Kathleen Stassen Berger
Part IV Chapter Thirteen
The School Years: Psychosocial Development
The Peer Group
Families and Children
The Nature of the Child
Prepared by Madeleine Lacefield
Tattoon, M.A.
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The School Years: Psychosocial Development
• In middle childhood, children break free
from the closely supervised and limited
arena of younger years. They venture forth
in the neighborhood, experiencing
friendships and other social
complexities…it is a time for interplay
between expanding freedom and guiding
forces,…they experience coping strategies
and inner strengths.
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The Peer Group
• getting along with peers is crucial
during middle childhood
• difficulties with peers can cause
serous problems, and being well-liked
is protective
• there is developmental progression in
peer relationships
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The Peer Group
• social comparison
– the tendency to assess one’s abilities,
achievements, social status, and other
attributes by measuring them against
those of other people, especially one’s
peers
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The Peer Group
• Culture of Children
• the particular habits, styles, and values
that reflect the set of rules and rituals
that characterize children as distinct from
adult society
– deviancy training
• the process whereby children are taught
by their peers to avoid restrictions
imposed by adults
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The Peer Group
• Children’s Moral Codes
– Age 7 to 11 are:
• years of eager, lively searching on the part of
children…as they try to understand things, to
figure them out, but also to weigh the rights and
wrongs…this is the time for growth of the moral
imagination, fueled constantly by the
willingness, the eagerness of children to put
themselves in the shoes of others (Cole, 1997)
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The Peer Group
• Children’s Moral Codes
– school-age children are more likely to
behave prosocially than are younger
children (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998)
– social efficacy
• people come to believe that they can
affect their circumstances; this belief then
leads to action that changes the social
context
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The Peer Group
• Stages of Moral Reasoning
– Kohlberg’s described three levels of
moral reasoning:
• preconventional moral reasoning
– rewards and punishments
• conventional moral reasoning
– social rules
• postconventional moral reasoning
– moral principles
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The Peer Group
• What Children Value
– moral specifics vary between and within
nations and within one ethnic group in
one region
– children seek respect from each other
– children’s moral precepts are not
necessarily the ones that adults endorse
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The Peer Group
• What Children Value
– Three common values among 6 to 11
year-olds are:
• protect friends
• don’t tell adults what is happening
• don’t be too different from your peers
which explains both apparent boredom
and overt defiance
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The Peer Group
• Social Acceptance
– aggressive-rejected
• rejected by peers because of
antagonistic, confrontational behavior
– withdrawn-rejected
• rejected by peers because of timid,
withdrawn, and anxious behavior
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The Peer Group
• Social Awareness
– social cognition
• the ability to understand social interactions,
including the cause and consequences of
human behavior
– effortful control
• the ability to regulate one’s emotions and
actions through effort, not simply through
natural inclination
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The Peer Group
• Friendship
– school-age children value personal
friendships
– friendship lead to psychosocial growth
– peer acceptance (popularity) and close
friendship (mutual loyalty) both affect
social interaction and emotional health
among 5th graders
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The Peer Group
• Friendship
– becomes more intense and intimate as
children grow older
– studies found that children had about
the same number of friends no matter
what their home background
– those from violent homes had fewer
closer friends and were lonelier
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The Peer Group
• Friendship
– becomes more intense and intimate as
children grow older
– older children tend to choose best friends
whose interests, values, and background are
similar to their own
– older children tend to choose
best friends whose interests,
values, and backgrounds are
similar to their own
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The Peer Group
• Bullies and Victims
– isolated attacks, occasional insults, and
unexpected social slights occur in childhood
– defining terms
• bullying
– repeated, systematic efforts to inflict harm through
physical, verbal, or social attack on a weaker person
• bully-victim
– someone who attacks others, and who is attacked as
well—also called provocative victims because they do
things that elicit bullying, such as taking a bully’s
pencil
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The Peer Group
– Can bulling be stopped?
• most children find ways to halt ongoing
victimization by:
– ignoring
– retaliating
– defusing
– avoiding
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The Peer Group
– Can bulling be stopped?
• Olweus used an ecological-systems
approach:
– sent pamphlets to parents
– showed videos to students
– trained school staff
– increased supervision during recess
– classroom discussion on how to stop bullying
– befriend lonely children
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Families and Children
genes affect temperament as well as
ability
peers are vital and schools and cultures
influence what, and how much, children
learn
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Families and Children
parental practices make a difference in
how children develop…
or do they?
some developmental researchers have
expressed doubts, suggesting that genes,
peers, and communities are so powerful
that there may be little room left
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Families and Children
• Shared and Nonshared Environment
– shared environment
• household influences that are the same for two
people, such as children reared together
– nonshared environment
• when siblings have different friends and
different teachers
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Families and Children
• Family Function and Dysfunction
– family structure
• the legal and genetic relationship (nuclear,
extended, step) among relatives in the same
home
– family function
• the way a family works to meet the needs of its
members…children need families to provide
basic material necessities, encourage learning,
develop self-respect, nurture friendships, and
foster harmony and stability
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Families and Children
• Family Function and Dysfunction
– school-age children thrive if their families
function for them in five ways:
•
•
•
•
•
provide basic necessities
encourage learning
develop self-respect
nurture peer relationships
ensure harmony and stability
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Families and Children
• Diverse Structures
– household
• defined by the U.S. Census as all the people who live
together in the same home
– structure
• nuclear family:
– a family that consists of a father, a mother, and their
biological children under the age of18
• single-parent family:
– a family that consists of only one parent and his or her
biological children under age18
• extended family:
– a family of three or more generations living in one
household
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Families and Children
• Connecting Structure and Function
– family structure and family function are
intertwined
– blended family:
• a family that consists of two
adults and the children of the
prior relationships of one or
both parents and/or the new
partnership
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Families and Children
• Family Trouble
– low income and high conflict
– financial stress and family fighting often co-occur because
they feed on each other
• Family Income
– correlates with both function and structure
– family-stress model holds that the crucial question to ask
about any risk factor is how does:
• low income
• divorce
• unemployment
increase the stress on families
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Families and Children
• Harmony and Stability
– ideally parents should form an alliance,
learning to cooperate and protect the children
• in any family the child’s well-being can decline if
family members fight, or are physically or
verbally abusive to each other
– no structure inevitably either harms children or
guarantees good family function
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The Nature of the Child
• Psychoanalytic Theory
– stresses that school-age children are eager to
learn about their expanding social universe
– latency
• Freud’s terms for middle childhood, during
which children’s emotional drives and
psychosocial needs are quiet (latent). Freud
thought that sexual conflicts from earlier stages
are only temporarily submerged, to burst forth
again at puberty
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The Nature of the Child
• Psychoanalytic Theory
– Industry versus inferiority
• the fourth of Erikson’s eight psychosexual
developmental crises, during which children
attempt to master many skills, developing a
sense of themselves as either industrious or
inferior, competent or incompetent
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The Nature of the Child
• Self-Concept
– social comparison, effortful control,
loyalty, and appreciation of peers and
parents typically capture the nature of
school-age children
– self-criticism and self-consciousness
tend to rise from ages 6 to12, as selfesteem dips for children who live with
unusual stresses
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The Nature of the Child
• Self-Concept
– if children are already stressed they
tend to have lower academic
achievement
– cultural differences make self-esteem
more complex
– many cultures expect children to be
modest
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The Nature of the Child
• Coping and Overcoming
– the school-age child’s expanding social
world and developing cognition can bring
disturbing problems
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The Nature of the Child
• Resilience and Stress
– resilience: the capacity to develop
optimally by adapting positively to
significant adversity
• resilience is dynamic, not a stable trait
• resilience is a positive adaptation to
stress
• adversity must be significant
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The Nature of the Child
• Social Support and Religious Faith
– a strong bond with a loving and firm parent
can see a child through many difficulties
– parenting practices can buffer stress and
adversity
– the social world of school-age children allows
for new possibilities for social support
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The Nature of the Child
• Social Support and Religious Faith
– a self-righting characteristic that seems evident
in all humans and naturally deals with problems
– well-equipped, well-intentioned school-age
children must connect to at least one other
person
• an example of self-righting is a child’s use of
religion—which provides social support via an
adult from the same community
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The Nature of the Child
• Social Support and Religious Faith
– faith can be psychologically protective
– parents can provide religious guidance
– many children believe that prayer is
communication, expecting prayer will make
them fell better—when they are sad or angry
– religious beliefs become increasingly useful as
school-age children cope with problems
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