195

Setting the Challenge: Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation, the ability to manage and control our feelings, is crucial to having a successful life. Children with externalizing tendencies often “act out their emotions” and behave aggressively. Children with internalizing tendencies have problems managing intense fear. Both temperamental tendencies, at their extreme, cause problems during childhood.

Self-awareness changes dramatically as children move into middle childhood. Concrete operational children think about themselves in psychological terms, realistically scan their abilities, and evaluate themselves in comparison with peers. These realistic self-perceptions explain why self-esteem normally declines during elementary school. Comparing Erikson’s early childhood task (initiative versus guilt) with industry versus inferiority highlights the message that, in middle childhood, we fully wake up to the realities of life. Relationships, academics, behavior, sports, and looks are the five areas from which elementary schoolchildren derive their self-esteem.

Children with externalizing tendencies minimize their difficulties with other people and may have unrealistically high self-esteem. Children with internalizing tendencies may develop learned helplessness, the feeling that they are incapable of doing well. Because both attitudes keep children from improving their behavior, the key to helping every child is to focus on enhancing self-efficacy, promote realistic views of the self, and offer love.

Prosocial behaviors—helping, comforting, and sharing acts—seem built into our biology and appear spontaneously during toddlerhood. There also is consistency, with prosocial preschoolers tending to be prosocial later on. While girls may be more attuned than boys to upsetting feelings, females are not necessarily more prosocial than males.

Acting prosocially—at older ages—involves transforming one’s empathy (directly experiencing another’s feelings) into sympathy (feeling for another person), having the information processing skills to decide when to be prosocial, feeling you can effectively offer help, and being happy. Promote prosocial behavior by allowing the child to naturally experience the joy of performing prosocial acts, model caring in your relationships, define the child as “a good person,” and use induction (get a child who has behaved hurtfully to understand the other person’s feelings). Induction helps because it induces guilt. Child-rearing techniques involving shame (personal humiliation) backfire, making children angry and less likely to act in prosocial ways.

Aggression, or hurtful behavior, is also basic to being human. Rates of open aggression (hitting, yelling) dramatically decline as children get older. Proactive aggression is hurtful behavior we initiate. Reactive aggression occurs in response to being frustrated or hurt. Relational aggression refers to acts of aggression designed to damage social relationships. Relational aggression increases during late elementary school and middle school, and is present in girls and boys. High levels of reactive aggression present problems getting along in the world.

A two-step pathway may produce a highly aggressive child. When toddlers are very active (exuberant) or difficult, caregivers may respond harshly and punitively—causing anger and aggression. Then, during school, the child’s “bad” behavior causes social rejection which leads to more reactive aggression. Highly aggressive children may have a hostile attributional bias. This “the world is out to get me” outlook is understandable since aggressive children may have been living in a rejecting environment since their earliest years. Because boys tend to act out their feelings, they are more likely to be diagnosed as having “problematic aggression” than are girls.

Play is at the heart of childhood. Rough-and-tumble play (play fighting and wrestling), is typical of boys. Fantasy play or pretending—typical of all children—begins in later infancy and becomes mutual at about age 4, with the beginning of collaborative pretend play. Fantasy play declines during concrete operations, as children become interested in organized activities.

Fantasy play may help children practice adult roles; offer a sense of control; and teach the need to adhere to norms and rules. Although educators view fantasy play as vitally important, the idea that pretending is critical to children’s development has yet to be proved.

Gender-segregated play unfolds during preschool, and in elementary school girls and boys typically play mainly with their own sex. Boy-to-boy play is rambunctious, while girls play together in quiet, collaborative ways. Boys tend to compete in groups; girls play one-to-one. Boys’ play is more excluding of girls. Gender-stereotyped play seems to have a biological basis, as shown by the fact that high testosterone levels during our early months and in utero promote stereotypically male behaviors. It is also socialized by adults and by peers as children play together in same-sex groups. According to gender schema theory, once children understand that they are a boy or a girl, they attend to and model behaviors of their own sex.

In childhood (and adulthood) we select friends who are similar to ourselves, and when children get older, deeper qualities, such as sharing feelings, having similar moral worldviews, and loyalty, become important. Friends provide children with emotional support and teach us to modulate our emotions.

While popular children are often prosocial, relational aggression helps children gain status. Still, being kind—not relationally aggressive—gets children well liked by their peers. Rejected children are disliked—either because of serious externalizing or internalizing problems, or because they are different from the group. Although unpopular children are at risk for later problems, children who are rejected for being different may flower as adults.

Children who are unpopular—either aggressive bully-victims or, more typically, shy, anxious kids—are vulnerable to chronic bullying. Its anonymous, 24/7 public nature makes cyberbullying more toxic than face-to-face harassment. Because bullying of any kind depends on peer reinforcement, school bully prevention programs work to change the class norms favoring relational aggression. To help socially anxious children, connect timid preschoolers with a friend. Give at-risk exuberant toddlers lots of love, and understand that these “difficult” girls and boys can flourish in the right environment.

196