Social and Emotional
Development During
Middle Childhood
Ages 6 - 12 years
[Cont.]

Social Cognition. Ability to understand people and think about social interaction--to initiate or not--to improve or not--to keep something going or not--and--to question how people respond or react.

Nature of social relationships changes significantly. More independent of family life. More dependent on the selective of her peers. More inclined to yield to peer pressure as she grows older--choosing to do what her friends do.

Advances in Social Cognition and Role-taking: Before we discuss the changes in the nature of the child's relationships with others, it is important to understand the impetus behind these changes. During the school-age years, the child makes enormous advances in social cognition--the ability to understand people and to think about social relations. She evidences her ability to infer accurately other people's thoughts and feelings, and she also realizes that since other people can do the same, her thoughts and feelings are the object of other people's thinking (Selman, 1976), so she begins to think about how other people will react to her actions and ideas....

Role-Taking. An understanding of other people. A cognitive skill which refers to the child's comprehension of information about another person's internal experiences. The child's ability to make inferences about others' psychological experiences and states is enhanced by advances that occur in role-taking. Also called perspective-taking.... There are several types of role-taking abilities, including the capacity to understand what another person sees (perceptual role-taking), how another person feels (affective role-taking), and what another person thinks (cognitive role-taking)....

Selman (1976) and his colleagues (Selman & Bryne, 1974) suggest that children go through a developmental sequence of levels in acquiring role-taking abilities--and distinguish four levels of role-taking that occur between the ages of 4 and 12 years.....

Level 0. Ego-centric (4 years).
Everyone else's feelings and thoughts are just like their own. Little understanding of others. Children do not yet distinguish between their own perspective and that of others. Assume that other people have feelings and thoughts that are more or less identical to their own.

Level 1. Subjective (6-8 years).
Children realize that other people think or feel differently because they are in a different situation or because they have in their possession different kinds of information. They also realize that people may have different interpretations of the same event. However the children have difficulty thinking about their own and others' perspectives at the same time, and they cannot put themselves in the position of the other person in judging what the other person thinks or feels. still ego-centric. Can't think about own thoughts and feelings and those of others at the same time. So, their own feelings take precedence.

Level 2. Self-reflective (8-10 years).
Children become aware that people think or feel differently not just because they may be in a different situation or have different information, but also because each person may have her or his own particular values and interests. At this stage, children realize that their perspective is not necessarily the only right or valid one, and they can put themselves in the other person's place, realizing that the other person can do the same thing with regard to them. Thus, children begin to think about how others view them and to anticipate how others will react to their own actions and ideas.

Level 3. Mutual (Children over 10).
They can think about their own point of view and that of others simultaneously. Dissonance. Situational friendships. Children are able not only to differentiate their own perspective from that of other people, they can also think about their own point of view and that of another person simultaneously.

[An exact age cannot be associated with each level, as a given child's role-taking ability may fluctuate from one occasion to another. An important aspect of role-taking ability is social experience. Apparently peer interactions provide the opportunity children need to become acquainted with how others behave, think, and feel in different situations.

Researchers point out that an important aspect of role-taking ability is social experience . . . . Apparently peer interactions provide the opportunity children need to become acquainted with how others behave, think, and feel in different situations . . . . Hollos found that farm children outperform village and town children on Piagetian tasks, which measure the ability to think logically, but they are not as good as the village or town children in taking another person's perspective. This study is important for it clearly illustrates that while the ability to think logically and acquire cognitive maturity may not be influenced by the individual's interactions with other people, social interactions are indeed important to the individual's ability to understand others and recognize that other people think and feel differently.

Just as social interactions enhance the child's role-taking skills, so the child's progress in role-taking enhances her interactions with other children and adults.

Having the ability to take the perspective of others, the child becomes better able to communicate, since effective communication depends on an assessment of what other people already know and what they need to know.

Empathy. The ability to understand how people think and feel also enhances empathy, the ability to understand and vicariously feel what another person is feeling. Empathy not only enables the child to help others who may be in distress, it also enhances her ability to think about the effects of her own behavior on others.....

Moral development. Progress in social cognition also enhances the child's ability to evaluate her own behavior in relation to what other people think as well as to how they feel. Hence, the child grows in her ability to behave and reason about moral problems. Every society has an unwritten moral code and explicit rules that specify people's moral behavior in the social setting. [Psychoanalysts focus on the emotional aspect of moral development, noting that guilt is a major component of morality--identification with the same-sex parent, which leads to the formation of a conscience. Social learning theorists contend that moral behavior and values are shaped by cultural experience through modeling and reinforcement. Cognitive-developmental approach is that moral reasoning develops progressively along with cognitive abilities--Piaget was particularly interested in children's notions about rules--they not only cooperate, they have to deal with a number of moral issues in a game of marbles, such as fairness (who goes first), reciprocity (taking turns), and justice (yielding a marble if they lose)--preschool kids are still ego-centric and change the rules to suit themselves--By the end of the elementary school years they reject the idea that rules are absolute and believe instead that since the purpose of rules is to benefit all those involved, rules can be changed and reformulated through reasoning, discussions, and agreement among participants--children 5-10 based judgment of an act on the consequences. By age 11 they base judgments on the intentions of the individuals involved (cup event)--as children grow older, their way of understanding the social world and, consequently, their way of making moral judgments changes.--see Kohlberg's application of Piagetian stages.]

Conscience. A by-product of moral development, which is the process of learning to accept standards of right and wrong as guides to behavior. Children are not born with a moral code or a conscience; they acquire these gradually.

Preconventional Level- emphasis is on avoiding punishment and getting a reward

Stage 1. Might makes right.
Stage 2. Instrumental relativist

Conventional Level - emphasis is on social rules and on maintaining the expectations of the individual's family, group, or nation.

Stage 3. Good girl and nice boy orientation.
Stage 4. Law and order orientation

Postconventional or Autonomous Level - Clear effort on the pat of the individual to define moral values and principles that have validity and application.

Stage 5. Social contract or legalistic orientation.
Stage 6. Universal ethical principles orientation.

Moral behavior. Ability to take another's perspective. Noting that there is a distinction between moral knowledge and moral behavior and that the two do not necessarily coincide, researchers have been interested in how children come to accept standards of right and wrong as guides to behavior and to behave accordingly. They found that the ability to take another's perspective is an important influence on moral behavior (Selman, 1980)....this ability is enhanced in the course of the child's social interactions, which offer children the exposure to how other people feel and think in numerous situations. Perspective-taking ability is an important but not sufficient influence on moral behavior. Observational learning, reinforcements, and punishments also play a role. Social learning theorists such as Aronfreed (1968), for example, contend that children imitate the behavior of powerful and significant people and that through observational learning they learn specific moral behaviors such as sharing. Aronfreed also notes that social approval, by the people who are important in the child's life, such as the parents, is one of the most powerful reinforcers of moral behavior. As children learn that certain behaviors are approved or disapproved by their parents, they begin to think about their own behavior according to the expected consequences. Aronfreed has outlined behavioral controls ranging from external to internal, noting that initially, the child's behavior is governed by external control....with age, she learns about the different rules that govern good behavior, and she develops internal controls, or a conscience, and is motivated to behave morally in order to avoid feeling guilty; she punishes or rewards herself when she deviates from or conforms to appropriate norms of behavior. According to Aronfreed, children are likely to develop strong internal controls when parents, in the course of their attempts to socialize the child, specify the behavior that she is being punished or rewarded for and they explain why . . . .

Punitive techniques. Emphasize the personal consequences of breaking rules. "If you do that you will not be able to do this..."

Inductive techniques. Stress the effects of misbehavior on the victims of moral transgressions. "If you hit him, he will be hurt."

Self-Concept. (Consider Eric Erikson's phases)

7-9. Takes place in terms of name, where live, and physical characteristics in general.

11-12. They begin to define themselves in terms of thoughts, feelings & personality. And, they begin to evaluate themselves. The family is important in showing children they are worthy and competent. Peers become extremely important for self-esteem. And the school becomes the major environment.

It appears, then, that parents, through their actions and childrearing techniques, have a strong influence on the child's morality and her adoption of standards of right and wrong as guides to behavior . . . . Parents also influence the child's self-concept and her self-esteem--her attitude toward herself (Maccoby, 1984) . . . . Gradually they discover more about themselves and they acquire a picture of the self that is unique and multifaceted (Markus & Nurius, 1984; Damon & Hart, 1982). Whereas at the beginning of this period (of middle childhood) children may still define themselves in terms of age and physical characteristics, by age 11 they give a more complex description of themselves that includes their inner thoughts and feelings

Children not only develop a more specific and multifaceted picture of themselves during the school-age years, they also begin to judge how worthy they are. The child's opinion of her own worth is a vital part of the child's personality, affecting all aspects of her behavior. The child with good self-esteem believes that she is a worthy individual who can achieve the goals she sets for herself and that she likes and is liked by the people around her . . . . The self-esteem develops gradually during the middle childhood years and becomes part of the complex network of attitudes and beliefs that make up the self-concept. It is often referred to as the evaluative component of the self-concept, since it is formed on the basis of the child's perceptions of other people's reactions to her (Harter, 1983)

The child undergoes the psychological crisis of industry vs. inferiority (Erikson) . . . . the child who finds and concentrates on areas that she is good at and things that she can accomplish gains a sense that she can make and do things, a sense of industry, and she is ready and eager to move into the world of adulthood . . . . How the child comes to regard himself is largely, although not entirely, a function of his interactions with his parents. In a study of the influences on the self-esteem, Stanley Coppersmith (1967) found that parents' attitudes and childrearing practices tend to predict high or low self-esteem in children

During the preschool years children adopt certain modes of behavior by watching television and by observing other children and adults at home in day care and nursery school.... (How much of what is observed is through interaction, response and the exercise of attitudes and behaviors? How much of what is adopted in behavior and social/moral attitude is related to performance?)

Stipek (1977), who studied the changes children's social and motivational development that occurred during first grade, found that children's experiences of success or failure are defined more by their interactions with their teachers than by the children's actual academic performance . . . . Teachers who have a positive influence on their students are the teachers who rely heavily on praise and reasoning, and who create a warm and nurturant environment in the classroom . . . . The teacher's belief that children are capable is also an important factor in the teacher's ability to positively influence children . . . .

Expectations . . . . in a series of studies, Rosenthal and his colleagues found that teachers' expectations of children's capabilities affect their interactions with the children, and subsequently, the children's performance on academic tasks

In recent testimony submitted before a hearing held by the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families (Families and Child Care: Improving the Options, 1984), it was indicated that between 2 and 4 million children aged 6 to 13 years come home from school each day to an empty house. . . . . There are disagreements on the possible effects of being left alone before and after school . . . . Currently, one out of every five children is living in a single-parent family