Chapter 8: Early School Age (4 – 6 Years). Early School Age (4 – 6 Years) Chapter Objectives –To describe the process of gender identification during

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 self-esteem during the early school-age 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


• 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


• 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?


• Case Study: Gender Identification in Early Childhood (cont.)– Thought Questions (cont.)

• How much of Lee’s preference for rough-and-tumble 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?


• 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


• 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


• 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


Figure 8.1 Four Components of the Concept of Gender


• 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


• 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


• 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


• 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 Moral Development– Early moral development involves a process

called internalization, which means taking parental standards and values on as one’s own


• 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 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 Moral Development: Cognitive-Developmental 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 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 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 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


• 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?


• Empathy and Perspective Taking– Empathy is sharing the perceived emotion of

another


• 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


• 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


• Empathy and Perspective Taking (cont.)– Perspective taking: cognitive capacity to

consider a situation from the point of view of another person


• 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


• 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




• 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


• 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


• 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


• Theory of Mind– Focuses on the natural way children

understand each other’s behavior


• 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


• 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 early-

school-age children may be especially vulnerable to fluctuations in feelings of self-worth


• 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


• 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


• 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


Figure 8.3 Hopscotch


• 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



• 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


• 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?



Figure 8.4 Percentage Distribution of First-Time Kindergartners by Number of Risk Factors and Type of Community: Fall, 1998

Documents

Chapter 8: Early School Age (4 – 6 Years). Early School Age (4 – 6 Years) Chapter Objectives –To describe the process of gender identification during