Chapter 9:
Middle Childhood
(6 – 12 Years)
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Chapter Objectives
– To clarify the role of friendship in helping
children to learn to take the point of view of
others, be sensitive to the norms and
pressures of the peer group, and experience
closeness in relationships, and to clarify the
negative consequences that result from social
rejection and loneliness
– To describe the development of concrete
operational thought, including conservation,
classification skills, combinatorial skills, and
the child’s ability to understand and monitor
his or her own knowledge and understanding
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Chapter Objectives (cont.)
– To explore skill learning, including the
presentation of a model for the process of
acquisition of complex skills such as reading
and the examination of societal factors that
provide the context within which skill learning
occurs
– To analyze the development of self-evaluation
skills, including self-efficacy, and ways that
social expectations of parents, teachers, and
peers contribute to a child’s self-evaluation
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Chapter Objectives (cont.)
– To describe a new level of complexity in play
as children become involved in team sports
and athletic competition
– To explain the psychosocial crisis of industry
versus inferiority, the central process through
which the crisis is resolved, education; the
prime adaptive ego quality of competence,
and the core pathology of inertia
– To explore the impact of exposure to violence
on development during middle childhood
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Friendship: Family Influences on Social
Competence
– Early family experiences contribute to a child’s
sociability and social competence, the
process of becoming ready for friendship may
begin in infancy
– Children who have secure attachments are
more popular and engage more freely in
social interactions
– A parent’s discipline techniques, the way she
speaks to the child, and her parenting values
are all linked to a child’s social competence
and popularity
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Friendship: Three Contributions of Friendship to
Social Development
– Perspective Taking and Cognitive Flexibility –
• As children interact with peers who see the world
differently than they do, they begin to understand
the limits of their own points of view
• Peers diminish one another’s self-centered or
egocentric outlook
– Social Norms and Peer-group Pressure
• The peer groups evolve norms for acceptance and
rejection
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Friendship: Three Contributions of Friendship to
Social Development (cont.)
– Close Friends
• Close friends occur at a more intimate level of
disclosure, trust, and supportiveness. “Best
Friends” occur during these years
• The stability of close friendships is quite variable
• Close friendships are influenced by attractiveness,
intelligence, classroom social status, and
satisfaction with and commitment to the best friend
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Friendship: Loneliness
– With the increased emphasis on friendship
and peer acceptance comes the risk of peer
rejection and feelings of loneliness
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Friendship: Loneliness (cont.)
– Four social characteristics combine to
increase a child’s experiences of
loneliness
• Peer rejection
• Children who have trouble forming close
friendships that provide emotional closeness and
companionship
• Among the children who are unpopular or rejected
by peers, those who are withdrawn, victimized, or
bullied report higher levels of loneliness than other
unpopular children
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Friendship: Loneliness (cont.)
– Four social characteristics combine to
increase a child’s experiences of
loneliness (cont.)
• Children who tend to blame themselves for their
lack of social acceptance feel more lonely and are
possibly less likely to believe that they can do
anything to improve their situation
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Friendship: Peer Rejection
– Aggressive-rejected children, often referred to
as gullies, are more likely than nonaggressive
children to attribute hostile intentions to others
– Withdrawn children tend to be inhibited,
anxious and interpersonally reserved with a
negative self-concept and these children tend
to interpret negative peer reactions as
resulting from their own personal failings
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Friendship: Peer Rejection (cont.)
– Aggressive-withdrawn children tend to be the
least well-liked of all three types of rejected
children. They exhibit anxiety, poor selfcontrol, and social withdrawal in addition to
aggressive behavior
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Concrete Operations
– Piaget suggested that at about age 6 or 7 a
qualitatively new form of thinking develops
– The word operation refers to an action that is
performed on an object or a set of objects
– Piaget argued that such transformations are
built on some physical relationship that the
younger child can perform but cannot
articulate
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
Figure 9.1 Three Concepts that Contribute to Conservation
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Concrete Operations
– Metacognition: a range of processes and
strategies used to assess and monitor
knowledge
– Metacognition includes the ability to review
various strategies for approaching a problem
in order to choose the one that is most likely
to result in a solution
– Metacognition develops in parallel with other
cognitive capacities
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Skill Learning: Features of Skilled Learning
– The development of skill depends on a
combination of sensory, motor, perceptual,
cognitive, linguistic, emotional, and social
processes
– Skills are attained through the simultaneous
integration of many levels of the component
behaviors
– Limits of the human system place constraints
on an individual’s capacity to perform skilled
behavior
– Skilled behavior requires the use of strategies
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Skill Learning: Reading
– Reading provides access to new information,
new uses of language, and new forms of
thinking
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Skill Learning: Reading (cont.)
– Parents influence their child’s reading ability
• The value they place on literacy
• The emphasis they place on academic
achievement
• The reading materials they make available at
home
• The time they spend reading with their children
• The way they read with their children
• The opportunities they provide for verbal
interaction in the home
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Skill Learning: The Social and Cultural Context
of Skill Development
– Progress in skill development is influenced by
parental and school expectations regarding
levels of performance in a specific culture
– Societies differ in their level of literacy
– The purpose of literacy varies from one
culture to the next
– The mark of a literate person varies by
context
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Self-Evaluation
– Children strive to match their achievements to
internalized goals and external standards
– The process of self-evaluation is further
complicated because the peer group joins the
adult world as a source of social comparison,
criticism, and approval
– Self-Evaluation takes place in two contexts
• Internal frame of reference
• External frame of reference
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
Figure 9.2 Four Components of Self-Efficacy
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Case Study: Becca
– Thought Questions
• How would you describe Becca’s level of academic
self-efficacy?
• How are the four factors of enactive attainments,
vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and
physical states contributing to her self-efficacy?
• What would you say is missing from Bandura’s
theory of self-efficacy that is illustrated in the case
of Becca?
• What are some gender issues that may underlie
this case? In what ways is Becca’s situation made
possible because of gender stereotypes?
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Case Study: Becca (cont.)
– Thought Questions (cont.)
• How might teachers intervene to reverse this
decline?
• What might be the likely outcome for Becca if this
pattern of disengagement continues?
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Self-Evaluation: Social Expectations
– Appraisals and expectations of others
become incorporated into one’s own selfevaluation
– Teacher’s Expectations: Self-fulfilling
prophecy refers to the idea that false or
inaccurate beliefs can produce a personal
reality that corresponds with them
– Parent’s Expectations: Parent’s expectations
about children’s capabilities also influence
children’s perceptions of their abilities
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Self-Evaluation: Social Expectations (cont.)
– Illusions of Incompetence: some children who
perform well on tests on academic
achievement (90th percentile or above)
perceive themselves as below average in
academic ability
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Team Play
– Team play is a new dimension of childhood
friendship during the middle childhood years
– Interdependence is a condition in which
systems depend on each other, or all the
elements in a system rely on one another for
their continued growth
– Division of labor is the splitting of activities
needed to accomplish a task between
participants
– Competition is a context between rivals
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• The Psychosocial Crisis: Industry versus
Inferiority
– Industry: an eagerness to acquire skills and
perform meaningful work
• Cognitive Component
• Behavioral Component
• Affective Component
– Inferiority: feelings of worthlessness and
inadequacy come from two sources: the self
and the social environment
• Organ inferiority
• Learned helplessness
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• The Central Process: Education
– Every culture must devise ways of passing on
the wisdom and skills of past generations to
its young
– Education is different from schooling
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• The Prime Adaptive Ego Quality and the Core
Pathology
– Competence: the exercise of skill and
intelligence in the completion of tasks; the
sense that one is capable of exercising
mastery over one’s environment
•
•
•
•
•
An outcome measure
Personality type
Motivational system
Composite of knowledge, skills, and abilities
Belief in one’s effectiveness
– Inertia: a paralysis of thought and action that
prevents productive work
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
Figure 9.4 Students’ Use of Computers at School
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Applied Topic: Violence in the Lives of Children:
Consequences of Exposure to Violence
– Large numbers of children and youth are
victims of violent crimes, with homicide the
third leading cause of death for children ages
5 to 14 and the second leading cause of
death for adolescents and young adults ages
15 to 24 in the United States
– The number of children who are themselves
aggressive and violent
– The disruption it produces in children’s
cognitive functioning and mental health
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Applied Topic: Violence in the Lives of Children:
Prevention Strategies
– Prevent prenatal and perinatal conditions that
cause neurological damage and increase the
biological vulnerability for violent behaviors
– Develop effective techniques for educating
parents and teachers about socialization
practices that help develop self-control,
empathy, and perspective-taking
– Develop effective techniques for teaching
children alternative, non-aggress strategies to
handle and respond to insults, threats, and
frustration
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Applied Topic: Violence in the Lives of Children:
Prevention Strategies (cont.)
– Devise educational experiences that help
children reframe cognitions and beliefs that
lead them to interpret the behaviors of others
as threatening
– Reduce exposure to violence at home, in the
neighborhood, and on television
– Decrease children’s access to guns
Middle Childhood (6 – 12 Years)
• Applied Topic: Violence in the Lives of Children:
Prevention Strategies (cont.)
– Increase the sense of social control and
cohesion in neighborhoods so that mutual
trust is higher, people help one another more,
and people are more willing too take steps to
intervene when children are acting
destructively