids can feel stuck between their parents.  You really shouldn’t run down your ex in front of your kids.  Saying bad things about their mother or father is basically saying bad things about the kids.  And definitely DO NOT use your kids as a mini­therapist – that is just messed up.  Go get a real therapist.

• If you are the non­custodial parent, you need to maintain a strong presence in your child’s life. A lot of non­custodial parents try to make their time with their kids fun, and they overdo it.  They turn into “Uncle Dad” or “Best friend Mom”, instead of maintaining the proper authority.

To avoid fights, you need to sit down together as adults and come to some agreements about continuity of rules and expectations between the households.  It is not fair to just be the fun parent as the non­custodial parent.  Don’t make the custodial parent be the “bad guy” who enforces rules – you both need to agree on and enforce rules in both households.

• During the early stage of middle childhood, children tend to blame themselves for the breakup. You need to make it very clear, more than once, that it’s not their fault.
• After 18 months to 2 years, most children return to their pre­divorce psychological adjustment.
• Twice as many children of divorced parents require psychological counseling as do children from intact families.

 

• Single ­Parent Families
  • For some children, living in a home with an unhappy marriage that is high in conflict has stronger negative consequences than a divorce.
  • Almost one quarter of all children under 18 in the United States live with only one parent.
    • Numbers are higher for minority children.
    • In the majority of cases, the single parent is the mother.
    • The consequences of living in a single parent home depend on: o Whether the other parent ever lived at home;
      • Economic status;
      • The amount of time the parent spends with the child; o The degree of stress in the household.
• Multigenerational Families
  • Some households consist of several generations, in which children, parents, and grandparents live together.
  • The presence of multiple generations in the same hours can make for a rich living experience for children.
  • However, it is important that all the adults agree on expectations and rules. Grandparents should not undermine parents.
• Blended Families
  • Blended families – a remarried couple that has at least one stepchild. They present challenges to the child but can also offer opportunities for increased social interaction.
    • Living in a blended family involves role ambiguity, in which roles and expectations are unclear. I was the peacemaker in my family.  When there was a fight, I often tried to smooth it over.  If all of the sudden there was another peacemaker in the house, I might feel threatened.
    • School­age children often adjust relatively smoothly to a blended family. o Financial status of family improves o More people to share household chores o More social interaction and attention
    • Not all children adjust well. If I was used to having Mom all to myself, I may really resent this new guy who wants me to call him Dad.  A lot of that depends on how old the child is when the blended family is formed.   If the child is still an infant, that’s now your kid, too.  But if the child is a teenager, they will often resent a step­parent who is pushy.
• Two Moms, Two Dads: How Do Children Fare With Gay and Lesbian Parents?

 Estimates range from 1 to 5 million families headed by two same­sex partners (or spouses in an increasing number of states), suggesting that some 6 million children have gay/lesbian parents in the United States.  Children of same­sex parents experience

• Less abuse than those of heterosexual parents
• The same numbers and types of friends as those with heterosexual parents
• Behavior no more or less­gender­typed State of being well­adjusted
• Adolescent romantic relationships and sexual behavior that is no different from those of adolescents living with opposite­sex parents

 

• Race and Family Life

 African American families often have a strong sense of family.

Supportive extended family o High number of single mothers makes extended family support critical.

• High proportion of grandmother­headed households: Well adjusted children

 Hispanic families often stress importance of family life.

• Child taught to value family ties and religious organizations.
• Supportive extended family
• Hispanic families tend to be large with an average size of 3.71 compared to Caucasian 2.97 and African American 3.31.

 Asian American families usually have the father as a powerful figure

• Collectivist values

1. Poverty and Family Life

 Regardless of race, poorer families have few resources.

• Parental stress may cause less attention to children’s needs.
• Little social support
• Often live in unsafe neighborhoods
• Children at risk o Poor academic performance

o Higher rates of aggression and conduct problems o Risk of mental health problems

1. Group Care: Orphanages in the 21st Century
   • The term orphanage has been replaced by group home or residential treatment center, which refer to group homes used for youngsters whose parents are no longer able to care for them adequately.
   • About three­fourths of children in group care are victims of neglect and abuse.