Trust, Attachment, and Social Development

Beginnings: Trust and Attachment

• Erikson's theory posits that individuals face unique crises at different developmental stages.
• Infancy and preschool years encompass Erikson's first three psychosocial stages.
  • Infancy's crisis: Balancing trust and mistrust, fostering hope.
  • Ages 1-3: Balancing autonomy and shame, developing will.
  • Ages 3-5: Balancing initiative and guilt, establishing purpose.
• Evolutionary psychology suggests human behaviors are adaptations to the environment.
  • Highlights the adaptive value of children’s behavior.

The Growth of Attachment

• Attachment is an enduring socioemotional bond between infant and parent.
• Many behaviors that contribute to attachment formation are biologically programmed in both adults and infants.
• Bowlby’s four phases of attachment:
  • Preattachment
  • Attachment in the making
  • True attachment
  • Reciprocal relationships

Forms of Attachment

• The Strange Situation assesses attachment relationships through separation and reunion episodes with the mother.
• Four primary attachment types:
  • Secure attachment
  • Avoidant attachment
  • Resistant attachment
  • Disorganized attachment
• Attachment quality in infancy predicts parent-child relations across development.
  • Securely attached infants often report relying on parents for support as adults.
  • Insecurely attached infants often report anger towards parents as adults.
• Infants form attachments to both mothers and fathers, with similar quality, despite interaction differences.
• Mothers spend more time caregiving and are more skilled at parenting than fathers.
• Fathers engage in more physical play with babies, while mothers spend more time reading and talking.
• Gender differences in caregiving are diminishing.

What Determines Quality of Attachment?

• The interaction between parents and babies is the most important factor in determining the quality of attachment.
• Secure attachment arises from sensitive and consistent caregiver responses to infant needs.
• Predictable parenting fosters secure attachment, leading to an internal working model of parental availability.
• Inconsistent or angry parental responses lead infants to view relationships as frustrating.
• Attachment formation illustrates the combined influence of the biopsychosocial framework.

Attachment, Work, and Alternative Caregiving

• Concerns exist regarding childcare's impact on children’s attachment, especially mother-child attachment.
• Studies show no impact of childcare on mother-infant attachment, except when mothers are less sensitive and childcare is low-quality, increasing insecure attachment.
• Children with extended non-parental care may exhibit aggression, conflicts with teachers, and reduced self-control, often linked to low-quality care.
• High-quality daycare programs feature low child-to-caregiver ratios, trained responsive caregivers, stimulating activities, and robust communication with parents.

Emerging Emotions

• Basic emotions (joy, anger, surprise, fear, interest, distress, disgust, sadness) emerge in the first months.
• Basic emotions have three elements: subjective feeling, physiological change, and overt behavior.

Development of Basic Emotions

• Positive emotions start with social smiles at 2 months, laughter appears at 4 months.
• Anger develops between 4-6 months.
• Fear emerges at 6 months, alongside stranger wariness.
• Infants are less fearful of strangers in familiar environments.
• Stranger wariness is adaptive, emerging as children master crawling and prevents wandering.

Emergence of Complex Emotions

• Complex emotions (guilt, embarrassment, pride) emerge around 18-24 months.
• These emotions require self-evaluation and understanding of self.
• Guilt, embarrassment, and pride are expressed around 18-24 months.
• Regret and relief are expressed around 5-6 years.
• By age 9, emotional expression becomes more appropriate along with cognitive growth.
• Reasons for fear evolve from the dark and imaginary to school, health, and personal harm.

Cultural Differences in Emotional Expression

• Cultures vary in encouraging emotional expression, emotion triggers, and expression methods.

Recognizing and Using Others’ Emotions

• By 4 months, infants distinguish facial expressions associated with different emotions.
• Infants match their own emotions to others’ emotions.
• Social referencing involves infants looking to caregivers for cues.
• Older children are more skilled at recognizing subtle emotional signals

Regulating Emotions

• Emotion regulation starts at 4-6 months with simple strategies like looking away.
• Cognitive growth facilitates reappraising event meanings, common in school-aged children.
• Poor emotion regulation leads to peer interaction and adjustment problems.
  • More frequent conflicts with peers
  • Less satisfying peer relationships
  • Less adaptive adjustment to school

Interacting with Others

• At 6 months, infants notice and respond to each other, by 12-15 months, they engage in parallel play (playing alone while watching each other).
• Simple social play emerges around 15-18 months and involves similar activities and interaction.
• Cooperative play appears around age 2 and is organized around themes with assigned roles.
• Make-believe play fosters cognitive development, abstract thinking, and frightful topic exploration.
  • It promotes language, memory, reasoning, and understanding of others’ thoughts.
• Cultural values influence the development of make-believe play.
  • In India and Peru, parents do not routinely engage in pretend play, children start later.
  • European American children focus on adventure and fantasy, Korean American children focus on family roles and everyday activities.
• Imaginary companions are associated with positive social characteristics.
  • More sociable, more real friends, advanced theory of mind, better adolescent adjustment
• Solitary play is normal, but certain forms may indicate interaction unease.

Gender Differences in Play

• From age 2, children prefer playing with same-sex peers and have different play styles.
• Rough-and-tumble play is popular for boys who are more competitive and dominating.
• Girls’ play is less rough and competitive, more enabling, while boys’ interactions are often constricting.

Parental Influence on Children’s Play

• Direct parental involvement includes being playmates by scaffolding, and social directors.
• Parents can coach children by helping them to acquire skills.
  • Initiating interaction, joint decisions, and conflict resolution produce socially competent children.
• Bad coaching harms peer relations.
• Parents mediate to help children resolve conflicts.
• Indirect influence stems from attachment relationships, serving as an internal working model.
  • Secure attachment fosters confidence in environmental exploration.

Helping Others

• Prosocial behavior benefits another person.
• Altruism is driven by feelings of responsibility towards others and it is related to perspective-taking skills.
• Empathy is the experiencing of another’s feelings, related to perspective-taking.
• Children understanding others’ thoughts and feelings share and help more.
• Altruism is influenced by the situation.
  • Children are altruistic when they feel responsible, competent, in a good mood, and the cost is modest.

Contributions of Heredity

• Prosocial behavior is an evolutionary adaptation because helping others increases survival likelihood.
• Inheriting oxytocin-promoting genes may contribute to prosocial behavior.
• Genes affect prosocial behavior via temperament.
  • The inability to regulate emotions may make a child less helpful.
  • Shyness makes a child reluctant to help strangers.
• Parents socialize altruism through modeling, disciplinary practices, and providing helping opportunities.

Gender Roles and Gender Identity

• Social roles are cultural guidelines for behavior learned early in life.
• Gender stereotypes are beliefs about males and females used to make inferences.

Images of Men and Women: Facts and Fantasy

• Gender stereotypes are learned.
  • By age 4, children know gender-stereotyped activities.
  • Elementary school children learn stereotypes about personality traits.
  • Beliefs about male versus female occupations become internalized.
  • Children understand that stereotypes do not always apply..
• Studies show gender differences in:
  • Verbal skills (girls excel)
  • Spatial skills (boys excel)
  • Math (negligible, slight boy advantage)
  • Object memory (girls excel)
  • Influence (girls are more easily influenced)
  • Physical aggression (boys exhibit more)
  • Relational aggression (girls exhibit more)
  • Emotional expression (girls are better)
  • Effortful control (girls are more skilled)

Gender Typing

• Children learn gender roles by observing the world around them.
• Parents and others shape gender roles, with children learning culture-appropriate behavior. Parents respond differently to sons and daughters. Parental Differences
• Traditional parental views = traditional views in children
• Non-traditional parental views = more gender-neutral views in children
• Father treat sons and daughters differently while encouraging gender related play
• Peers encourage early playmate segregation and penalize against cross-gender play.

Gender Identity

• As children identify with one group, they develop a gender identity.
• Kohlberg’s understanding of gender develops in three steps:
  • By age 2-3, a child can label themselves as a boy or girl.
  • Gender is stable during the preschool years.
  • Between ages 4-7, a child understands that gender is consistent.
• Gender-schema theory states that children decide if something is associated with males or females, then use that information to decide to learn more about it.
• After understanding gender, they choose gender-typical activities.
• By school age, children know that gender roles are flexible.

Biological Influences

• Evolutionary developmental psychology suggests men and women evolved different traits and behaviors.
• Twin studies suggest a biological basis for gender-role learning.
• Sex hormones, like androgen, are key players in gender-role learning.
• Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) affects baby girls, enlarging the clitoris and influencing brain development.

Evolving Gender Roles

• Gender roles are changing over time.
• Studies of nontraditional families indicate that some aspects of stereotypes are easier to change.

Cognitive Development

More Sophisticated Thinking: Piaget’s Version

• Concrete operations stage (age 7-11)
  • Less egocentric.
  • Rarely confuse appearances with reality.
  • Mental operations allow reversible thinking.
  • Solve perspective-taking and grasp conservation.
  • Thinking is limited to the tangible and real.
  • Draw earthbound, concrete, practical-minded.
  • Resist conclusions contrary to facts.
• Formal operations stage (age 11-adulthood)
  • Apply operations to abstract entities.
  • Consider hypotheticals and reason abstractly.
  • Deductive reasoning emphasizes logic, not experience.

Comments on Piaget’s View

• Overestimates cognitive competence in adolescents, is vague concerning processes of change.
• It does not account for variability in children’s performance and undervalues the influences of the sociocultural environment.

Information-Processing Strategies for Learning and Remembering

• Cognitive development increases processing efficiency.
• Thought takes place in working memory and ideas are stored briefly, before being transferred to long-term memory.
• Memory strategies:
  • Organization: Grouping related information.
  • Elaboration: Embellishing information to make it more memorable.

Metacognition

• Effective strategy use includes analyzing tasks and monitoring performance.
• Metamory is an intuitive understanding of memory.
• Children develop theory of mind and naive theories of memory.
• Metacognitive knowledge increases awareness of cognitive processes.
• Cognitive self-regulation coordinates goals, strategies, and outcomes, characteristic of successful students.

Aptitudes for School

Theories of Intelligence

• Psychometricians measure characteristics of intelligence and personality.
• Some believe in a general intelligence factor, while others believe in distinct abilities.
• Hierarchical view intelligence has three levels and it balances that a general factor and distinct abilities.
• Critics argue that it ignores cognitive research and theory.

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences

• Theory draws on child development research, brain-damaged people, and exceptionally talented people.
• He has identified nine different types of intelligence, each having unique developmental history and regulation by distinct brain regions.
• Researches look beyond traditional linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences.
• Emotional intelligence is the ability to use emotions to solve problems and live happily.
  • Emotionally intelligent people have satisfying relationships and high self-esteem.
• Fostering all intelligences in schools, capitalizing on strengths can produce higher test scores, discipline, and involved parents.

Robert Sternberg’s theory of successful intelligence

• Intelligence is defined as using abilities to achieve personal goals.
• People use analytical ability, creative ability, and practical ability.
  • Analytical ability analyzes problems to find solutions.
  • Creative ability is dealing adaptively with novel situations and problems.
  • Practical ability is knowing which solution will work.
• Instruction is most effective when geared to a child’s strength.
• Pursuit of goals reveals successful intelligence and are partly defined by environment and cultural context.

Binet and the Development of Intelligence Testing

• They developed a way to determine which children needed special instruction.
• Mental age (Ma) measures performance corresponding to the chronological age of those with equal performance.
• MA distinguishes “bright” from “dull” children.

The Stanford-Binet

• Terman revised using Binet’s work.
• Introduced the intelligence quotient (IQ). Ratio of mental age to chronological age, multiplied by 100.
• Now, IQ scores are determined by comparing test performance to same-age peers.
• Terman introduced the concept of using 100 to represent average intelligence.

Do Tests Work?

• Intelligence tests are reliable, yielding consistent scores.
• IQ scores predict school grades, achievement, education, and occupational success. Self-discipline predicts grades better than IQ scores do.
• High IQ individuals are often chosen as leaders, have healthier lifestyles, and live longer.

Heredity and Environmental Factors

• Heredity influences intelligence
  • Identical twins share more similar IQs than fraternal twins do.
  • Adoptees’ IQs are more similar to the biological parents.
• Environment influences intelligence.
  • High test score children have organized homes and play materials.
  • Historical changes in IQ scores show environmental impact.
  • Intervention programs for disadvantaged children show importance of stimulating environments

The Impact of Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Status

• Ethnic groups differ in intelligence test performance. Asian Americans tend to score the highest, followed by European Americans, Latino Americans, and African Americans.
• Children from economically advantaged homes have higher scores.
• IQ test difference are reduced after comparing children from comparable socioeconomic statuses.
• Differences within ethnic groups are due to heredity, while differences between groups reflect environmental influences.

Experience with Test Contents

• Critics claim differences are caused by test bias, cultural experience.
• Culturally fair tests, measure experiences common across cultures.

Test-Taking Skills

• Collaboration strategies are not applied during an intelligence test.
• Economically disadvantaged children often answer questions with “I don’t know.” when wary of unfamiliar adults.
• Test scores improve with familiarity and ease with the examiner.
• Stereotype threat accounts for poor performance of minorities on tests.

Special Children, Special Needs

Gifted Children

• Have high IQ scores, passion about subjects.
• Have the ability to think divergently.
• Intelligence and creative experiences cultivate creativity.
• Gifted children tend to be mature, emotionally sound, and satisfied with life.

Children With Disability

• They have intellectual disability. IQ score of 70 or lower, that emerges before 18.
• Put at risk by biomedical, social, behavioral, and educational factors.
• Have limited intellectual, social, and practical skills.
• Put at risk by biomedical, social, behavioral, and educational factors.

Children with Learning Disabilities

• Have difficulty mastering academic subjects
• Have normal intelligence
• Are not suffering from conditions that could explain performance
• Have difficulties reading individual words
• Developmental dyslexia reflects inadequate for phonological awareness.
• Benefits from explicit, intensive instruction connecting letters and sound are typical.
• Disabilities in comprehension stem from vocabulary and meaning issues.
• Mathematical learning disability (dyscalculia) reflects processing and number sense issues. Need Intensive practice to develop their skills.

Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

• Three symptoms: hyperactivity, inattention, and impulsivity.
• Causes problems in academics, conduct, and peer relations.
• Causes are not TV, sugar, allergies, or poor home life.
• ADHD is a chronic condition that is not outgrown.
• Hyperactivity often fades but few complete college.
• Stimulants have calming influence by increasing brain activity.
• Other treatments focus on self-regulation, organization, and social skills.
• Race and income affect diagnosis and treatment.
• ADHD symptoms in racial bias are often attributed to biology in European American children, but to poor parenting in minority children.

Academic Skills

Reading

• Skilled reading involves word recognition and comprehension.
• Word recognition identifies patterns of letters.
• Comprehension extracts meaning from words.
• Foundations include letter recognition and phonological awareness.
• Phonological awareness relates to success in reading.

Recognizing Words

• Words are retrieved directly from long-term memory.
• Sounding out novel word stores them for direct retrieval.

Comprehension

• Simple View of Reading Model
  • Word decoding
  • Language comprehension
• Improved comprehension factors: improved language skills, better word recognition, increased working memory, more general knowledge, better strategies, and comprehension monitoring.

Writing

• Skills develop gradually, with more knowledge incorporated.
• Young writers use knowledge-telling strategy, then knowledge-transforming strategy.
• Effective revising requires knowing how to correct errors.
• Teach writing strategies, planning, drafting, and revising.

Math Skills

• Preschool children have mastered counting.
• Formal arithmetic instruction facilitates mental addition and subtraction.
• Effective techniques:
  • Students compare solutions.
  • Students explain information.

Comparing U.S. Students with Students in Other Countries

• U.S. students have lower scores than students in leading nations.
• Cultural differences hold for operations and problem solving.
• Asian students spend more time on academic tasks, and parents hold higher standards.
• Americans can learn from asian systems like mentoring training, more free time to lesson plan
• Provide curriculum, that emphasized problems solving and critical thinking.

Effective Schools, Effective Teachers

• School-Based Influences on Student Achievement:
  • Characterized as academic excellence
  • The school climate is safe and nurturing.
  • Parents are involved.
  • Progress of students, teachers, and programs are monitored.

Teacher-Based Influences on Student Achievement

• They manage the classroom effectively
• Believe they are responsible for their students’ learning and that their students will learn when taught well
• Emphasize mastery of topics
• Teach actively
• Pay careful attention to pacing
• Value tutoring
• Teach children monitor manage their own learning

Physical Development

Growth

• Growth happen steadily during elementary years.
• Children gain about 8 pounds and 2-3 inches yearly.
• Girls grow more rapidly during puberty and become much bigger than boys their age.
• School-age children need to eat more to support their growth and provide energy for their busy lives with one-fourth of the daily calories coming being from breakfast.

Development of Motor Skills

• Elementary school children’s greater size and strength contributes to improved motor skills.
• Fine motor skills also improve as children move through the elementary school years. Children gain much greater control over their fingers and hands, making them much more nimble and improving their handwriting.
• Gender differences are apparent.
  • Girls excel in fine motor skills and flexibility.
  • Boys excel in gross motor skills.

Physical Fitness

• Physical activity promotes growth and cardiovascular health.
• Fewer than half meet fitness standards on all tasks. Can be improved through:
  • Frequent physical education classes
  • Vigorous activity during physical education classes
  • Encouraging walking or biking to school/work
  • Increase activity after school (60 minutes)

Participating in Sports

• Sports participation improves motor skills, self-esteem, social skills, initiative, and cognition.
• Potential hazards: linked to delinquent and antisocial behavior.

Socialization

• Socialization is teaching children cultural values, roles, and behaviors and is influenced through family, peers and the media.

Family Relationships

• Families nurture and protect children during development.

The family as a system

• Families form a system of interacting elements, and its is embedded in social systems that can affect family dynamics.

Dimensions and styles of parenting

• Parenting includes warmth-responsiveness and control dimensions. Warm parents respond to children’s needs and are involved with them. Uninvolved parents seem more focused on their own needs, aren’t interested in their children’s daily activities, pay little attention to their children’s emotional states, and don’t try to comfort them when they’re upset. Psychological control involves emotional manipulation like withdrawing love. Behavioral control ranges from dictatorial to permissive. Best control happens with an intermediate amount of behavioral control combined with minimum of psychological control. Reason expectation help children to be better adjusted.
• Parenting Styles:
  • Authoritarian: controlling, uninvolved
  • Authoritative: controlling, responsive
  • Indulgent-permissive: loving, permissive
  • Indifferent-uninvolved: neither warm nor controlling-Authoritative is the best strategy for cognitive and social development and help a parental style that combines control, warmth, and affection.
  • Authoritative parenting = higher grades, responsible, self-reliant, and friendly students authoritarian: controlling, uninvolved
  • Authoritarian parenting = unhappy, low self-esteem, aggressive students authoritative: controlling, responsive
  • Permissive parenting = impulsive, little self-control indulgent-permissive: loving, permissive
  • Uninvolved parenting = poor school performance, aggressive indifferent-uninvolved: neither warm nor controlling

Variations associated with culture and socioeconomic status

• European Americans want happiness as self-reliant individuals that achieve balance and a moderate degree of balance.
• Asian cultures value cooperation and collaboration and dictates restraint and obedience. This leads to obedience without question.
• Latino culture values emphasis on family ties and respect.
• Parents with lower socioeconomic status are more punitive and controlling. More likely yo lead stressful lives.
• Higher socioeconomic status lends itself to being more authoritative.

Genetic Influences on Parenting

• As parents, identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins.
• Genes that make for effective parenting are more likely than the rest to be passed on.
• Family is an adaptation that evolved to provide for children until they mature.
• Behavioral genetics studies reveal environmental influences on parental style from

Parental behavior influences children’s development.

• Direct instruction is when to do something when and why.
• Modeling combined leads to imitation through young children’s observational learning.
• Feedback can be is used to direct future behavior.
• Reinforcement and punishment is affect the re occurrence of a response.
• Parents often unwittingly reinforce the very behaviors they want to discourage, a situation called the negative reinforcement trap.
• Desired behavior should lead to punishment and should be accompanied by explanations. -Warmth, affectionate relationships help to administer punishment.
• Punishment drawbacks:
  • Primarily suppressive.
  • Undesirable side effects.
• Physical punishment is ineffective.
• Time-out is one that combines the best features of punishment while avoiding its shortcomings is time-out. A child who misbehaves must briefly sit alone in a quiet, unstimulating location.

Influences of the marital system

• Research indicates that chronic parental conflict is harmful for children through

Children’s contributions: reciprocal influence

• Characteristics of children influence how parents treat them. Parental influence can happen due to and parent has

Siblings

• Birth of a sibling can be stressful for older children, Fathers are more involved with old children. Relationship improves with as siblings perceive one another as equals. Parents improve sibling relationships through quality parenting.

Unique features among different ethnic groups

• Siblings feel closer and spend more time together when they have strong ties to their family (family obligation).

Adopted children

• Adopted children are as prone to school issues however has become more common in recent years due to a larger amount of communication with birth parents in an arrangement known as an open adoption.

Impact of birth order

• Parents of firstborn children of firstborn are more likely to have high expectations and affection.
• Firstborn is more likely to go to college.
• Only children often succeed in school.

Divorce and Remarriage

• Divorce involves conflict and separation.
• Children divorce had many hardships.
• More likely to divorce themselves.
• Following divorce is often rocky for parents and children.
• Joint custody is when parents retain legal custody of the children.
• Traditionally, mothers have been awarded primary custody.
• Divorce influences children to often feel problems. - Children are less likely to suffer harm when they exhibit self control or not interpret life events negatively.

Blended families

• Biological parent, stepparent, and children.
• Children can thrive to blended family and is related to adjustment. -Stepfathers and stepmothers provide strategies to achieve balance.
• Second marriages are more likely to end in divorce.

Parent–Child Relationships Gone Awry: Child Maltreatment

• Physical abuse
• Sexual abuse
• Neglect
• Psychological abuse700,000 and about 75% of them are involved in neglect.
• Estimated as 700,000 each year. More likely to be neglect.

Who Are the Abusing Parents?

• Cultural factors exhibit unrealistic expectations. This is more likely to be social isolation.
• Because abuse typically happens due to ignorance and burden, not malice.
• Effect of abuse show negative developmental outcomes.
• Resiliency to abuse is related to ego resilience.

Peers

Friendships

• Are voluntary relationships involving mutual liking with trust and assistance helping create longevity.
• Boys and girls are equally open for opposite-sex partnerships or friendships.

Some friendships are brief

• Some friendships occur when children lack the social skills.
• Some friendships occur when children are more concerned with about their own needs and are unwilling to compromise.
• Friendship will end when children discover their needs and interest are not similar.
• Children spend time helping each out, thus making putting them at different risks.
• Teenagers engaging in risky behavior will tend to help out each other out, leading to higher risk.

Groups

• Cliques are small groups of like-minded children or adolescents.
• A crowd is a larger mixed-sex group.
• Have similar values with common groups. Hierarchal and defer to a leader.
• When parents practice authoritative parenting, their children become involved with crowds that endorse adult standards of behavior.

Peer Influence

• Peer influence can be positive or negative.
• The pressure is stronger when the standards are not clear-cut.
• Crowd influence can influence members to.
• The presence of peers can influence rewards.

Popularity and rejection

• Popular are liked by classmates.
• Those that are rejected tend to be children of awkward, aggressive behavior.
• Controversial children are both liked and disliked.
• Average children are liked and disliked, without being popular or rejected.
• Neglected children and average children tend to get ignored by peers.
• Bullying can be found within all social groups; this is often tied to cultural upbringing and exposure.
• Friendly parents demonstrate better behaviors.

Electronic Media

• Video Games improve cognitive and perceptual. However, it can cause aggressiveness and lessen empathy skills.
• Electronic Media shows that social media and texting are used to help relationships.
• Social Media helps to promote a high quality of friendships.
• Cyber bulling refers to using of using social media to hurt other people.

Understanding Others

• Children progress into more psychological understanding over time.

Describing others

• Children describe people terms of abstract traits.

Understanding what others think

• The third party will influence others.

Prejudice

• They begin to start prejudice at a young age.
• Ask children to play in different roles.
• Once children identify with a group, they begin to show prejudice, a negative view of others based on their membership in a specific group.