Middle Childhood: Physical Development & Motor Skills

• Middle childhood spans ages 6-12.

Physical Development

• This stage is the least dramatic and slowest in terms of physical changes.
• Growth spurts occur approximately two years before puberty.
• Girls tend to hit puberty before boys.
• Significant variations in growth make averages fairly meaningless during this period.
• Adults may have behavioral expectations based on a child's physical stature, which can be problematic if the child's emotional maturity is not aligned.
• Bone and muscle development is critical during middle childhood.
• Physical fitness improves, and high energy levels lead to increased movement, raising the risk of injury.
• The dentition stage is highly variable.
• Children lose 16 primary (deciduous) teeth.
• 28 permanent teeth begin to emerge.

Motor Skills

• Bilateral coordination continues to improve.
• Strength (force) develops, with boys typically developing it first.
• Speed (rate of movement after already moving) is equal in development for both sexes.
• Balance (maintaining equilibrium) emerges as girls develop it first.
• Flexibility, precision (controlling the body with accuracy), rhythm (pattern of movement), impulsion (transitioning from sedentary to moving), and coordination (integrating everything) are refined.

Sports

• Structured activities with rules of engagement.
• Sports can be beneficial, fostering motivation, teamwork, commitment, and pride.
• Sports can be harmful, leading to pressure, stress, burnout, and injury.
• The 5 Cs of sports are Competence (having basic skills and abilities), Confidence (having faith in one's ability), Connection (having a sense of belonging), Character (sense of integrity and honesty), and Caring (empathy).

Health and Nutrition

• Eating habits and appetites generally improve.
• Media targeting children may lead to pressure to buy junk food.
• Parents are busy and opt for easy processed foods.
• Kids are busy and prefer processed foods and also start associating with those who expose them to alternative foods.

Health Concerns

• Children's perspective on health involves understanding contamination (illness caused by external things) and internalization (illness caused by things inside one's body).
• School-aged children have better health than preschoolers.
• They can contribute to their own safety, verbalize symptoms, seek treatment, or stay home.
• Accidents are the number one cause of death for this age group.
• Mental health issues affect children, with anxiety at 9.4%, depression at 4.4%, ADHD at 9.8%, and behavioral issues at 8.9% for ages 3-17.

Cognitive Development

• Cognitive and social changes speed up during middle childhood.
• Children enter the concrete operational stage of Piaget's cognitive development theory.
• They process information more effectively and have more sophisticated thought processes.
• In the 5-7 shift (ages 5-7), children might use intuition to guess answers without fully understanding the reasoning.
• By ages 7-8, children are more concrete in their thinking.
• They understand the environment is limited to present and immediate physical realities.

Characteristics

• Characteristics of this are classification( less egocentric and can consider more) , class inclusion (differentiate things and look at things for their whole and their parts, reversibility (the ability to see things forwards and backwards, Conservation (Properties of something remain unchanged even if it looks different, Very inconsistent from kid to kid in development, Seriation (Putting things in a series) and Time (Understanding of different time frames).

Concrete Operations Cognitive Style

• Less bound by egocentrism allows for elementary logic to infer reality.
• Cognitive conceit involves all-or-nothing thinking.

Information Processing

• Children experience many new learning opportunities, and much of it is necessary to function effectively in the social world.
• The mind is more complex than a computer.
• Executive functioning is becoming more complex, focusing on attention, memory, and problem solving.

Attention

• Children develop a new understanding of attention as a concept.
• Attention becomes selective, requiring concentration and blocking out distractions.
• Attention becomes differential, prioritizing stimuli to determine the most relevant or time-sensitive information.

Memory

• Sensory memory receives information from the external world.
• Working memory provides a temporary hold for manipulating information.
• Long-term memory allows for indefinite storage aided by strategies like repetition, chunking, rehearsal, and mnemonics.
• Children develop scripts, a series of steps learned by doing, eliminating the need to consciously remember these steps.
• Problem Solving and Metacognition and Metamemory skills continue to develop.

Problem Solving

• Cognitive processes can be enhanced through new learning skills

Metacognition and Metamemory

• This may reflect heightened awareness of one's own processes.
• It involves increased awareness of what is known and what is not known and a willingness to seek out information.
• The perimeter of ignorance is the awareness that you do not know everything but not fully realizing what you don't know.

Intelligence

• Intelligence is the ability to solve novel problems and adapt to and learn from experience.
• Gardner (1998) suggested multiple intelligences, including linguistic, logical, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, bodily kinesthetic, naturalistic, and musical abilities.

Mathematics

• Mathematics is codified, written systematically, arranged, and guided by rules.
• Requires formal instruction, so basics are drilled and memorized, and complexities build through algorithms.

Language Arts

• Significant development occurs during middle childhood.
• Reading involves the integration of perceptual comprehension, attention, and memory.
• Early reading is essential.
• Writing moves beyond communication, incorporating persuasive arguments, thesis statements, intros and summaries, coherence, and organization.
• Metalinguistics is the ability to use language to analyze, study, and understand language, including figurative language, idioms, and rules with exceptions.

Social-Emotional Development

• School is a significant cultural experience, teaching punctuality, cooperation, responsibility, peer relations, and working with authority figures.
• Children begin to understand the cognitive appraisal of experience.
• Recognition can be used to regulate conflicting emotions.
• Emotions are multidimensional. Children understand that emotions and communication about emotions is distinct.
• A baby's temperament often persists through adulthood.
• Secure attachment in infancy supports greater dimensions of social skills, ego resiliency, self-esteem, self-confidence, emotional health, social competence, friendship development, and independence.

Self

• Developing social cognition involves awareness and knowledge of human interaction.
• This helps to make sense of peer behavior and understand basic human nature.
• It promotes self-awareness and self-esteem, leading to an increased capacity to think about self-as-person in positive and negative terms- strengths and weaknesses.
• Children begin to categorize others as all good or all bad based on specific traits.
• They learn that facial expressions are not always reliable indicators of internal states.

Social-Emotional Development (Play)

• Play development sees and increased ability to tolerate and follow rules, take turns, share, and handle loss
• Games with roles help increase perspective taking and helps to dislodge egocentrism

Social-Emotional Development (Family)

• Styles of parenting changes as necessitated by child's changing needs as the child shift to "co-regulation”.
• Parents transition to the role of general supervisors, trusting the child's self regulation.
• Non-family members become more important and influential, necessitating parents to "let go.”
• Parents value social cooperation (competence), openness to experience, and the ability to advocate for themselves.
• Divorce impacts at least 50% of children children causing issues with the parents( treat to each other and talk about each other to the kids), everyone is grieving initially, mourning loss of family and what the future was to be
• Best outcome is involved and nurturing parents with minimal conflict
• Siblings show increased Social understanding and conflict resolution provide context for appropriate interaction with others

Social-Emotional Development (Peers)

• Prosocial acts with peers offer opportunity for perspective-taking, helps with compensation for negative relationships
• Peer Groups are spontaneously or artificially formed groups of children of approximate same age and abilitiesFunction like other social systems, Code of appropriate behavior and associated rules and Consequences for infractions of rules or violations of codes
• Social politics what is okay
• Social hierarchy-Organized based on popularity rankings Determines • Playmates • How play occurs • Circumstances of play Self-concept is often based on how peers treat child, categories such as Average Popular and Neglected,
• Friendships- • Stage 0- momentary playmates Random kid at the playground • Stage 1- one-way assistance One kid helping the other kid (friendship could persist) • Stage 2- fair-weather coordination

Social-Emotional Development (Industry)

• Get along and have fun when they both want to do the stage 3 intimate and mutually shared relationship is constant and ongoing
• Industry vs inferiority • Erikson's crisis for this stage of development
• Industry- the need to master basic skills
• Inferiority- Pervasive attitude of worthlessness based on negative self-assessment