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 1Ages 4-9Social-informational perspective taking Level 2Ages 7-12Self-reflective perspective taking Level 3Age 10-15Third 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 Peer acceptance  4 general categories of peer acceptance 1.Popular (prosocial, antisocial) 2.Rejected (aggressive, withdrawn) 3.Controversial 4.Neglected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.