Hi, this is Bart Polson and this is a video for Psychology 1100 Lifespan Development. In this one we're looking at Chapter 4 on Early Childhood, Section 3 on Social and Emotional Development in Early Childhood. The first thing we want to look at is the dimensions of child-rearing, where we talk about things like parental warmth. In fact, parents have obviously very different approaches to rearing their children, and researchers have found it useful to classify them in two very broad dimensions. The first is warm versus cold, so warmth versus coldness.
And the second one is restrictive versus permissive, restrictiveness to permissiveness. And what these mean, warm parents are affectionate towards their children. They hug, kiss, smile at them.
They're caring, supportive. They're less likely to use physical discipline. Cold parents, on the other hand, show few feelings of affection towards their children. They may complain excessively about them.
They may call their children naughty or just problematic. Now, you end up with a couple of combinations here when you combine the warm versus cold and restrictive versus permissive. So, for instance, you have something called the authoritative style.
An authoritative parent, now this is not to be confused with authoritarian. Authoritarian is the iron fist, my way or the highway parent. The authoritative parent... is one who shows consistent control, firm enforcement of rules, fine, but also they show strong support and affection. And this combination has been found to have a lot of positive consequences for the child.
We can also talk about some other methods of child rearing and ways of teaching kids. And so, for instance, there's a lot of ways that parents can enforce their restrictions. They can use methods that are called induction, power assertion, and withdrawal of love.
So inductive methods, and for some reason we're to believe that this woman here is teaching her children using inductive methods. She just looks like she's sitting down while they bounce around. Inductive methods include things like reasoning, and they aim to teach children, to give them knowledge to help them understand what's going on, and the idea is that that will generate desirable behavior on their own. And, you know, it's a wonderful goal.
I've got a few kids, and I can tell you it doesn't always work so... Well in practice, um, raising kids is hard. Um, anyhow, the inductive is the idea to teach the kids to understand the rules and that they will then follow them on their own. Power assertive methods can include things like physical punishment, the denial of privileges. They're related to parental authoritarianism, and they often have negative effects on children.
So these effects can include things like lower acceptance by peers, poorer grades, more antisocial behavior in children. Um, they also... seem to prevent children from developing their own internal standards of conduct. It could be linked with aggression and delinquency.
Finally, withdrawal of love is another method used by some parents. And these parents can isolate or ignore their misbehaving children. And this can actually be more threatening to kids than physical punishment.
You talk about, in terms of neglect, as being a form of abuse, potentially, that can branch into that category. On the other hand, we can look at these four different styles here. This is research by Diana Baumrand.
And based on these combinations of restrictiveness versus control and warmth and responsiveness, Baumrand identified four parenting styles. And the authoritarian parenting style, that's where parents demand submission, obedience. They've got a lot of control but very low warmth, sort of the drill sergeant approach. They rely on force, they don't communicate well, don't respect their children's viewpoints, and their children are often less competent socially and academically.
On the other hand, you have two kinds of permissive parents. You have what's called permissive indulgent. That's when the parents are warm, but they're permissive, and they make no attempt to control their children, make few demands on them, and indulge them.
So, anyhow, at least that's the caricature of this particular one. A rejecting... neglecting parent, they're also permissive in that they don't get involved in their kids and they don't have restrictions on them.
But they have low expectations for maturity but they also show low support and low responsiveness. They just kind of don't want to be there. And then children from these types of parenting styles, they can seem to develop pretty poorly. They often show less competence in school. They can have more misconduct, higher rates of substance abuse than those of more restrictive and controlling parents.
Now the fourth style the good one identified by Boehm-Rindt is authoritative parenting style. Again, not authoritarian. That's bad. Authoritative. And although these parents are highly restrictive and they make strong demands for maturity from their children, they also reason with their kids and they show a strong demand for maturity.
strong support and they show love for their kids. Now, this style seems to generally produce the most capable kids. They show independence, high self-esteem, and social competence. So, in any case, to the extent that the parent is able to use one of these more than the others in this situation, the authoritative is going to be most beneficial.
What's not mentioned in this is that parenting styles can often be responsive to the child's innate temperament and can make it easier or harder to use. a particular style. Okay, now let's talk about siblings just for a moment. Okay, siblings do a lot of things.
They can give physical care if they're old enough. They can provide emotional support and nurturance. They can offer advice. They can serve as role models.
They can, you know, provide social interaction. They can develop social skills. They can also make demands and impose restrictions.
And so, to a certain extent, that's the ideal situation. They can make a big difference for their siblings. On the other hand, we also know that there can be a lot of stress in having a sibling in terms of the fighting that can occur and the competition that can occur between siblings. To give one interesting example here, let's talk about birth order very briefly. Birth order, whether you're the first, second, middle, last child, it can make a difference, though I should mention these differences really only show up when you have very large samples of people.
So we're talking about very general conclusions that might be very different for a particular family. So anyhow, firstborn children and only children are more likely, at least statistically noticeable, to perform... better academically, generally more cooperative than later-born children. Also, the flip side of this is they can often show more anxiety and less self-reliance.
So later-born children seem to show, again, these differences are small, but can show more aggression and can show a less positive self-concept, and they can... On the other hand, they can have greater social skills and more popularity with peers. So there's an element of rebelliousness and liberality as opposed to firstborns.
It's an interesting thing. And also, it's worth mentioning, like what you see up here in the picture, is that while children can be enthusiastic to have their younger siblings, it's also not uncommon for the older siblings to experience what's called regression. It just means to go back, in which they revert.
at least temporarily, to earlier behavior such as crying and clinging, maybe even undoing some of the potty training or being able to sleep through the night. Again, not necessarily intentional, but can be in part because of a loss of the parental attention that goes with the new sibling as this guy is showing here. All right, now a little bit about peer interactions with your friends, and they can take on a lot of different meanings.
So, peer interactions can foster social skills such as sharing, helping, dealing with conflict, Also, the physical and cognitive skills can benefit from interacting with peers. In fact, let's take a look a little bit at variations on play. Play is a major component of social and cognitive development, and you can talk about a lot of versions.
You have dramatic play where children take on new roles, and they can learn to share, take turns. And we want to look at a few different kinds of play here. For instance, in this particular list, there's, for instance, unoccupied play, which is a non-social.
You actually don't even appear to be playing, just kind of rambling about. Solitary play, you're by yourself, you're not even really paying attention to the people around them. And then you have onlooker play, where you're just watching another person.
And then there's a few kinds of social play. Parallel play, you're both playing, and you're with each other, and you may be talking to each other, but you're doing your own thing. So one person might be building with blocks, another person might be building with Legos, one person might be playing with a doll, another one might be drawing pictures. They're doing their own thing, and they're happy to be together, but they're not interacting.
Associative play is where you can share things, you can interact. It's an interesting one. The association with the other kid seems to be the primary goal, not the activity. And they like being with each other, but fundamentally they're not playing together. It's the last one, cooperative play, where you have this common group goal, and you subordinate your own desires to be with a group.
That's what's really termed a social play. Also, Piaget, good old Jean Piaget, talked about four kinds of play in terms of their cognitive complexity, because that's what he was all about. He talked about functional play, symbolic play, constructive play, formal games. I'm not going to get into those.
I'll just mention that they all have to do with the ability to deal with abstract concepts often in a social setting. Let's take another look at something else about pro-social or, you know, nice behavior and aggression. And what you have here is a bunch of photos from a very famous series of studies done in the 60s by Albert Bandura. And what you have here is something called a Bobo doll.
It's a big inflatable doll like a bowling pin. It's got a clown painted on it. It's got sand in the bottom.
So when you knock it, it stands back up. And it's one of the major things in terms of modeling aggression. What you have here is at the top, Bandura prepared a few different videos, and you have here an adult who is really attacking the Bobo doll. And what happens is she can either be praised for attacking it, I think the term they used was, you know, a strong hero, a victor, or they could be ignored, you know. And what happened is children would watch this video of this adult doing this, and then they would go into a room and lo and behold there was a Bobo doll and Bandura was interested in the circumstances under which children would follow the model, the aggressive model and not surprisingly when the grown-up was praised for attacking the Bobo doll the kids did the same thing.
In fact you see this guy, the little boy and the girl are both attacking the doll with a hammer which is something that the woman did in her video. They're just all over it. um And so what you have here is that aggression can be modeled.
I mean, that's the major thing about Bandura's work. You can break down aggression into what's called either inductive, excuse me, instrumental aggression, which is designed to accomplish a particular purpose. You can also have what's called possession-oriented aggression. Now, aggression that continues and is pervasive can be predictive of social and emotional problems later on, not surprisingly.
Also, aggression can result from both biological factors, their genetic influences, and their also environmental factors, such as reinforcement and modeling, which is what Bandura showed here, the powerful effects of modeling on aggression with his Bobo Dahl studies. But let's also talk about pro-social behavior. So pro-social behavior, which can include altruism, that's behavior that can benefit other people, generally without an expectation of a reward. It can include sharing, cooperation, helping and comforting others in distress.
It's linked to empathy and perspective taking. So empathy promotes pro-social behavior, decreases aggression behavior as early as the second year, and while pre-operational children tend to be egocentric and see things only from their own viewpoint, I mean in sort of a literal and emotional way, you find that as they mature they become better able to take on another person's perspective, and they show more pro-social behavior, consideration and respect for the other person, and less aggression. Now let's talk a little bit about personality and emotional development.
The sense of self, which is a very big topic of research, gradually emerges during infancy. This is our self-description, our self-evaluation according to categories. So, for instance, age, gender, and skills. And even though, well, even three-year-olds can describe themselves in terms of behaviors and internal states that occur often. Most preschoolers can describe themselves in terms of certain categories, usually based on some concrete external traits called the categorical self.
For instance, whether you're a boy or a girl, whether you have long hair, short hair, whether you have a backpack or a bag, they refer to these really obvious external objective things, but that's sort of the beginning of a formation of a discrete concept of self. Finally, in this section, we want to look at personality and emotional development, and that most preschoolers fear animals, you know, like this wolf. It's scary. And, I don't know, that could be a coyote.
They also fear imaginary creatures. They are afraid of the dark, afraid of personal danger. What's interesting is they're not really afraid of social disapproval, which comes up much stronger later in a person's life. Now, most of these fears, animals, the dark, those seem to taper off around four years old.
Again, they can stay for a long time, but they become less extreme. And it's during middle childhood that children are more likely to have fears about bodily harm and injury, and also fears of failure and social criticism. Those social fears start to become more prominent than those about imaginary creatures.
And that's where you get this big shift that will continue throughout adolescence. And that's where we end this particular section.