Introduction

• Freud labeled middle childhood the latency period when he believed sexual urges are dormant, awaiting the great reawakening of adolescence.
• Erikson saw the major developmental task of this stage as a sense of industry. It is a basic belief in one's own competence, coupled with a tendency to initiate activities, to seek out learning experiences, and to work hard to accomplish goals. Repeated failure to master new skills leaves a child with feelings of incompetence and inferiority.
• Another task of middle childhood: forming a coherent self-concept by pulling together various experiences.
• Major developments in peer relations.
• Growing understanding of emotions.

• The Emergence of the Psychological Self
1. Preschoolers think of the self in physical terms, but elementary school children describe themselves in terms of a psychological self--psychological traits, thoughts, and feelings, an overall view called a metatheory of the self. Children must consider multiple situations in order to know their own traits or the traits of others. Can coordinate various self-representations.
2. Children of this age also possess an understanding that others have hidden thoughts and feelings and, further, that people's inner psychological experiences do not always coincide with their external words and actions.
• The Development of the Social Self
1. Elementary school children develop a social self by defining themselves in terms of social group membership and traits exhibited in dealings with others.
2. Closely linked to the inclination to define the self in terms of relationships with others is the tendency to use others as a source of information in evaluating the self through social comparison. This depends on:
• A decline in centration - can consider their own performance and someone else's at the same time.
• Normative understanding of ability - the capacity to think about ability partly in terms of what most children do.
• Cultural context - in some cultural contexts, social comparisons are encouraged, in some it is not.
• The Developing Sense of Gender
1. Gender-role concepts continue to evolve during middle childhood because of both changes in children's abilities to think about themselves and the influence of peers and parents.
2. Younger elementary school children have rigid gender-role ideas, which become more flexible as they grow older.
3. Boys are more strongly sex-typed than girls are.
4. Parents continue to model and reinforce gender role behavior, and they have different expectations and supervision levels for sons and daughters.
• Personal Effectiveness and Self-Management
1. Preschoolers believe their physical and cognitive accomplishments are due to their own efforts, but not until school age do they believe social success depends on their own actions.
2. Although the capacity for self-management improves with age for almost everyone, children with a sense of personal effectiveness do particularly well on measures of self-control (delay of gratification) and coping with stress.

• During middle childhood, peer relationships provide an important setting for learning rules of social behavior and developing self-esteem. Because of the time children spend with peers, they provide unique learning experiences (principles of fairness and sharing guide relations of equal status), and peer groups challenge youngsters to develop interaction skills (must work to make peers grasp what one is thinking or feeling).
• Advances That Enable More Complex Peer Relations
1. By age 8 or 9, children's peer relationships become significantly more complex. This is due to several advances:
• The tendency to think of others in terms of their psychological traits;
• A greater ability to understand the perspectives, needs, and feelings of others;
• The ability to grasp more complex rules regarding interpersonal behavior and to know that different situations require different behavior toward others;
• A growing ability to communicate feelings and wishes with words rather than actions.
2. Girls become especially likely to use verbal aggression. They display less physical aggression than boys but more relational aggression, which includes attempts to exclude peers from activities, to damage their reputation, and to gossip about their negative characteristics or behaviors.
• Five Major Developments in Peer Relations
1. Forming Loyal Friendships
• By the end of the elementary school years most children are involved in "chumships" - very close and personal friendships between two peers.
• The appearance of this new type of relationship is related to cognitive advances (evaluation in terms of personal traits).
• An emphasis on fairness, equity, and reciprocity is typical of elementary schoolers' friendships. Children of this age come to understand that conflict is a part of friendship and may even strengthen it. Whether cooperating or competing, what most distinguishes friends' interactions is a deeper involvement with each other. They stay connected in emotionally arousing situations.
2. Forming Peer Groups
• Relatively stable friendship networks are the hallmark of middle childhood peer relations. Children this age have a well-defined sense of "groupness", with an us-them understanding, partly due to their social experiences in clubs and group memberships
• School age children tend to play with relatively stable clusters of friends, with girls' networks generally smaller than boys' networks. Girls emphasize intimacy and sharing of confidences with girls.
• Boys are more likely to engage in competitions and joint building activities. Girls focus on accord and verbal and emotional intimacy.
3. Coordinating Friendship and Group Interaction
• Trust and reciprocity are the lessons of close friendships. Cooperation, coordination of activities, and adherence to rules/norms are the primary lessons of peer groups.
• Both close friendships and acceptance by peer groups are related to feelings of self-worth and lack of loneliness in children. Friendships promote integration into a group, and functioning in the group is a rich context for sharing between friends.
4. Adhering to Peer Group Norms
• Elementary school children are very conscious of peer group norms, and they often interpret rules rigidly and literally.
• Norms include fairness, equity, and sharing.
• Good arena for promoting moral development.
5. Maintaining Gender Boundaries
   The peer group is a major agent of socialization, particularly for gender roles. Gender-role learning is facilitated by border work, in which children define and defend the borders of their gender-segregated groups by reacting negatively toward children who stray too far across gender lines. Must follow unwritten rules of contact between the sexes (see Table 12.1).
   
• Status and Acceptance in the Peer Group
1. A research technique called sociometrics is used to measure children's peer status-the extent to which they are accepted by their peers. This technique involves asking children to name others they especially like or don't like to play with.
2. Status and acceptance in children's peer groups are related to personal characteristics that are instrumental for achieving group goals. Unpopular children may be either rejected or neglected. Aggressive children are more likely to be rejected. The combination of aggression and rejection is strongly associated with maladjustment.
3. Peer status tends to become more firm in middle childhood. Popular and unpopular children's behaviors tend to reinforce peer attitudes toward them and help to perpetuate their status within the group.
4. Peer acceptance is a good predictor of adjustment in adolescence and mental health in adulthood. Intervention strategies have been examined. Close friendships in middle childhood seem to forecast positive adult relationships.

• During middle childhood, children go beyond simply experiencing emotions such as guilt and pride to understanding these emotions and their causes.
• The Changing Understanding of Emotion
1. During middle childhood one major advance in understanding emotions is the ability to understand the complexity of emotion-arousing situations. More differentiation is shown.
2. School-age children can take into account the particular situation when determining an appropriate emotional response.
3. School-age children know a great deal about display rules for emotions.
4. These changes are related to increases in true empathy for others.
• Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Bases of Moral Development
1. Cognitive advances, social relationships, and emotions all work together to foster moral development. School-age children's more mature moral thinking is due not only to their cognitive ability to understand other people's feelings but also to their emotional experiences in friendships and their commitment to them.
2. Will experience feelings of guilt when standards are not met and this prompts them to try to justify their behavior or compensate for what they have done.
3. The combined influences of all of the factors were explored by Keller and Edelstein (1993) in a series of studies with 7- and 12-year-olds.
4. Moral principles adopted depend largely on one's culture.

• The Family
1. Parents and siblings are powerful influences on children's behavior.
2. Parent-Child Relationships
• Partly due to advancing cognitive abilities, children's relationships with parents change markedly during middle childhood, moving toward coregulation. Parents begin to give their children more responsibilities; and are less inclined to use physical coercion and more likely to use reasoning in order to get their children to do what they should. The parents' role as monitors of behavior remains critically important.
• Parents model behavior and influence by how they supervise and what they expect of them, which is different for boys vs. girls.
3. Parenting Styles and Child Development
• Parental characteristics that show warmth, support, and a reasoning approach to discipline is consistently associated with child characteristics like cooperativeness, effective coping, low levels of behavior problems and a high sense of personal responsibility.
• In contrast, absence of warmth and reliance on power-assertive discipline are associated with aggression, noncompliance, and projecting blame for negative outcomes.
• The connection between parenting style and child development is not a cause-effect relationship.
• It is important to look at clusters of parenting characteristics rather than isolated traits.
• As discussed in Chapter 10, authoritative parenting, as contrasted with either authoritarian or permissive parenting, tends to be associated with positive outcomes in middle childhood, including a higher degree of agency (tendency to take initiative, rise to challenges, and try to influence events).
• There are positive developmental outcomes in families where parent-child conflicts over goals are infrequent and are resolved in a balanced way. This style of parenting seems to be based in parents' earlier responsiveness to infant needs and the development of positive expectations on both sides.
• Factors that encourage harmonious parent-child relationships include cognitive advances that allow for and understanding of the legitimacy of parents' authority and empathy or caring shown by the parents.
• Family Violence, Conflict, and Divorce
1. Harsh physical abuse is related to later negative behavior in children, even when it is not directed specifically at them.
2. Family conflict, divorce, and separation from parents also have a variety of effects. Effects of divorce vary, depending on age and sex of the children. Long-term outcomes for children of divorce can be positive, especially if conflict decreases after the divorce and the children maintain positive relationships with both parents.
• Sibling Relationships
1. Sibling relationships resemble parent-child relationships in some ways and peer relations in other ways.
2. Sibling relationships provide a setting for learning to deal with conflict within a relationship. Children also learn various social skills from the roles they play as older and younger siblings, and these relationships often cross gender boundaries.
• Emotional qualities of sibling relationships. Competition for parents' attention and approval is common.
1. Sibling strife based on social comparisons intensifies around age 8. By late middle childhood, children feel that they have more conflicts with their siblings than with their friends.
2. Siblings can be seen as facilitators, helpers.
3. Quality of sibling relationships varies greatly from case to case, influenced by closeness in age, gender composition, stress experienced by the siblings, personalities, and preferential treatment by parents.
• The importance of sibling relationships. Teaches how to deal with anger and aggression in an ongoing relationship. Must work things out to continue to live with each other.
1. Important because of mutual support they can provide.
2. Other benefits depend on the ages-caretaking; boss roles.
3. Maladjustment can result from exceptionally conflictual sibling relationships. See the sibling amplifier model for child aggressiveness.
• The School
1. Formal schooling begins and changes children's lives dramatically. Must meet societal expectations for knowledge acquisition and performance.
2. Socialization in the Classroom
• In addition to the regular curriculum, school also provides opportunities for children to learn many kinds of social behavior and to acquire mainstream cultural values and norms, including gender roles (such as the differences noted in classroom behavior between girls and boys, and how teachers respond to these differences. The atmosphere is often not female friendly, especially for high achieving females).
• Influences on School Achievement and Adjustment. The specific school environment has an impact on children's behavior and achievement, and children's own personalities and abilities also contribute to their school adjustment and success.
• After-School Care
1. Approximately 75 percent of American households are either single-parent or two-career families.
2. Researchers are especially concerned about latchkey children, particularly those living in poverty since significant time in after-school self-care is associated with academic and behavioral problems.

• Development in middle childhood is coherent in the same three ways as in early childhood:
1. Coherent set of influences.
2. Coherence of individual adaptation.
3. Coherence of development over time.
• Coherent Sets of Influences
  Family, peers, and school are an interacting set of agents of socialization during middle childhood. Because they affect one another, the influences they exert on the child tend to be similar in certain ways.
  
• For instance social competence is related to peer and sibling competence, which can influence parent-child interactions.
• School adjustment affects adjustments in other contexts as well.
• The Coherence of Individual Adaptations
  The distinctive characteristics of children--their individual patterns of adaptations--are also coherent.
  
• The Coherence of Development over Time
1. There is also coherence in how clusters of characteristics develop over time. Socially competent toddlers who are securely attached to their caregivers tend to become preschoolers who are competent with peers, and they, in turn, tend to go on to be popular and well-adjusted during the elementary school years. With age, a child's current characteristics become increasingly predictable from his or her past characteristics.
2. Factors within the child-skills, experiences, personal beliefs, and social expectations formed early in life and carried forward into middle childhood-also enter the picture.
3. Feelings of self-worth and positive expectations move the child toward closer and more complex relationships. These are what Bowlby called internal working models (Chapter 6).
• These models are reflected in children's stories and drawings.
• Connections between internal working models and behavior are illustrated in the behavior of aggressive children, via their perceptions of others' actions as being hostile (especially in ambiguous situations).