Cognitive Development in Children

Cognitive Developments

• Between 3-6 years, children develop the ability to distinguish between their own self and others.
• Self-consciousness increases, leading to the expression of more negative emotions (anger) and defiant behavior.
• Self-evaluation becomes stronger, resulting in emotions like guilt, embarrassment, shame, and pride.
• Children develop an increasing sensitivity to moral and social norms.

Emotional Development

• Emotions arise from relationships with others and oneself, and are mediated by language and social context.
• Social and emotional orientation of newborns:
  • Preference for human faces
  • Orientation towards mother's voice
• Emotional expressions of infants:
  • Social smile (3 months)
  • Anger (4-6 months), surprise (6 months), fear (7 months)
  • Emotions requiring self-consciousness (18 months): shame, pride, envy
• Around 2 years, children can:
  • Identify and label basic emotions (happiness, fear, sadness, anger)
  • Talk about past and future emotions
  • Begin to develop skills to regulate fear, anger, and frustration

Development of Self-Concept

• Mirror theory (Mead, 1934; Gergen, 1992): Individuals see themselves in the image reflected by significant others.
• Social learning theory (Bandura, 1989): Children learn behaviors and attitudes from significant others and create a similar self-concept.
• Teachers can promote a positive self-concept and self-esteem by:
  • Treating students as worthy individuals
  • Making compliments (personal, specific, effort-based)
  • Showing affection
  • Providing opportunities for success and mastery
  • Promoting positive self-statements

Relationship with Parents

• The family is the first socialization context for children, providing:
  • Survival and nurture
  • Cognitive, emotional, and social development
  • Transmission of social and cultural values
  • Sense of belonging and independence
• Changes in Western societies over the last 50 years:
  • Single adults, postponed marriage, remarriage, and patchwork families
  • More adoptive families and families with homosexual parents

Moral Development

• Freud's theory: development of the superego during the phallic stage (3-6 years):
  • Oedipus complex: internalization of father's moral standards
  • Electra complex: internalization of mother's moral standards
• New ideas on early development of conscience (Kochanska et al., 2001):
  • Committed compliance develops in a warm, mutually responsive relationship
  • Situational compliance is learned from insensitive, aloof parents

Children's Morality

• Piaget's theory: moral development according to children's understanding of justice, lies, and stealing:
  • Moral content (what) vs. moral criteria (how)
  • Young children learn that certain behaviors are punished or rewarded
  • Egocentric speech declines towards the end of the preoperational period, becoming more social

Vygotsky's Theory

• The function of thought:
  • External talk > Egocentric talk > self-talk
  • Language as a symbolic mediation tool: changing function from communicative to regulative and self-regulative

Learning Theories

• Learning is a process that produces change, with relatively permanent results, and occurs through experience.
• Learning theories:
  • Behavioral
  • Cognitive
  • Constructivist
• Types of learning:
  • Acquisition of responses
  • Acquisition of knowledge
  • Construction of knowledge