The Role of the Family

What is a family?  Nuclear family  Extended family  Functions of family  Sustenance  Developmental  advocacy

The Family System  The family is a social system  A constellation of subsystems defined in terms of generations, gender and roles  Important terms:  Reciprocal socialization  Scaffolding  Family Life cycle

The Family Life Cycle  First stage: Launching, leaving home and becoming a single adult  2nd stage: The New Couple, Joining families through marriage  3rd stage: Becoming parents and families with children  4th stage: Families with an adolescent  5th stage: Families in mid-life  6th stage: Families in later life

Parenting Roles and Styles  Baumrind, 1971  Authoritarian  Authoritative  Permissive (neglectful/indifferent and indulgent)

Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

Physical Development in Middle Childhood  Weight:  First close to 2 lbs. Lighter at age 6, 2 cm shorter at age 6  At age 11, girls experience growth spurt  Not until age 14 or so do boys becoming heavier and taller  Gradual decrease in fatty tissue, increase in bone/muscle development

Nutrition and Health  With nourishment, children 6-12 grown 2-3 inches and gain 5-7 lbs. A year  Height is better indicator of good nutrition than weight gain.  Height requires better nutrition -protein, vitamins, minerals, etc.

Obesity  Contributing Factors  Overeating – consume more than is expended  Genetics – Metabolic rate  Modeling of eating patterns  Inactivity (possibly a very prevalent factor in U.S.)  Use of food as a reward (emotion induced eating)

Controlling Obesity  Primary control method is prevention  Especially with children genetically predisposed  Balanced diet  Food Pyramid  Self-control  Do not use food as a reward

Sex Differences in Motor Skills  Boy’s physical strength is superior to girls even though the average girl in this age range is taller and heavier  Boys out jump girls and are better at kicking, throwing, catching, running and batting  Girls are better at muscular flexibility tasks and rhythmic movements  Are the differences biological or learned?

Cognitive Development  Piaget’s Views:  Concrete Operations  Ability to conserve  Logic of classes and relations  Understanding of numbers  Thinking is still concrete (not abstract)  Reversibility in thinking

Figure 9.4 When asked to draw the fluid level in a tilted jar, young children typically draw the figure shown in (A) rather than (B)—not because they have ever seen anything like (A) in the real world, but because the logic they use in their attempts to make meaning out of their experiences is not always appropriate.

Horizontal Decalage  Intellectual accomplishments in one area may not generalize to other areas  Learning conservation of mass  What about volume?  What about number?  What about weight?  What about area?

Conservation  Thought Question:  How could conservation skills be enhanced?

Figure 9.5 Some simple tests for conservation, with approximate ages of attainment.

Figure 9.5 (cont.) Some simple tests for conservation, with approximate ages of attainment.

3 rules of logic important to acquisition of conservation  Identity: nothing ahs been added or taken away, so must be identical  Reversibility: deformed object can be reformed into what it was so it must contain the same amount  Compensation: deformed object appears to have more material b/c of it’s shape (longer), but its thinness makes up for its length.

Figure 9.6 Suppose X comes in exactly two shapes, each of which can be either black or white. How many different X’s are there? Right There are four. The concrete-operations child may have some difficulty with the simple classification problem because it’s too abstract. X is not concrete enough. The problem is simpler if we ask, instead, “How many kinds of balls do we have f we have big and small red ones, and big and small green ones?” Such a problem can be used to test a child’s ability to classify objects.