Notes on social and emotional development in the preschool years...Study for test on Dec 3.

Berk: Chapter 10

I. ERIKSON’S THEORY: INITIATIVE VERSUS GUILT

  •  According to Erikson, Initiative versus Guilt is the psychological conflict of the period of early childhood. It is resolved positively through play  experiences that foster a healthy sense of initiative and through development of a conscience that is not overly strict.

  •  Play permits preschoolers to try new skills and cooperate with other children to achieve common goals.

  •  In Freud’s theory, to avoid punishment and maintain parental affection, preschoolers form a superego, or conscience, by identifying with the same-sex parent. For Erikson, the negative outcome of early childhood is an overly strict superego, one that causes children to feel too much guilt.

  •  Although Freud’s psychosexual conflicts are no longer accepted is satisfactory explanations of conscience development, Erikson’s image of initiative captures diverse changes in young children’s emotional and social lives.

II. SELF-DEVELOPMENT 

  •  This period is where the foundations of a self-concept begin. Self-concept is the set of attributes, abilities, attitudes, and values that an individual believes defines who he or she is. 

  • Preschoolers usually describe themselves with concrete terms such as name, physical appearance, possessions, and everyday behaviors. By age 31/2, they can also describe themselves in terms of typical emotions and attitudes. Preschoolers do not yet make explicit reference to internal traits.

  • Children’s struggles over objects seem to be positive efforts at forming boundaries between self and others.

  •  A firmer sense of self also permits children to cooperate in resolving disputes over objects, in playing games, and in solving problems.

  •  Understanding Intentions:

    1. By age 2, preschoolers already have intentions on their minds and by age 21/2 to 3 years, begin to understand others intentions.  
    2. By age 4, children start to understand intention as a mental state that guides but can be distinguished from behavior. 
    3. By the end of the preschool years, children use a much wider range of information to judge intentionality.
    4. Children acquire these understandings through conversations with adults and sociodramatic play.

  • Emergence of Self-Esteem : 

    1. Self-esteem is an aspect of self-concept that involves judgments about one’s own worth and the feelings associated with those judgments.
    2. Evaluations of our own competencies affect emotional experiences, future behavior, and long-term psychological adjustment.
    3. Preschoolers’ sense of self-esteem is not as well defined as that of older children or adults.  They usually rate their own ability as extremely high and underestimate the difficulty of a task.
    4. A high sense of self-esteem contributes greatly to preschoolers’ initiative during a period in which they must master many new skills.
    5. Criticism can undermine a preschooler’s self-esteem and enthusiasm for learning.

III. EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT  

  • Gains in representation, language, and self-concept support emotional development.

  • Self-development also contributes to a rise in self-conscious emotions such as shame, embarrassment, guilt, envy, and pride.

  • Cognitive Development and Emotional Understanding

    1. Early in the preschool years, children refer to causes, consequences, and behavioral signs of emotion.
    2. Preschoolers have an impressive ability to interpret, predict, and change others’ feelings. 

    3. Children’s emotional understanding has limits. In situations with conflicting cues about how a person feels, preschoolers have difficulty making sense of what is going on.

    4. Preschoolers also do not realize that people can experience more than one emotion at a time.

  • Social Experience and Emotional Understanding

    1. Preschoolers growing up in families that frequently talk about feelings am better at judging the emotions of others when tested at later ages.
    2. Intense emotions between siblings and the need to resolve them and make-believe play with siblings is related to advanced emotional understanding.
    3. Emotional knowledge and understanding helps children in their efforts to get along with others.

  • Emotional Self-Regulation

    1. Language contributes to preschoolers’ improved emotional self-regulation, or the ability to control the expression of emotion.
    2. Preschoolers know that emotions can be blunted by restricting sensory input, talking to yourself; or changing your goals.
    3. Because of the increased use of these self-regulating strategies, intense emotional outbursts become less frequent over the preschool-years.
    4. Most cultures encourage members to communicate positive feelings and inhibit unpleasant ones as a way of promoting good interpersonal relations.
    5. Temperament affects the development of emotional self-regulation. If emotionally- reactive children are to avoid social difficulties, they must develop effective emotion-regulation strategies.
    6. Preschoolers’ vivid imaginations, combined with their difficulty in separating appearance from reality, make fears common in early childhood. Parents can contribute to the development of the child's coping mechanisms in dealing with these fears.

  • Self-Conscious Emotions: Self-conscious emotions involve injury to or enhancement of the sense of self.

    1. As children’s self-concepts become better developed, they experience self-conscious emotions more often.
    2. Young children are likely to feel shame and guilt for any act that can be described as wrongdoing, especially if it was accidental.
    3.  The presence of an audience seems to be necessary for preschoolers to experience self­conscious emotions.
    4. Preschoolers depend on adults’ messages to know when to feel self-conscious motions.
    5. Intense shame is associated with feelings of  inadequacy and are linked to maladjustment.
    6. In contrast, guilt is related to good adjustment, perhaps becauso guilt helps children resist harmful impulses.

  •   Empathy and Sympathy

    1. Young children who react with empathy are more likely to share and help when they notice another person in distress.
    2. Compared to toddlers, preschoolers rely increasingly on words to console others, an indication of a more reflective level of empathy.
    3. Empathy does not always give way to sympathy or feelings of concern for  another’s plight.
    4. Whether empathy prompts sympathetic, prosocial behavior or a personally distressed, self-focused response is related to both temperament and early experiences.
    5. Children are likely to respond to the suffering of others in the same way that their parents respond to them.

IV. PEER RELATIONS:  Peers provide young children with learning experiences that they can get in no other way. Mildred Patton concluded that social development proceeds in a three  steps:

      a.  Nonsocial activity is unoccupied, onlooker behavior and solitary play.
      b.  Parallel play is a form of limited social participation in which the child plays near other    
           children with similar materials but does not  interact with them. 
      c.  At the highest level, preschoolers engage in two forms of true social interaction:
  •      Associative play: when children engage in saparate activities but interact by 
         exchanging toys and commenting on one another’s behavior.
  •      Cooperative play  occurs when children’s actions are directed toward a common 
         goal.
  1. Research has shown that all play types coexist during the preschool years and that nonsocial activity is the most frequent form of behavior among 3- to 4-year-olds, but the proportion of cooperative play increases with age.
  2. Certain types of nonsocial activities wandering, hovering near peers, and functional play involving immature repetitive motor actions are cause for concern in the preschool years.
  3. Sociodramatic play becomes especially common during the preschool years and contributes a great deal toward learning social and cognitive skills.
  4. Culture shapes children’s interactions and. play activities. Peer sociability in collectivist societies, which stress group harmony, differs from that in Western individualistic cultures. Cultural beliefs about the importance of play also affect early peer associations.

  • First Friendships 

    1. Four to 7-year-olds regard friendship as pleasurable play and sharing of toys; it does not yet have a long-term, enduring quality based on mutual trust.
    2. Sensitivity, spontaneity and intimacy characterize friendships very early, although children are not yet able to say that these qualities are essential to a good friendship.
    3. Children, oven when they are best friends, sometimes come into conflict, but conflicts are not very frequent when compared with children’s friendly, cooperative interactions.
    4. Social conflicts offer children invaluable learning opportunities for social problem solving.
    5. Children who get along well with age mates interpret social cues accurately, formulate goals that enhance relationships, and have a repertoire of effective problem-solving strategies.
    6. In contrast, children with peer difficulties often hold biased social expectations. They attend selectively to social cues and misinterpret others’ behavior. Their social goals often lead to strategies that damage relationships.
    7. Social problem-solving skills improve from preschool to the early school years. Intervening with children who have weak social problem-solving skills enhances development by improving peer relations and providing a sense of mastery in the face of stressful life events. Discussions with preschoolers about how to resolve social problems and practice in enacting responses may strengthen positive outcomes.

  • Parental Influences on Early Peer Relations 

    • Young children depend on their parents to help them establish peer associations. 
    • Parents also influence their children’s social relations by offering advice, guidance, and effective examples of how to act toward others.
    • s early as the preschool years, some children have difficulty getting along with peers.

IV.  FOUNDATIONS OF MORALITY All theories of moral development recognize that conscience begins to take   shape during the preschool years.

  • By age 2, children show concern with deviations from the way objects should be and people should act. In response to this awareness, parents hold their children more responsible for their behavior.
  • At first, the child’s morality is externally controlled by adults. Gradually it becomes regulated by inner standards. Truly moral individuals have developed compassionate concern for others and principles of good conduct  which they can then follow in a variety of situations.

Psychoanalytic theory stresses the emotional side of conscience development

  • . Freud claimed that moral development is largely complete by age 5 or 6, with the development of the superego. Most researchers disagree that conscience develops as a result of fear of the same sex parent and research shows that children whose parents use threats, commands, or physical force usually feel little guilt after harming others. However, he was correct that guilt is an important motivator of moral action, stopping hurtful actions, repairing damage caused by misdeeds, and engaging in future prosocial behavior.
  •  Induction, in which the child is helped to understand the effects of the child’s misbehavior on others are communicated to the child, leads the child to try to make up for their mistakes and to show more prosocial behavior. The success of induction may lie in its power to cultivate children’s active commitment to moral standards based on their ability to empathize. Induction can be used as early as 2 years of age.

Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory focus on the effects of reinforcement and punishment and social modeling on the development of moral behavior.  

  • According to traditional behaviorists, children start to behave morally because parents and teachers fol1ow up “good behavior” with positive reinforcement. This is operant conditioning.
  • The punishment aspect of operant conditioning shows more mixed results. The use of sharp reprimands or physical force to restrain or move a child from one place to another is justified when immediate obedience is necessary. Research indicates that punishment only promotes momentary compliance, not lasting changes in children’s behavior. Harsh punishment serves to 1) provide children with adult models of aggression, 2) teach children to avoid the punishing adult, and  3) offer immediate relief to adults, who are then reinforced for having used coercive discipline.
  • Time out, as a mild alternatives to harsh Punishments, is when the misbehaving child is removed from the immediate setting until they are ready to act appropriately. Withdrawal of privileges also allows parents to avoid harsh discipline techniques.
  • The effectiveness of punishment is increased when it is used consistently, there is a warm parent-child relationship, and the punishment is accompanied by an explanation.
  • Parents who use the most effective forms of discipline encourage good conduct, reduce the opportunities for misbehavior, and have positive cooperative relationships with their young children. Warmth and reasoning in discipline foster internalized mor.  

  • Social learning theorists believe that children learn to act morally through modeling - by observing and imitating models who demonstrate appropriate behavior. Research shows that preschoolers are more likely to model their behavior after adults who are warm, responsive, competent, powerful, and who demonstrate consistency between their directives and their own behaviors.

The cognitive-developmental perspective emphasizes that children are active thinkers about social rules who contribute to their own moral development.

  • Early in the pre-school years, children make moral judgments.

  • Preschoolers distinguish moral imperatives, which protect people’s rights and welfare, from two other types of action: social conventions or customs, such us table manners and dress styles; and matters of personal choice, which do not violate eights and are up to the individual.

  • Children arrive at these distinctions by actively making sense of their experience.

  • With age, children start to appreciate the interdependence of moral, social-conventional, and personal matters.

  • Social experiences are vital to preschoolers’ moral understanding and provide important opportunities to work out first ideas about justice and fairness. The way parents handle rule violations and discuss moral issues also helps children reason about morality. Preschoolers who are disliked by peers because of their aggressive approach to resolving conflict show difficulties with moral reasoning.

Temperament:  The child’s temperament can affect the success of certain parenting techniques. Some children are very sensitive to correction and others who are less reactive need firm guidelines but special attention to establishing positive warm relationships with parents.

The Other Side of Morality: Development of Aggression

  • Instrumental aggression is aggression aimed at obtaining an object, privilege, or space with no deliberate intent to harm another person; it decreases with age. 

  • In contrast, hostile aggression is aggression that is intended to harm another individual.                1.)Overt aggressive harms others through physical injury or the threat of such injury. It increases between 4 and 7.   2.) Relational aggression does damage to another's peer relationships, as occurs in social exclusion or rumor spreading.

  • On the average, boys we more overtly aggressive than girls. The male sex hormones (androgens) contribute to boys’ higher rate of physical activity, which may increase their opportunities for aggressive encounters. Also, as 2-year-olds become aware of gender stereotypes, aggression drops off in girls but is maintained in boys. Parents more often use commands and physical punishment with sons, which encourages them to adopt the same tactics. 

  • Girls are more likely than boys to express their hostility through relational aggression.

  • The Family Training Ground:  Anger and punitiveness can spread from one family member to another, creating a conflict-ridden family atmosphere and an “out-of-control” child. Children who are products of these family processes soon view the world from a violent perspective. Because they expect others to react with anger and physical force, they see hostile intent where it does not exist.

  • Highly aggressive children tend to be rejected by peers, to fail in school, and (by adolescence) to seek out deviant peer groups.

  • Television's effects: Televised violence also encourages childhood aggression.  Because young children fail to understand a great deal of what they see on TV, they are especially likely to be influenced by television. Young children also find it hard to separate true-to-life from fantasized television content. Many violent TV scenes are embedded in humor. Violent programming can create both short-term and long-term difficulties in parent and peer relations. The ease with which television can minipulate the beliefs and behavior of children has resulted in strong public pressure to improve its content.

  • To help aggressive children, parents and children must be taught more adaptive ways of interacting. Social problem-solving training teaches children how to resolve social conflicts through discussing and trying out successful strategies

VII. GENDER TYPING:  Gender typing is the process of developing gender roles or gender-linked preferences and behaviors valued by the larger society.

  • Around age 2, children begin to label their own sex and that of other people. Children then start to sort out what the categories mean in terms of behavior and activities. Boys tend to be more active, assertive, and assertiveness, while girls tend to be more fearful, dependent, compliant, and emotionally sensitive.

  •  Over the preschool years, children’s gender-stereotyped beliefs become stronger, so much so that they operate like blanket rules rather than flexible guidelines. Most preschoolers do not yet realize that characteristics associated  with gender do not determine whether a person is male or famale.

  • Genetic Influences on gender typing: Eleanor Maccoby argues that hormones lead to rough, noisy movements among boys and calm, gentle actions among girls. Then as children begin to interact with peers, they choose same-sex partners whose interests and behaviors are compatible with their own; in their play they tend to reinforce gender stereotypes. 

  • Environmental Influences on gender typing : Many parents state that they want their children to play with “gender-appropriate” toys, and they also believe that boys and girls should be raised differently. They reward sons for active and assertive behavior, but more often direct play activities and provide help to a daughter, encouraging dependency.  Parents who hold non-storeotyped values and apply them in their daily lives have less gender-typed children. Of the two sexes, boys are more gender-typed because parents—particularly fathers—are less tolerant of “cross-gender” behavior in their sons than in their daughters.

  •  Teachers often encourage children to conform to gender roles. Girls get more enoouragement to participate in adult-structured activities at preschool.

  •  Peers: By age 3, same-sex peers positively reinforce one another for gender-typed play by praising, imitating, or joining in the activity of an agemate who shows a “gender­appropriate” response. When preschoolers engage in “gender-inappropriate” play, they - especially boys - receive criticism from peers.  Children also develop different styles of social influence in sex-segregated peer ‘groups.  Over time, children form beliefs about peers’ play preferences, which contribute further to gender segregation. 

  • Television . In TV programs, women appear less often than men and continue to be portrayed in traditionally stereotypic roles. Gender roles are especially stereotypic in entertainment programs for children and youths. 

  •  The Broader Social Environment:  Children’s everyday environments contain many examples of gender-stereotyped behavior.  In addition to imitating the gender-linked responses they observe, children also start to view themselves and the surrounding world in gender-biased ways.

Gender Identity: Gender identity is the image of oneself as relatively masculine or feminine in characteristics.

  • Androgyny is a type of gender-role identity in which the person scores high on both masculine and feminine personality characteristics.

  • Masculine and androgynous children and adults have a higher sense of self-esteem, whereas feminine individuals often think poorly of themselves. 

  • According to social learning theory, preschoolers first acquire gender-typed responses through modeling and reinforcement, and later they organize these behaviors into gender-linked ideas about themselves.

  • Cognitive-developmental theory asserts that children first acquire gender constancy, the understanding that sex remains the same even if clothing, hairstyle, and play activities change, before they develop gender-typed responses. It is not present in most children until the end of the preschool years.  Lack of early gender constancy results, in part, from the lack of opportunity to learn about genital differences between the sexes.  At present, researchers disagree on just how gender constancy contributes to gender-role development. But they do know that once children begin to reflect on gender roles, they form basic gender categories that strengthen gender-typed self-images and behavior. 

  • Gender Schema Theory:  The information-processing approach to gender typing combines social learning and cognitive - developniontal features to explain how environmental pressures and children’s cognitions work together to shape gender-role development. Young children organize their experiences into gender schemas, or masculine and feminine categories, which they use to interpret their world and guide their behavior. Gender schemas are so powerful that when children e others behaving in “gender­inconsistent” ways, they often cannot remember the behavior or distort their memory to make it “gender consistent.” 

  • Adults can reduce gender-stereotyping in young children by removing stereotyping from their own behavior and from the alternatives they provide children, by explaining that interests and skills, not gender, should determine a person’s occupations and activities. Research shows that such reasoning is very effective in reducing children’s tendency to view the world in a gender-biased fashion.

VIII.    CHILD REARING AND EMOTIONAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT 

  • Parenting styles:  In a series of observations of parents interacting with their preschoolers, two broad dimensions of parenting emerged: 
    a. Demandingness: some parents establish high standards for their children, whereas others demand vely little and rarely by to influence their child’s behavior. 
    b. Responsiveness: some parents are accepting and responsive, whereas others are rejecting and unresponsive.

  • These two dimensions can be used to divide parenting styles into four general types:
    a.  Authoritative : both demanding of mature behavior and responsive to child's needs. It is a rational, democratic approach in which parents’ and children’s rights are respected. Children of authoritative parents are lively, happy, self-confident, and self-controlled. In addition, they seem less gender-typed.
    b.  Authoritarian: is demanding but low in responsiveness to children’s rights and needs. Conformity and obedience arc valued over open communication with the child.  Prschoolers of authoritarian parents are anxious, withdrawn, unhappy, and they tend to react with hostility when frnstrated in peer interactions. ( Boys show high rates of anger and defiance, while girls tend to be more  dependent and lack in exploration, and they retreat from challenging tasks.
    c. Permissive: The permissive style is responsive but undemanding. This is an overly tolerant approach to child rearing.  Children of permissive parents tend to be very immature, have difficulty controlling their impulses, and are overly demanding and dependent on adults. They tend to show less persistence on challenging tasks.
    d. Uninvolved: At the extreme, uninvolved parenting is called neglect.  Children of uninvolved parents tend to have a low tolerance for frustration, poor emotional control, achievement difficulties in school, and delinquency in adolescence.

  • What Makes Authoritative Child Rearing Effective? Controls that appear fair and reasonable to the child are more likely to be complied with and internalized. Nurturant parents who are secure in the standards they hold for their children provide models of caring concern as well as confident, assertive behavior. Authoritative parents make demands that are reasonable in terms of their child’s developing capacities.

  • Throughout childhood and adolescence, authoritative parenting is associated with task persistence, social maturity, high self-esteem, internalized moral standards, and superior academic achievement. Supportive aspects of the authoritative style help protect children from the negative effects of family stress and poverty.

  • Cultural Variations in parenting styles: Different cultures demand different characteristics from their participants, and child-rearing styles can only be fully understood in their larger ecological context. For example, in highly repressive societies, authoritarian parenting may be more adaptive in preparing the child for adult life.  Chinese adults describe their parenting techniques as more demanding. In Hispanic and Asian Pacific Island families, high parental control (particularly by the father) is paired with high maternal warmth. Some research suggests that African-American mothers often rely on an adult-centered approach in which they expect immediate obedience from children; again, this may stem from a history of repression in which unquestioning obedience was necessary. Today, African-American parents use strict discipline for broad reasons - to promote self-reliance, self-control, and a watchful attitude in risky surroundings.

  • Many factors, including the personal characteristics of both child and parent, socioeconomic well­being, family and community supports, cultural values and practices, and public policy, contribute to parents’ capacity to be appropriately warm, consistent, and demanding.
Child Maltreatment: 
Child maltreatment includes physical, sexual, or psychological abuse, and physical or emotional neglect.
  • The increase in public concern for the issue of child maltreatment may be due to the fact that it is especially common in large, industrialized nations. Difficulties arise when experts cannot agree on bow frequent and/or intense an adult’s actions in order to qualify as maltreatment.
  • In 1998, a total of 3.1 million cases wore reported to juvenile authorities, an increase of 132 percent over the previous decade.
  • The rate of psychological abuse may be the highest, since it accompanies most other types.
  • The largest number of sexual abuse victims are identified in middle childhood.

Factors in child maltreatment: 

  • Premature or very sick babies, children who are temperamentally difficult, inattentive and overactive, or  who have other developmental problems have an increased chance of becoming victims.
  • Unmanageable parental stress is strongly associated with all forms of maltreatment.
  • The majority of abusive parents are isolated from both formal and informal social supports in their communities. Because of their own life histories, many of these parents have learned to mistrust and avoid others. 
  • Once child abuse gets started, it quickly becomes part of a self-sustaining family relationship.
  • Societies that view force and violence as appropriate ways to solve problems set the stage for child abuse. Although all 50 U.S. states have laws designed to protect children from maltreatment, there is still strong support for the use of physical force in parent -child relations. In countries wh\ere physical punishment is not accepted, such as Japan, Luxembourg, and Sweden, child abuse is rare.

 Consequences of Child Maltreatment:

  • Over time, abused children show serious learning and adjustment problems.
  • The low warmth and control to which neglected children are exposed promotes aggressive, acting-out behavior.
  • At school, maltreated children’s noncompliance, poor motivation, and cognitive immaturity interfere with academic achievement.
  • The trauma of repeated abuse can lead to psychophysiological changes, including abnormal BEG activity and altered production of stress hormones.

Prevention of Child Maltreatment:
Interventions directed at the family, community, and overall societal levels are necessary.

  •  Providing social supports to families is effective in easing parental stress and subsequent child maltreatment.
  • Many experts believe that child maltreatment cannot be eliminated as long as violence is widespread and corporal punishment is regarded as acceptable.
  • Child maltreatment remains a crime that is difficult to prove. 
  • In cases in which parents are unlikely to change their behavior, separating parent from child and legally terminating parental rights is the only reasonable course of action
  Assignment: Child observation papers are due. Study for a test in the next class. It will be given in a relatively stress-free format, based on the materials on early childhood which we have covered.