Part IV: The Developing Person So Far: Middle Childhood

During middle childhood, children grow more slowly than they did earlier or than they will during adolescence. Physical play is crucial for health and happiness. Genes as well as immunization protect them against contagious diseases, and medical awareness and care have improved over the past decades.

Obesity and asthma, have genetic roots and psychosocial consequences.

Brain maturation continues, leading to faster reactions and better self-control. The specific skills that are mastered depend largely on culture, gender, and inherited ability, all of which are reflected in intelligence tests. Children have multiple intellectual abilities, most of which are not reflected in standard IQ tests.

Many children have special learning needs. Early recognition, targeted education, and psychological support can help them.

Beginning at about age 7, Piaget noted, children attain concrete operational thought, including the ability to understand the logical principles of classification and transitive inference. Vygotsky emphasized that children become more open to learning from mentors, both teachers and peers. Information-processing abilities increase, including greater memory, knowledge, control, and metacognition.

Children’s increasing ability to understand the structures and possibilities of language enables them to extend the range of their cognitive powers and to become more analytical and expressive in vocabulary. Children have the cognitive capacity to become bilingual and bicultural, although much depends on the teacher.

International comparisons reveal marked variations in the overt and hidden curriculums, as well as in learning, between one nation and another. In recent years, traditional educational approaches have been pitted against a more holistic approach to learning.

Theorists agree that many school-age children develop competencies, emotional control, and attitudes to defend against stress. Some children are resilient, coping well with problems and finding support in friends, family, school, religion, and community.

Parents continue to influence children, especially as they exacerbate or buffer problems in school and the community. During these years, families need to meet basic needs, encourage learning, foster self-respect, nurture friendship, and—most important—provide harmony and stability. Nuclear families often provide this, but one-parent, foster, same-sex, or grandparent families can also function well for children. Household income, little conflict, and family stability benefit children of all ages.

Children depend less on their parents and more on friends for help, loyalty, and sharing of mutual interests. Rejection and bullying become serious problems.

Moral development, influenced by peers, advances during these years. Children develop moral standards that they try to follow, although these may differ from the moral standards of adults.