Childhood Socioemotional Development

• Chapter 6 discusses socioemotional development in childhood.

Developing a Sense of Self and Others

• Children develop ways to enhance self-understanding.
• A child's initiative vs guilt involves usage of perceptual, motor, cognitive, and language skills. It is the child's initiative to make things happen and to be their own person.
• Industry vs inferiority occurs in mid-late childhood and shows the industry theme of this period.
• Children who are encouraged to make and build things develop a greater sense of industry.
• Self understanding involves the cognitive representation of self with physical and psychological qualities that make a child unique.
• Children start to categorize themselves as they understand their uniqueness.
• They also identify as a member of a specific social group.
• Self-descriptions differ during early childhood and middle childhood.
• One difference is describing oneself in psychological terms, rather than physical terms.
• During middle and late childhood, children describe themselves with psychological characteristics and traits rather than physical descriptions.
• The beginnings of understanding discrimination involves children identifying with social groups and comparing themselves to others.
• Discrimination treats individuals or a group badly based on race, age, or disability.
• Children may belong to at least one stigmatized group based on ethnicity, gender, orientation, "ableness", etc.
• Self-esteem is a global evaluation of the self.
• High self-esteem is linked to well-being.
• Low self-esteem has been tied to obesity, disordered eating, decreased activity, anxiety, depression, suicide, drug use, and delinquency.
• The foundations of self-esteem and self-concept emerge from the quality of parent-child interaction in infancy and early childhood.
• Teachers, social workers, and healthcare professionals are often concerned about low self-esteem in children.
• Two strategies to improve self-esteem are identifying the causes of low self-esteem and providing approval and support.
• Self-efficacy is a belief that one can master a situation and produce favorable results.
• Self-regulation is the deliberate effort to manage one's behaviour, emotions, and thoughts.
• It also increases social competence/achievement.
• From ages 3 to 7 there is a shift in self-regulation when a reactive or assisted behaviour progresses into a more cognitive and advanced behaviour.
• The increased capacity for self-regulation is associated with developmental advances in the brain's prefrontal cortex.
• Between ages 4 and 5, children start to describe themselves and others with psychological traits.
• Perspective-taking is the process of understanding the thoughts and feelings of others.
• This involves understanding joint commitments and scepticism that people do not always give accurate reports of beliefs.
• Perspective-taking is associated with frontal cortex development.
• Children learn to critically evaluate information and become sceptical of claims in middle and late childhood.
• Cultural differences in scepticism may be based on negative feedback for future performance.
• Children become increasingly sceptical of some information sources during middle childhood.
• Gender refers to the characteristics of people as males and females.
• Gender identity is the sense of being male or female. Children usually acquire this at age 3.
• Gender roles are sets of expectations that prescribe how males and females should think, act, and feel.
• Peers join the process of responding to and modelling masculine and feminine behaviours.
• Gender development has been described as "gender school", especially on the playground.
• Boys face stricter punishments and have greater pressure to conform to gender norms than girls.
• Gender influences peer relations.
• Sex differences in the brain are very similar, with some small differences in anatomy.
• Regarding cognitive development and achievement, differences have been found in some cognitive areas.
• Girls and women are slightly better in verbal skills, memory, processing speed, and grades.
• Boys and men do better at spatial and mathematical skills.
• In socioemotional development, boys are more physically and verbally aggressive than girls.
• Girls consistently show as much or more indirect aggression than boys.
• Females have better ability to decode emotion, smile more, cry more, and are happier than males.
• Men tend to show more anger.
• Androgyny is the presence of positive masculine and feminine characteristics in the same person.
• Gender experts like Sandra Bem argue that androgynous individuals are more flexible, competent, and mentally healthier than those with just masculine or feminine traits.
• It is important to consider culture when examining behaviors prescribed for males and females.

Emotional and Moral Development

• Emotional development allows children to make sense of other people's reactions and to control emotions.
• Preschoolers get better at understanding their own emotions, assessing others, and choosing adaptive emotional strategies.
• Children gain insights and control over emotions by middle and late childhood.
• Moral understanding and behaviour also improve with age.
• Young infants experience emotions such as joy and fear. Self-conscious emotions cause children to refer and be aware of themselves as distinct from others.
• During early childhood, emotions of pride and guilt become common.
• Emotion understanding requires children to be knowledgeable about emotion language and verbal and nonverbal emotion communication. Further, they need to be aware of others' emotions.
• Facial expressions are important for social communication.
• Sensitivity to happy expressions develops more quickly than to other expressions and improves with age.
• The expression of emotions varies across families, communities, and contexts.
• Culture influences emotions as parents teach children how to express and control themselves based on social rules and norms of a group.
• Harmony and emotional control is valued in China, India, and Japan with the goal of promoting interdependence.
• Emotion regulation is the ability to control the time and way emotions are expressed. It is a critical aspect of development.
• The growth of emotion regulation is fundamental to the development of social competence.
• Also, it is an important component of self-regulation and executive function.
• Emotion-coaching allows children to view negative emotions as teaching opportunities.
• Emotion-dismissing involves denying negative emotions.
• Emotional understanding and knowledge strongly determine the success of social adaptation.
• The ability to modulate one's emotions is important for children's relationships with peers.
• Childhood stress has been broadly defined to encompass social, environmental, and physical stressors.
• Social stressors involves other people (e.g. parents with harsh parenting); environmental stressors include poverty and violence; physical stressors involve health problems, poor nutrition and exposure to toxins
• As children interpret and make sense of stressful experiences, they are guided by their feelings, expectations, and attitudes.
• There are five crucial categories of evident coping:
  • Problem solving
  • Positive cognitive restructuring
  • Seeking support
  • Avoidance
  • Distraction
• Improved emotional understanding, awareness of the events for certain reactions, negative suppression, use of redirecting strategies and increased empathy are middle and and late childhood developments.
• Moral development is the development of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors about what people should do regarding rules and conventions in their interactions with others.
• Freud emphasized conscience.
• Piaget emphasized learning/understanding rules of the games.
  • Heteronomous morality is one type.
  • Autonomous morality is another.
• Kohlberg believed that peer interaction is important for challenging children to change moral reasoning.
• Also, he did not appreciate culture or gender differences.
• Turiel's theory is that as children interact, they develop their own ideas to understand events and people.
  • Includes the moral domain
  • Also the social conventional domain
  • This theory also includes personal domain.
• Behavioural & social cognitive approaches help explore behaviour via reinforcement, punishment, and imitation.
• Moral behaviours differ among situations.
• Empathy allows for discerning emotional states along with perspective taking.
• There is emphasis placed on prosocial behaviour and empathic responses as a behavioural aspect of moral development.
• The ability to recognize and foresee sadness for excluded peers is an important part of peer relationships.
• Children's sharing reflects a complex sense of what is right and just during middle and late childhood.

Families

• Parenting encompasses more positive feelings related to caregiving than other activities.
• Parents are unhappy because of negative emotions, finances, sleep, and troubled marriages.
• Parenting cognitions and developmental pathways shape children.
• Baumrind's parenting styles:
  • Authoritarian is a punitive style that exhorts the child to follow directions or respect parents
  • Authoritative parenting style encourages independence, but places limits/controls
  • Neglectful parenting is where the parent is uninvolved in the child's life
  • Indulgent parenting involves lots of interaction but demands are limited
• A big criticism of Baumrind's parenting typology is that parents will act a certain way across situations.
• Parenting style creates an emotional climate where behaviours are expressed.
• Baumrind's approach does not consider relevance to ethnicities.
• In some ethnic groups, authoritarian style aspects are associated with positive outcomes more than predicted by Baumrind.
• The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child defines corporal punishment as "any punishment in which physical force is used and intended to cause some degree of pain or discomfort" and adds that physical punishment is “invariably degrading".
• Avoid spanking for these reasons:
  • Child may copy behaviour
  • There is a risk of abuse
  • Can instill fear, rage, or avoidance
  • Tells children what not to do
• Child maltreatment includes physical & sexual abuse, child neglect, emotional harm, and exposure to family violence. It is difficult to determine the exact prevalence of it.
• There is no single cause: context, culture, and characteristics of the family, developmental characteristics of the child, parenting stress, substance abuse, socioeconomic difficulties, isolation or single parenting are included.
• Developmental consequences of abuse include: poor emotion regulation, attachment problems, internalizing and externalizing behaviours, interpersonal challenges, adapting difficulty, and delinquency
• Preventing harm by public health and more enriching parenting as well as minimizing abuse.
• Familiarity/emotional intensity, shared play, and teaching are characteristics of sibling relationships
• Siblings comfort, help, and share with each other. But they can also abuse each other. And relations change over time.
• Some family dynamics and various relationships include such things as parents’ employment, relationship status, widow status, new partner after divorce, and if parents identify as LGBTQ.
• With working parents, there tends to be more egalitarian views of gender with generally positive effects.
• Divorce is one of the most difficult advere events experienced in childhood and include externalizing, irresponsible behaviour, less connection in intimate relationships, drop out of school, become sexually active early, abuse drugs, associates with antisocial peers, have low self-esteem, and struggle to have healthy attachments
• It is important to acknowledge children are resilient.
• The harmony between parents' relationships helps can prevent children from experiencing maladjustment after parents have divorced.
• Coparenting improves adjustment, if no violence occurs.
• Custodial mothers experience economic loss more than custodial fathers after a divorce.
• Remarried parents face unique tasks of defining the marriage, renegotiating parent-child relationships, and establishing stepparent-stepchild and stepsibling relationships.
• Stepparents define privacy boundaries where sensitive information of family and marital histories should be negotiated.
• Children have improved relationships with biological parents and less well with step parents.
• Same-sex parents face own challenges concerning legal issues like adoption and fertility.
• Lesbians are deemed as noncustodial as heterosexuals win custody. Discrimination occurs as well.
• Distribution of childcare and co-parenting is equitable in any familial household.
• Similiar parental qualities are seen through shared cultural group or religion.
• Ethnic minority parents transfer tools to equip children for the impact of possible racial ethnic marginalized experiences as they positively encourage children with this method.
• Lower income families face lack of the resources/necessities higher income families can provide, e.g., nutrition, healthcare and tutoring.

Peer Relations, Play, and Media/Screen Time

• Older children spend more time with peers of similar age and maturity.
• Peers provide feedback and can be a source of information, even more so than just family.
• Good friends supports socioemotional development that can lead to reciprocity during exchanges at school.
• Parents support by basic decisions such as neighbourhoods, schools and friends to pool best possible friends.
• Interactions and managing aspects impact by opportunities a child can manage their time and life.

Peer status

• Popular children can nominate best friends and rarely disliked
• Average children can nominate average positive or negative friend
• Neglected children are not disliked or looked bad for
• Rejected children are disliked and not nominated best friend.
• Controversial children can be best friends as they can be disliked.
• Friendships are the cognitive or emotional assets through self esteem and overall well being.

Six functions of children's school friendship:

• Companionship
• Stimulation
• Physical support
• Ego support
• Social comparison
• Affection and intimacy
• Social cognition in terms of thoughts during social matter and perceptions involved steps that attend select, attribute intent, generates goal to assess scripts for decision for behvaiourism
• Play can help child master through problems, anxieties, tensions and imaginary play.
• Sensorimotor play is what allows for pleasure of schemes.
• Practice play = repetition.
• Pretense / symbolic allows the physical environment to symbolise.
• Social play impacts with peers with construction through senorimotor practice and symbolic actions.
• Activities for pleasure are games and follow proper rules.

Trends in play is what are seen among mammals

• Plays is universal to humans
• Young mammals
• Decline
• Too much school at times
• Adults teach to best or fear
• Media impacts the way with TV or Internet
• Impacts the technological advances but can be linked to positives as too much screen can effect the individual
• Viewing harmful acts can cause children concern.
• Digital literacy and media allow parents to knowledge these factors that parents show responsiblity as they care that benefit children and support characteristics like acting involvement, being engaged, having meaningfulness and interactions