Chapter 8:
Early School Age
(4 – 6 Years)
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Chapter Objectives
– To describe the process of gender
identification during early school age and its
importance for the way a child interprets his or
her experiences
– To describe the process of early moral
development, drawing from research and
theories to explain how knowledge, emotion,
and action combine to produce internalized
morality
– To analyze changes in the self-theory, with
special focus on self-evaluation and selfesteem during the early school-age years
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Chapter Objectives (cont.)
– To explore the transition to more complex
group play and the process of friendship
development in the early school-age years
– To explain the psychosocial crisis of initiative
versus guilt, the central process of
identification, the prime adaptive ego function
of purpose, and the core pathology of
inhibition
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Chapter Objectives (cont.)
– To consider social expectations for school
readiness, its relation to the developmental
tasks of early school age, and the obstacles
that may prevent children from being able to
adapt and learn in the school environment
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Case Study: Gender Identification in Early
Childhood
– Thought Questions
• What aspects of the formation of gender
identification are captured in this narrative?
• What are the salient images of mother and father
that Lee may have identified with?
• What role might the rural, small-town environment
play in Lee’s experiences of gender identification in
early childhood?
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Case Study: Gender Identification in Early
Childhood (cont.)
– Thought Questions (cont.)
• How much of Lee’s preference for rough-andtumble play do you attribute to her desire to be “the
son” for her father? How much do you attribute to
her temperament and other aspects of her
personality?
• From what you have read, and drawing on your
own experiences, how might Lee’s gender
identification at this period of her life influence later
relationships with male and female peers, and her
capacity to form intimate relationships in later
adolescence or early adulthood?
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Gender Identification
– Physical, cognitive, emotional, and social
domain as they become integrated into an
early scheme from thinking of oneself as male
or female
– Gender identification provides the basis for
early moral development
– This developmental task centers around the
acquisition of a personal self-theory that
becomes increasingly complex because it is
being stimulated by expanding social
influences
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Gender Identification (cont.)
– Through peer play the process of learning the
rules and playing cooperatively with others,
children begin to form meaningful friendships
and mental representations of ways of
participating in groups
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Gender Identification: Individual Differences
versus Constructivism
– Individual Differences perspective of gender
identification suggests that gender differences
reside within the individual, as persistent,
internal attributes
– The constructivist perspective suggests that
gender differences are a product of particular
interactions that have a certain socially,
agree-upon, gender-related meaning
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Figure 8.1 Four Components of the Concept of Gender
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Gender Identification: Gender Role Standards
and Identification with Parents
– Gender role standards are cultural
expectations about appropriate behavior for
boys and girls, and for men and women
– At the cognitive underpinnings related to the
concept of gender maturity, children form
gender schemes, or personal theories about
cultural expectations and stereotypes related
to gender
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Gender Identification: Gender Role Standards
and Identification with Parents (cont.)
– Identification is the process through which
one person incorporates the values and
beliefs of another
– Parents devise their beliefs and parenting
practices out of a strong, internalized cultural
script about gender
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Gender Identification: Gender Preference
Depends on 3 Factors
– The more closely one’s own strengths and
competencies approximate the gender-role
standards, the more one will prefer being a
member of that sex
– The more one likes the same-sex parent, the
more one will prefer being a member of that
sex
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Gender Identification: Gender Preference
Depends on 3 Factors (cont.)
– To the extent to which cultural determined
values are communicated to children, males
are likely to establish a firmer preference for
their sex group, and females are likely to
experience some ambivalence toward, if not
rejection of, their sex group
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Early Moral Development
– Early moral development involves a process
called internalization, which means taking
parental standards and values on as one’s
own
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Early Moral Development (cont.)
– From the Behavioral Learning Theory
perspective, moral behavior and the process
of internalization are viewed as a response to
environmental reinforcements and
punishments
• Moral behaviors, like other operant responses, can
be shaped by the consequences that follow them
• A positive, prosocial behavior is likely to be
repeated if rewarded
• Avoidance conditioning is viewed as a paradigm
for understanding how internalization is sustained
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Early Moral Development (cont.)
– Social Learning Theory offers another source
of moral learning: the observation of models
– Cognitive Learning Theory describes how
moral behavior is influenced by situational
factors and the child’s expectations, values,
and goals
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Early Moral Development: CognitiveDevelopmental Theory
– Heteronomous morality is a child's moral
perspective, in which rules are viewed as
fixed and unchangeable
– Autonomous morality is a more mature moral
perspective in which rules are viewed as a
product of cooperative agreements
– As children become increasingly skillful in
evaluating the abstract and logical
components of moral dilemma, their moral
judgments change by the mechanism of
equilibration to establish balance
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Early Moral Development: Psychoanalytic
Theory
– The Psychoanalytic Theory focuses on
morality as the ability of children to control
their impulses and resist temptations, rather
than on their cognitive understanding of what
constitutes a moral transgression
– This perspective suggests that a moral sense
develops as a result of strong parental
identification
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Early Moral Development: Psychoanalytic
Theory (cont.)
– Classical psychoanalytic theory views a
child’s conscience, or superego, as an
internalization of parental values and moral
standards
– The more severely a parent forces a child to
inhibit her or his impulses, the stronger the
child’s superego will be
– Neopsychoanalytic Theory, sometimes
referred to as object relations theory, views
the critical time for moral development as
coming earlier life, in infancy
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Early Moral Development: Psychoanalytic
Theory (cont.)
– According to Neopsychoanalytic Theory, the
origins of moral reasoning and behavior have
links to early feelings about the self and its
needs, especially the feelings of pleasure and
pain, and the way these feelings are mirrored
or accepted by the loving caregiver
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Case Study: Early Learning About Obedience
– Thought Questions
• What is the moral lesson this case?
• How does the case illustrate the themes of moral
emotion, knowledge, and action?
• How do each of the theoretical perspectives
discussed above contribute to an understanding of
this case?
• How does this case illustrate the particular
orientation of early-school-age children to moral
dilemmas?
• How generalizable is this case? Can you imagine
similar moral conflicts among non-Chinese
children?
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Empathy and Perspective Taking
– Empathy is sharing the perceived emotion of
another
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Empathy and Perspective Taking (cont.)
– Hoffman has four levels of empathy
• Global empathy: you experience and express
distress as a result of witnessing someone else in
distress
• Egocentric empathy: you recognize distress in
another person and respond to it in the same way
you would respond if the distress were your own
• Empathy for another’s feelings: you show empathy
for a wide range of feelings and anticipate the
kinds of reactions that might really comfort
someone else
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Empathy and Perspective Taking (cont.)
– Hoffman has four levels of empathy (cont.)
• Empathy for another’s life conditions: you
experience empathy when you understand the life
conditions or personal circumstances of a person
or a group
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Empathy and Perspective Taking (cont.)
– Perspective taking: cognitive capacity to
consider a situation from the point of view of
another person
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Parental Discipline
– Four elements determine the impact of these
techniques on the child’s future behavior
(cont.)
• The discipline should help the child interrupt or
inhibit the forbidden action
• The discipline should point out a more acceptable
form of behavior so that the child will know what is
right in a future instance
• The discipline should provide some reasons,
understandable to the child, why one action is
inappropriate and the other more desirable
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Parental Discipline
– Four elements determine the impact of these
techniques on the child’s future behavior
(cont.)
• The discipline should stimulate the child’s ability to
empathize with the victim of his of her misdeeds. In
other words, children are asked to put themselves
in their victim’s place and to see how much they
dislike the feelings they caused in the other person
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Self-Theory
– Both gender identification and moral
development can be thought of as
components of the child’s self-concept
– Self-concept is viewed as a theory that links
the child’s understanding of the nature of the
world, the nature of the self, and the meaning
of interactions between the two
– The function of self-theory is to make
transactions between the self and the world
turn out as positively and beneficially as
possible
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Self-Theory: The Me and The I
– Me: the self as object – one can describe the
self
– I is more subjective
• A sense of agency or initiation of behaviors
• A sense of uniqueness
• A sense of continuity from moment to moment and
from day to day
• An awareness of one’s own awareness
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Developmental Changes in the Self-Theory
– Self-theory: result of a person’s cognitive
capacities and dominant motives as he or she
comes into contact with the stage-related
expectations of the culture
– Categorical Identifications: self is understood
by a variety of identifications
– Comparative Assessments: self
understanding relies on comparisons of
oneself with social norms and standards or
with specific other people
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Theory of Mind
– Focuses on the natural way children
understand each other’s behavior
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Self-Theory: Self-Esteem
– Self-esteem or self-evaluation is based on
three sources
– Messages of love, support, and approval from
others
– Specific attributes and competencies
– The way one regards these specific aspects
of the self in comparison with others and in
relation to one’s ideal self
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Self-Theory: Self-Esteem (cont.)
– Feelings of positive self-worth provide a
protective shield
– Low self-esteem is associated with a lack of
clarity about one’s essential characteristics
– Research on self-esteem suggests that earlyschool-age children may be especially
vulnerable to fluctuations in feelings of selfworth
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Peer Play: Group Games
– Children show interest in group games that
are more structured and somewhat more
oriented to reality than play that is based
primarily on imagination. They involve more
cognitive complexity, physical skill, and ritual
and allow children to shift roles
– Friendships are based on the exchange of
concrete goods and the mutual enjoyment of
activities
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Peer Play: Group Games (cont.)
– Children who have stable friendships become
skilled in coordinating their interactions with
their friends, creating elaborate pretend
games, and being willing to modify their play
preferences so that both members in the
friendship have a chance to enjoy the kinds of
play they like best
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Peer Play: Friendship Groups
– Children tend to evaluate situations on the
basis of outcomes rather than intentions and
therefore are often harsh in assigning blame
in the case of negative outcomes
– One of the most notable characteristics of
young children’s friendship groups is that they
are likely to be segregated by sex
– Girls enjoy dyadic interactions over larger
groups, whereas boys seem to enjoy larger
groups
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Figure 8.3 Hopscotch
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• The Psychosocial Crisis: Initiative versus Guilt
– Initiative: an expression of agency; an
outgrowth of early experiences of the self as a
causal agent that continues to find expression
as children impose themselves and their
ideas and questions onto their social world
– Guilt: an emotion that accompanies that
sense that one has been responsible for an
unacceptable thought, fantasy, or action
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• The Prime Adaptive Ego Quality and the Core
Pathology
– Purpose: thought or behavior with direction,
and therefore with meaning
– Inhibition: the restraint or suppression of
behavior
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
• Applied Topic: School Readiness
– Defining Readiness
– Measuring Kindergarten Readiness
– Obstacles to School Readiness
•
•
•
•
Parents who have not graduated from high school
Low income or welfare dependence
Single-parent families
Families where a language other than English is
the primary language spoken at home
– Who is responsible for meeting the goal for
school readiness?
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Figure 8.4 Percentage Distribution of First-Time Kindergartners by
Number of Risk Factors and Type of Community: Fall, 1998