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9
Middle Childhood
Personality and
Sociocultural Development
Chapter 9
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Middle Childhood
Personality and Sociocultural Development
• Personality Development in an Expanding
Social World
• Social Knowledge and Reasoning
• Peer Relationships
• Family Influences in Middle Childhood
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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
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Three Major Perspectives on
Middle Childhood
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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
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Personality Development
• Industry versus inferiority – Erikson’s
stage of middle childhood
– When children succeed in school they
incorporate a sense of industry into their selfimage
– Children who don’t achieve mastery may
perceive themselves to be inferior
– Their success in this stage lays the
groundwork for their self-esteem
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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
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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
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Development of Social Cognition
• Social cognition is a person's knowledge and
understanding of the social world. It includes:
– Social inference: 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
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Aspects of Social Cognition
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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
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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
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Kohlberg’s Six Stages of Moral
Development
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Video Clip
Interviews with people of various ages
providing responses to Kohlberg’s Heinz
dilemma:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY4etXWYS84
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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
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Selman’s Stages of Friendship
Development
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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
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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
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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
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Video Clip
ABC news video provides information on
cyberbullying:
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3563260
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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)
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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
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Seven Guidelines for Single
Parenting
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The Changing Family
• About half of all U.S. marriages
divorce
end in
• 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
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Video Clip
Two girls describe their experiences of their
parents’ divorce:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRkXi2t9O0Y
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Factors That Affect Children’s
Reactions to Divorce
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.