The Play Years: Psychosocial Development

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Part III
Chapter Ten

• The Play Years Psychosocial Development

Emotional Development Parents Becoming Boys and
Girls
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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

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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
• Ericksons 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 persons 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-year-olds
  have immodest and quite positive self-concepts,
  holding themselves in high self-esteem.
• longer attention spanthey 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 dont
  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 competentthis
  contracts with external motivation, the need for
  rewards from outside, such as material
  possessions or someone elses 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 ones 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 ones 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 childs 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 persons
  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 childs
  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 childs
  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 Americansthe 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

• Baumrinds 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 childrens 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 minutesfor 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 childrens 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
• Freuds 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 mothers
  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 fathers exclusive love
• identification
• an attempt to defend ones 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 childrens 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 beliefthe 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

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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

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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