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CHAPTER EIGHT
SOCIAL AND PERSONALITY
DEVELOPMENT IN EARLY
CHILDHOOD
I. THEORIES OF SOCIAL AND PERSONALITY
DEVELOPMENT
• Freud and Erikson’s psychoanalytic
perspective offered key insights into the
emotional components of development in the
early childhood years
• Modern theorists have focused on the role of
cognition
A. Psychoanalytic Perspectives
• Erikson’s stage of autonomy versus shame and
doubt centres around the toddler’s new mobility
and the accompanying desire for autonomy
• Erikson’s stage of initiative versus guilt is ushered
in by new cognitive skills (e.g. ability to plan)
which accentuates his/her wish to take the
initiative
• Both Freud and Erikson suggest that the key to
this period is the balance between the child’s
emerging skills and desire for autonomy, and the
parents’ need to protect the child and control the
child’s behaviour
B. Social-Cognitive Perspectives
• Social-cognitive theory: the theoretical
perspective that asserts that social and
personality development in early childhood are
related to improvements in the cognitive
domain
• Assumes that social/emotional changes are the
result of, or at least facilitated by, the enormous
growth in cognitive abilities that happens
during the preschool years
• Person perception: the ability to classify others
according to categories such as age, gender, and
race
(continued)
Social-Cognitive Perspectives (continued)
• Understanding Rule Categories
– Young children use classification skills to
distinguish between social conventions and moral
rules
• Understanding Others’ Intentions
– Young children understand intentions to some
degree
– Children understand that intentional wrong-doing
is deserving of greater punishments than
unintentional rule transgressions
II. FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS AND
STRUCTURE
• Family relationships constitute one of the
most, if not the most, important contributing
factor to early childhood development
• These relationships reflect both continuity and
change in that the preschooler is no less
attached to his or her family than the infant
but, at the same time, is struggling to
establish independence
A. Attachment
• Attachment quality predicts behaviour during
the preschool years—children who are
securely attached to parents experience fewer
behaviour problems
• Four- and five-year-olds who are securely
attached to their parents are more likely than
insecurely attached peers to have positive
relationships with their preschool teachers
B. Parenting Styles
• Diana Baumrind focuses on four aspects of
family functioning:
– Warmth or nurturance
– Clarity and consistency of rules
– Level of expectations
– Communication between parent and child
(continued)
Parenting Styles (continued)
• Baumrind’s and Maccoby and Martin’s
Parenting Styles:
– Authoritarian parenting style: a style of parenting that is
low in nurturance and communication, but high in control
and maturity demands
– Permissive parenting style: a style of parenting that is high
in nurturance and low in maturity demands, control, and
communication
(continued)
Parenting Styles (continued)
• Baumrind’s and Maccoby and Martin’s
Parenting Styles:
– Authoritative parenting: style a style of parenting that is
high in nurturance, maturity demands, control, and
communication
– Uninvolved parenting style: a style of parenting that is low
in nurturance, maturity demands, control, and
communication. This style produces the most consistently
negative outcomes
(continued)
Maccoby and Martin’s Expansion on
Baumrind’s Theories
Parenting Styles (continued)
• Canadian Parenting Styles
– About 33% are authoritative
• They scored above average on all key measures of
parenting practice
• Only 1 in 5 children had behavioural problems
– 25% were authoritarian
– 25% were permissive
– 15% scored low – similar to uninvolved
• Almost half of these children had behavioural problems
(continued)
Parenting Styles (continued)
• Parenting and Child Discipline
– Discipline: training, whether physical, mental or
moral, that develops self-control, moral character
and proper conduct
– Two problems make if hard to identify effective
discipline:
• Difficult to establish the effects of discipline
• Research has not concluded how intense and frequent
effective discipline needs to be
– Different styles of discipline work on different
temperaments of children
(continued)
Parenting Styles (continued)
Research Report: Disciplining Children: The
Canadian Perspective
• Research is equivocal: some studies link childhood
spanking with adult problems, others do not
• When is discipline assault?
• January 2004: Supreme Court of Canada rules that
physical force can be applied within ‘reasonable limits’ as
a form of discipline, but does not allow:
– Hitting with objects
– Delivering slaps or blows to the face or head
– Using physical punishment on children under 2 years or
over 12
C. Ethnicity, Socio-Economic Status,
and Parenting Styles
• Parenting style may be dependent upon the cultural
context in which parents and children live, so that as the
cultural context changes the best corresponding type of
parenting style changes with it
• Canadian studies have shown that parenting style is a
better predictor of poor outcomes in a child than is a
parent’s socio-economic status
• Good parenting practices are common in all SES levels, as
are hostile/ineffective parenting practices
• Children raised in lower SES families are more likely to
experience a greater number of risk factors and this,
coupled with ineffective or hostile parenting practices,
results in proportionally higher levels of vulnerability
Risk Factors Associated with Problems at
Age 2-3
Lone-parent Income and Negative
Outcomes
D. Family Structure
• Despite increases in the number of single-parent
households, the majority pattern in Canada continues to
be the two-parent family
• Families are far more diverse than in the past
• The impact of lone-parenthood has different outcomes
depending upon the age of the child
• Other Types of Family Structures
– Recent research found higher levels of behavioural and
emotional disturbance in children raised by custodial
grandparents
– Children raised in gay and lesbian families show no
differences in sexual orientation or identity, self-esteem,
adjustment, or qualities of social relationships compared
to those raised in other family structures
High Stress, by Household Type
E. Divorce
• Divorce is generally traumatic for children
• Children are probably affected by a multitude
of divorce-related factors such as:
– Parental conflict
– Poverty
– Disruptions of daily routine
• Children whose parents separate or stay in
conflict-ridden marriages, even if they do not
actually divorce, may experience many of the
same effects
F. Understanding the Effects of Family
Structure and Divorce
• Non-intact families seem to have negative effects for
three key reasons:
– Single parenthood or divorce reduces the financial and
emotional resources available to support the child
– Any family transition involves upheaval during which the
parents often find it difficult to maintain good monitoring
and control over the children
– Single parenthood, divorce, and step-parenthood all
increase the likelihood that the family climate or style will
shift away from authoritative parenting towards less
optimal forms
• Extended families seem to serve a protective function for
children who are growing up in single-parent homes
Proportion of Children with Emotional or
Behavioural Problems pre/post Divorce
III. PEER RELATIONSHIPS
• The child’s family experience is a central
influence on emerging personality and social
relationships, particularly in early childhood
when a good portion of the time is still spent
with parents and siblings
• Over the years from ages 2 to 6, relationships
with non-sibling peers become increasingly
important
• This is the critical period when brain
development and function is most sensitive to
social skills development
A. Relating to Peers Through Play
• Relating to Peers Through Play
• Solitary play
– All ages of children
• Parallel play
– 14 – 18 months
• Associative play
– 18 months
• Cooperative play
– 3 – 4 years old
– Social skills: a set of behaviours that usually leads
to being accepted as a play partner or friend by
peers
B. Aggression
• Physical Aggression (PA) peaks at age 2
• Indirect Aggression (IA) increases to age 11
– Most children show declining levels of PA with low
level IA between 2 and 8 years
– Most who are low on PA to begin with remain low
on IA
– Boys and girls with high early PA levels usually
show increasing IA over time
– PA and IA almost always occur together
(continued)
Aggression (continued)
• Richard Tremblay finds that:
– The vast majority of preschool children use
physical aggression
– The vast majority learns to use other means of
solving problems with age
– Some need more time than others to learn
– Girls learn more quickly than boys
– Only 5% of males and few females are chronically
physically aggressive by adolescence with most of
these ongoing since early childhood
(continued)
Aggression (continued)
• Aggressive behaviour tends to run in families
• Harsh, punitive parenting is linked with aggression
• Reinforcement and modelling play a key role in
aggression
• Between 17 and 29 months of age, the ratio of male to
female physical aggression is consistent (5:1)
• Epigenetics theory says that children enter the world
with aggressive predispositions and environment
influences their ability to control their aggression
• Preventive measures are needed to modify epigenetic
factors that can affect children from conception to
shortly after birth
• Corrective interventions are necessary after ages 12 to
17 months for high-risk families
Physical and Indirect Aggression of
Boys and Girls Across Childhood
Changing Parental Practices
Changes Behaviour
Child Behaviours:
Witnessing Fights at Home
C. Prosocial Behaviour & Friendships
• Prosocial behaviour: behaviour intended to
help another person
• Prosocial behaviour becomes evident by 2 or 3
years of age
• The role of empathy:
– One study shows girls to be more prosocial than
boys
– Empathy is an important predictor of
interpersonal closeness for both genders
(continued)
Prosocial Behaviour & Friendship
(continued)
• Parental Influences on Prosocial Behaviour
– Parents of altruistic children:
• Create a loving and warm family climate
• Provide prosocial attributions—positive statements
about the cause of an event or behaviour
• Look for opportunities for their children to do helpful
things
• Model thoughtful and generous behaviour, that is, they
demonstrate consistency between what they say and
what they do
(continued)
Prosocial Behaviour & Friendship
(continued)
• Friendships
– An important change in social behaviour during
early childhood is the formation of stable
relationships:
• 18 months: early hints of playmate preferences or
individual friendships
• Age 3: 20% of children have a stable playmate
• Age 4: more than half spend 30% or more of their time
with one other child
– Having a stable friend in early childhood is related
to social competence during the elementary
school years
IV. PERSONALITY AND SELF-CONCEPT
• As young children gain more understanding of
the social environment, their temperaments
ripen into true personalities
• At the same time, their self-concepts become
more complex, allowing them to exercise
greater control over their own behaviour
A. From Temperament to Personality
• The dimension of effortful control (i.e.
controlling one’s impulses) is important for
getting along with others
• Children with difficult temperaments learn
that their behaviours often result in peer
rejection
• Inborn infant temperament constitutes the
foundation of personality in later childhood
and adulthood
• Transition to personality is influenced by
parental responses to temperament
B. Self-Concept
• Categorical Self:
– The self-concept (and the concept of others) tends
to focus on his or her own visible characteristics
• Emotional Self:
– The acquisition of emotional regulation is central
to this stage
– Acquiring emotional regulation involves shifting
control slowly from the parents to the child
– Empathy and the awareness of moral emotions
play key roles
(continued)
Self-Concept (continued)
• Social Self:
– The toddler now begins to develop a variety of
social “scripts”
– Sociodramatic play provides opportunities to take
explicit roles, helping the child become more
independent
– Children adjust to school in several different ways
V. GENDER DEVELOPMENT
• Describing oneself as being a boy or girl is
important for young children
• One of the most fascinating developmental
processes is the one that involves children’s
evolving sense of gender
A. Explaining Gender Concept & Sex-
Role Development
• Social-Cognitive Explanations:
– Mothers interact with and speak differently to
sons and daughters
– Kohlberg’s gender constancy theory asserts that
children must understand that gender is a
permanent characteristic (gender constancy)
before they can adopt appropriate sex roles
• Gender schema theory:
– an information-processing approach to gender
concept development that asserts that people use
a schema for each gender to process information
about themselves and others
(continued)
Explaining Gender Concept & Sex-
Role Development (continued)
• Biological Approaches:
– Female animals exposed to testosterone
prenatally behave more like male animals after
birth while blocking the release of testosterone
during prenatal development in male animal
embryos results in behaviour that is more typical
of females of the species
– Hormones play some role in gender development
B. The Gender Concept
• Gender identity: the ability to correctly label
oneself and others as male or female
• Gender stability: the understanding that
gender is a stable, lifelong characteristic
• True gender constancy is the recognition that
someone stays the same gender even though
she or he may appear to change by wearing
different clothes or changing their hair length
C. Sex-Role Knowledge
• Stereotyped ideas develop early
• Even 2-year-olds already associate certain activities and
possessions with men and women
– Women feed babies, apply makeup, and wear dresses
– Men are associated with cars and hammering
• By age 3 or 4, children can assign occupation, toys, and
activities to the stereotypic gender
• By age 5, children begin to associate certain personality
traits with males or females
• Five- to six-year-olds, having figured out that gender is
permanent, are searching for a rule about how boys and
girls behave
D. Sex-Typed Behaviour
• Sex-typed behaviour: different patterns of behaviour
exhibited by boys and girls
• Sex-typed behaviour develops earlier than ideas
about sex roles
• Boy-boy and girl-girl interactions vary in quality
• Maccoby describes girls’ enabling style and boys’
constricting/restrictive style
• Cross-gender behaviour is tolerated more in girls
than boys
• Sex-typed behaviour results from much more than
just cultural modelling and reinforcement
