chapter summary:

Four major types of social development theories present contrasting views of the social world of children.

Psychoanalytic Theories

• The psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud has had an enormous impact on developmental psychology and psychology as a whole, primarily through Freud’s emphasis on the importance of early experience for personality and social development, his depiction of unconscious motivation and processes, and his emphasis on the importance of close relationships.
• Freud posited five biologically determined stages of psychosexual development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) in which psychic energy becomes focused in different areas of the body. Children face specific conflicts at each stage, and these conflicts must be resolved for healthy development to proceed. Freud also posited three structures of personality—id (unconscious urges), ego (rational thought), and superego (conscience).
• Freud believed that the Oedipus complex and the Electra complex form the basis for superego (conscience) development, as children identify with and adopt the values of their same-sex parent. He thought that girls develop a weaker conscience than boys do.
• Erik Erikson extended Freud’s theory by identifying eight stages of psychosocial development extending across the entire life span. Each stage is characterized by a developmental crisis that, if not successfully resolved, will continue to trouble the individual.

Learning Theories

• John Watson believed strongly in the power of environmental factors, especially reinforcement, to influence children’s development.
• B. F. Skinner held that all behavior can be explained in terms of operant conditioning. He discovered the importance of intermittent reinforcement and the powerful reinforcing value of attention.
• Albert Bandura’s social learning theory and his empirical research established that children can learn simply by observing other people. Bandura has increasingly stressed the importance of cognition in social learning.

Theories of Social Cognition

• Social cognitive theories assume that children’s knowledge and beliefs are vitally important in social development.
• Robert Selman’s theory proposes that children go through four stages in the development of the ability to take the role or perspective of another person. They progress from the simple appreciation that someone can have a view different from their own to being able to think about the view of a “generalized other.”
• The social information-processing approach to social cognition emphasizes the importance of children’s attributions regarding their own and others’ behavior. The role of such attribution is clearly reflected in the hostile attributional bias, described by Dodge, which leads children to assume hostile intent on the part of others and to respond aggressively in situations in which the intention of others is ambiguous.
• Dweck’s theory of self-attribution focuses on how children’s achievement motivation is influenced by their attributions about the reasons for their successes and failures. Children with an incremental/mastery orientation enjoy working on challenging problems and tend to be persistent in trying to solve them, whereas children with an entity/helpless orientation prefer situations in which they expect to succeed and tend to withdraw when they experience failure.

Ecological Theories of Development

• Ethological theories examine behavior within the evolutionary context, trying to understand its adaptive or survival value. The research of Konrad Lorenz on imprinting has been particularly relevant to certain theories of social development in children. Sex differences have been documented in children’s toy and play preferences.
• Evolutionary psychologists apply Darwinian concepts of natural selection to human behavior. Characteristic of their approach are parental-investment theory and the idea that the long period of immaturity and dependence in human infancy enables young children to learn and practice many of the skills needed later in life.
• Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model conceptualizes the environment as a set of nested contexts, with the child at the center. These contexts range from the microsystem, which includes the activities, roles, and relationships in which a child directly participates on a regular basis, to the chronosystem, the historical context that affects all the other systems.