Childhood Studies and Psychology

Childhood Studies and Psychology

Introduction

The first few years of a child involves considerable change. Children attain new skills and gain a better understanding of the existing social world around them. The first relationship of a child with their parents or caregivers is essential for the development of the infants; understanding the current social world. Infants may be born with limited capacities, but are usually active in early relationship development due to inherent abilities to do so (Meins, E., 2013). The first social relationship widens as the child grows to include a broad range of people, such as peers, siblings, grandparents, as well as fathers. These relationships are crucial for the emotional and social development of children later in their childhood and adulthood. This report recognizes the importance of early relationships and how they contribute to a healthy social and emotional relationship, including later life social relationships. This report examines how different social relationships can influence the lives of young people and children.

Parents often provide safe environments and protected spaces for their children. Adults are expected to take steps that advance the protection of children and establishes a safe, healthy environment for their upbringing. The primary contributor to a child’s early emotional wellbeing is their parents, family members, primary caregivers, and the children themselves. Moreover, the concept of children’s welfare is based on broad social expectations and government policies that exist around health and children’s needs protection.

The Still Face Experiment

Infant Interaction

Edward Tronick and his colleagues designed the ‘Still Face’ experiment in the 1980s. The Still Face experiment is the procedure used to analyze the infant-mother relationship. It studies the emotional and social development of infants. It is important to note that the study was carried out exactly thirty years ago in a usual middle-class family in the United States, where mothers were the primary caregivers to their infants. It applies to another critical caregiver despite their genders or ages.

Results from the still face experiment suggest that infants are susceptible to the behaviours of their parents. Sensitive parenting involves physical behaviours that are affectionate such as feeding and cuddling (Gerhardt, S. 2006, 306). Sensitive parenting also includes the production of strong social signals making vocalization, talking, or using “motherese,” which is the high pitched tone used when communicating with infants common in many cultures. Experiments suggest that children respond well to such types of interactions, and when the relationship changes, they will try to regulate the flow of such communications.

Child psychologists have used the still face experiment to examine maternal sensitivity, as the primary caregivers, and its effect on the early development of children’s emotions. The analysis can also be utilized in examining the significance of fathers and other important adults to the child’s socialization.

The Role of Parents in Children’s Emotional Development

Studies suggest that infants begin to show emotion from an early age. Infants are highly emotional beings where they can go from states of great delight to rage or irritable crying. Infants can show signs of depression, reflecting the depression from their caregivers. Thirty-four per cent of parents have said that children can sense their emotions and can tell whether their parents are sad or angry, which in turn affected the moods of the infants (Meins, E., 2013). It is essential to look at infants as beings instead of perceiving them as just objects to be taken care of as with the conception of most parents (Grossmann T. 2010, 220). Children express emotions according to their wants and needs. For instance, in supermarkets, there is the case of parents and their children when they become overly frustrated when they cannot get what they want. Parents view their children as uncooperative during such instances and expect children to be able to control such emotions; however, children are incapable of managing their emotional expressions and feelings.

Attachment Theory

It highlights the relationship that infants have with their primary caregivers. This theory was developed by John Bowlby while working with boys with adjustment problems in the 1930s (Bowlby, 1969). Bowlby postulated that a disruption in infant maternal bonds harmed childhood development. From the maternal-infant bond, children can establish strong physical and emotional security. Bowlby was of the view that healthy attachments require stable long term sense of emotional and physical security. Moreover, despite early attachments being subject to primary caregivers in the early stages of a child’s life, he suggested that attachment was possible through other dominant individuals within the child’s life.

As much as attachments involve deep and lasting emotional bonds, it is not always mutual. An individual may have an accessory that the other individual does not share. Attachment is dominated by children looking for closeness with the figure of attachment when threatened or upset and the ability of the adult to respond appropriately and sensitively to the emotional needs of children. Bowlby suggests two types of attachments, insecure and secure attachments, both have an influent in the social and emotional development of children. Children who are identified as having secure attachment have mothers that portray a higher level of emotional openness, warmth, and acceptance, and sensitivity.

Children’s Understanding of Self

Children can become self-aware only after understanding their emotions and that of other people. The ability to switch to different states of emotion and recognize several primary emotion is the foundation that sets children into learning about themselves (Bretherton, I. 2010, 10-15). Children should also develop emotional competence, which involves children’s abilities to recognize their own emotions and that of other people. By the nine months, children should be able to understand fear, sadness, distress, disgust, interest, surprise, anger, joy, and joy – these are regarded as the most primary emotions that should be learned by nine months. Children will be able to regulate their own emotions through interaction with other people, such as parents, peers, and siblings, where personal relationships are full of emotive content such as happiness, frustration, anger, and sadness.

The recognition and regulations of different states of emotions enable children to become more aware of their feelings, thoughts, and expression driving through a self-discovery journey. This will lead to a growing self-awareness where children get to understand their minds. Children should be able to identify who they are and their likes and be able to differentiate themselves from their peers. Self-awareness is best tested through the “rouge test’. Young children between eighteen to twenty-four months are positioned in front of a mirror with a red mark on their noses; if they can recognize the mark and attempt to remove it, this means that the child is self-aware (Damian, R. and Robins, R. 2012, 432-435). The self-discovery journey is a sophisticated process not only impacted by peers, siblings, family, and parents, but also through exposures to different media types such as the internet, books, and television representing a cultural expectation of a particular place and time (Barrett, M. 2012, 81). Understanding of self leads to how a child levels their self-esteem and self-worth.

The Understanding of Other by Children

Social cognition is an individual’s ability to understand the minds of other people (Wellman, H. 2010, 277). When children get to the age of five, they begin to realise that other individuals may hold particular desires, beliefs, and intentions which are different from their own (Grusec, J. 2011, 345). The ability of children to recognize the emotional and mental states of other individuals facilitates the occurrence of far more complex interactions within the childhood of the child. Prosocial behavior such as cooperating, sharing, and giving may be contributed by ideologies and cultural expectations, including children’s own experiences (Whiting, B. and Whiting, J. 1975).

Social Relationship among Peers

Through middle and late childhood, children’s social interaction with peers leads to social and emotional development. Throughout the school life of a child, they may form several types of relationships with their peers, and this may have an impact on emotional development (Swain, J 2004, 168-82). Peer acceptance is a determinant of how much an individual is liked within a particular peer group set up. The masculinity and femininity of a child will influence their peer group status and popularity (Ladd, G. et al., 1999, 1974-82). Psychologists employ sociometric approaches in examining peer-group popularities

Conclusion

Emotional and social skill development among young children is a sophisticated process that advances from infancy to later childhood process. This report discovers that the infant-mother relationship provides fundamental elements for then emotional and social development. Children are born with the ability to interact emotionally with other people as they can recognize familiar voices and faces from an early age and allowing the engagement in mutual interactions that lead to secure attachment with primary caregivers such as mothers, fathers, and siblings. Children are also able to identify the mental states of other individuals as they become aware of themselves. Friendship is developed through the realization that not everybody has their best interest at heart; this enables children to engage in sophisticated interactions into their late childhoods. Early social development has an impact on the emotional and social wellbeing of a child and will, therefore, determine who the children become in the future.

References

Barrett, M. (2012) ‘Beliefs about other countries’, in Byram, M. and Hu, A. (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning, 2nd and,

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, vol. 1: Attachment, New York, Basic Books.

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, vol. 1: Attachment, New York, Basic Books.

Bretherton, I., 2010. Fathers in attachment theory and research: A review. Early Child Development and Care, 180(1-2), pp.9-23.

Damian, R.I. and Robins, R.W. (2012) ‘Investigations into the human self: a naturalist perspective,’ Social Cognition, vol. 30, special issue, pp. 431–48.

Gerhardt, S. (2006) ‘Why love matters: how affection shapes a baby’s brain,’  Infant Observation, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 305–9.

Grossmann, T., 2010. The development of emotion perception in face and voice during infancy. Restorative neurology and neuroscience, 28(2), pp.219-236.

Grusec, J.E., 2011. Domains of social knowledge and socialization theory. Human Development, 54(5), p.343-7

Ladd, G.W., Birch, S.H., and Buhs, E.S., 1999. Children’s social and scholastic lives in kindergarten: Related spheres of influence?. Child Development, 70(6), pp.1373-1400.

London, Routledge, pp. 78–83.

Meins, E., 2013. Security of attachment and the social development of cognition. Psychology Press.

Schneider, B., Bouyer, S., and Mietkiewicz, M. C. (2000). Problèmes éthiques posés par quelques paradigmes de recherche (trop) classiques en psychologie et en psychopathologie développementale. Psychiatrie Enfant 43, 5–22.

Swain, J., 2004. The resources and strategies that 10–11‐year‐old boys use to construct masculinities in the school setting. British Educational Research Journal, 30(1), pp.167-185.

Wellman, H.M. (2010) ‘Developing a theory of mind,’ The Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 258–84.

Whiting, B.B. and Whiting, J.W. (1975) Children of Six Cultures: APsycho- Cultural Analysis, Oxford, Harvard University Press.

Part B

Sounds like lots of hands-on experience with children, both personal and professional, was there a particular interest area or focused for the course for you that links to your experiences, or is a new area for you that you are less familiar with?

I feel like have a strong calling to work with children. I realize that working with children can be challenging at times because it is not easy to understand them. I was first attracted to the field of child psychology because my family was friends with a child psychologist; I was very close to her. She was a supportive, kind-hearted and an amazing person whose abilities to connect with other people always amazed me. Unfortunately, she passed away just when I was about to join college, and I felt like I needed to take up after her. Since then, I have never looked back. I have discovered throughout my course studies that preventative measures can contribute to the occurrence of change if therapy is put into more focus. I am highly interested in understanding the complex mind of a child and how to create strategies that will assist parents in understanding their children more. I am interested more in solution-targeted approaches that can be best employed by parents.

An excellent link from personal experience to the motivation to study – it sounds as though for you, you are interested in the contribution and role of adults around children to supporting their development.

I am of the feeling that consistent, caring adults are children will to the healthy development of children. It is only through the guidance of caring and patient adults that children’s socio-emotional development occurs even if it takes an extended period. In my own experience with a child psychologist during my childhood, I feel that when children learn to feel safe and close to adults, they learn to have more confidence and trust. Therefore adults or educators should focus on the needs of children and see to it that they are appropriately attended to. Educators should teach children by the example of problem solving and acceptable behavior.

Was there any specific module materials relating to child development which connected with your interests? Relevant information here – how might this link back to your learning and furthering your understanding?

I always had an interest in the emotional development of children. In my studies, I have come to learn that emotional competence of children contributes to their growth. I have also discovered that successful relationships between children and their peers and parents will require active development of their emotions. Emotional development should not be set aside; rather, it should consider part and parcel of cognitive and academic competence. Most childhood psychologist disordered can be linked-to unsuccessful emotional development. Research has concluded that emotion is essential in effective and rational decision making.