5: Middle Childhood
- Page ID
- 146923
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- 5.1: Introduction to Middle Childhood
- Middle childhood is the period of life that begins when children enter school and lasts until they reach adolescence. Growth patterns slow at this time, the id becomes hidden during the latent stage, according to Freud, and children spend much more time in schools, with friends, and in structured activities. It may be easy for parents to lose track of their children’s development unless they stay directly involved in these worlds.
- 5.2: Physical Development
- Children tend to slim down and gain muscle strength and lung capacity during middle childhood, making it possible to engage in strenuous physical activity for long periods of time. The brain reaches its adult size at about age 7 so the school-aged child is better able to plan, coordinate activity using both left and right hemispheres of the brain, and to control emotional outbursts.
- 5.3: Sports
- Middle childhood seems to be a great time to introduce children to organized sports, and in fact, many parents do. Nearly 3 million children play soccer in the United States (United States Youth Soccer, 2012). This activity promises to help children build social skills, improve athletically and learn a sense of competition. However, it has been suggested that the emphasis on competition and athletic skill can be counterproductive and lead children to grow tired of the game and want to quit.
- 5.4: Childhood Obesity
- The decreased participation in school physical education and youth sports is just one of many factors that has led to an increase in children being overweight or obese. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), children’s whose BMI is at or above the 85th percentile for their age are considered overweight, while children who are at or above the 95th percentile are considered obese.
- 5.5: Cognitive Development
- From ages 7 to 11, the school-aged child is in what Piaget referred to as the concrete operational stage of cognitive development. The child can use logic to solve problems tied to their own direct experience but has trouble solving hypothetical problems or considering more abstract problems. The child uses inductive reasoning which means thinking that the world reflects one’s own personal experience.
- 5.6: Information Processing
- Children differ in their memory abilities, and these differences predict both their readiness for school and academic performance in school (PreBler, Krajewski, & Hasselhorn, 2013). During middle and late childhood children make strides in several areas of cognitive function including the capacity of working memory, their ability to pay attention, and their use of memory strategies. Both changes in the brain and experience foster these abilities.
- 5.7: Theories of Intelligence
- Psychologists have long debated how to best conceptualize and measure intelligence. These questions include how many types of intelligence there are, the role of nature versus nurture in intelligence, how intelligence is represented in the brain, and the meaning of group differences in intelligence.
- 5.8: Developmental Problems
- Children’s cognitive and social skills are evaluated as they enter and progress through school. Evaluation and diagnosis of a child can be the first step in helping to provide that child with the type of instruction and resources needed. It is important to consider that children can be misdiagnosed and that once a child has received a diagnostic label, the child, teachers, and family members may tend to interpret actions of the child through that label.
- 5.9: Children with Learning Disabilities
- A Learning Disability (or LD) is a specific impairment of academic learning that interferes with a specific aspect of schoolwork and that reduces a student's academic performance significantly. A LD shows itself as a major discrepancy between a student's ability and some feature of achievement: The student may be delayed in reading, writing, listening, speaking, or doing mathematics, but not in all of these at once.
- 5.10: Learning and Intelligence - Schools and Testing
- Intelligence tests and psychological definitions of intelligence have been heavily criticized since the 1970s for being biased in favor of Anglo-American, middle-class respondents and for being inadequate tools for measuring non-academic types of intelligence or talent. Achievement tests are used to measure what a child has already learned. Aptitude tests are designed to measure a student’s ability to learn or to determine if a person has potential in a particular program.
- 5.11: Psychosocial Development
- Children in middle childhood have a more realistic sense of self than do those in early childhood. Contemporary children also receive messages from the media about how they should look and act. According to Erikson, children in middle childhood are very busy or industrious. They are constantly doing, planning, playing, getting together with friends, achieving. This is a very active time and a time when they are gaining a sense of how they measure up when compared with friends.
- 5.13: Socioemotional Development in Middle and Late Childhood
- Erikson argued that children in middle and late childhood are very busy or industrious. They are constantly doing, planning, playing, and getting together with friends. This is an active time and when they are gaining a sense of how they measure up when compared with peers. Erikson believed that if these industrious children can be successful in their endeavors, they will get confidence for future challenges. If not, a sense of inferiority can be haunting during middle and late childhood.
- 5.14: Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development
- Kohlberg called a self-centered approach to moral decision-making pre-conventional moral development. Conventional moral development referred to being able to determine right from wrong based on what other people think. Post-conventional moral development is based on a concern for others; for society as a whole or for an ethical standard rather than a legal standard.
- 5.15: Friends and Peers
- riendships take on new importance as judges of one's worth, competence, and attractiveness in middle and late childhood. Friendships provide the opportunity for learning social skills, such as how to communicate with others and how to negotiate differences. Children get ideas from one another about how to perform certain tasks, how to gain popularity, what to wear or say, and how to act. This society of children marks a transition from a life focused on the family to a life concerned with peers.
- 5.16: Family Life
- One of the ways to assess the quality of family life is to consider the tasks of families. Berger (2014) lists five family functions: (1) Providing food, clothing and shelter, (2) Encouraging learning, (3) Developing self-esteem, (4) Nurturing friendships with peers, and (5) Providing harmony and stability.