Psychosocial Development in Middle Childhood

Development of Fairness

Goals

Fast Forward: Middle School and High School

• Mixed-sex friendships appear again
• Time with friends increases. Time with family decreases.
• Rate trust and loyalty as more important than children do
• Self-disclosure increases:
• Adolescent best friends know more about each other's preferences, thoughts, and feelings than childhood best friends do.

1. Identify parents', caregivers', and siblings' roles in social development.

2. Build general, foundational knowledge of childhood peer relationships and friendships.

3. Evaluate a "typology" of children's peer relationships.

4. Clarify an important question: What is intimacy?

Beyond this, kids' emphasis on social comparison lets them develop a sense of what peers are popular (or not):

Average = Moderately liked or disliked by others, don't really stand out (40%-60%)

Popular = Liked by many, disliked by few (15%)

Rejected = Disliked by many, liked by few (15%)

Neglected = Unnoticed by most children, may not have friends (10%)

Controversial = Both liked and disliked by peers (6%)

Friends become a primary source of information about parents, teachers, and peers.

Intimacy = degree to which two people share personal knowledge, thoughts, feelings

Sullivan: foundation for studying intimacy in adolescent friendships

• Need for intimacy intensifies in early adolescence
• Early adolescents identify a same-sex best friend for a particularly close relationship.
• Targets change over time: "friendships replace parent relationships, then cross-sex relationships replace same-sex friendships" (NOT exactly!)

Sheskin, Bloom, and Wynn (2014) explored fairness in MC:

• People often assume that kids want fair outcomes.
• That's not really the case in some tests of kids' social cognition.
• Young kids take spiteful costs to make sure they have an advantage over peers.
• 5- and 6-year-old kids will penalize themselves to ensure that peers have less than they do
• Starts to change toward the middle of elementary school (around age 7).

Again, the important question: How do we use this?

Key Terms

Elementary School (6-10)

• 85% of school-age children have friends
• Average 3-8 friends
• Homophily strengthens
• Selection of friends with similar characteristics
• In elementary school, sex cleavage is strongest
• By 4th grade, 95% of preferred friends are same-sex.
• Preference strongest at school
• Children may actively avoid opposite-sex peers

Family Structure = Legal and genetic relationships among relatives living in the same home

Family Function = How a family works to meet the needs of its members

Difference-Equals-Deficit Error = Mistaken belief that a deviation from a norm is inferior to what is "normative"

Attachment = Affectional tie between child and caregiver that binds them together over time (enduring, affectionate bond)

Social Convoy = Collective of family, friends, and strangers who move through life with a person

Psychosocial Development in

Middle Childhood

"Parenting" Styles

Warmth

Higher Lower

Rewind: Preschool (3 to 5)

• Children use the word friend around 3 or 4
• Overgeneralize friend to all playmates or interactions
• Proximity becomes foundation for friendship
• 75% of preschoolers have friends
• Sex cleavage begins, normative in childhood
• Rise of imaginary friend (imaginary companion)
• 30% of 3- to 7-year-olds have one
• Variability in cross-cultural research

Control

Lower Higher

The Social Convoy

Myths

Children's Friendships

Siblings: What We Know

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5209261/

One recent article (Farrell et al., 2017): Early parenting quality (maternal sensitivity) relates to physical health 30 years later.

Generally, authoritative parenting is most consistently associated with positive outcomes for children.

• More inductive discipline
• Help kids internalize positive values
• Help kids self-regulate

This could be context-specific:

• In dangerous environments, authoritarian parenting might be protective.
• Some studies find cultural variability in outcomes associated with parenting.

Indifferent/uninvolved parenting consistently related to worse developmental outcomes than other styles.

As of 2010, "82.22% of youth age 18 and under lived with at least one sibling—a higher percentage than were living in a household with a father figure" (McHale, Updegraff, & Whiteman, 2012).

• TONS of shortcomings in research on siblings.
• Evidence of birth-order effects is not good.
• Older siblings may play a role in ToM development.
• Siblings = important agents of socialization, much like friends.
• Might be especially important in helping people learn to handle conflict.

Rewind: Birth to 2

• Infants: preference in playmates, may have friends by 1 year (regular playmates)
• Preference, mutual enjoyment, and comforting define friendship in childhood
• Young toddlers tend to have one friend
• Equally likely to be same-sex or opposite-sex
• Older toddlers may have more friends
• Friendship stability in early childhood depends on stability of social group

Myth 1: Same-sex parents are not as effective as heterosexual parents.

• This is flat-out false.

Myth 2: Single parents put kids at a disadvantage.

• Stop stigmatizing single mothers.

Myth 3: Being an only child is a disadvantage.

• Surprise: also not the case!

Myth 4: Adopted children struggle in comparison to peers.

• Steve Jobs tended to disagree.

Franco and Levitt (1998) tried to make sense of the relative roles of adults and friends:

• Family support (parents, siblings) and relationships with nonparental adults related to kids' friendship quality.
• Sibling support related to better conflict resolution
• Relationships with adults and friendship quality related to self-esteem.
• Dynamic socialization system.

So, how do you use this knowledge?