I.

Section 3: Emotional and Social Development

A.

Emotional Regulation and Gender Socialization

1.

Emotional Regulation

a.
Early childhood is a key time for the development of emotional self-regulation, which is the
ability to control your emotions.
i.

Self-regulation and impulse control are important for good social relations.

ii.
The progression through early childhood sees an increase in emotion regulation
expectations across cultures.
iii.
We also see a decrease in emotional outbursts as the frontal cortex continues to develop
and as children learn strategies for handling their emotions.
a.
Effortful control occurs when children actively try to manage their emotions. Strategies
include leaving an intense situation, talking to themselves, redirecting attentions, and seeking
comfort.
b.

Achieving a good level of self-regulation is a difficult balance.

1.
Some children undercontrol their emotions later resulting in externalizing problems,
primarily for males. Some children overcontrol their emotions, later resulting in internalizing
problems, primarily for females.
c.

The optimal level of self-regulation varies by culture.

2.

Moral Development

a.
The capacity for empathy increases in early childhood, which leads in turn to an increase
in prosocial behavior and contributes for understanding basic moral principles.
b.
Early childhood is also a time when children learn much of their cultures detailed, moral
rules and are able to anticipate the potential consequences for violating such rules.
c.
By age 5, most children understand that it is wrong to steal and hurt someone on purpose,
but moral views do vary by culture.
d.
Children learn moral rules through explicit instruction, hearing or reading stories, and
modeling their behavior after the behavior of others.
e.
Around age 34, children show the beginnings of a capacity for moral reasoning with their
beliefs in justice and fairness, and later in knowing the difference between the truth and a lie.
f.

Moral reasoning is rigid at this age and mostly based on fear of punishment.

3.

Gender Development

a.

Gender Identity and Gender Socialization

i.
The concept of gender identity is more rigid during early childhood due to cognitive
limitations, such as a failure to understand the biological nature of gender constancy.

ii.
Children in early childhood may cling to their ideas of appropriate gender roles for fear of
changing their gender.
b.

Gender Socialization

i.

Parents actively socialize their children in gender-appropriate ways directly and indirectly.

ii.
This transpires by what they say and give to their children, through their approval or lack
thereof based on the childrens behavior, and through modeling.
a.

Parents, especially fathers, and peers are important to gender socialization.

1.

Fathers tend to be stricter on boys than girls with regard to conforming to gender roles.

2.

Peers may reject someone who violates gender role expectations.

c.

Gender Schemas and Self-Socialization

i.
A gender scheme or schema is a gender based cognitive structure for organizing and
processing information about the world.
ii.
Gender schemas may be used to categorize activities and objects, interpret the behavior
of others and what we should expect from them.
iii.
Children (and even adults) seek out information that is consistent with our gender beliefs
while ignoring information that is inconsistent.
iv.
Self-socialization is the process of trying to maintain consistency between gender schemas
and behavior in a way that conforms to culturally appropriate gender role expectations.
B.

Parenting

1.

Parenting Styles

a.

The Effects of Parenting Styles on Children

i.
Parenting styles are the practices and beliefs that parents exhibit in regards to raising their
children.
ii.
American parenting research has emphasized the dimensions of demandingness (control)
and responsiveness (warmth) in parenting.
a.
Demandingness is the degree to which parents lay down a set of rules and behavioral
expectations and the requirements for compliance.
b.
Responsiveness is the degree to which the parents are sensitive to their childrens needs
and nurturing.
iii.
Baumrinds research with American children led her to develop four parenting styles,
which are: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and disengaged.
a.
Authoritative parents are high in demandingness (with explanation) and responsiveness
and tend to produce well-adjusted, successful children.

b.
Authoritarian parents are high in demandingness, but low in responsiveness, and tend to
produce children with low self-esteem and poor interpersonal skills.
1.

For boys, externalizing problems develop.

2.

For girls, internalizing problems emerge.

c.
Permissive parents are low in demandingness, but high in responsiveness and tend to
produce children who are immature, lack self-control, and have interpersonal deficits.
d.
Disengaged parents are low in both demandingness and responsiveness and tend to
produce children who are impulsive and have behavior problems.
b.

A More Complex Picture of Parenting Effects

i.
The relationship between parenting styles and childrens development is complex due to
reciprocal or bidirectional effects between parents and children.
ii.
Childrens behavior may evoke a certain parenting style or cause a parent to modify their
parenting style based on the outcomes of their previous attempts.
2.

Parenting in Other Cultures

a.

The effects of parenting on young children depend substantially on cultural context.

b.
Authoritative parenting style is very rare in non-Western cultures, where parents expect
that their authority will be obeyed, without question and without requiring an explanation.
c.
In Asian cultures, children are expected to respect, obey, and revere their parents
throughout their whole lives. This is called filial piety. This concept also exists in the Latino
culture and is referred to as respeto, but is combined with familismo, which is like bidirectional
responsiveness.
d.
This does not mean that non-Western cultures are authoritarian; rather their style of
parenting is culturally based and the same outcomes as in the United States would not be
expected.
e.
Baumrinds parenting style theory really only applies to the White, middle class, majority
culture as that is the group she employed for her research.
3.

Discipline and Punishment

Usually, it is during early childhood when children are first disciplined for inappropriate behavior
because by then, it is believed that they know what they should be doing.
a.

Cultural Variations in Discipline

i.
In Western cultures, the approach to discipline in early childhood tends to emphasize the
authoritative approach of explaining the consequences of misbehavior and the reasons for
discipline.
ii.

For young children, discipline often involves taking away privileges or going in time out.

iii.
In Western cultures, it is important for parents discipline to be consistent, timely
(immediate), and include an explanation.

iv.
In some cultures, they discipline by withdrawing love and shaming (Japan); while that
works well in Japans collectivistic culture, the same method applied in Western countries
produced negative outcomes in response to psychological control.
b.
Physical or corporal punishment has quite different effects on children depending on the
cultural context.
i.
In the United States and Europe, researchers have linked negative outcomes to children
who experienced physical punishment, but only for White children. The opposite was true of
African American children.
ii.
The explanation for the outcomes produced with White children should address the rarity
of physical punishment and thus it is ill-received, and the interactions of a passive and active
genotype environment, which may play a role.
iii.
In contrast, mild, physical punishment followed by an explanation and parental warmth is
widespread among African Americans and in traditional cultures.
c.

Child Abuse and Neglect

i.

Child maltreatment includes both abuse and neglect of children.

a.

It includes physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and neglect.

ii.
Childrens risk factors for physical abuse include difficult temperament, aggressiveness,
and overly active.
iii.
Parental risk factors for physical abuse include poverty, unemployment, and single
motherhood.
iv.
Children who have experienced physical abuse are at risk for not meeting some social and
cognitive developmental milestones, and for experiencing negative outcomes later in life.
v.
Children who are abused are usually removed from the abusive parent, either informally in
traditional cultures with placement with safe relatives or formally in Western cultures with
placement in foster care, group homes, or with relatives.
vi.
Prevention programs for parents with risk factors for abuse have been successfully shown
to reduce abuse and neglect.

The Childs Expanding Social World

According to Meads research and what followed, children around the world are socialized
similarly as they progress from lap children (ages 02) to knee children (ages 34) to yard
children (ages 56) with greater levels of freedom at each age as their social worlds expand.
4.

Siblings and Only Children

a.
On average, there is a 24 year gap between siblings. Thus, children in early childhood
often experience the birth of a sibling.
b.
Jealousy toward young siblings is very common worldwide in early childhood, but they also
love their sibling and like to dote on him or her.

c.
Sibling conflict can be beneficial in advancing young childrens theory of mind and it
allows them to have peer like practice social interactions with their siblings.
d.
Only children fare very well and are even advantaged compared to children with siblings,
even in China where there has been concern about the social effects of the governments one
child population policy.
5.

Peers and Friends

a.

Peers are persons who share some aspect of their status in common, such as age.

b.

Social interactions between peers are part work and learning and part play.

c.
Peer and friend relations are usually strictly segregated by same sex gender associations
during early childhood, but age differences are common to traditional cultures and uncommon in
Western cultures.
d.

Play in Early Childhood

i.
Children engage in simple social play and cooperative, pretend play more in early
childhood than in toddlerhood.
ii.

Play becomes increasingly segregated by age as young children get older.

iii.
For young children, play is their primary activity, unless they have to help their parents
with their work which sustains the family.
iv.
Most children play with their siblings and mixed-age peers while directed by older children.
Except in the West, children dont typically play with adults.
e.

Aggression

i.

The different types of aggression are instrumental, hostile, and relational aggression.

ii.
Physical aggression peaks in toddlerhood and the first year of early childhood, then
declines as verbal aggression rises.
iii.
Physical aggression is more common among boys than girls, however, there are individual
differences for the propensity to display aggression that remain stable over time. Nurturing,
responsive parents can mitigate that effect for children who tend to be aggressive, which is
especially important to do during early childhood.
iv.

In most cultures, aggressive play or rough housing is common, particularly among boys.

v.
Both verbal and relational aggression increases during early childhood, slightly more so for
girls, as their language ability, and cognitive and social understanding increases.
6.

Media Use in Early Childhood

Children, even those in early childhood, are already consumers of mediawhich includes
television, electronic games, recorded music, and computers.
a.

Violence and Advertising: The Negative Impact of Television Use

i.
In early childhood, TV viewing time per day varies from about 1 3 hours across
developed countries and many of these children have TVs in their bedrooms.
ii.
Researchers have shown that childrens programming is violent, even more so than adult
programming, even though most of the violence depicted is mild, animated situations.
iii.
Abundant evidence shows that violent television promotes aggressive behavior in young
children as they are most likely to model what they have seen.
iv.
Western, young children are especially susceptible to advertising because many
commercials seem like programs to them and they nag their parents to buy the products they
see.
b.

The Beneficial Effects of Educational Television

i.
Educational programs, including Sesame Street, can have positive effects on young
childrens development in language, math, and prosocial behaviors.
c.

Electronic Games and Music

i.
Boys most often play electronic games involving fighting and sports, whereas girls prefer
adventure and learning games.
ii.
It is common for children in developed countries to have access to computers with most of
this time spent playing electronic games.
iii.
Boys most often play electronic games involving fighting and sports whereas girls prefer
adventure and learning games.
iv.
Listening to music is important in early childhood for the development of responses to
music, as children first connect musical sounds with specific emotions.
v.

On average, children in early childhood listen to music for about an hour a day.