Middle Childhood Personality Development and Social Understanding

1. Middle ChildhoodPersonality and Sociocultural Development Chapter 9 9

2. Middle ChildhoodPersonality and Sociocultural Development • Personality Development in an Expanding Social World • Social Knowledge and Reasoning • Peer Relationships • Family Influences in Middle Childhood

3. Personality Development in an Expanding Social World • Three perspectives on middle childhood • Social-learning • Psychodynamic • Cognitive-developmental • The development of the self is among the most important task of this period • Self-concept is a central component of self

4. Three Major Perspectives on Middle Childhood

5. Personality Development • Self-concept • Children form increasingly stable pictures of themselves, and self-concept becomes more realistic • They begin to attribute specific traits to themselves • They start to compare themselves specifically with others

6. Personality Development • Industry versus inferiority – Erikson’s stage of middle childhood • When children succeed in school they incorporate a sense of industry into their self-image • Children who don’t achieve mastery may perceive themselves to be inferior • Their success in this stage lays the groundwork for their self-esteem

7. Personality Development • Self-esteem: children’s positive or negative evaluation of themselves • Significant correlation between self-esteem and academic achievement & achievement in other activities • Positive self-esteem is linked to being viewed positively by family, peers, and others • Praise is good, but not if it is unrealistic • Excessive praise can lead to distorted perceptions of right and wrong and make children too egocentric

8. Social Knowledge and Reasoning • Children move from Piaget’s preoperational stage to the concrete operational stage • Central to development is: • development of social cognition • development of morality

9. Development of Social Cognition • Social cognition is a person's knowledge and understanding of the social world. It includes: • Socialinference:guesses and assumptions about what another person is thinking or feeling • Social responsibility: one’s obligations to family, friends, and people in authority • Social regulation: adhering to the customs and conventions that govern social interaction

10. Aspects of Social Cognition

11. Development of Morality • Morality—a sense of what is right and wrong and of fairness and justice • Stage Theories • Piaget’s moral realism versus moral relativism • Kohlberg’s preconventional, conventional, and postconventional reasoning

12. Moral Development • Kohlberg presented children of different ages with moral “dilemmas” • A person’s level of moral reasoning assessed by evaluating reasoning behind response • Critics say that moral behavior is not as orderly and predictable as Kohlberg suggested and that his emphasis on “justice” shows a male bias

13. Kohlberg’s Six Stages of Moral Development

14. Video Clip Interviews with people of various ages providing responses to Kohlberg’s Heinz dilemma: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY4etXWYS84

15. Peer Relationships • Functions of Friendships • help with social concepts and skills • vehicle for self-expression • Developmental Patterns in Friendship • Selman’s stage model • Selman’s model may be too simplistic, as it does not differentiate among different kinds of friendship • Children’s friendships today are complex and multifaceted

16. Selman’s Stages of Friendship Development

17. Peer Groups • Peer groups – three or more children who interact and share norms and goals • In early middle childhood, groups are relatively informal • At ages 10 to 12, peer groups become more formal and are usually gender-segregated • Peers often conform to the expectations of their peer group, which may be desirable or undesirable effects

18. Peer Groups (continued) • Children may experience discrimination and prejudice due to their ethnicity or nationality • Children develop an ethnic awareness in early childhood, but in middle childhood begin to self-identify themselves with ethnic labels

19. Peer Groups (continued) • Children have to figure out what it means to be a member of their peer and ethnic groups • Popularity in one’s peer group is important • Popular children generally have good emotional control and can cooperate and share • Children who are overly aggressive, timid, or different in some way are usually less popular

20. Video Clip ABC news video provides information on cyberbullying: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3563260

21. Family Influences in Middle Childhood • Parent-Child Relationships • Family continues to be the most important socializing force • Effective parenting in middle childhood involves effective monitoring of children’s activities and behaviors, so as to promote self-regulated behavior • Children adjust better when parents and children share responsibilities for regulating behavior (coregulation)

22. Changing Nature of the Family • Single parenthood has become commonplace • Married women are more likely to work outside the home • 27% of single mothers are unemployed and therefore likely to be living in poverty • The fact that most parents work outside the home has had an impact on child care related institutions • Other factors add to stress, including finances, divorce, moves, illness, and deaths

23. Seven Guidelines for Single Parenting

24. The Changing Family • About half of all U.S. marriages end in divorce • Children feel a sense of loss and worry about what will happen to them • Exactly how children react to divorce depends on their individual temperament and the hostility level of their parents • If a parent remarries, children face additional challenges: resentment about discipline, having to “share” their parent, living with stepsiblings

25. Video Clip Two girls describe their experiences of their parents’ divorce: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRkXi2t9O0Y

26. Video Clip Scene from the documentary In My Room: girl describes how she has been affected by her parents’ divorce: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS3c3342UCc

27. Factors That Affect Children’s Reactions to Divorce

28. Summary • The context within which personality and sociocultural development takes places widens during middle childhood • Children come to understand themselves and their place in the world • They learn what is right and wrong • They associate with peer groups. Their family relationships and circumstances have a huge impact on their development

29. Summary • Their self-concept becomes more stable, more realistic, more complex, and more accurate • Their self-esteem is linked to being viewed positively by family, peers, and others • Erikson called this the age of industry versus inferiority • They make advances in their cognitive abilities that aid in their expanding social cognition • They become less egocentric, and are able to make social inferences and assume social responsibility

30. Summary • Kohlberg’s moral dilemmas indicate how children of this age think about right and wrong • Peer relationships become very important to development and popularity in one’s peer group is an important dimension of group membership • The family continues to be the most important socializing force, however • The goal of parenting at this stage is to help children learn to self-regulate their behavior • Many life situations can cause stress to the family at this stage, especially divorce