Social Development in Middle Childhood

Erin Sherlock & Mayu Moriyasu

Social Influence on Self-Concept and Self-Esteem

During middle childhood, self-concepts include:

Personality traits

Competency

Social comparison: judging their own appearance, abilities, and behavior in relation to those of others

Achievement-related Attributions

Attribution: common everyday explanations of the causes of behavior

Mastery-oriented attribution: credit success to abilities and failure to lack of effort. Believe they can improve by trying harder.

Learned Helplessness: believe success is due to external factors (luck). Believe they can’t improve by trying hard.

Influences on achievement-related attributions

Parents and teachers play a role to encourage mastery- oriented attributions.

Cultural Influences

Cultural values and beliefs, social system

Understanding Others: Perspective Taking

Perspective taking: capacity to imagine what other people are thinking and feeling

Selman’s stages of perspective taking

Level 1 Ages 4-9 Social-informational perspective taking

Level 2 Ages 7-12 Self-reflective perspective taking

Level 3 Age 10-15 Third party perspective taking

Social Influence on Moral Development

Learning about justice through sharing

Distributive justice: beliefs about how to divide material good fairly

Children’s basis of reasoning

1. Strict equality (5-6 years)

2. Merit (6-7 years)

3. Equity and benevolence (8-9 years)

Social Influence on Moral Development

Moral and social-conventional understanding

Prosocial and antisocial intentions

Moral rules and social conventions

People’s intentions and the context of their actions

Children’s realization in people’s knowledge differences

Social Influence on Moral Development

Understanding individual rights

Culture and moral understanding

Understanding diversity and inequality

In-group favouritism

Out-group prejudice

Out-group favouritsm

The level of racial and ethnic biases is influenced by:

1. Fixed view of personality traits

2. Overly high self-esteem

3. A social world in which people are sorted into group

Peer Relations

Peer groups

Friendship

Peer acceptance

4 general categories of peer acceptance

1. Popular (prosocial, antisocial)

2. Rejected (aggressive, withdrawn)

3. Controversial

4. Neglected

Gender Typing

Gender-stereotyped belief

Gender identity and behavior

Peers, gender typing, and culture

Sibling Influence Rivalry

Companionship

Resolve conflict

Emotional support and assistance in difficult tasks

Resiliency

Resilience: capacity to overcome adversity

Factors to promote resilience

Children’s personal characteristics

Family life including parenting style

Social support at school and in the community

Building Blocks of Resiliency

True or False Questions!

1.Cultural forces have no impact on self-esteem.

FALSE

Strong emphasis on social comparison in school explains why Chinese, Japanese and Korean children score lower in self-esteem than NA children. Asian culture values modesty and social harmony, children less often call on social comparisons to promote own self-esteem.

True or False Questions!

2. Between ages 4-9 children can “step into another person’s shoes.”

FALSE

Ages 7-12

True or False Questions!

3. Peer groups organize on the basis of proximity (same classroom) and similarity in sex, ethnicity, academic achievement, popularity and

aggression.

TRUE

True or False Questions!

4. School aged children of both sexes are aware that society attaches greater prestige to “masculine” characteristics and they rate “masculine”

occupations as having higher status than “feminine” occupations.

TRUE

True or False Questions!

5. An older sibling’s academic and social competence tends to lead to poor academic achievement and negative peer relations in younger peer

relations.

FALSE

When siblings feel affection for one another, the older sibling’s academic and social competence tends to “rub off on” younger siblings fostering

higher achievement and more positive peer relations.

True or False Questions!

6. Children are born with resilient characteristics and their resilience increases through negative social interactions and peer relations

FALSE

Resilience is not pre-existing attribute. It develops through childhood experiences.

Children’s personal characteristics, a warm family life that includes authoritative parenting and social support at school and in community are

related to resilience in the face of stress.