The Nature of the Child

Adults Stay Out In middle childhood, children want to do things themselves. What if parents grabbed each child’s hand and wanted to jump in, too? That would spoil the fun.

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As explained in the previous two chapters, steady growth, brain maturation, and intellectual advances make middle childhood a time for more independence (see At About This Time). Children acquire an “increasing ability to regulate themselves, to take responsibility, and to exercise self-control” (Huston & Ripke, 2006, p. 9).

One practical result is that between ages 6 and 11, children learn to care for themselves. They not only hold their own spoon but also make their own dinner, not only zip their own pants but also pack their own suitcases, not only walk to school but also organize games with friends. They venture outdoors alone. Boys are especially likely to engage in activities without their parents’ awareness or approval (Munroe & Romney, 2006). This budding independence fosters growth.

Industry and Inferiority

Throughout the centuries and in every culture, school-age children are industrious. They busily master whatever skills their culture values. Their mental and physical maturation, described in the previous two chapters, makes such activity possible.

Erikson’s Insights

With regard to his fourth psychosocial crisis, industry versus inferiority, Erikson noted that the child “must forget past hopes and wishes, while his exuberant imagination is tamed and harnessed to the laws of impersonal things,” becoming “ready to apply himself to given skills and tasks” (Erikson, 1963, pp. 258, 259).

Think of learning to read and add, both of which are painstaking and boring tasks. For instance, slowly sounding out “Jane has a dog” or writing “3 + 4 = 7” for the hundredth time is not exciting. Yet school-age children busily practice reading and math: They are intrinsically motivated to read a page, finish a worksheet, memorize a spelling word, color a map, and so on. Similarly, they enjoy collecting, categorizing, and counting whatever they gather—perhaps stamps, stickers, stones, or seashells. That is industry.

Overall, children judge themselves as either industrious or inferior—deciding whether they are competent or incompetent, productive or useless, winners or losers. Self-pride depends not necessarily on actual accomplishments, but on how others, especially peers, view one’s accomplishments. Social rejection is both a cause and a consequence of feeling inferior (Rubin et al., 2013).

Freud on Latency

Sigmund Freud described this period as latency, a time when emotional drives are quiet (latent) and unconscious sexual conflicts are submerged. Some experts complain that “middle childhood has been neglected at least since Freud relegated these years to the status of an uninteresting ‘latency period’” (Huston & Ripke, 2006, p. 7).

But in one sense, at least, Freud was correct: Sexual impulses are absent, or at least hidden. Even when children were betrothed before age 12 (rare today but common in earlier eras), the young husband and wife had little interaction. Everywhere, boys and girls typically choose to be with others of their own sex. Indeed, boys who write “Girls stay out!” and girls who complain that “boys stink” are typical.

Self-Concept

As children mature, they develop their self-concept, which is their idea about themselves, including their intelligence, personality, abilities, gender, and ethnic background. As you remember, the very notion that they are individuals is a discovery in toddlerhood, and a positive, global self-concept is typical in early childhood. Not so in middle childhood. The self-concept gradually becomes more specific and logical, the result of increases in cognitive development and social awareness.

Crucial during middle childhood is social comparison—comparing one’s self to others (Davis-Kean et al., 2009; Dweck, 2013). Ideally, social comparison helps school-age children value themselves and abandon the imaginary, rosy self-evaluation of preschoolers. The self-concept becomes more realistic, incorporating comparison to peers and judgments from the overall society (Davis-Kean et al., 2009).

This means that some children—especially those from minority ethnic or religious groups—become newly aware of social prejudices they need to overcome (Kiang & Harter, 2008; McKown & Strambler, 2009). Children also become aware of gender discrimination, with girls complaining that they are not allowed to play tougher sports and boys complaining that teachers favor the girls (Brown et al., 2011).

For all children, this increasing self-understanding and social awareness come at a price. Self-criticism and self-consciousness rise from ages 6 to 11, and “by middle childhood this [earlier] overestimate of their ability or judgments decreases” (Davis-Kean et al., 2009, p. 184) while self-esteem falls. Children’s self-concept becomes influenced by the opinions of others, even by other children whom they do not know (Thomaes et al., 2010).

In addition, because children think concretely during middle childhood, materialism increases, and attributes that adults might find superficial (hair texture, sock patterns) become important, making self-esteem fragile (Chaplin & John, 2007). Insecure 10-year-olds might desperately want the latest jackets, cell phones, and so on.

Culture and Self-Esteem

Academic and social competence are aided by realistic self-perception. Unreal-istically high self-esteem reduces effortful control (deliberately modifying one’s impulses and emotions), and less effortful control leads to lower achievement and increased aggression.

The same consequences occur if self-esteem is too low. Obviously then, the goal is to find a middle ground. This is not easy: children may be too self-critical or not self-critical enough. Cultures differ on what that the middle ground is.

Same Situation, Far Apart: Helping at Home Sichuan, in China, and Virginia, in the United States, provide vastly different contexts for child development. For instance, in some American suburbs, laws require recycling and forbid hanging laundry outside—but not in rural China. Nonetheless, everywhere children help their families with household chores, as these two do.

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High self-esteem is neither universally valued nor universally criticized (Yamaguchi et al., 2007). Many cultures expect children to be modest, not prideful. For example, Australians say that “tall poppies are cut down,” the Chinese say “the nail that sticks up is hammered,” and the Japanese discourage social comparison aimed at making oneself feel superior. This makes self-esteem a moral issue as well as a practical one: Should people believe that they are better than other people, as is typical in the United States? Answers vary (Robins et al., 2012; Buhrmester et al., 2011).

Often in the United States, children’s successes are praised and teachers are wary of being critical, especially in middle childhood. For example, some schools issue report cards with grades ranging from “Excellent” to “Needs improvement” instead of from A to F. An opposite trend is found in the national reforms of education, explained in Chapter 12. Because of the No Child Left Behind Act, some schools are rated as failing. Obviously culture, cohort, and age all influence attitudes toward high self-esteem: The effects are debatable.

One crucial component of self-concept has received considerable research attention (Dweck, 2013). As children become more self-aware, they benefit from praise for their process, not for their person: for how they learn, how they relate to others, and so on, not for static qualities such as intelligence and popularity. This encourages growth.

For example, children who fail a test are devastated if failure means they are not smart. However, process-oriented children consider failure a “learning opportunity,” a time to figure out how to study the next time.

Resilience and Stress

In infancy and early childhood, children depend on their immediate families for food, learning, and life itself. Then “experiences in middle childhood can sustain, magnify, or reverse the advantages or disadvantages that children acquire in the preschool years” (Huston & Ripke, 2006, p. 2). Some children continue to benefit from supportive families, and others escape destructive family influences by finding their own niche in the larger world.

Surprisingly, some children seem unscathed by early experiences. They have been called “resilient” or even “invincible.” Current thinking about resilience (see Table 13.1), with insights from dynamic-systems theory, emphasizes that no one is impervious to past history or current context (Jenson & Fraser, 2006; Luthar et al., 2003; Masten, 2013), but some cope better than others.

Differential sensitivity is apparent, not only because of genes but also because of early child rearing, preschool education, and sociocultural values. Some children are hardy, more like dandelions than orchids, but all are influenced by their situation (Ellis & Boyce, 2008).

Resilience has been defined as “a dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity” (Luthar et al., 2000, p. 543). Note the three parts of this definition:

• Resilience is dynamic, not a stable trait. That means a given person may be resilient at some periods but not others.
• Resilience is a positive adaptation to stress. For example, if parental rejection leads a child to a closer relationship with another adult, that is positive adaptation, not mere passive endurance. That child is resilient.
• Adversity must be significant. Some adversities are comparatively minor (large class size, poor vision), and some are major (victimization, neglect). Children need to cope with both kinds, but not all coping qualifies them as resilient.

Cumulative Stress

One important discovery is that accumulated stresses over time, including minor ones (called “daily hassles”), are more devastating than an isolated major stress. Almost every child can withstand one trauma, but repeated stresses make resilience difficult (Jaffee et al., 2007).

Death and Disruption Children are astonishingly resilient. This girl is in a refugee camp in Northern Syria in 2013, having fled the civil war that killed thousands in her community. Nonetheless, she is with her family and is adequately fed and clothed, and that is enough for a smile.

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One international example comes from Sri Lanka, where many children in the first decade of the twenty-first century were exposed to war, a tsunami, poverty, deaths of relatives, and relocation. A study of the Sri Lankan children found that accumulated stresses, more than any single problem, increased pathology and decreased achievement. The authors point to “the importance of multiple contextual, past, and current factors in influencing children’s adaptation” (Catani et al., 2010, p. 1188).

The social context, especially supportive adults who do not blame the child, is crucial. A chilling example comes from the “child soldiers” in the 1991–2002 civil war in Sierra Leone (Betancourt et al., 2013). Children witnessed and often participated in murder, rape, and other traumas. When the war was over, 529 war-affected youth, then aged 10 to 17, were interviewed. Many were pathologically depressed or anxious, as one might expect.

These war-damaged children were interviewed again two and six years later. Surprisingly, many had overcome their trauma and were functioning normally. Recovery was more likely if they were in middle childhood, not adolescence, when the war occurred. If at least one caregiver survived, if their communities did not reject them, and if their daily routines were restored, the children usually regained emotional normality.

Cognitive Coping

Obviously, this example from Sierra Leone is extreme, but the general finding appears in other research as well. Disasters take a toll, but resilience is possible. Factors in the child (especially problem-solving ability), in the family (consistency and care), and in the community (good schools and welcoming churches) all help children recover (Masten, 2013).

One pivotal factor is the child’s own interpretation of events. Cortisol (the stress hormone) increases in low-income children if they interpret events connected to their family’s poverty as a personal threat and if the family lacks order and routines (thus increasing daily hassles) (E. Chen et al., 2010). When low-SES children do not take things personally and their family is not chaotic, they are more likely to be resilient. Think of people you know: Many adults whose childhood family income was low did not consider themselves poor. In that case, poverty may not have harmed them.

In general, a child’s interpretation of a family situation (poverty, divorce, and so on) determines how it affects him or her (Olson & Dweck, 2008). Some children consider the family they were born into a temporary hardship; they look forward to the day when they can leave childhood behind. The opposite reaction is called parentification, when children feel responsible for the entire family, acting as parents who take care of everyone, including their actual parents (Byng-Hall, 2008).

In another example, children who endured hurricane Katrina were affected by their thoughts, positive and negative, more than by factors one might expect, such as their caregivers’ distress (Kilmer & Gil-Rivas, 2010). Interestingly, religious faith is sometimes crucial in helping children cope because faith is thought to provide hope and meaning (Masten, 2013).

Same Situation, Far Apart: Praying Hands Differences are obvious between the Northern Indian girls entering their Hindu school and the West African boy in a Christian church, even in their clothes and hand positions. But underlying similarities are more important. In every culture, many 8-year-olds are more devout than their elders.

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