MIDDLE CHILDHOOD--- SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

INDUSTRY VERSUS INFERIORITY

    In "The eight ages of man"  (a chapter in the book Childhood and society), Erikson makes the interesting comment that a child who has had a relatively good start in life can be ruined by poor schooling. On the other hand, a good school experience can go a long way toward repairing damage which has been done by a poor home environment.

According to Erikson, in every society, it is during middle childhood that children are first exposed to the "tools of their culture", whatever those might be. In our culture, it is reading, writing and mathematics which are critical to success in the adult world, so that is when children go to school. In cultures where hunting and gathering or pottery making  are important activities, middle childhood is when a person begins to learn to hunt, gather or make pottery.

At this stage in life, it is important for children to develop a sense of competence, of being able to do good work. It is not enough to just repeatedly say "you are a special person" to increase a child's self-esteem. They must have success experiences.
 
 
A SENSE OF INDUSTRY
The wonderful thing about this stage is that children want to help out and to to try everything. Ronda is in judo and practices an average of 10 hours a week, plus another six hours of driving to practice and back. Nonetheless, when she signed up for middle school, she was DETERMINED to play in the band, which means practice at 7:20 every morning and an hour lesson once a week after school. She is also willing to help out caring for her baby sister. You would say, then, that Ronda has a well-developed sense of industry.

You may notice that in elementary classrooms there are always volunteers to help the teacher clean the blackboard, take papers to the office and so on. Somehow, this sense of industry does not seem to be as predominant in high school, does it?

As with nearly every topic in this course (except for moral development), there are about a million things I would like to say about social development in middle childhood. Assuming you have a life, and not an infinite amount of time, however, I will try to limit my enthusiasm to a few key areas, and not repeat too much what is in your textbook. There are, in my opinion, four major influences on social development during middle childhood, and only two of them (schools and peers) are in your textbook. The other two, parents and siblings, we will address on these web pages, as well as briefly reviewing the information on schools and peers.
 
 
 
THE SCHOOLS

A major effect on development during middle childhood is schooling. Since schools are discussed at length in your textbook, I would just like to bring up some brief points that, I think, deserve a little more emphasis or on which you could use some useful information.

School is often the first time children are compared to others. When you were a little girl or boy and made a picture for your mother, she didn’t run over and compare it with the child’s next door and then say,
"I think this rates a C+, the neighbor’s three-year-old had better use of color and you need to learn to draw more realistic flowers."

Most likely, she put your picture on the refrigerator and said it was wonderful. School is not necessarily like that.
 
 

DISABILITIES AND SCHOOLING

Perhaps at the extreme of being told you do not measure up is to be identified as disabled.
The majority of disabilities are first diagnosed in school.

LEARNING DISABILITIES - LD, ADD, ADHD AND SOME OTHER LETTERS
 Learning disabilities is defined under PL 94-142 as impairment in neurological functioning manifested in an imperfect ability to read, write, speak or perform mathematical calculations and which is not due to physical, sensory or emotional impairment or sociocultural disadvantage.
 

[Incidentally, one of the things that really bugs me is that people do not ask questions when they don’t know something. I don’t know for certain, but I think it has to do with the assumption that everyone else knows the answer to whatever it is and that I must be the only dumb one who doesn’t get it. PL 94-142 is a perfect example of this. It is the law which mandates a free, appropriate public education for all children, regardless of handicap. The PL stands for Public Law.]


Now that I know a child has a learning disability, what can I do?
There is not, of course, one simple answer to that question. One approach is given by the Landmark Study Skills System. This is one of a large group of methods which focus on improving organizational and metacognitive skills of students.

ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER
 The diagnosis of the hour, it seems, is ADHD or ADD. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is characterized by:

If hyperactivity is not present, the disorder is called ADD or Attention Deficit Disorder.
 
"Dusty Nash, an angelic-looking blond child of seven, awoke at 5 one recent morning... and proceeded to throw a fit. He wailed. He kicked. Every muscle in his 50-lb. Body flew in furious motion. Finally, after about 30 minutes, Dusty pulled himself together sufficiently to head downstairs for breakfast ... After grabbing some cereal in his hands, he began kicking the box, scattering little round corn puffs across the room. Next, he turned his attention to ...{the Con-Tact paper covering the TV table and began peeling it off}. Then he became intrigued with the spilled cereal and started stomping it to bits.... In a firm but calm voice {his mother} told her son to get the stand-up dustpan and broom and clean up the mess. Dusty got out the dust pan but forgot the rest of the order. Within seconds, he was dismantling the plastic dustpan piece by piece. His next project: grabbing three rolls of toilet paper from the bathroom and unraveling them around the house. It was only 7:30, and his mother... was already feeling half-dead from exhaustion." (Claudia Wallis, "Life in Overdrive" Time, July 18, 1994)

 Reading the description above, of a little boy diagnosed with ADHD who has been removed from Ritalin for the day, it is easy to sympathize with his mother and teachers, and see that his behavior might readily be characterized as a disorder. However, when one reads later in the same article that, in some classrooms, 30-40% of boys are on Ritalin, it is hard to believe that ALL of them had such severe behavior problems.


SCHOOLS AND SOCIAL CLASS

The following statements were taken from page 305 of your textbook. Think about them, because they are a little scary.

"...in many cases, education operates as a critical intervening variable in the transmission of status from one generation to the next."

"...early academic failure strongly predicts later academic failure."

The next several pages in the textbook discuss the advantages upper and middle class children have over, to be quite blunt about it, children who live on the reservation, if not your children, certainly your neighbor's children, your cousin's children and your cousin's neighbor's children. In brief, what these statements mean are that middle class children go to school with a lot of the knowledge the school system expects them to have. They know their colors, ABC's, how to write their names, and all that other good stuff. Their parents have taught them how to behave in ways that will satisfy the teacher. From the very beginning, middle class children are very unlikely to fail. On the other hand, the child who did not learn division very well in elementary school, or cannot read well, is going to be at high risk for failure in high school. Failing high school, of course, he or she is not going to get into college, which pretty much rules out getting a job which will pay enough to bring the student into the middle class - ever!
 
 
There are many many volumes written on how schools funnel working class kids into working class jobs, and help middle and upper class kids get into colleges which will insure that they continue to live the lifestyle to which they have been accustomed. In fact, sociologists almost have an obsession about this issue. It does not have to be this way. There are schools which are succcessful with students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Schools that work- research you can use

Pay a lot of attention to page 306. The textbook gives a brief review of Michael Rutter's research on effective schools which were successful in educating poor students. Next time your school administrator says,

"What do you want me to do?"

try some of these suggestions on them.
 

Notice which one I put last. Much of the research on differences between middle and low-income schools show that teachers in schools in poverty-stricken areas are often more concerned with maintaining order than academic achievement, a policy which would bring the parents down on them screaming in a more affluent area.

We have discussed some of the effects of school on children. Yet, children do not exist in a vacuum. Bronfenbrenner (remember him?) click on his name to go back there, if you don't. What about the effects of PARENTS on schooling? They are VERY important. I was somewhat appalled that your textbook hardly mentions parents at all during middle childhood. I checked a few other textbooks to see if this was abnormal, and most of them also ignore parents. Fortunately for you, you have me, your wonderful instructor, to remedy this oversight!

For two views, one on the Spirit Lake Nation particularly, and the other on parent involvement in general, click here (it's the next lesson).

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