Middle Childhood

(Age 6-11)

Middle Childhood

Ages 6-11

Children are becoming more independent and taking on new responsibilities (e.g. school)
Physical growth slows to 2-3 inches per year until adolescence
Lower potion of body grows faster-- Growing pains in legs as muscles adapt to skeleton
Losing baby teeth

Cognition

Emerging health issues may impact (esp if not diagnosed)
- Vision- Myopia
- Hearing- Middle ear infection (can lead to hearing loss)
- Malnutrition- Cognitive/physical deficits
How to teach literacy?
- Language-specific issues ( Spanish v. English v. Traditional Chinese)
- whole-language approach- Whole texts (stories) to understand cultural meaning of literacy
- phonics approach- sound/letter correspondance to build decoding skills

Piaget: Concrete Operational

Thought is more logical, flexible and organized
Child passes conservation tasks
Reversibility- can mentally reverse directions
Improved categorization skills and passes inclusion tasks (hierarchical)
Spatial reasoning- cognitive maps, influenced by culture
- What is north?
Operational thought is promoted through hands-on learning.
Differences across cultures depending on child tasks (eg Mayan basket weaving)

Personality Development

Psychosexual Development - Freud
- Latency Period, where sexual urged are "dormant"
- Expressed through social and intellectual pursuits
Psychosocial Development - Erikson
- Industry v. Inferiority
  - Industry: Interested in how things work. Interested in social, physical and academic pursuits
  - Inferiority: Feeling inadequate and low in confidence. Sense of negative comparison with peers.
Development of self understanding and comparative self
- Recognize social aspects of self (e.g. shy, good at sports)
- Individualist cultures- children describe more traits
- Collectivist cultures- describe roles and relations (eg a good daughter)

""Intelligence""

Binet and Simon
- Work with France government to identify children who would not need support in school
- Developed tests of reasoning skills, and found a correlation among questions
- Spearman theorized a common "General Intelligence" (g) among these skills ( "specific intelligence" (s))
Who's smarter, Mozart or Ghandi? Rosalind Franklin or James Baldwin?
Multiple intelligence?
Lower-IQ sometimes useful correlations
higher-IQ weaker relationships, even with wealth/income

Dwek's Theory of self-attributions and Achievment Motivations

Children make attributions about their abilities (esp intelligence)

Entity Theory

Entity/helpless orientation

Incremental Theory

Incremental/mastery orientation

*Issues with replicability *Shifting blame? *Just another thing to test?

Sociometric Status

Questionnaire (Coie & Dodge,1988) about how well children liked/disliked their peers

5 peer statuses
- Popular - Many positive nominations
- Rejected - Many negative nominations
- Neglected - Few of either
- Average - Average amount of either
- Controversal - Many of both
Popularity predicted by social skills*
traditional classroom increases these inequalities*

*Berndt, T. J. (1983). Correlates and causes of sociometric status in childhood: A commentary on six current studies of popular, rejected, and neglected children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly (1982-), 439-448.

Bullying

Bullied children reported more loneliness and difficulty in making friends
Anxious and socially withdrawn children may be victimized because they are unlikely to retaliate
Children who are bullied (1 in 5) are more likely to suffer from:
- Depression; Low self-esteem; Health problems; Poor grades; Suicidal thoughts (and commit suicide)

Origin of Discrimination

If adults highlight race & children experience less diversity-- white children express more prejudice
Intergroup contact is effective at reducing prejudice
- Best when equal status and common goals
Cooperative learning v. traditional classroom?
Viewing personality as changeable leads to more liking of outgroups and the disadvantaged
Impacts include stereotype threat

Moral Development

Psychoanalytic
- Freud- Id ("pleasure principle") versus Superego ( "morality principle " from culture)
Behaviorist
- Skinner- Operant conditioning
- Social learning. Children model adults who are kind, competent and/or consistent between assertion and behaviors

Moral Development

Cognitive:
- Piaget- 2 stages (Consequences --> intentions)
- Kohlberg- six global stages
- Turiel- Domain Theory
  - morality, society and individual choice (psych)
  - 4-5yrs distinguish the three

Consider:

Deontology v Teleology

Heinz Dilemma

A woman was on her deathbed. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's laboratory to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

Moral Development

Moral education- can we foster morality without imposing beleifs?
Kohlberg's politics

The most publicized criticism of Kohlberg’s theory has come from Carol Gilligan
She argues that Kohlberg’s theory reflects a gender bias
- Kohlberg’s theory is based on a male norm (and male subjects) that puts abstract principles above relationships and concern for others
- In contrast to Kohlberg’s justice perspective, Gilligan argues for a care perspective
- Yet, women tend to test higher on both morality tests

Consider:

John Rawls

"veil of ignorance"