Chapter Overview

Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development

• Erikson provided a framework for understanding children’s personal development. His theory helps us understand the emergence of the self in early development, the need for self-sufficiency in the school years, and the search for identity in adolescence. According to Erikson, children need a safe and secure environment in order to develop a sense of trust. They also need opportunities to initiate activities and to learn about their different strengths and options for the future.

Foundations of Social and Emotional Development

• Children’s social and emotional development begins with early attachment relations. Children need secure attachments with parents who are warm, responsive, and caring.

• Attachments with caregivers, including teachers, can affect many behaviors important for school success, including curiosity, attention, problem-solving behavior, and persistence.

• With development, children become better interpreters of people’s emotions and better able to use this information in regulating their behavior. They also become better able to express and understand complex emotions such as embarrassment, guilt, and jealousy. Gender and cultural expectations can influence what emotions are expressed and how they are expressed.

• Self-control involves the deliberate use of cognitive or behavioral strategies to achieve a desired goal. It is important for establishing positive social relations, for adjusting to school, for learning, and for lowering the risk of adolescent health and safety problems.

• Between the ages of 5 and 12, children show an increased ability to use cognitive and behavioral strategies for controlling impulses, tolerating frustration, and delaying gratification.

• School can play an important role in the development of emotional competence in the classroom. Teachers need to (1) create a positive affective environment for students, (2) model how to exhibit and express emotions, (3) discuss emotions with students, and (4) provide explicit instruction regarding how to handle emotions and stress.

Development of Self-Conceptions

• Self-concept refers to a set of beliefs, attitudes, ideas, and knowledge that people have about themselves. Young children describe themselves in terms of physical traits, whereas older children and adolescents use psychological traits (i.e., intelligent, trustworthy, caring, etc.) and abstract concepts (e.g., devout Catholic). In addition, as children mature, their self-concepts become more differentiated and integrated. They see themselves as having multiple abilities, and they begin to see links between their past, present, and future selves. As children become more introspective with age, they can become more self-conscious and self-critical. During the early school years, children’s self-esteem increases as they achieve success in peer relations. Although there is considerable stability in children’s self-esteem by the late elementary years, the school environment plays a very important role in helping children and adolescents maintain positive self-esteem. Teachers who show concern about students, involve students in decision making, and encourage self-sufficiency can have a positive influence on self-esteem. Schools and classrooms that are highly structured, controlling, and competitive can have a negative influence on self-esteem.

• Students’ perceptions and evaluations of their abilities influence their performance in school. Doing well in school can bolster self-esteem, which, in turn, can affect how well students do in school later on. Once a child’s sense of ability is firmly established, it can have a stronger influence on academic performance than grades, standardized test scores, and other measures of ability.

• Children begin to develop an awareness of ethnic differences early. By age 3, children can correctly identify skin color and their own ethnic group. Because of racial prejudices and stereotypes, it may be difficult for ethnic minority children to develop positive feelings of competency and worth. Early research suggested that a larger percentage of African-American and Native American children than white children misidentify with their ethnic group. This misidentification was presumed to indicate low self-esteem and self-hatred. Current research, however, suggests that this early work may have been based on faulty assumptions. Most studies today report little difference in white and African-American children’s self-perceptions, if they are succeeding in school and are held in high regard by parents and peers. The racial composition of the school can also have an important influence on the self-concepts and self-esteem of ethnic minority youths.

• The work of forming an ethnic identity generally takes place in adolescence. Ethnic minority youths have four possible ways to resolve identity issues. They can assimilate to the dominant culture or become a marginal member of the dominant culture. Alternately, they can choose to associate only with their own ethnic group. Fourth, adolescents can become bicultural by maintaining ties to both cultures through a process of code switching. Unfortunately, some youths resolve their identity crisis by forming a negative identity. They totally reject the values of the dominant culture as well as their own.

• Gender role identity is a key component of the self. During the school years, children acquire an understanding of what it means to be a male and female in our society. The gender-role concepts of young children tend to be very rigid and exaggerated. Therefore, the gender-role behaviors and attitudes of young children tend to be very sexist. Students’ self-concepts of abilities reflect traditional sex stereotypes: Boys are better at physical, mathematical, and technical activities, and girls are better at verbal, social, and domestic activities. With cognitive maturity, children’s gender-role concepts become more flexible and less absolute. Adolescents who have a blend of masculine and feminine traits (i.e., they are androgynous) tend to have high-esteem, positive self-concepts, and good coping skills.

• Gender-role behaviors and attitudes are learned from the environment through the process of socialization. Parents are extremely influential socializers of gender norms. Considerable research suggests that they model sex-typed behaviors, they encourage boys and girls to engage in sex-typed activities, and they treat boys and girls differently. Along with the family and the mass media, schools have an important role in gender-role socialization. In books and television programs, male and female characters continue to perform in sex-stereotypic occupations and domestic roles. The school setting is an important place for confirming and consolidating gender-role conceptions. Unfortunately, the images of masculinity and femininity children are exposed to at school continue to be sex-stereotypic.

Development of Achievement Motivation

• In achievement situations, motivation refers to forces that initiate, sustain, and terminate behavior. Motivation has been defined as an enduring trait, a situational state, and a set of cognitions, values, and beliefs. Most contemporary theories of motivation fall within the cognitive model. These theories emphasize the importance of efficacy beliefs, achievement values, causal attributions, and achievement goals. Of these cognitive theories, goal theory may provide the most useful framework for teachers. When children are focused on learning goals, they define their competence in terms of improvement, focus on their efforts, perceive errors as a part of the learning process, attribute difficulties to lack of effort, and persist at finding the correct solution. With a learning focus, students use cognitive strategies that can enhance conceptual understanding and the long-term retention of information. In contrast, a performance orientation tends to be associated with lower levels of cognitive engagement in learning activities and with negative affect and task avoidance when learning tasks are difficult.

• The home environment is a source of individual differences in motivation. During early development, children need an opportunity to explore and to have an effect on their environment. Parenting styles that support children’s independence are positively associated with higher levels of perceived competence and intrinsic motivation. Also, children who view their abilities as something that can be enhanced through effort and practice have higher levels of perceived competence and intrinsic motivation. When children perceive their abilities as fixed and unchangeable, it can have a negative effect on motivation. Motivation problems are prevalent among low-income children due to lack of resources at home to support learning, mismatches between the home and school environment, and the lack of educational and employment opportunities.

• As children progress in school, they report lower self-perceptions of ability, less control over learning, less intrinsic motivation to learn, and more anxiety about grades and evaluation. It is believed that these changes result from both individual and environmental changes. As children mature cognitively, they are better able to evaluate and integrate different sources of information about their abilities. They are also better able to compare their abilities with those of others. But most theorists believe that declines in motivation result from changes in the school environment. As students progress in school, the learning environment becomes more structured, controlling, impersonal, and evaluative. These conditions make it difficult for students to maintain positive perceptions of their abilities and to sustain an intrinsic interest in learning.