Development During Middle Childhood The Years From Six to Twelve (1984) / Chapter Skim
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5 Middle Childhood in the Context of the Family
5 Middle Childhood in the Context of the Family
Pages 184-239
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From page 184... ...
Maccoby Between the time when children enter school and the time they reach adolescence, the family plays a crucial role in socialization, although its role is not so predominant as in the early childhood years. In middle childhood, teachers, peers, coaches, and others outside the family have more contact with the child than in early childhood, and they exercise varying degrees of influence.
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From page 185... ...
This point of view has been applied primarily to infants and toddlers, while the trait approach remains predominant in studies that examine how parental practices influence the characteristics of preschool children.
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From page 186... ...
The chapter presents developmental changes that normally occur as children enter the middle childhood years, some of the concomitant changes in parents' child-rearing roles, and some of the more traditional socialization findings those concerned primarily with individual differences among schoolage children and their parents. The chapter goes on to describe how parents differ from one another, then summarizes some of the major findings for this age period concerning the way parental variations relate to the variations among children in their personalities and social behavior.
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From page 187... ...
Although there is reason to believe that the issues arising between parents and children change significantly as children enter and progress through the middle childhood period, data on these changes are limited, and many issues have been studied only minimally. We know little, for example, about what moral or ethical matters come up in family exchanges or how they are dealt with.
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From page 188... ...
Studies consistently show a decline in the use of physical punishment as children get order (Clifford, 1959; Fawl, reported in Patterson, 1982; Newson and Newson, 1976~. Parents also decreasingly use distraction and physically moving the child away from forbidden or dangerous activities.
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From page 189... ...
, working with families in the Fels longitudinal study, compared the relationships between parents and 3-year-olds with those between parents and 9-year-olds. At the younger age, higher levels of parental warmth were recorded on all the relevant measures: child centeredness, approval, acceptance, affection, and rapport.
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From page 190... ...
Baldwin's (1946) reports from the Fels longitudinal study in some ways run counter to a transfer-of-power trend.
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From page 191... ...
The information to support this suggestion is meager, however, and it is obvious that children ages 6-12 already are participating in the controlling and managing processes. This participation is a simple necessity that stems in part from the decrease in time that parent and child are together.
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From page 192... ...
With the child's increasing age, we should expect an increase in parents' fostering out-of-sight compliance. These changes in child-rearing occur concurrently with a variety of normative developmental changes that occur in all children during middle childhood, albeit at somewhat different rates.
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From page 193... ...
Specifically, there is a shift in children's conceptions about authority and the basis for parents' rights to exercise it (Damon, 1977~. While preschoolers tend to think that parental authority rests on the power to punish or reward, the beginning of an exchange relationship can be seen with the onset of the middle childhood period.
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From page 194... ...
complain that when their children have entered the school-age period, it is no longer so easy to know what their children are thinking and feeling; this renders the task of monitoring and guidance more difficult. Impulsivity ImpuIsivity declines fairly steadily from early childhood into the schoolage years.
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From page 195... ...
noted with children ages 3 and 6 disciplinary encounters were more common when the children were tired or hungry; by the age of 9, this correlation had disappeared. This finding suggests that older children are more able to maintain self-control under the stresses of moderate hunger or fatigue; they do not become so restless or demanding that they require parental powerassertive controls.
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From page 196... ...
To our knowledge, no studies have focused on changes in the locus and content of monitoring with children's increasing age, and this is a serious gap. We can only assume that there is a transition stage, during which moment-to-moment monitoring by parents is replaced by a joint monitoring process, so that with older children parents intervene only at the higher modes of action hierarchies, while children self-monitor the subroutines.
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From page 197... ...
report that children's reactions to their parent's divorce varies with the children's age (see section on single parents below)
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From page 198... ...
Clearly, however, the sequence of developmental events is more complex than would be implied by either a simple parent-shapes-child formulation or one that views developmental change as inherent in the child and changes in parental behavior as mainly a reflection of children's development. Children's developmental changes emerge, in part, from prior socialization efforts by their parents.
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From page 199... ...
As children grow older, parents and children accumulate experience with one another and develop expectations of the other's probable reactions. It appears inevitable that each must begin to label the other in terms of broad stereotypes and that these codified expectations must influence the inter' action between parent and child.
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From page 200... ...
Thus far we have considered primarily the developmental changes that almost all children undergo during the 6-12 age period and how these changes may affect parent-child interaction. Parents also undergo life-span developmental changes.
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From page 201... ...
VARIATIONS AMONG FAMILIES Dimensions of Parental Variation Most parents use a variety of child-rearing techniques, depending on their goals and the situation in which the child's behavior is an issue. As we noted earlier, parents control infractions occurring in their presence in other ways than they control actual or potential infractions occurring away from home.
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From page 202... ...
Parental strictness that involves power assertion on the basis of their authority and power to punish has a different effect than strictness that is a consistent enforcement of rules grounded in discussion and explanation. Parental warmth generally a positive factor in development was also found to be variable in its effects, depending on whether it was accompanied by indulgence, overprotection, intrusive and anxious involvement in all aspects of the child's life, or reasonable rules firmly enforced.
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From page 203... ...
Some of the aspects of children's functioning discussed below are also discussed in other chapters in this volume; the focus here is on the way these child characteristics are related to the functioning of the families in which the children are reared. Aggression, Other Antisocial Behavior, and Undercontrol In a longitudinal study in Finland, Pulkkinen (1982)
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From page 204... ...
Perhaps some of the dysfunction can also be traced back to early childhood. It has been shown that antisocial children tend to be deficient in social perspective taking; that is, they do not empathize with others' distress and tend not to consider how others will view their actions (Chandler, 1973; Chandler et al., 1974~.
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From page 205... ...
Parental warmth is consistently associated with children's self-esteem (Loeb et al., 1980) , while physical punishment and psychological punishment withdrawal of love-are associated with low self-esteem.
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From page 206... ...
Competence Baumrind (1973) , in a longitudinal study of the development of competence in children, stressed three aspects of competence: cognitive abilities, social assertiveness, and social responsibility, i.
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From page 207... ...
We will focus first on the demographic comparisons, then on family structural ones. Socioeconomic Status Child,Rear~ng in Different Social Classes When parents are grouped by income, education, or occupation or indexed by a combination of these average group differences in child-rearing consistently appear, although the overlap between groups is great (for reviews see Bronfenbrenner, 1958; Hess, 1970; Laosa, 1981; for studies providing data on specific issues, see Bee et al., 1969; Hill and Stafford, 1980; Newson and Newson, 1976; Shipman et al., 1976; Stafford, 1980; Yankelovich et al., 1977; Zill, in press)
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From page 208... ...
· Show a lower incidence of clearly hostile or rejecting attitudes toward their children. The large majority of parents, regardless of education and income, are reasonably warm and accepting, and scores on summary measures of warmth or affection are frequently not significantly different for the social class groups.
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From page 209... ...
found that education carries far more weight than income in predicting the teaching styles of Chicano mothers, while others emphasize the importance of affluence or economic deprivation in influencing parental behaviors. This question alerts us to a point that has been stressed by a number of writers: that social class is not a meaningful variable in itself; rather it is a convenient index for variations in the life experiences of parents and children.
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From page 210... ...
Socialclass differences in childrearing, then, may be viewed as a reaction to the differential levels of stress impinging on parents in different social classes (Maccoby and Martin, 1983~. Still another view is that what appear to be social-class differences in child-rearing are actually products of other demographic and ecological conditions with which socioeconomic status is correlated.
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From page 211... ...
A central idea here is that parental behavior serves as the functional mediator between a family's social status and those aspects of children's behavior that are linked to social class. That is, parents' education or position in the social structure has an impact on how they raise their children via some of the mechanisms listed aboveand these cIass-linked variations in child-rearing produce differential behavior patterns in children, some of which adapt children to the social situation in which they have been reared or maladapt them to other social milieus.
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From page 212... ...
have used multivariate analysis in their work with a sample of black mothers and children from several social classes; they found first-order relationships between socioeconomic status and maternal teaching styles. Furthermore, child outcome variables were related to both socioeconomic status and matemal teaching styles.
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From page 213... ...
Much parental behavior, such as maternal teaching styles, shows great variation within ethnic groups along socioeconomic lines (Hess and Shipman, 1967; Laosa, 1982~. Apart from socioeconomic factors, ethnic groups that may be perceived by outsiders as homogeneous subcultures in fact are not so.
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From page 214... ...
Ethnicity and Family Influence in Middle Childhoo~l The limited research on families in minority subcultures focuses primarily on infants and preschool children. Only two large-scale interview studies with carefully selected representative samples provide some data on the middIe-childhood period: the national survey by Zill (in press)
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From page 215... ...
From the Zill (in press) study we leam that, with socioeconomic factors equated, Hispanic families place greater emphasis on such traditional values as respect for authority than do other ethnic groups, while black families are more likely to use physical punishment.
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From page 216... ...
Single-Parent Families We turn now to variations in family structure and will consider both the current changes in family structures and the implications for school-age children. At the time of this writing, approximately one-fifth of American children ages 6-12 are living with only one parent, and as many as 40 percent will probably live in a single-parent household at some time during their childhood (see Chapter I; see also Click, 1979~.
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From page 217... ...
For many single parents, parenting functions return to a more organized and child-centered pattern as the stress of separation diminishes; this is more likely to happen when the parent forms new intimate ties and is no longer "single." As the custodial family stabilizes over time, contact with the noncustodial parent usually diminishes, so that the outside parent becomes peripheral in the lives of most children of divorce (Furstenberg et al., 19831.
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From page 218... ...
A remedy for this gap is long-term follow-ups of individuals whose families were disrupted during their childhood, although simple comparisons between such persons and persons from intact homes are likely to be confounded by socioeconomic status or ethnic differences. Some studies indicate that the long-term effects of broken homes may be modest for many of the children involved (Kulka and Weingarten, 1979)
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From page 219... ...
both reported that signs of disturbance in children and distortions in parental behavior are as great in disharmonious two-parent families as they are in divorced or separated ones. In the study by Hetherington and colleagues (1982)
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From page 220... ...
Minority families tend to have a larger number of kin living nearby, even though the number of nonparental adults living in the household may not be unusually high. While it is true, however, that minority single parents have considerable contact with kin, the nature of the contact is highly variable.
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From page 221... ...
They fee} they have too little time to spend with their children; their schoolage children echo this feeling, complaining that their parents spend too little time with them (Yankelovich, 1977~. Recent studies of children at risk for delinquency highlight the importance, for the avoidance of antisocial behavior, of parental monitoring of children's activities and whereabouts (Patterson, 1982; Pulkkinen, 1982~.
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From page 222... ...
Family income, ethnicity, parental education and employment, and family structure are intricately linked.
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From page 223... ...
In addition, clinicians have been concemed with the way in which therapeutic interventions with one family member may affect the functioning of other family members, for better or worse. Thus far, however, these conceptualizations have seldom entered the mainstream of research on the family, and little consideration has been given to whether there are changes in the family as a system when the developmental level of the children in the family changes.
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From page 224... ...
Research with infants and young children has shown that fathers can perform competently all the child care activities that have traditionally been part of the matemal role, beyond childbearing and breastfeeding, of course. There is no reason to believe that fathers' competency does not extend to the middIe-childhood period, although this question has not been studied.
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From page 225... ...
A recent review by Dunn (1983) concentrated on sibling relationships in early childhood, in part because more information was available for this age, but a number of points emerged from the review that have relevance for the middle childhood period.
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From page 226... ...
3. Poor sibling relationships during the preschool years predict both continued poor sibling relationships by the age of school entry (Stilwell, 1983)
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From page 227... ...
The existence of substantial sibling differences provides an interesting counterweight to the earlier emphasis on socioeconomic factors and family structures. ~ have argued that a family's sociocultural milieu has important implications for the way the family functions.
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From page 228... ...
We suspect that these issues of developmental change constitute one reason why using structural models for time-sequential data analysis has trickled only slowly into child development research.
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From page 229... ...
We need to introduce some cautions, however, concerning either planned or ex post facto matching. Selecting a subgroup of, say, single white mothers who match single black mothers with respect to other demographic variables results in the selection of a group of single white mothers who are unrepresentative of their own population.
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From page 230... ...
The ratings by familiar peers are also highly related to aggregated observational scores that reflect how the children actually behave; this relation is particularly strong with respect to antisocial behavior (see also Epstein, 1980, on the importance of aggregation)
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From page 231... ...
CONCLUSION The first major theme of this chapter is that research on socialization has not been sufficiently developmental in concept. ~ have argued that the middle childhood period has its distinctive patterns of parent-child relationships and its distinctive socialization agenda, both of which need to be understood in terms of the developmental level children have reached by the time they enter this period and the normative developmental changes they undergo as they traverse it.
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From page 232... ...
Hoffman, eds., Review of Child Development Research.Vol.
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From page 233... ...
1972 Concept learning of young children as a function of sibling relationships to the teacher. Child Development 43:282-287.
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From page 234... ...
Child Development 54:787-811.
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From page 235... ...
Halverson, C.F., and Waldrop, M.F. 1970 Matemal behavior toward own and other preschool children: The problem of "ownness." Child Development 41:838-845.
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From page 236... ...
Child Development. April.
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From page 237... ...
In M.E. Lamb, ea., Non-Traditional Families: Parenting and Child Development.
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From page 238... ...
In W.A. Collins, ea., Minnesota Symposium on Child Development.
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From page 239... ...
versus placebo status of hyperactive boys in the classroom. Journal of Child Development 52:1005-1014.
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