OVERVIEW

(PRACTICE) Infancy quiz January 21 Infancy-early childhood documentary January 23

SYLLABUS

Key to: Chapters 7 and 8 in Boyd and Bee.
This guide has a focus on:

overall development, including physical and cognitive development

social interaction

some effects of social class and

gender issues among young childtren.
 
 

Early childhood is an exciting time. Many of the earlier challenges of infancy have been met. Virtually all children can feed themselves, walk (run, jump, although skipping takes a bit longer), have many basic language skills, and by age two most are well along the way to completing basic toilet training. So, why in the world do we often call this stage "the terrible twos"? In this guide, I will take children from age two through to approximately age 5, approximately corresponding to their entry into kindergarten, and maybe we'll see some answers to this question.

MORE DEVELOPMENT THAN "GROWTH"

Young children are still growing physically, of course, but not at the rate that they did in the first two years. They are also impressively gaining in physical skill and coordination. This is especially true for fine motor control and hand manipulative skills. Girls and boys at these ages are quite similar in height and weight. However, girls show language development at slightly earlier ages, and their manipulative hand control--fine muscle or motor control--is also somewhat more developed. These skills are still relatively unsophisticated, leading to the "stick figures" that children often draw even in kindergarten or first grade (see below), but they also mean that young girls tend to find early coloring and writing skills easier to acquire than young boys. On the other hand, gross motor skills which are involved in locomotion, throwing or catching, tend to develop slightly earlier in boys.

This stick figure, of a scientist in the laboratory was drawn by a first grade boy, age 7. Although the gender of the figure is somewhat indistinct (it's bald but its clothing could either be a laboratory coat or possibly a dress?), notice the detail in the eyeglasses and SIX lab beakers.

 OPTIONAL: See a couple more children's drawings of scientists at: http://mailer.fsu.edu/~slosh/DrawIJSE200830773792.pdf

However, what is most startling about young children is not their physical development (although that's considerable), but the verbal, cognitive and social sophistication and development that they show at these ages. Not only do children learn massive amounts of symbols but they learn cooperative play, rudimentary group dynamics, and role taking. They begin to think for themselves and form the beginnings of several identities because the child is better able to envision her or himself as an entity separate from other people and things in the environment (one contributor to the "terrible twos"). They begin to act as "naive scientists," testing out many cause-effect relationships.

Not surprisingly, these developments can foster consternation in parents. After all, parents are delighted at the development and learning that they see occurring on all fronts. At the same time, as children form and test their own ideas, as they gain a sense of their own identity and those of the people around them, they stick up for themselves more. They disagree. Sometimes they vehemently disagree. They can throw violent trantrums, throw themselves down on the floor kicking, screaming, holding their breath, and insisting on their own way no matter what. In part, this is because children are discovering what they do and do not like. And when they do like something, young children are as likely to simply grab it away from another child as politely ask and accept a refusal. And parents, who at least with some children, were accustomed to a bidable toddler, aren't sure what to make of it or what to do about it.

Some of the "naive scientist" ways that young children express can also be difficult and even frightening for parents to live with. A young child in a high chair can drop food or dishes on the floor over and over, in part just to see what will happen (that's the somewhat difficult part). Greater mobility means that a child can chase the dog and pull its tail (and sometimes receive a dog bite in the process), get into cupboards and pull out everything that's in them, including poisonous substances, or climb on top of chests and cabinets, toppling them in the process (the more frightening parts). This is an age where children want to test everything, inspect everything, try everything. Their eagerness to learn is stunning in its intensity. And, unlike later occasions which can unfortunately sometimes include school, the adults in the child's immediate environment, while  trying to keep the child safe, typically encourage and reinforce him or her in such explorations.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC (SES) ISSUES

There are indications that families with higher SES have healthier children. They are less likely to live in houses or apartments with older lead paint or lead pipes. Their children less often develop asthma, partly because they live in newer housing which is less likely to harbor cockroaches and other bugs.. Because better-educated parents tend to have jobs with more flexible schedules and telecommuting, a parent is more likely to be able to stay home with the infant or young child when a child is sick. On the other hand, social class does not seem to much influence whether a family member tends to the child in a parent's absence, or whether the child is in some form of home or collective day care.

Higher SES families more often have books and subscribe to magazines (and have the space to store them) than poorer families. They are more likely to read to their children, converse with their children, and definitely more likely to enroll them in nursery schools that teach basic social and cognitive skills rather than in day care centers that are more custodial.

It will be interesting to see how much these SES differences will persist given the recent proliferation of reading tablets, home computers, smart phones and other electronic storage devices. For example, young U.S. working class males increasingly access the Internet via smart phones.

As a result, children from middle and upper class families enter elementary school with certain cognitive, social, and even physical development advantages. They are ill somewhat less often, thus have lower absenteeism. They more often enter with "school readiness"--able to name colors, objects, numbers, alphabet letters, and so forth. They are more likely to be able to write their name, recite their address and telephone number, or even dial 911. On the other hand, if they have largely been kept at home, upper SES children may not possess some of the social skills that little day care veterans do.

Day care "soldiers" know that they are supposed to line up when the teacher says so and stand in line. They may be better at taking turns, more willing to share toys, treats and attention, and more familiar with taking a nap in the company of other children. Initially kindergarten teachers may find these children easier to work with because they are more used to a group setting and may show less of a sense of entitlement.

One interesting issue is the development of self esteem, i.e., a generalized appraisal of one's self worth, and issues of socio-economic status, including ethnicity. In the United States, Euro- and Asian-Americans tend to have more financial resources than Hispanic-, African- or Native-Americans. Early researchers thus expected that White and Asian American children would have higher self-esteem than children from other ethnic groups. However, generally ethnic group differences in children's self esteem do not occur, and when the effects are statistically significant, they are typically small. On the other hand, ethnic differences do occur in self-efficacy, or more domain-specific appraisals of one's competencies. Self-efficacy, rather than self-esteem, is more likely to predict children's behaviors that can lead to academic achievement, for example, persistence or self-regulation, and children from higher income families have greater expectations of academic success and their ability to complete academic tasks.

(I'll elaborate on the "self esteem" material later this semester.)
 

CATEGORICAL THINKING AND BEYOND

Developmentalists long ago renounced the "tabula rosa" or "blank slate" view of infancy and early childhood that prevailed over a century ago. By the same token, we no longer view children as naturally "filled with sin", although we also no longer see children as quite so innocent, "naturally good," or malleable as we once did. One example of this "naturally good" perspective was shown in the late 1950s movie musical South Pacific, which is set in World War II. American Nurse Nellie Forbush, the heroine, falls in love with French Polynesian planter Emile, a widower. She learns that Emile's late wife was Polynesian, not European, and his two young children reflect that ethnic heritage. Initially, Nellie is very bothered by these discoveries, but upon reflection realizes that she is wrong and prejudiced to be so upset. Nellie and Emile sing a lovely duet about how people "have to be carefully taught" prejudice and that young children do not see ethnic differences. Well, this makes for charming singing--but unfortunately young children are more likely to be biased than adults! Part of the reason this occurs is because infancy and early childhood are times of categorical thinking.

Why reject the "blank slate" view of childhood? First, each child has his or her own "temperament" from birth, although that can change over the first couple of years (see work by Kagan on optimal stimulation levels). Some babies are placid, some are "fussy," some are incessantly curious, some are shy, and so forth. In part, the child's temperament can influence how adults and other children treat her.

Second, young children reason, although their reasoning processes differ in kind from adult reasoning. Once children begin to understand symbols and that entities have names, they also learn that each entity has certain characteristics and it will often covary with another entity. For example, mustard is often placed on hot dogs and hamburgers, but typically not on ice cream or peanut butter and jelly. Although both women and men wear jeans and trousers, generally only women in Western cultures wear skirts.

Third, on their own, children begin to build schema or form categories. Young children's categorical thinking is generally much more superficial and rigid than it will be later on. For example, young children may sort their toys or clothes by color and insist the arrangement could not go any other way. As noted below, children form gender identities and sex stereotypes before preschool age. Initial gender categories tend to be relatively rigid, and, in fact, children may describe their parents along stereotyped lines even though these descriptions may be highly inaccurate. Mary Goodman's work during the 1960s demonstrated that younger children can be more highly stereotyped about different ethnic groups than older children were.

As children develop, usually their experiences widen. As they begin day care and nursery school, they meet a variety of other children and adults. On trips, they become more aware of the new people and scenarios they encounter. Furthermore, their thinking becomes more refined and probabilitistic (most of the time mustard is on hot dogs but a few people put it on ice cream). Children begin to admit "exceptions to the rule." (Review Bronfenbrenner's work on concentric circles in B&B and see how our own spheres widen over time with new experiences.)

By the end of the first year of life, infants have learned basic words and they begin the process of learning that objects and persons have names. Accompanying this development, children begin to more greatly understand symbolism. Early childhood is characterized by the language explosion of symbol learning and symbol making as the young child's language skills rapidly develop, which also results in a "grammatical" explosion and continued vocabulary development. Symbol making has several important ramifications.

First, creating symbols means that the young child can call up a image of an object or behavioral sequence to mind, whether it is present or not. For example, a child newly enrolled at day care can call up their soothing image of Mommy or Daddy and feel less lonely and comforted. The classic infancy game "peek-a-boo" can develop this capability. Creating enduring sumbols can help develop a sense of object permanence.

Being able to symbolize means that the child can anticipate people or events, for example, seeing their grandmother, celebrating Christmas or enjoying their birthday cake.

Symbolic activity enhances and develops the child's imagination; she can imagine what her room would look like painted a different color, the clothes she will wear, or her future career as an animal doctor.

Symbolism development begins to pave the way for the enormous social development that occurs during early childhood. Speech development means that private speech, i.e., children's conversations with themselves, can occur. Vygotsky believed that private speech was the key to internalizing the child's conceptions of society. Although young children often talk to themselves out loud, private speech increasingly literally becomes private, silently occuring "inside" the child's head. For Vygotsky, private speech was the means of developing the equivalent of the Freudian "superego", conscience development, and the lists of "oughts" and "shoulds" that illustrate the world outside for the child. In turn, modern symbolic interactionists believe that this kind of private speech (they typically don't use this term) is one important mechanism in how the child develops a sense of self, or learns to view the self as an object. And, of course, language development is critical in a child's learning to read.

All these increases in speech (hence symbolic development) begin to "prime" the child for more sophisticated interactions with others.
 

INTERACTION, ROLE TAKING, AND DEVELOPING EMPATHY

The most naive observer will notice that as children grow they become much more social. You can plop an infant down in a sandbox next to other infants. He will notice, probably even smile at the other infants, then cheerfully play on his own. This side by side independent co-actor play,  in which infants perfom the same behaviors independently side by side, characterizes the beginnings of early childhood.

As children develop, their play becomes increasingly cooperative. They will play with other children. They will share toys and actually converse. (I have long had the hypothesis that young children have their own language, which allows them to communicate with each other but that adults can't understand a word of it.) These social developments open the door to even more elaborate fantasy interlocking role play, with games such as "house" or games that mimic the characters in their favorite movie or TV show. In these games, children assume specific specialized roles, such as "mother" or "Wolverine" (in the X-Men).

Further, children begin to trade roles. This is the Meadian approach described under Symbolic Interactionism in Guide 2. Preschool children begin to play more organized games, often structured for them and supervised by adults. There is at least some suggestion that parents involve boys more often and at earlier ages in structured games through sports activities. Thus the young child plays several roles and begins to see the game situation from several perspectives. These experiences are hypothesized to generate several outcomes:

The child learns a more complex, elaborated view of the world by looking at the same situation in several different ways.

The child begins to look at the situation through the eyes of players who assume different roles in the game. This helps the child to develop empathy with others, to "take the role of the other" and put themselves in the place of another person.

Empathy fosters the development of "different social selves" and the development of situated identity. The child begins to see the self as both an actor ("I threw the ball") and a reflective object ("I need more practice to throw the ball well.")

Structured games also help the child to learn social scripts that are appropriate to the situation. For example, the base player in a baseball game cannot just grab the ball and bat in a home run.

The child begins to learn the rules that govern particular situations, such as conversational turn-taking. Children who do not have such experiences may experience eventual social development delays in such areas as appropriate behaviors in class, religious ceremonies, family interactions, and other social settings.

Theorists during the 1980s and early 1990s proposed that success in the marketplace frequently depends on being able to be a "team player" and working effectively with others. Some then attributed the greater marketplace success of males than females to early experiences playing in teams, because in most industrial countries, boys still have more opportunities to engage in team sports than girls do. (You might be interested to learn that later theorists in management areas are now complaining that recent generations are too used to playing in teams, and, as a result, these young workers now do not have enough experience working independently and assuming leadership roles. I guess no matter what, you just can't win!)

Is this the case? Studies of young children do in fact indicate that boys are more likely to play active games in teams than girls. Girls' games are more likely to emphasize individual performances, such as hopscotch. Further, as young children begin to form friendships and through the teenage years, boys are more likely to form friendships with a group of other boys, whereas girls are more likely to pair off in dyads, with a "best friend," another practice that continues through the teenage years.

However, girls also appear more likely than boys to play fantasy games, where they assume the characters of their favorite TV stars or to play complex situation games like "house" or "doctor". In these group games, girls also take turns assuming different roles (which in young children could mean gender switch-offs, e.g., playing "Daddy" rather than "Mommy). It seems to me that such games should be able to foster the same sets of cognitive and social experiences for girls that can occur for boys in organized sports. It's also unclear just which kind of games are the most "worthwhile". Some games (e.g., football) seem to foster a specialized hierarchy of roles, wherein some players receive more attention and acclaim than others. Many board games emphasize individual "wins" (such as Monopoly) at the expense of others. So, "teamwork and success" is an interesting idea that needs more refinement than research has provided to date.
 

Gender identity appears very early in children. In many, it's present by age 2. By age 3, virtually all children can tell you that they are a girl or a boy. Although gender identity is not totally permanent in the early ages, most of the time children are able to state their gender in a manner  consistent with societal standards. If we look at national surveys of American adults (such as the General Social Survey), most parents do not place "acting like a girl or boy should" at the top of their priority list, especially compared with other wishes that parents have for their children. Being obedient and being honest typically lead the list of desired child characteristics among parents. Nevertheless, through a combination of curiosity, symbol development and language, media, and interaction with other adults and their peers, children learn their biological sex at an early age.

Gender identity is just one form of identity; most of us have several identities. By the time we start elementary school, we may have a religious identity, an ethnic identity, a community identity, to name just a few. Why are these identities important? First, identity serves as a cognitive organizing mechanism or "anchor". We assimilate incoming information in terms of its relevance for us and our particular set of identities. For example, developmentalist Kohlberg theorized that once we have established a gender identity, we pay special attention to "girl-like" or "boy-like" things--toys, books, other media, clothing and so forth. We are more interested in the entities that appear to fit with our own set of identities. There is some systematic empirical evidence that Kohlberg's hypotheses were correct and that young children are more interested in identity-congruent activities and objects. Gender is sometimes called a master identity or master status.

Second, our identities serve as a guide to action. For example, in the case of gender identity, Kohlberg asserted that once a relatively stable gender identity was established, children would want to acquire and perform congruent girl-like or boy-like behaviors. If a girl believes that females are interested in their appearance and like to participate in sports, she may experiment with her mother's cosmetics and join a group of neighborhood children in a game of baseball. Once again, some of Kohlberg's hypotheses in this area have received empirical support.
 
 

Cognitive processes, including those addressing identity are initially rigid, egocentric, highly stereotyped, and probably very influenced by media in young children. I refer you to work by the late George Gerbner who devoted the bulk of his professional career to documenting what we really see on television. He found it's a scary and stereotyped world out there fpr children with phenomenal amounts of TV violence, the worst of which is found in children's cartoons. By egocentric, I mean that the child largely sees the world through his or her personal viewpoint lens. If the child likes a particular food or toy, she will assume that everyone else likes it too. If he dislikes a particular preschool teacher, he will see the cause of his feelings as the teacher's personality and assume the other children share his attitudes.

As noted earlier, as they grow older and develop, children begin to realize that their attitudes are just that: their own and that these may not be shared by other people. They begin to elaborate their sex-stereotypes and make them more complex. They begin to be guided by their own experiences and they compare their experiences to their pre-existing knowledge and their own expectations. As cognitively, children about to enter kindergarten also move to more sophisticated processing (e.g., Piaget's concrete operations, or Kohlberg's third moral stage), they begin to focus more intently on the intentions of an individual's act rather than the consequences of an individual's act.
 
 

 As a result of this more probabilistic, less rigid way of thinking, children's sex stereotypes also change.

Initially, children apply rigid, relatively undifferentiated sex-stereotypes to their parents and other adults that the children knows. These applications are frequently highly inaccurate. For example, Matina Horner, a University of Michigan Psychology PhD (and the former President of Radcliffe) who did early research on "fear of success"  was determined to bring up her daughter in an egalitarian environment. With great difficulties in the Ann Arbor, Michigan environment of the early 1960s, she found female pediatricians and family care physicians. She often pointed out female role models to her young daughter. So you can imagine Dr. Horner's astonishment when she asked her daughter could mommies be medical doctors and her daughter replied "no." Stunned, Horner asked about her daughter's best friend: "what about Steffi's Mommy (the daughter's own pediatrician)?" Her daughter casually denied that her very own doctor and best friend's mother could be a mommy.

Young boys who learn from TV that crocodile hunters are men, and so are most soldiers and company Chief Executive Officers, may expect that their own fathers will also be hunters and fighters, even if Dad's idea of hunting is to locate a program with the TV remote control. Daughters may erroneously describe their mother's demeanor and apparel, drawing Mommy wearing a nice dress and jewelry although Mommy typically wears jeans. Even in preschool, kids can tell you: girls cry, mothers are nice, dads yell and "men are the boss" (OPTIONAL: access research by Jerome Kagan, with H.A. Moss, From Birth to Maturity, among others). As the child develops, she is much more likely to describe the people she knows more accurately, although she may continue to apply the stereotypes to strangers.

Even more interesting, although preschool children have clearly learned the sex-stereotypes for their culture, this does not necessarily influence their interpersonal gender behavior. Marilyn and Jack Whalen, who study interpersonal communication in children, find that preschool girls and boys are equally likely to boss each other around, interrupt each other, insist on holding the "conversational floor" and other indicators of equal status gender behavior. As schoolage children learn more about authoritative behavior, girls begin to defer to boys in cross-sex interactions and same sex play intensifies, suggesting that children become more and more able to see the links between their attitudes and beliefs,  societal norms" and their own behaviors.
 
 

OVERVIEW

SYLLABUS

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Susan Carol Losh January 20 2014