Kathleen Stassen Berger
Part III Chapter Ten
The Play Years: Psychosocial Development
Emotional Development
Parents
Becoming Boys and Girls
Prepared by Madeleine Lacefield
Tattoon, M.A.
1
The Play Years: Psychosocial Development
• 2 to 6-year-old transformation
• maturation and motivation are crucial;
so are emotion and experiences.
• psychosocial development is
multifaceted, involving genes, gender,
parents, peers, and culture
2
Emotional Development
• Learning when and how to express
emotions is the preeminent psychosocial
accomplishment between the ages of 2
and 6 years
• emotional regulation
– the ability to control when and how emotions
are expressed
– This is the most important psychosocial
development to occur between the ages
of 2 and 6 though it contains throughout life
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Emotional Development
• Initiative Versus Guilt
– Erickson’s third psychosocial crisis
• children begin new activities and feel guilty
when they fail
– self-esteem
• how a person evaluates his or her own worth,
either in specific (e.g., intelligence,
attractiveness) or overall
– self-concept
• a person’s understanding of who he or she is
– Self-concept includes appearance, personality, and various
traits
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Emotional Development
• Pride
– “Erickson recognized that typical 3 – 5-yearolds have immodest and quite positive selfconcepts, holding themselves in high selfesteem.”
– longer attention span—they have a purpose
for what they do
– self-esteem and concentration are connected
with maturation (but are not the cause)
– feeling proud of oneself is the foundation for
practice and then mastery
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Emotional Development
• Guilt and Shame
– guilt
• people blame themselves because they
have done something wrong
– shame
• people feel that others are blaming them
– guilt and shame often occur together,
but don’t necessarily go hand in hand
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Emotional Development
• Intrinsic Motivation
– goals or drives that come from inside a
person, such as the need to feel smart
or competent—this contracts with
external motivation, the need for
rewards from outside, such as material
possessions or someone else’s esteem
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Emotional Development
• Psychopathology
– illness or disorder (-pathology) that
involves the mind (psycho-)
– the first signs in children usually involve
emotions that seem to overwhelm the
child
– emotional regulation begins with
impulse control
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Emotional Development
• Emotional Balance
– without adequate control, emotions overpower
children
– externalizing problems
• difficulty with emotional regulation that involves
outwardly expressing emotions in uncontrolled
ways, such as by lashing out in impulsive anger
or attacking other people or things
– internalizing problems
• difficulty with emotional regulation that involves
turning one’s emotional distress inward, as by
feeling excessively guilty, ashamed, or
worthless
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Emotional Development
• Differences in Early Care
– neurological damage can occur during early
development
• prenatally
– If a pregnant woman is stresses, ill, or a heavy drug
user
• in infancy
– if an infant is chronically malnourished, injured, or
frightened
• extensive stress can kill some neurons and stop
others from developing properly
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Emotional Development
• Differences in Early Care
– early care can prevent or worsen innate
problems with emotional control
– the harm of poor caregiving is evident in
maltreated 4 – 6-year-olds.
– if neglect or abuse occurs in the first few
years it is more likely to cause
internalizing or externalizing problems
than mistreatment that begins when the
child is older
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Emotional Development
• Empathy and Antipathy
– empathy
• the ability to understand the emotions of
another person, especially when those
emotions differ from one’s own
– antipathy
• feelings of anger, distrust, dislike, or
even hatred toward another person
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Emotional Development
• Leading to Behavior
– prosocial behavior
• feelings and acting in ways that are
helpful and kind, without obvious benefit
to one self
– antisocial behavior
• feelings and acting in ways that are
deliberately hurtful or destructive to
another person
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Emotional Development
• Aggression
“The gradual regulation of emotions and
emergence of antipathy is nowhere
more apparent than in the most
antisocial behavior of all, active
aggression, which occurs when a child’s
dislike erupts into action."
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Emotional Development
• Aggression
– instrumental aggression
• hurtful behavior that is intended to get or keep
something that another person has
– reactive aggression
• an impulsive retaliaton for another person’s
intentional or accidental actions, verbal or physical
– bullying aggression
• unprovoked, repeated physical or verbal attack,
especially on victims who are unlikely to defend
themselves
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Emotional Development
• Aggression
– bullying
• is not always physical; it can be verbal or
relational when the goal is to disrupt a
child’s friendship
• physical aggression declines over the
preschool and school-age years, but
verbal attacks may increase (so might
relational aggression)
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Parents
the primary influence on the young child’s
emotions--including brain maturation
and culture
– parents differ a great deal in what they
believe about children and how they act
with them
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Parents
• Parenting Style
– Diana Baumrind (1967, 1972) studied 100
preschooler, in California (middle class,
European Americans—the cohort and
cultural limitations of this sample were not
obvious at the time.)
• parents differed on four important dimensions
– expressions of warmth
– strategies for discipline
– communication
– expectations for maturity
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Parents
• Baumrind’s Three Patterns of Parenting
• authoritarian parenting
– child rearing with high behavioral standards,
punishment of misconduct, and low
communication
• permissive parenting
– child rearing with high nurturance and
communication but rare punishment,
guidance, or control
• authoritative parenting
– child rearing in which the parents set limits
but listen to the child and are flexible
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Parents
• Cultural Variations
• effective Chinese, Caribbean, and African
American parents are often stricter than
effective parents of northern or western
European backgrounds
• Japanese mothers tend to use reasoning,
empathy and expressions of disappointment to
control their children more than North American
mothers do
– it is important to acknowledge that multicultural
and international research has found that
specific discipline methods and family rules are
less important then parental warmth, support
and concern
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Parents
• Discipline and Punishment
– discipline varies a great deal from family
to family, culture to culture
– ideal parents anticipate misbehavior and
guide their children towards patterns
that will help them lifelong
– disciplinary techniques do not work
quickly or automatically to teach desired
behavior
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Parents
• Discipline and Punishment
– first step is clarity
• what is expected
– each family needs to decide its goals and
make them explicit for the child
– second step is to remember
• what the child is able to do
– parents forget how immature children’s
control over their bodies and minds is
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Parents
• Discipline and Punishment
– time-out
• an adult requires the child to sit quietly apart
from other people for a few minutes—for young
children, one minute per year of age
– withdrawal of love
• when the parent expresses disappointment or
looks sternly a the child, as if the child were no
longer loveable
– induction
• the parents talk with the child, getting the child
to understand why the behavior was wrong
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Parents
• The Challenge of Media
– many parent allow television watching
and/or computers because they keep
children engaged
– parents often ignore the possible impact
on the emotionally immure child who is
dazzled by fast-moving images
– experts advise parents to minimize
media exposure
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Parenting
• The Importance
of Content
– most young
children spend
more than three
hours a day using
some sort of
media
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Parenting
• The Importance of Content
– almost every home has at least two televisions
– “What do children see?”
– attempts to limit or restrict children’s watching
have limited success
– evidence from every perspective confirm that
violence is pervasive, children who watch
violence on television become more violent
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Parenting
• The Effects on Family Life
– the worst effect of the media is how it
interferes with family life
– the more media a family uses, the less
time they spend together
– media reduces the amount of time
children spend in imaginative and social
play, thus on learning
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Becoming Boys and Girls
• sex differences
– biological differences between males
and females, in organs, hormones, and
body type
• gender differences
– differences in the roles and behavior of
males and females that originate in the
culture
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Becoming Boys and Girls
• Theories of Gender Differences
– experts and parents disagree about what
proportion of observed gender differences is
biological and what proportion is
environmental
– neuroscientists tend to look for male-female
brain differences, and they find many
– sociologist tend to look for male-female,
family, and culture patterns, and they also find
many
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Becoming Boys and Girls
• Psychoanalytic Theory
– phallic stage
• Freud’s third stage of development,
when the penis becomes the focus of
concern and pleasure
– oedipus complex
• the unconscious desire of young boys is
to replace their father and win their
mother’s exclusive love
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Becoming Boys and Girls
• Psychoanalytic Theory
– superego
• in psychoanalytic theory, the judgmental part of
the personality that internalizes the moral
standards of the parents
– electra complex
• the unconscious desire of girls to replace their
mother and win their father’s exclusive love
– identification
– an attempt to defend one’s self-concept by taking on
the behaviors and attitudes of someone else
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Becoming Boys and Girls
• Behaviorism
– belief that virtually all
roles are learned and
therefore result from
nurture, not nature
– gender distinctions are
the product of ongoing
reinforcement and
punishment
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Becoming Boys and Girls
• Cognitive Theory
– focuses on children’s understanding:
• of the way a child intellectually grasps a specific
issue or value
– children develop concepts about their
experience
• developing a gender schema, a type of
cognitive schema or general belief—the
understanding of sex differences
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Becoming Boys and Girls
• Sociocultural Theory
– proponents point our that many
traditional cultures enforce gender
distinctions with dramatic stores, taboos,
and terminology
– adult activities and dress are strictly
separate by gender, girls and boys
attend sex-separated schools and
virtually never play together
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Becoming Boys and Girls
• Sociocultural Theory
– every culture has powerful values and
attitudes regarding preferred behavior
for men and women and every culture
teaches these values to its young, even
thorough the particular task assigned
may vary
– androgyny
• a balance, within a person,
of traditionally male and
female psychological
characteristics
35
Becoming Boys and Girls
• Epigenetic Theory
– that our traits and behaviors are the result of
interactions between genes and early
experiences… not just for individual but for the
human race as a whole
– gender differences based in genetics are
supported by recent research in neurobiology
– there are dozen of biological differences
between the male and female brain
36
Becoming Boys and Girls
• Gender and Destiny
– lead in two opposite directions…
• gender differences are rooted in biology
• biology is not destiny--children are
shaped by their experiences
– given nature and nurture, both these
conclusions are valid
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Becoming Boys and Girls
• Gender and Destiny
– “Since human behavior is plastic, what gender
patterns should children learn?”
– answers vary among developmentalist,
mothers, fathers, and cultures
– if children respond to their own inclinations,
some might choose behavior, express
emotions, and develop talents that are taboo,
even punished in certain cultures
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