Chapter Introduction

CHAPTER 13
Middle Childhood: Psychosocial Development

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What Will You Know?

  1. What helps some children thrive in a difficult family, school, or neighborhood?

    Resilience has been defined as “a dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity.” The social context, especially supportive adults who do not blame the child, is crucial. In general, a child's interpretation of a family situation determines how it affects him or her. Religious faith can be crucial in helping children cope because it provides hope and meaning.

  2. Should parents marry, risking divorce, or not marry, and thus avoid divorce?

    The legal status of the parents is not the most important factor. Instead, it is the stability that parents can provide that is critical. Marriage should be entered into slowly and carefully, and couples need to work to keep their relationship strong. If a divorce is the only solution to a troubled marriage, parents need to minimize transitions and strive to maintain the child's relationship with each parent.

  3. What can be done to stop a bully?

    Most victimized children find ways to halt ongoing bullying by ignoring, retaliating, defusing, or avoiding. Friends can defend each other and restore self–esteem. The school community as a whole needs to change. When the school climate encourages learning and cooperation, children with high self–esteem are unlikely to become bullies. If peers within a school are encouraged to notice bullying and to empathize with the victim and learn to stop admiring the bully, this aggression decreases.

  4. When would children lie to adults to protect a friend?

    When child culture conflicts with adult morality, children often align themselves with peers. Peer values may outweigh adult values. There are three moral imperatives in middle childhood: Protect your friends; don't tell adults what is happening; conform to peer standards of dress, talk, and behavior.

  1. The Nature of the Child

    Industry and Inferiority

    Self-Concept

    Culture and Self-Esteem

    Resilience and Stress

  2. Families and Children

    Shared and Nonshared Environments

    a view from science: “I Always Dressed One in Blue Stuff…”

    Family Structure and Family Function

    a view from science: Divorce

    Connecting Family Structure and Function

    a case to study: How Hard Is It to Be a Kid?

    Family Trouble

  3. The Peer Group

    The Culture of Children

    Friendships

    Popular and Unpopular Children

    Bullies and Victims

  4. Children’s Moral Values

    Moral Reasoning

    What Children Value

“But Dad, that’s not fair! Why does Keaton get to kill zombies and I can’t?”

“Well, because you are too young to kill zombies. Your cousin Keaton is older than you, so that’s why he can do it. You’ll get nightmares.”

“That’s soooo not fair.”

“Next year, after your birthday, I’ll let you kill zombies.”

[adapted from Asma, 2013]

This conversation between a professor and his 8-year-old illustrates psychosocial development in middle childhood, explained in this chapter. All children want to do what the bigger children do, and all parents seek to protect their children, sometimes ineffectively. Throughout middle childhood, issues of parents and peers, fairness and justice, inclusion and exclusion are pervasive. Age takes on new importance, as concrete operational thinking makes chronology more salient, and age-based cutoffs are the usual mode that schools, camps, and athletic leagues decide if a given child is “ready.”

I still remember who was the youngest, and the oldest, child in my fourth grade class—even though we all were born within the same 12 months. In the excerpt above, the professor hoped his son would no longer want to kill zombies when he was 9, but as you will see, a child’s sense of fairness often differs from an adult’s. Morality is the final topic of this chapter, but even the first topic, the nature of the child, raises ethical as well as psychosocial questions.