PSYCHO SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF INFANTS AND TODDLERS.

A.  ERIKSON’S THEORY OF INFANT AND TODDLER PERSONALITY
The leading neo-Freudian perspective is Erik Erikson’s psychosocial theory.

• Freud called the first year the oral stage, in which infants’ need for food and oral stimulation is vital . Erikson believed that a healthy outcome in infancy depended on the quality of the mother’s behavior during feeding, and not the amount of food or oral stimulation offered. He called this period of development Basic Trust versus Mistrust .   Basic trust versus mistrust is the conflict during infancy in Erikson’s psychosocial theory. The dilemma is resolved positively if the balance of care is sympathetic and loving.

• Freud’s second stage is the anal stage, during which instinctual energies shift to the anal region. In Erikson’ s theory, Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt is the conflict of toddlerhood, when the toddler is figuring out the differences between himself and the other important people in his life. It is resolved positively if parents provide suitable guidance and reasonable choices.

• If children emerge from the first few years without sufficient trust in caregivers and without a healthy sense of individuality, the seeds are sown for adjustment problems.

B. EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT: Emotions play a powerful role in organizing the developments that Erikson regarded as so important to relationships with caregivers, exploration of the environment, and discovery of self.

• Basic emotions are those that can be directly inferred from facial expressions, such as happiness, interest, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. At first, a baby’s emotional life is relatively undifferentiated, consisting of two global arousal states: attraction to pleasant stimulation and withdrawal from unpleasant stimulation.Over time, emotions become clear, well-organized signals.

• Happiness binds parent and baby and fosters the infant’s developing competence. The social smile—the smile evoked by the stimulus of the human face—first appears between 6 and 10 weeks. Laughter first appears around 3 to 4 months in response to active stimuli.

• Anger and Sadness: From 4 to 6 months into the second year, angry expressions increase in frequency and intensity. Cognitive and motor development both contribute to the increase in angry reactions with age. Expressions of sadness are usually less frequent than anger. Sadness is especially common when parent—infant interaction is seriously disrupted.

• Fear: Like anger, fear rises during the second half of the first year. The most frequent expression of fear is to unfamiliar adults, a response called stranger anxiety. Stranger anxiety depends on several factors: temperament, past experiences with strangers, and the situation in which baby and stranger meet. Culture can modify stranger anxiety through infant-rearing practices.  The rise in fear after 6 months of age helps protect newly crawling and walking babies by keeping them close to caregivers and careful about approaching unfamiliar people and objects.

• Understanding and Responding to the Emotions of Others: Early on, babies detect others’ emotions through a fairly automatic process of emotional contagion. Between 7 and 10 months, infants perceive facial expressions as organized patterns, and they can match the emotional tone of a voice with the appropriate face of a speaking person.  Social referencing occurs when an infant relies on a trusted person’s emotional reaction to decide how to respond in an uncertain situation. Social referencing provides infants with a method of learning about the environment through indirect experience. By toddlerhood, children use emotional signals to infer others’ internal states and guide their own actions.

• Self-conscious emotions appear in the middle of the second year. They involve injury to or enhancement of the sense of self and include shame, embarrassment, guilt, envy, and pride. Self-conscious emotions play an important role in children’s achievement-related and moral behaviors.

• Beginnings of Emotional Self-Regulation: Emotional self-regulation refers to the strategies used to adjust emotional states to a comfortable level of intensity. In the early months, infants have only limited capacity to regulate their emotional states. By the end of the first year, babies’ ability to move around permits them to regulate feelings more effectively by approaching or retreating from various stimuli. As caregivers help infants regulate their emotional states, they contribute to the child’s style of emotional self-regulation. Mothers more often match their baby’s positive, especially with their sons, than negative emotions. Growth in representation and language permits toddlers to talk their emotions, an important coping mechanism in managing emotional states..

C. DEVELOPMENT OF TEMPERAMENT (PP. 262-269) Temperament refers to stable individual differences in quality and intensity of emotional reaction, activity level, attention, and emotional self-regulation.

• Research indicates that temperament is predictive of psychological adjustment but that parenting practices can modify children’s emotional styles.

• In one research model, there were three basic types of temperament seen in children: 1) easy children (40 percent of sample) who quickly establish regular routines, are cheerful, and adapt easily to new experiences, 2) difficult children (10 percent of sample) who are irregular in daily routines, slow to accept new experiences, and tend to react negatively and intensely, and 3) Slow-to-warm-up children (15 percent of sample) are inactive, have mild, low-key reactions to stimuli, and adjust slowly to new experiences. 35 percent of children did not fit any of these categories, demonstrating blends of characteristics instead. The difficult temperamental type places children at risk for adjustment problems.

• Another model found six types: that varied along certain dimensions. 1)  emotion (fearful distress, irritable distress, positive affect, and soothability), 2)  attention (attention span/persistence), and 3)  action (activity level). These components were seen as forming an integrated system of capacities and limitations.

• Assessments of Physiological Reactions finds that 1) Inhibited, or shy, children react negatively to and withdraw from novel stimuli, 2) uninhibited, or sociable, children display positive emotion to and approach novel stimuli, and 3) the heart rate, hormone levels, and EEG waves in the frontal cortex differentiate children with inhibited and uninhibited temperamental styles.

• Many studies support the long-term stability of temperament, yet, when the evidence as a whole is examined carefully, temperamental stability from one age period to the next is generally low to moderate. One major reason that temperament is not more stable may be that temperament itself develops with age; early behaviors reorganize into new, more complex systems. Long-term prediction from early temperament is best achieved from the second year of life and after.

• Changes shown by many children suggest that experience can modify biologically-based temperamental traits.Genetic findings from twin studies reveal that identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins across a wide range of temperamental traits and personality measures. About half of the individual differences among us can be traced to differences in our genetic make-up. Asian infants tend to be less active, irritable, and vocal than Caucasian infants. Boys tend to be more active and daring than girls.

• Environmental Influences: Some differences in early temperament are encouraged by cultural beliefs and practices. For example, Asian mothers do more comforting and Caucasian mothers more stimulating. Parents more often encourage infant sons to be physically active and daughters to seek help and physical closeness. Research indicates that when one child in a family is viewed as easy, another is likely to be perceived as difficult, even though the second child might not be very difficult when compared to children in general.

• Temperament and Child Rearing: The Goodness-of-Fit Model:  The goodness-of-fit model explains how temperament and environmental pressures work together to produce favorable outcomes.  Goodness-of-fit is an effective match between child-rearing environments and a child’s temperament, leading to healthy adjustment. Difficult infants are less likely than easy babies to receive sensitive care. ( Caregiving, of course, is not just responsive to the child’s temperament; it also depends on life conditions and cultural values.)

D.    DEVELOPMENT OF ATTACHMENT : Attachment is the strong affectional tie that we feel toward special people in their lives. Infant attachment behaviors include seeking closeness to the mother, following her about, and crying and calling in her absence.

• Psychoanalytic theory regards feeding as the central context in which caregivers and babies build emotional bonds. According to the behaviorist drive reduction explanation, as the mother satisfies the baby’s hunger (primary drive), her presence becomes a secondary or learned drive because it is paired with tension relief. Research indicates the attachment bond is not solely dependent on the satisfaction of the infant’s hunger. Human infants can also become attached to people who do not feed them, as well as to soft, cuddly objects.

• Today, ethological theory of attachment is the most widely accepted view of attachment. Bowlby’s ethological theory views the infant’s emotional tie to the mother as an evolved response that promotes survival. The human infant is endowed with a set of built-in behaviors that keep the parent nearby, which increases the chances that the infant will be protected from danger.

• The development of attachment takes place in four phases:

  • The preattachment phase (birth to 6 weeks)—built-in signals such as smiling and crying help bring the newborn into close contact with other humans.

  • The “attachment-in-the-making” phase (6 weeks to 6-8 months)—infants begin to respond differently to a familiar caregiver than to a stranger

  • The phase of “clear-cut” attachment (6-8 months to 18 months-2 years)—attachment to the familiar caregiver is evident. At this stage, babies exhibit separation anxiety when they become upset at the departure of a familiar caregiver and they use caregivers as a secure base from which they can explore the environment and to which they can return for emotional security and support.

  • Formation of a reciprocal relationship (18 months-2 years and on)—separation anxiety decreases; instead, toddlers try to persuade caregivers not to leave.

• An internal working model is a set of expectations derived from early caregiving experiences concerning the availability and reliability of attachment figures and their likelihood of providing support during times of stress. This becomes a guide for all future close relationships.

• The Strange Situation is a procedure for measuring the quality of attachment between 1 and 2 years of age. It involves short separations from and reunions with the parent. Secure attachment characterizes infants who may or may not cry at parental separation but are easily comforted by the parent when she returns. Avoidant attachment describes infants who are usually not distressed by parental separation and who avoid the parent when she returns. Resistant attachment identifies infants who remain close to the parent before departure and display angry, resistive behavior when she returns. Disorganized/disoriented attachment characterizes infants who respond in a confused, contradictory way when reunited with parents. This pattern seems to reflect the greatest insecurity.

Some points about attachment:

        1.    Quality of attachment is usually secure and stable for middle-SES babies experiencing favorable life conditions.
2.    Infants who move from insecurity to security typically have well-adjusted mothers with positive family and friendship ties.
3.    For low-SES families with many stresses and little support, attachment status usually moves away from security or changes from one insecure pattern to another.
4.    Many children show short-term instability in attachment quality. Those with high long-term stability usually come from middle-SES homes with stable family lives.
5.  Cross-cultural evidence indicates that attachment patterns may have to be interpreted differently in other culture, but the secure attachment pattern is the most common in all societies studied.
6. In order for adequate attachment to occur, babies must have opportunities for attachment to develop: In a series of studies, Spitz observed that institutionalized infants experienced emotional difficulties, wept and withdrew from their surroundings, lost weight, and had difficulty sleeping. These problems occured not because they were separated from their mothers, but because they were prevented from forming a bond with one or a few adults.It is possible that fully normal attachment development depends on establishing close bonds with caregivers during the first few years of life.
7. Research findings indicate that securely attached infants have mothers who engage in sensitive caregivlng—responding promptly to infant signals, expressing positive emotion, and handling their babies tenderly and carefully. Insecurely attached infants have mothers who dislike physical contact, handle them awkwardly, and behave in a routine” manner when meeting the baby’s needs.
8. Interactional synchrony contributes to the development of secure attachment. Interactional synchrony is best described as a sensitively tuned “emotional dance,” in which the caregiver responds to infant signals in a well-timed, appropriate fashion and both partners match emotional states, especially the positive ones.
9. Child abuse and neglect are associated with all three forms of insecure attachment. When caregiving is highly inadequate, it is a powerful predictor of disruptions in attachment.

Some of the characteristics that contribute to problems of attachment: 

• Prematurity, birth complications, and newborn illness are linked to attachment insecurity in poverty-stricken, stressed families. The role that temperament plays in attachment security has been debated. Some evidence indicates that sensitive caregiving can override the impact of infant characteristics on attachment security.  A major reason that temperament and other infant characteristics do not show strong relationships with attachment security may be that their influence depends on goodness-of-fit.

• In families where there is stress and instability, insecure attachment is especially high. Availability of social supports to stressed families reduces stress and fosters attachment security.

• Parents bring to the family context a long history of attachment experiences, out of which they construct internal working models that they apply to the bonds established with their babies. Mothers who show objectivity and balance in discussing their childhoods tend to have securely attached infants. Mothers who dismiss the importance of early relationships or describe them in angry, confused ways usually have insecurely attached babies. This does not mean that  negative early rearing experiences destine us to become  insensitive parents. Internal working models or those early experiences are reconstructed memories affected by many factors over the life course.

    Multiple Attachments and other relationships: 

• Bowlby believed that infants are predisposed to direct their attachment behaviors to a single attachment figure and that this preference typically declines over the second year of life.

•  Fathers’ sensitive caregiving predicts secure attachment—an effect that becomes stronger the more time they spend with their babies. Usually, mothers spend more time in physical care, while fathers spend more time in playful interaction. As a result, babies tend to look to their mothers when distressed and to their fathers for playful stimulation.This picture of mother as caregiver and father as playmate has changed in some families due to the revised work status of women.  Highly involved fathers are less gender stereotyped in their beliefs, have sympathetic, friendly personalities, and regard parenthood as an especially enriching experience. They become more similar to mothers in their parenting style except that they tend to continue to play more physically actively with their infants.

• Siblings:  80 percent of American children grow up with at least one sibling. Conflict between siblings increases when one member of a sibling pair is emotionally intense or highly active. Secure infant—mother attachment and warmth toward both children are related to positive sibling interaction, whereas coldness is associated with sibling friction. Setting aside special times and more 'grown-up' activities for the older child supports sibling harmony.

• Between 1 and 2 years, coordinated peer interaction occurs more often, typically in the form of mutual physical play and imitation. Reciprocal play and positive emotion are especially frequent in toddlers’ interactions with familiar agemates, suggesting that they are building true peer relationships. Peer sociability is present in the first two years, and it is fostered by the early caregiver—child bond.

• When infants and toddlers have day care or babysitters, etc, the continuity of caregiving determines whether attachment problems arise. Infants who lack adequate parenting can develop compensating affectional ties outside the immediate family and can be insulated from or bounce back from adversity.

• Quality of attachment to the main caretaker in infancy is related to cognitive and social development in early childhood. A child whose parental caregiving improves can recover and develop normally if the condition has not lasted too long.

E.   SELF-DEVELOPMENT (PP. 283-286)

  Self-Awareness:  The earliest aspect of self awareness to emerge is the I-self—the sense of self as subject, or agent, who is separate from, but acts on, other objects and other people. During the second year, toddlers construct the me-self—a reflective observer that considers the self an object of knowledge and evaluation. Conscious awareness of the self’s features accompanies development of the me-self.

• Self-awareness leads to the child’s initial efforts to understand another’s perspective.Self-awareness is accompanied by empathy—the ability to understand and respond sympathetically to the feelings of others.

• Development of the me-self permits toddlers to compare themselves to other people. Between 18 and 30 months children categorize themselves and others on the basis of age, sex, and even goodness and badness.

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Self-control: One critical aspect of development that is very much a part of Erikson's stage of 'autonomy vs. shame and doubt' is the toddlers attempts to begin to control himself. Self-control is the capacity to resist an impulse to engage in socially disapproved behavior. 

• The first signs of self-control appear as compliance—voluntary obedience to adult requests and commands.

• Toddlers who experience positive caregiving and reasonable expectations are more likely to be compliant and cooperative than oppositional.

• Toddlers’ control over their own actions is dependent upon parental guidance and reminders