Children gradually learn when and how to express emotions, becoming more capable in every aspect of their lives. Controlling the expression of their feelings, called emotional regulation, is the preeminent psychosocial task between ages 2 and 6. Emotional regulation is a lifelong endeavor, with early childhood crucial for its development (Gross, 2014; Lewis, 2013).

By age 6, signs of emotional regulation are evident. Most children can be angry but not explosive, frightened but not terrified, sad but not inconsolable, anxious but not withdrawn, proud but not boastful. Depending on training and temperament, some emotions are easier to control than others, but even temperamentally angry or fearful children learn to regulate their emotions (Moran et al., 2013, Tan et al., 2013).

202

Cultural differences are apparent: Children may be encouraged to laugh/cry/yell or, the opposite, to hide emotions. Some adults guffaw, slap their knees, and stomp their feet for joy; others use their hands to cover their mouths if a smile spontaneously appears. No matter what the specifics, parents everywhere teach emotional regulation (Kim & Sasaki, 2014).

Emotional regulation is also called effortful control (Eisenberg et al., 2014), a term which highlights that controlling outbursts is not easy, in childhood or later, for reasons that are biological as well as experiential. Effortful control is more difficult when people—of any age—are in pain, tired, or hungry.

I see this in my own life. My 5-year-old grandson burst into tears when he spilled his snack—grapes—on the subway platform. A stranger gave him an orange, and immediately his tears vanished. I worried that he lacked emotional regulation, but then my daughter reminded me that when I am tired and hungry I sometimes snap at her.

Emotional regulation is one of the skills children acquire during Erikson’s third developmental stage, initiative versus guilt. Initiative can mean several things—saying something new, expanding an ability, beginning a project, expressing an emotion. Depending on the outcome (especially reactions from other people), children feel proud or guilty.

Usually, North American parents encourage enthusiasm, effort, and pride in their 2- to 6-year-olds, and they also prevent guilt from becoming self-hatred. If, instead, parents ignore rather than guide those emotions of joy and pride, a child may not learn emotional regulation (Morris et al., 2007).

Guidance, yes; brutal honesty, no. Preschool children are usually proud of themselves, overestimating their skills. As one team expressed it:

Compared to older children and adults, young children are the optimists of the world, believing they have greater physical abilities, better memories, are more skilled at imitating models, are smarter, know more about how things work, and rate themselves as stronger, tougher, and of higher social standing than is actually the case.

[Bjorklund & Ellis, 2014, p. 245]

That helps them try new things, which advances learning of all kinds. As Erikson predicted, their optimistic self-concept protects them from guilt and shame.

If young children know the limits of their ability, they will not imagine becoming an NBA forward, a Grammy winner, a billionaire inventor. But that might discourage them from trying to learn new things (Bjorklund & Ellis, 2014). Initiative is a driving force for young children, and that is as it should be.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE In the United States, pride quickly includes gender, size, and heritage. Girls are usually happy to be girls; boys to be boys; both are glad they aren’t babies. “Crybaby” is an insult; praise for being “a big kid” is welcomed; pride in doing something better than a younger child is expressed, even when it makes the younger child feel sad.

203

Many young children believe that whatever they are is good. They feel superior to children of the other sex, or of another nationality or religion. This arises because of maturation: Cognition enables children to understand group categories, not only of ethnicity, gender, and nationality, but even categories that are irrelevant. They remember more about cartoon characters whose names begin with the same letter as theirs do (Ross et al., 2011).

One amusing example occurred when preschoolers were asked to explain why one person would steal from another, as occurred in a story about two fictional tribes, the Zaz and the Flurps. As you would expect from theory-theory, they readily found reasons. Their first reason illustrated their understanding of groups. Only when that failed did they consider personality.

“Why did a Zaz steal a toy from a Flurp?”

“Because he’s a Zaz, but he’s a Flurp … They’re not the same kind …?”

“Why did a Zaz steal a toy from a Zaz?”

“Because he’s a very mean boy.”

[Rhodes, 2013, p. 259]

The new initiative that Erikson describes results from myelination of the limbic system, growth of the prefrontal cortex, and a longer attention span—all the result of neurological maturation. Emotional regulation and cognitive maturation develop together, each enabling the other to advance (Bell & Calkins, 2011; Lewis, 2013).

Normally, neurological advances in the prefrontal cortex at about age 4 or 5 make children less likely to throw tantrums, pick fights, or giggle during prayer. Throughout early childhood, violent outbursts, uncontrolled crying, and terrifying phobias (irrational, crippling fears) diminish.

The capacity for self-control, such as not opening a present immediately if asked to wait and not expressing disappointment at an undesirable gift, becomes more evident. Consider the most recent time you gave someone a gift. If the receiver was a young child, you probably could tell whether the child liked the present. If the receiver was an adult, you might not know.

In one study, researchers asked children to wait eight minutes while their mothers did some paperwork before opening a wrapped present in front of them (Cole et al., 2010). The children used strategies to help them wait, including distractions and private speech.

204

Keisha was one of the study participants:

“Are you done, Mom?” … “I wonder what’s in it” … “Can I open it now?”

Each time her mother reminds Keisha to wait, eventually adding, “If you keep interrupting me, I can’t finish and if I don’t finish …” Keisha plops in her chair, frustrated. “I really want it,” she laments, aloud but to herself. “I want to talk to mommy so I won’t open it. If I talk, Mommy won’t finish. If she doesn’t finish, I can’t have it.” She sighs deeply, folds her arms, and scans the room…. The research assistant returns. Keisha looks at her mother with excited anticipation. Her mother says, “OK, now.” Keisha tears open the gift.

[Cole et al., 2010, p. 59]

This is a more recent example of the famous marshmallow test. Children could eat one marshmallow immediately or get two marshmallows if they waited—-sometimes as long as 15 minutes. Children who delayed gobbling up a marshmallow became more successful as teenagers, young adults, and even middle-aged adults—doing well in college, for instance, and having happy marriages (Mischel, 2014).

Of course, this is correlation, not causation: Some preschoolers who did not wait became successful in later life. Many factors influence emotional regulation:

Motivation is the impulse that propels someone to act. It comes either from a person’s own desires or from the social context.

Intrinsic motivation arises from within, when people do something for the joy of doing it: A musician might enjoy making music even if no one else hears it. Intrinsic motivation is thought to advance creativity, innovation, and emotional well-being (Weinstein & DeHaan, 2014). Erikson’s psychosocial needs are intrinsic: The young child feels compelled to initiate things, from walking along a ledge to exploring an anthill.

Extrinsic motivation comes from outside the person, when people do something to gain praise or some other reinforcement. A musician might play for applause or money. Social rewards are powerful lifelong: Four-year-olds hold an adult hand crossing the street because they are praised for doing so—and punished if they forget. If an extrinsic reward stops, the behavior stops, unless it has become a habit, continued because it feels right (intrinsic).

Intrinsic motivation is crucial for children. They play, question, and explore for the sheer joy of it. That serves them well. A study found that 3-year-olds who were strong in intrinsic motivation were, two years later, advanced in early math and literacy (Mokrova et al., 2013).

Child-centered preschools, as described in Chapter 5, depend on children’s motivation to talk, play, learn, and move. Praise and prizes might be appreciated, but that’s not why children work at what they do. When playing a game, few young children keep score; the fun is in the activity (intrinsic), not the winning.

Intrinsic motivation is apparent when children invent dialogues for their toys, concentrate on creating a work of art or architecture, or converse with imaginary friends. Such conversations with invisible companions are rarely encouraged by adults (thus no extrinsic motivation), but from about age 2 to 7, imaginary friends are increasingly common. Children know their imaginary friends are invisible and pretend, but conjuring them up meets various intrinsic psychosocial needs (M. Taylor et al., 2009).

205

The distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation may be crucial in understanding how and when to praise something the child has done. Praise may be effective when it is connected to the particular production, not to a general trait. For example, the adult might say, “You worked hard and did a good drawing,” not “You are a great artist.” The goal is to help the child feel happy that effort paid off. That motivates future action (Zentall & Morris, 2010).

In a set of experiments which suggest that specific praise for effort is better than generalized statements, some 4- to 7-year-old boys were told that boys are good at a particular game. Knowing this decreased their scores on the game. The same thing happened when girls were told that girls were good at the game. The children apparently feared that they would not be as good as most children of their sex. They “felt less happy and less competent, liked the game less, [and] were less persistent” (Cimpian, 2013, p. 272).

By contrast, other children were told that one particular child was good at the game. That led them to believe that personal effort mattered. That belief was motivating; their scores were higher than those told that boys or girls in general were good.

Play is timeless and universal—apparent in every part of the world over thousands of years. Many developmentalists believe that play is the most productive as well as the most enjoyable activity that children undertake (Elkind, 2007; Bateson & Martin, 2013; P. Smith, 2010). Not everyone agrees. Whether play is essential for normal growth or is merely fun is “a controversial topic of study” (Pellegrini, 2011, p. 3).

This controversy underlies many of the disputes regarding preschool education, which increasingly stresses academic skills. One consequence is that “play in school has become an endangered species” (Trawick-Smith, 2012, p. 259). Among the leading theorists of human development, Vygotsky is well known for his respect for child’s play, which makes a playing child “a head taller” than his or her actual height (Vygotsky, 1980).

Some educators want children to play less in order to focus on reading and math; others predict emotional and academic problems for children who rarely play. If children are kept quiet for a long time, they tend to play more vigorously when they finally have the chance (Pellegrini, 2013). For people of all ages, taking a break from concentrated intellectual work enhances learning.

PLAYMATES There are two general kinds of play, pretend play that often occurs when a child is alone and social play that occurs with playmates. One meta-analysis of the research on pretend and social play is careful not to confuse correlation with causation (Lillard et al., 2013). That is an important precaution because imaginative children tend to be intelligent children, not because of their pretend play but simply as a correlation.

The researchers report that evidence is weak or mixed regarding pretend play but that social play has much to commend it. If social play is prevented, children are less happy and less able to learn, which suggests that social play is one way that children develop their minds and social skills.

Young children play best with peers, that is, people of about the same age and social status. Although infants are intrigued by other children, most infant play is either solitary or with a parent. Some maturation is required for play with peers (Bateson & Martin, 2013).

206

207

Such an advance can be seen over the years of early childhood. Toddlers are too self-absorbed to be good playmates, but they learn quickly. By age 6, most children are quite skilled: Some know how to join a peer group, manage conflict, take turns, find friends, and keep the action going (Şendil & Erden, 2014; Göncü & Gaskins, 2011). As they become better playmates, they learn emotional regulation, empathy, and cultural understanding.

Parents have an obvious task: Find peers and arrange play partners. Of course, some parents play with their children, which benefits both generations. But even the most playful parent is outmatched by another child at negotiating the rules of tag, at play-fighting, at pretending to be sick, at killing dragons, and so on. Specifics vary, but “play with peers is one of the most important areas in which children develop positive social skills” (Xu, 2010, p. 496).

Parents in some cultures consider play important and willingly engage in games and dramas. In other places, sheer survival takes time and energy, and children must help by doing chores. In those places, if children play, it is with each other, not with adults who spend all their energy on basic tasks (Kalliala, 2006; Roopnarine, 2011).

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT As children grow older, play becomes more social, influenced by brain maturation, playmate availability, and the physical setting. One developmentalist bemoans the twenty-first century’s “swift and pervasive rise of electronic media” and adults who lean “more toward control than freedom.” He praises children who find places to play independently and “conspire ways to elude adult management” (Chudacoff, 2011, p. 108).

His opinion may be extreme, but it is echoed in more common concerns. As you remember, one dispute in preschool education is the proper balance between unstructured, creative play and teacher-directed learning. Before the electronic age, most families had several children and few mothers worked outside the home. The children played outside with all their neighbors, boys and girls, of several ages.

That was true in the United States a century ago. In 1932, the American sociologist Mildred Parten described the development of five stages of social play, each more advanced than the previous one:

Parten thought that progress in social play was age-related, with 1-year-olds usually playing alone and 6-year-olds usually cooperatively.

208

Research on contemporary children finds much more age variation, perhaps because family size is smaller and parents invest heavily in each child. Many Asian parents successfully teach 3-year-olds to take turns, share, and otherwise cooperate (stage 5). Many North American children, encouraged to be individuals, still engage in parallel play at age 6 (stage 3). Given all the social, political, and economic changes over the past century, many forms of social play (not necessarily in Parten’s five-step sequence) are normal (Xu, 2010).

ACTIVE PLAY Children need physical activity to develop muscle strength and control. Peers provide an audience, role models, and sometimes competition. For instance, running skills develop best when children chase or race each other, not when a child runs alone. Gross motor play is favored among young children, who enjoy climbing, kicking, and tumbling (Case-Smith & Kuhaneck, 2008).

Active social play—not solitary play—correlates with peer acceptance and a healthy self-concept and may help regulate emotions (Becker et al., 2014; Sutton-Smith, 2011). Adults need to remember this when they want children to sit still and be quiet.

Among nonhuman primates, deprivation of social play warps later life, rendering some monkeys unable to mate, to make friends, or even to survive alongside other monkeys (Herman et al., 2011; Palagi, 2011). Might the same be true for human primates?

The most common form of active play is called rough-and-tumble play because it looks quite rough and because the children seem to tumble over one another. The term was coined by British scientists who studied animals in East Africa (Blurton-Jones, 1976). They noticed that monkeys often chased, attacked, rolled over in the dirt, and wrestled quite roughly, but without injuring one another.

If a young male monkey wanted to play, he would simply catch the eye of a peer and then run a few feet away. This invitation to rough-and-tumble play was almost always accepted with a play face (smiling, not angry). Puppies, kittens, and young baboons behave similarly.

When these scientists returned to London, they saw that their own children, like baby monkeys, engaged in rough-and-tumble play, signified by the play face. Children chase, wrestle, and grab each other, developing games like tag and cops-and-robbers, with various conventions, expressions, and gestures that children use to signify “just pretend.”

Rough-and-tumble play happens everywhere (although cops-and-robbers can be “robots-and-humans” or many other iterations) and has probably been common among children for thousands of years (Fry, 2014). It is much more common among boys than girls and flourishes best in ample space with minimal supervision (Pellegrini, 2013).

Many scientists think that rough-and-tumble play helps the prefrontal cortex develop, as children learn to regulate emotions, practice social skills, and strengthen their bodies (Pellis & Pellis, 2011). Indeed, some believe that play in childhood, especially rough-and-tumble play between father and son, may prevent antisocial behavior (even murder) later on (Fry, 2014; Wenner, 2009).

Another major type of active play is sociodramatic play, in which children act out various roles and plots. Through such acting, children:

Sociodramatic play builds on pretending, which emerges in toddlerhood. But preschoolers do more than pretend; they combine their imagination with that of their friends, advancing in theory of mind (Kavanaugh, 2011). As they become conscious of gender differences, preschoolers also prefer to play with children of their own sex. Their play differs by gender.

This was evident in a day-care center in Finland, which allowed extensive free play. The boys often enacted dramas of good guys versus bad guys. In this episode, four boys did so, with Joni as the bad guy. Tuomas directed the drama and acted in it.

Tuomas: … and now he [Joni] would take me and would hang me…. this would be the end of all of me.

Joni: Hands behind!

Tuomas: I can’t help it … I have to. [The two other boys follow his example.]

Joni: I would put fire all around them.

[All three brave boys lie on the floor with hands tied behind their backs. Joni piles mattresses on them, and pretends to light a fire, which crackles closer and closer.]

Tuomas: Everything is lost!

[One boy starts to laugh.]

Petterl: Better not to laugh, soon we will all be dead…. I am saying my last words.

Tuomas: Now you can say your last wish…. And now I say I wish we can be terribly strong.

[At that point, the three boys suddenly gain extraordinary strength, pushing off the mattresses and extinguishing the fire. Good triumphs over evil, but not until the last moment, because, as one boy explains, “Otherwise this playing is not exciting at all.”]

[adapted from Kalliala, 2006, p. 83]

Often boys’ sociodramatic play includes danger and then victory over evil. By contrast, girls typically act out domestic scenes, with themselves as the adults. In the same day-care center where Joni piled mattresses on his playmates, preparing to burn them, the girls say their play is “more beautiful and peaceful … [but] boys play all kinds of violent games” (Kalliala, 2006, p. 110).

The prevalence of sociodramatic play varies by culture, with parents often following cultural norms. Some cultures find make-believe frivolous and discourage it; in other cultures, parents teach toddlers to be lions, or robots, or ladies drinking tea. Then children elaborate on those themes (Kavanaugh, 2011). Many children are avid television watchers, and they act out superhero themes.

That children copy superheroes and villains from video screens is troubling to many developmentalists, who prefer dramas from a child’s imagination. This is not to say that screen time is necessarily bad: Children learn from videos, especially if adults watch with them. However, children rarely select educational programs over fast-paced cartoons with characters who hit, shoot, and kick. They act out what they have seen.

210

Canadian as well as U.S. organizations of professionals in child welfare (e.g., pediatricians) suggest zero screen time for children under age 2 and less than an hour a day for 2- to 6-year olds. However, about half of all North American children exceed those limits, with screen time increasing as income falls (Carson et al., 2013; Fletcher et al., 2014).

The data trouble professionals for many reasons. One is simply time—the more children are glued to screens, especially when the screen is their own hand-held device, the less they spend in active, social play (see Figure 6.1). Further, much of the most attractive media teaches aggression, reinforcing gender and ethnic stereotypes.