Berk:  Chapter 13 

I. ERIKSON'S THEORY: INDUSTRY VERSUS INFERIORITY 

     A. According to Erikson, the personality changes of the school years build on Freud's latency stage.
     B. In Erikson’s theory, Latency versus Inferiority is the psychological conflict of middle childhood, which is resolved positively when experiences lead children to develop a sense of competence at useful skills and tasks.
     C. The danger at this stage is inferiority, reflected in the sad pessimism of children who have little confidence in their ability to do things well.

II. SELF-DEVELOPMENT 

     A.  During the school years, children develop a much mine refined self-concept, organizing their observations of behaviors and internal states into general dispositions. School children begin making social comparisons, judging their appearance, abilities, and behavior in relation to those of others. at this age, children describe themselves in terms of psychological traits, and emphasize competencies instead of specific behaviors.
     B. Cognitive developments support the development of a self-concept.  Perspective-taking skills emerging during middle childhood play a crucial role in the development of a psychological self. Self reflection as well as feedback from others contribute to a new view of the self. Children become bettor at "reading" messages they receive from others and incorporating them into their self-definitions.
     C.  As school-age children internalize others' expectations, they form an ideal self that they use as a standard against which to evaluate their real self.
     D. The content of self-concept varies from one culture to another. In collectivist cultures, the self and social group are not differentiated as completely as they are in North American and Western European cultures.   
     E. Self-Esteem: In schools, children learn to evaluate their own competence as compared with others. 

• When children first enter school, their self-esteem drops from the high levels of preschoolers'. As they come to appraise their abilities and characteristics more realistically, they come to accept themselves and self-esteem rises again toward the end of this period.  
• The main contexts in which children learn to evaluate their own competence mare the classroom, the playground and in peer groups.
• By age 7 to 8, children have formed at least four separate self-esteems-1) academic competence, 2) social competence, 3) physical/athletic competence, and 4) physical appearance. Although children and adolescents differ in the aspects of the self they deem most important, they way they perceive their physical appearance correlates more strongly with general self-worth than with any other self-esteem factor. Children with high social self esteem are consistently better liked by their peers, and academic self-esteem predicts school achievement.
• The use of social comparison in self-evaluation does not characterize children of every culture; in some cultures, competence in academics or athletics is so highly prized that self-esteem suffers despite high levels of competence. In others, the self is subjugated to the group and self-esteem is not valued.
• Child-Rearing Practices and self-esteem: Children whose parents use an authoritative child-rearing style feel especially good about themselves. Warm. positive parenting lets children know that they are accepted as competent individuals. Firm but appropriate expectations, along with explanations, help children make sensible choices. n contrast, highly coercive parenting communicates a sense of inadequacy to children. It tells them that their behavior needs to be managed by adults because they cannot manage it themselves. Indulgent parenting creates a false sense of self-esteem.

F. Attribution Theory: Attributions are our common, everyday explanations for the causes of behavior, and include luck, ability, and effort.

• Children who are mastery-oriented attribute success to high ability and failure to insufficient effort. This leads to high self-esteem and a willingness to approach challenging tasks. 
• Learned helplessness however, involves attributions that credit success to luck and failure to low ability, and children with learned-helplessness hold a fixed view of ability - that it cannot be changed. When a task is difficult, they give up easily. Learned-helpless children tend to have parents who set unusual1y high standards yet believe their child is not very capable and has to work harder to succeed. 
• Girls, more often then boys, blame lack of  ability when they do not do well, and girls also tend to receive messages from teachers and parents that their lack of ability is the problem when they do not do well. 
• Low-SES ethnic minority children are also vulnerable to learned helplessness, as so many of the conditions of their lives condition them to feel they have little control over their fate.
•  Cultural values for achievement also affect the likelihood that children will develop learned helplessness. For instance, children growing up on Israeli kibbutzim are shielded from learned helplessness by classrooms that emphasize mastery and cooperation rather than ability and competition.
• Learned helplessness can be overcome by teaching children to believe that they can overcome failure by exerting more effort, and by refocusing children on mastery rather than grades.
• Low self-esteem can be prevented by minimizing competition among children, helping them overcome failures, and designing school environments that accommodate individual differences in development and styles of learning.

III. EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 

    A.  In middle childhood, the self-conscious emotions of pride and guilt become internalized and guide personal responsibility; these feelings are now experienced in the absence of adult monitoring.
    B.  School-age children do not report guilt for any mishap, but only for intentional wrongdoing, but they still tend to feel shame when they violated a standard that is not under their control. 
    C.  Pride motivates children to take on further challenges, and guilt prompts them to make amends and strive for self-improvement as well.
    D.  School-age-children's increasing psychological understanding means that they are likely to explain emotion by making reference to internal states rather than to physical events. ('She is crying because she feels bad'; whereas earlier, the child would have looked for some external reason:  'She is crying because someone took her toy'.)
    E.  Children at this age are also more aware of the diversity of emotional experiences. Similarly, school-age children realize that an expressed emotion may not mirror the person's true feelings.  Also, they can use information about a person's past experiences to predict how he will feel in a new situation. Cognitive and social experiences also contribute to a rise in empathy.
    F. Emotional Self-Regulation: school children become much more in control of their emotions.

• Children come up with more ways to handle emotionally arousing situations as they make rapid gains in emotional self-regulation during middle childhood.
• Emotionally well-regulated children are generally upbeat in mood, more empathic and prosocial, and better liked by their peers. 
• Both temperament and parenting style affect emotional self-regulation of the school age child.
  
  IV. UNDERSTANDING OTHERS: PERSPECTIVE TAKING 
• Perspective-taking is the capacity to imagine what other people may be thinking and feeling. Over time, school-age children become more conscious of the fact that people can interpret the same event in different ways.
  
• Soon, they can "step in another person's shoes and reflect on how that person might regard their own thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Finally, they can examine the relationship between two people's perspectives simultaneously.

V. MORAL DEVELOPMENT 

• School-age children are no longer as dependent on adult oversight, modeling, and reinforcement as they were at younger ages. These changes lead children to become considerably more independent and trustworthy. In early childhood, they learn about justice through sharing, dividing material goods evenly. This is called distributive justice.
  Chi1dren in the early school grades are intent an making sure that each person gets the same amount of a treasured resource. Next, children start to view fairness in terms of merit, rewards for having worked extra hard , etc. Around age 8, children see benevolence as an aspect of justice: that  special consideration should be given to special needs or to those at a disadvantage. Parental advice and encouragement support developing standards of justice, but the give- and-take of peer interaction is especially important.
• As their ideas about justice advance, children make connections between moral rules and social conventions, and distinctions between social conventions that have an obvious purpose from those that don't serve a clear purpose.
• In middle childhood, children also realize that people whose knowledge or awareness differs may not be equally responsible for moral transgressions. Children are more tolerant of people holding immoral beliefs than expressing them, and more tolerant of people expressing such beliefs than acting on them.
• Moral Education: There is a debate over whether and how to teach morality in the public schools. Some educators who call for character education, following a common set of moral virtues, while others argue that transmitting a ready-made morality ignores children's  developing capacity to consider multiple variables.
  
  VI. PEER RELATIONS 
• The society of peers becomes an increasingly important context for development. Aggression declines in middle childhood, but the drop is greatest for physical attacks. From third grade on, relational aggression rises among girls. Boys are more straightforward in their conflicts.
• Peer Groups, social units with shared values and standards of behavior and a social structure of leaders and followers, begin to form. Peer groups organize on the basis of proximity, and similarity in gender, ethnicity, and popularity, and are moderately stable.
• Peer groups provide a context in which children practice cooperation, leadership and followership, and develop a sense of loyalty to collective goals.
• Children who participate in formal groups (Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, 4.-H, church groups, and other associations) gain in social and moral understanding.
• During middle childhood, friendship becomes a mutually agreed upon relationship in which children like each other's personal qualities and respond to one another's needs and desires. Once a friendship is formed, trust becomes its defining feature. Consequently, violations of trust are viewed as serious breaches of friendship. Friendships remain fairly stable over middle childhood.
• Throughout childhood, friends tend to be of the same age, sex, ethnicity, and SES. However, characteristics of schools and neighborhoods can also affect friendships.
• Children who bring kindness and compassion to their friendships behave more prosocially toward others in general and also have more friends.
• Researchers assess peer acceptance with self-report measures called sociometric techniques that ask peers to evaluate one another's likeability. Children's responses reveal four different categories of social acceptance: 
  1) popular children who are liked, 
  2) controversial children who are both liked for their positive prosocial behaviors, and disliked for disruptive and occasionally hostile behavior.
  3) rejected children are actively disliked, and
  4) neglected children are seldom chosen, either positively or negatively.
• Neglected children are usually well adjusted; they are considered shy by their classmates, but are not less socially skilled than average children. 
• Popular children are kind and considerate: children enjoy being around them due to their good social skills. Peer acceptance is a powerful predictor of current as well as later psychological adjustment. 
• Others, the controversial ones, are both admired and disliked for their socially sophisticated yet belligerent or manipulative behavior. 
• Rejected children are unhappy, alienated, poorly achieving children with a low sense of self-esteem. Rejection is also strongly associated with poor school performance, dropping out, antisocial behavior, and delinquency in young adulthood. Successful interventions to help rejected children involve coaching, modeling, and reinforcement of positive social skills. Also, intensive academic tutoring has been shown to improve both their school achievement and social acceptance. Other interventions focus on perspective taking and social problem solving.
  

VII. GENDER TYPING 

• Throughout the school years, children develop stereotypes that regard reading, art, and music as more for girls and mathematics, athletics, and mechanical skills as more masculine.
• Girls seem to adopt a more general stereotype of males as smarter than females.
• Both children and adults are fairly tolerant of females' violations of gender roles, but they judge males' violations very harshly.
• As they develop the capacity to integrate conflicting social cues, children realize that a person's sex is not an absolute predictor of personality traits, activities, and behaviors.

           B. Gender Identity and Behavior 

• From third to sixth grade, boys strengthen their identification with the "masculine" role.
• In contrast, girls' identification with "feminine" attributes decline.
• Perhaps girls realize that society attaches greater prestige to 'masculine" traits.
              
     C. Cultural Influences on Gender Typing
• Girls are less likely to experiment with "masculine" activities in cultures and subcultures in which the gap between male and female  is especially wide.
• When social and economic conditions make it necessary for boys to take over "feminine" tasks, their personalities and behaviors become less stereotyped.                   

VIII. FAMILY INFLUENCES 

         A. Relationships with Parents

•  During middle childhood, the amount of time children spend with parents declines dramatically.
•  Reasoning works more effectively with school-age children because of their greater capacity
  for logical thinking and increased respect for parents' knowledge, and skill.
• Coregulation is a term for a transitional form of supervision in which parents exercise general oversight, while permitting children to be in charge of moment-by-moment decision-making.
• Although school-age children often press for greater independence, they know how much they needd their parents' continuing support.

        B. Relationships with Siblings

• Siblings often provide companionship, help with difficult tasks, and comfort during times of emotional stress.
• When parents often compare siblings' traits, abilities, and accomplishments, this may lead to an increase in sibling rivalry. This effect is particularly strong when fathers prefer one child.
• Even after brothers and sisters are born, the oldest child receives greater pressure for mature behavior from parents. As a result, the oldest child is slightly advantaged with slightly higher IQ and greater school achievement.
• Younger children tend to be more popular with agemates, and they become especially skilled at negotiating and compromising.
• 'Only' children are just as well adjusted as children with siblings, and sibling relationships are not essential for normal development. 'Only' children score higher in self-esteem and achievement motivation.

        C.  Diversity in family makeup: effects upon development

1. Gay and Lesbian Families: Several million American gay men and lesbians are parents, most through heterosexual marriages that ended in divorce, a few through adoption or reproductive technologies. Families headed by a homosexual parent or a gay or lesbian couple are very similar to those of heterosexua1s. Children of gay and lesbian parents are as well adjusted as other children, and the large majority are heterosexual.
2. Never-Married Single-Parent Families: Over 10 percent of American children have parents who have never married. The largest group of never-married parents are African-American young women. African-American women postpone marriage more and childbirth less than do all other American ethnic groups. Strengthening social support, education, and employment opportunities for low-income parents would encourage marriage as well as help unmarried-mother families.
3. Divorce: Currently, the divorce rate in the United States is the highest in the world. At any given time, one-fourth of American children live in single-parent households. Children of divorced parents spend an average of 5 years in a single-parent home, or almost a third of their total childhood. About two-thirds of divorced parents many a second time. Half of these children eventually experience the end of their parents' second marriage. In newly divorced households, family conflict often rises.Three-fourths of divorced women who are supposed to receive child support from the absent father got loss than the full amount or none at all. Divorced mothers often move to new housing for economic reasons, reducing supportive ties to neighbors and friends. "Minimal parenting" occurs when the typical home routine is no longer evident. Mothers dole out harsh and inconsistent discipline. Fathers 'who see their children only occasionally tend to be permissive and indulgent.
   When parents are divorcing, younger children often blame themselves, and take the marital breakup as a sign they could be abandoned by both parents. They may whine and cling, displaying intense separation anxiety. While preschoolers are especially likely to fantasize that their parents will get back together, older children can recognize that strong differences of opinion, incompatible personalities, and lack of caring for one another are responsible for parental divorce. When family conflict is high, older children are likely to display adjustment difficulties, but for some older children, especially the oldest child in the
   family, divorce can trigger more mature behavior and taking on more responsibilities around the house.
   Mother-headed homes typically experience a sharp drop in income and living in a single-mother household makes it harder to overcome poverty.
   A child's temperament and sex  affect how s/he is impacted by divorce. When temperamentally difficult children are exposed to stressful life events and inadequate parenting, their problems are magnified. Easy children are less often targets of parental anger and are also better able to cope with adversity when it hits. Girls sometimes respond with internalizing reactions such as crying and withdrawal. At other times, they show demanding, attention-getting behavior.I n mother-custody families, boys experience more serious adjustment problems. Children of both sexes show declines in school achievement during the aftermath of divorce, but school problems are greater for boys.
   Long-Term Consequences of divorce:   There is clear evidence that remaining in a stressed intact family is much worse than making the transition to a low-conflict, single-parent household. However, divorce itself does have negative consequences for children: 1) The majority of children show improved adjustment by 2 years after divorce.2) Boys and children with difficult temperaments are especially likely to experience lasting emotional problems. 3) The overriding factor in positive adjustment following divorce is effective parenting, in particular, how well the custodial parent handles stress, shields the child from family conflict, and engages in authoritative parenting. 4) Several studies indicate that outcomes for sons are better when the father is the custodial parent.
4. Blended Families. A blended, or reconstituted, family is a family structure resulting from remarriage of a divorced parent that includes parent, child, and new step-relatives. In mother-stepfather families, boys usually adjust quickly and welcome a stepfather who is warm and responsive. In contrast, stepfathers disrupt the close relationship many girls have established with mothers in a single-parent family, and girls often react with sulky, resistant behavior. In the case of noncustodial fathers, remarriage often leads to reduced contact; they tend to withdraw from their "previous~ families, more so if they have daughters rather than sons. 
   In father-stepmother families, research consistently reveals more confusion for children. Girls, especially, have a hard time getting along with their stepmothers.

      D. Maternal Employment and Dual-Earner Families

• Today, single and married mothers are in the labor market in nearly equal proportions, and 78 % of those with school-age children are employed.
• An estimated 2.4 million 5-to 13-year-olds in the United States regularly look after themselves during after-school hours. Self-care children who have a history of authoritative child rearing, are monitored from a distance by telephone calls, and have regular after-school chores appear responsible and well adjusted. Those children left to their own devices are more likely to bend to peer pressures and engage in antisocial behavior. 
• After-school programs for 6- to 13-year-olds are increasing, but are not widespread, in American communities.
  With high-quality "after care" programs which have a staff trained in child development, a good adult-child ratio, positive adult-child communication; and stimulating, varied activities, children show better social skills and good psychological adjustment.
  
• When working mothers enjoy their work and remain committed to parenting children show especially positive adjustment.  Girls, especially, profit from the image of female competence.
• Working long hours and spending little time with school-age children are associated with less favorable outcomes.
• In dual-earner families, the husband's willingness to share household and parenting responsibilities is crucial. Too often the mother holds two 'jobs', her paid employment and her parenting and household chores.
• Part-time employment, flexible schedules, job-sharing, and paid leave when children are ill would help e mployed mothers juggle the demands of work and child rearing.

IX. SOME COMMON PROBLEMS OF DEVELOPMENT 
A. Fears and Anxieties

•  As children begin to understand the realities of the wider world, the possibility of personal harm and media events often trouble them.
• Fears decline steadily with age, especially for girls, who express more fears than do boys throughout childhood.
• From 10 to 20 percent of school-age youngsters develop an intense, unmanageable anxiety of some kind.
• School phobia is a severe apprehension about attending school, often accompanied by physical complaints that disappear as soon as the child is allowed to remain home.
• Several childhood anxieties may also arise from harsh living conditions.

B. Child Sexual Abuse 

• Sexual abuse is committed more often against girls than boys. Reported cases are highest in middle childhood, but sexual abuse also occurs at younger and older ages.
• Generally,  the abuser is a male, a parent or someone whom the parent knows well.
•  Reported cases of child sexual abuse are strongly linked to poverty, marital instability, and resulting weakening of family ties.
• The adjustment problems of child sexual abuse victims often include depression, low self-esteem, mistrust of adults, feelings of anger and hostility, and difficulties in getting along with peers. Younger children may have sleep difficulties, loss of appetite, and generalized fearfulness and anxiety. Adolescents may run away or become suicidal, abuse substances, or become involved in delinquent behavior. Abused girls often enter into unhealthy relationships and become promiscuous.
• Once child sexual abuse is revealed, the reactions of family members can increase children's distress. Long-term therapy with children and families is usually necessary. Prevention is the best way to reduce the suffering of child sexual abuse victims.
• Today, courts are prosecuting abusers more rigorously; children's testimony is being taken more seriously, including the use of new courtroom procedures that protect them. In schools, educational programs can help children recognize inappropriate sexual advances and show them where to go for help. Educating teachers, caregivors, and other adults who work with children about the signs and symptoms of sexual abuse can help to identify victimized children and ensure they receive the help they need.

C. Fostering Resiliency in Middle Childhood 

• Many studies indicate that only a modest relationship exists between stresstful life experiences and psychological disturbances in childhood.
• Three factors appear to consistently protect against maladjustment: 1) for the child, an easy temperament, high self-esteem, and a mastery-oriented approach to new situations, 2) for the family, an environment that provides warmth, closeness, and order and organization to the child's life, and 3) outside the family, a person who develops a special relationship with the child, offering a support system and a positive coping model.
• When negative conditions pile up, the rate of maladjustment is multiplied. Also, children are more vulnerable during periods of developmental transition bcause they are faced with many new tasks; social supports are especially important during these times.