1. Chapter 8: Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)

2. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Chapter Objectives
To describe the process of gender identification during early school age and its importance for the way a child interprets his or her experiences
To describe the process of early moral development, drawing from research and theories to explain how knowledge, emotion, and action combine to produce internalized morality
To analyze changes in the self-theory, with special focus on self-evaluation and self-esteem during the early school-age years

3. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Chapter Objectives (cont.)
To explore the transition to more complex group play and the process of friendship development in the early school-age years
To explain the psychosocial crisis of initiative versus guilt, the central process of identification, the prime adaptive ego function of purpose, and the core pathology of inhibition

4. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Chapter Objectives (cont.)
To consider social expectations for school readiness, its relation to the developmental tasks of early school age, and the obstacles that may prevent children from being able to adapt and learn in the school environment

5. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Case Study: Gender Identification in Early Childhood
Thought Questions
What aspects of the formation of gender identification are captured in this narrative?
What are the salient images of mother and father that Lee may have identified with?
What role might the rural, small-town environment play in Lee’s experiences of gender identification in early childhood?

6. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Case Study: Gender Identification in Early Childhood (cont.)
Thought Questions (cont.)
How much of Lee’s preference for rough-and-tumble play do you attribute to her desire to be “the son” for her father? How much do you attribute to her temperament and other aspects of her personality?
From what you have read, and drawing on your own experiences, how might Lee’s gender identification at this period of her life influence later relationships with male and female peers, and her capacity to form intimate relationships in later adolescence or early adulthood?

7. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Gender Identification
Physical, cognitive, emotional, and social domain as they become integrated into an early scheme from thinking of oneself as male or female
Gender identification provides the basis for early moral development
This developmental task centers around the acquisition of a personal self-theory that becomes increasingly complex because it is being stimulated by expanding social influences

8. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Gender Identification (cont.)
Through peer play the process of learning the rules and playing cooperatively with others, children begin to form meaningful friendships and mental representations of ways of participating in groups

9. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Gender Identification: Individual Differences versus Constructivism
Individual Differences perspective of gender identification suggests that gender differences reside within the individual, as persistent, internal attributes
The constructivist perspective suggests that gender differences are a product of particular interactions that have a certain socially, agree-upon, gender-related meaning

10. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Figure 8.1 Four Components of the Concept of Gender

11. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Gender Identification: Gender Role Standards and Identification with Parents
Gender role standards are cultural expectations about appropriate behavior for boys and girls, and for men and women
At the cognitive underpinnings related to the concept of gender maturity, children form gender schemes, or personal theories about cultural expectations and stereotypes related to gender

12. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Gender Identification: Gender Role Standards and Identification with Parents (cont.)
Identification is the process through which one person incorporates the values and beliefs of another
Parents devise their beliefs and parenting practices out of a strong, internalized cultural script about gender

13. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Gender Identification: Gender Preference Depends on 3 Factors
The more closely one’s own strengths and competencies approximate the gender-role standards, the more one will prefer being a member of that sex
The more one likes the same-sex parent, the more one will prefer being a member of that sex

14. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Gender Identification: Gender Preference Depends on 3 Factors (cont.)
To the extent to which cultural determined values are communicated to children, males are likely to establish a firmer preference for their sex group, and females are likely to experience some ambivalence toward, if not rejection of, their sex group

15. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)

16. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early Moral Development
Early moral development involves a process called internalization, which means taking parental standards and values on as one’s own

17. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early Moral Development (cont.)
From the Behavioral Learning Theory perspective, moral behavior and the process of internalization are viewed as a response to environmental reinforcements and punishments
Moral behaviors, like other operant responses, can be shaped by the consequences that follow them
A positive, prosocial behavior is likely to be repeated if rewarded
Avoidance conditioning is viewed as a paradigm for understanding how internalization is sustained

18. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early Moral Development (cont.)
Social Learning Theory offers another source of moral learning: the observation of models
Cognitive Learning Theory describes how moral behavior is influenced by situational factors and the child’s expectations, values, and goals

19. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early Moral Development: Cognitive-Developmental Theory
Heteronomous morality is a child's moral perspective, in which rules are viewed as fixed and unchangeable
Autonomous morality is a more mature moral perspective in which rules are viewed as a product of cooperative agreements
As children become increasingly skillful in evaluating the abstract and logical components of moral dilemma, their moral judgments change by the mechanism of equilibration to establish balance

20. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early Moral Development: Psychoanalytic Theory
The Psychoanalytic Theory focuses on morality as the ability of children to control their impulses and resist temptations, rather than on their cognitive understanding of what constitutes a moral transgression
This perspective suggests that a moral sense develops as a result of strong parental identification

21. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early Moral Development: Psychoanalytic Theory (cont.)
Classical psychoanalytic theory views a child’s conscience, or superego, as an internalization of parental values and moral standards
The more severely a parent forces a child to inhibit her or his impulses, the stronger the child’s superego will be
Neopsychoanalytic Theory, sometimes referred to as object relations theory, views the critical time for moral development as coming earlier life, in infancy

22. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Early Moral Development: Psychoanalytic Theory (cont.)
According to Neopsychoanalytic Theory, the origins of moral reasoning and behavior have links to early feelings about the self and its needs, especially the feelings of pleasure and pain, and the way these feelings are mirrored or accepted by the loving caregiver

23. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Case Study: Early Learning About Obedience
Thought Questions
What is the moral lesson this case?
How does the case illustrate the themes of moral emotion, knowledge, and action?
How do each of the theoretical perspectives discussed above contribute to an understanding of this case?
How does this case illustrate the particular orientation of early-school-age children to moral dilemmas?
How generalizable is this case? Can you imagine similar moral conflicts among non-Chinese children?

24. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Empathy and Perspective Taking
Empathy is sharing the perceived emotion of another

25. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Empathy and Perspective Taking (cont.)
Hoffman has four levels of empathy
Global empathy: you experience and express distress as a result of witnessing someone else in distress
Egocentric empathy: you recognize distress in another person and respond to it in the same way you would respond if the distress were your own
Empathy for another’s feelings: you show empathy for a wide range of feelings and anticipate the kinds of reactions that might really comfort someone else

26. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Empathy and Perspective Taking (cont.)
Hoffman has four levels of empathy (cont.)
Empathy for another’s life conditions: you experience empathy when you understand the life conditions or personal circumstances of a person or a group

27. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Empathy and Perspective Taking (cont.)
Perspective taking: cognitive capacity to consider a situation from the point of view of another person

28. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Parental Discipline
Four elements determine the impact of these techniques on the child’s future behavior (cont.)
The discipline should help the child interrupt or inhibit the forbidden action
The discipline should point out a more acceptable form of behavior so that the child will know what is right in a future instance
The discipline should provide some reasons, understandable to the child, why one action is inappropriate and the other more desirable

29. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Parental Discipline
Four elements determine the impact of these techniques on the child’s future behavior (cont.)
The discipline should stimulate the child’s ability to empathize with the victim of his of her misdeeds. In other words, children are asked to put themselves in their victim’s place and to see how much they dislike the feelings they caused in the other person

30. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)

31. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)

32. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Self-Theory
Both gender identification and moral development can be thought of as components of the child’s self-concept
Self-concept is viewed as a theory that links the child’s understanding of the nature of the world, the nature of the self, and the meaning of interactions between the two
The function of self-theory is to make transactions between the self and the world turn out as positively and beneficially as possible

33. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Self-Theory: The Me and The I
Me: the self as object – one can describe the self
I is more subjective
A sense of agency or initiation of behaviors
A sense of uniqueness
A sense of continuity from moment to moment and from day to day
An awareness of one’s own awareness

34. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Developmental Changes in the Self-Theory
Self-theory: result of a person’s cognitive capacities and dominant motives as he or she comes into contact with the stage-related expectations of the culture
Categorical Identifications: self is understood by a variety of identifications
Comparative Assessments: self understanding relies on comparisons of oneself with social norms and standards or with specific other people

35. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Theory of Mind
Focuses on the natural way children understand each other’s behavior

36. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Self-Theory: Self-Esteem
Self-esteem or self-evaluation is based on three sources
Messages of love, support, and approval from others
Specific attributes and competencies
The way one regards these specific aspects of the self in comparison with others and in relation to one’s ideal self

37. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Self-Theory: Self-Esteem (cont.)
Feelings of positive self-worth provide a protective shield
Low self-esteem is associated with a lack of clarity about one’s essential characteristics
Research on self-esteem suggests that early-school-age children may be especially vulnerable to fluctuations in feelings of self-worth

38. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Peer Play: Group Games
Children show interest in group games that are more structured and somewhat more oriented to reality than play that is based primarily on imagination. They involve more cognitive complexity, physical skill, and ritual and allow children to shift roles
Friendships are based on the exchange of concrete goods and the mutual enjoyment of activities

39. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Peer Play: Group Games (cont.)
Children who have stable friendships become skilled in coordinating their interactions with their friends, creating elaborate pretend games, and being willing to modify their play preferences so that both members in the friendship have a chance to enjoy the kinds of play they like best

40. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Peer Play: Friendship Groups
Children tend to evaluate situations on the basis of outcomes rather than intentions and therefore are often harsh in assigning blame in the case of negative outcomes
One of the most notable characteristics of young children’s friendship groups is that they are likely to be segregated by sex
Girls enjoy dyadic interactions over larger groups, whereas boys seem to enjoy larger groups

41. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Figure 8.3 Hopscotch

42. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
The Psychosocial Crisis: Initiative versus Guilt
Initiative: an expression of agency; an outgrowth of early experiences of the self as a causal agent that continues to find expression as children impose themselves and their ideas and questions onto their social world
Guilt: an emotion that accompanies that sense that one has been responsible for an unacceptable thought, fantasy, or action

43. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)

44. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
The Prime Adaptive Ego Quality and the Core Pathology
Purpose: thought or behavior with direction, and therefore with meaning
Inhibition: the restraint or suppression of behavior

45. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Applied Topic: School Readiness
Defining Readiness
Measuring Kindergarten Readiness
Obstacles to School Readiness
Parents who have not graduated from high school
Low income or welfare dependence
Single-parent families
Families where a language other than English is the primary language spoken at home
Who is responsible for meeting the goal for school readiness?

46. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)

47. Early School Age (4 – 6 Years)
Figure 8.4 Percentage Distribution of First-Time Kindergartners by Number of Risk Factors and Type of Community: Fall, 1998