MIDDLE CHILDHOOD (6 to 12)

Middle Childhood is the period of life between ages 6 - 12 years when children attend school, are making
friends outside the immediate family, master new physical and mental skills, and are becoming more and more
individual. However, this opens the door for a new set of challenges, both for the child and the parent, and
often can lead to stressful situations that can have a negative effect on the childs development.

Social and Emotional Development

- Begins to see parents and authority figures as fallible human beings
- Rituals, rules, secret codes and made-up languages are common
- Enjoys being a member of a club
- Increased interest in competitive sports
- Outbursts of anger are less frequent
- May belittle or defy adult authority

Physical Development
- Girls are generally as much as 2 years ahead of boys in physical
- Increase body strength and hand dexterity
- Improves coordination and reaction time

Intellectual Development
- Interested in reading fictional stories, magazines, and how-to project books
- May develop special interest in collections or hobbies
- May be very interested in discussing a future career
- Fantasizes and daydreams about the future
- Capable of understanding concepts without having direct hands-on experience

Developmental tasks
1. Friendship
To clarify the role of friendship in helping children to learn to take the point of view of others, be sensitive to
norms and pressures of the peer group, experience-closeness in relationships, and clarify the negative
consequences that result from social rejection and loneliness.
At this age, children describe close friends as people who play together, like the same activities, share common
interests, enjoy each other's company and count on each other for help.
Family influences on social competence
Not all children enter middle childhood with the same capacity to make friends and enjoy the benefits of close
peer relations. Early family experiences, including the quality of a child's attachment, the family's approach to
discipline, and the nature of family conversations, all contribute to child's social competence.
By social competence, we mean all the skills involved in the child's ability to form and maintain positive
relationship with others. Social competence includes the ability to alter one's behaviour to conform to the
norms and expectations for interactions in various settings, and with different social partners.
Social competence also involves the ability to manage occasional social difficulties, such as being teased,
excluded, or ignored. The features of social competence change as children mature because the expectations
for social behaviour change with a child's age, and the social settings a child is likely to encounter become
more diverse.
Friendships clearly provide social and developmental advantages. In middle childhood, the radius of significant
relationships expands to include classmates, teammates, and close friends.
 Three contributions of friendship to social development:
- Perspective Taking and Cognitive Flexibility as children interact with peers who see the world
differently than they do, they begin to understand the limits of their own points of view.
- Social Norms and Peer-group Pressure the peer groups evolve norms for acceptance and rejection.
- Close Friends occur at a more intimate level of disclosure, trust, and supportiveness. Also, best
friends occur during these years.
2. Concrete operations
To describe the development of concrete operational thought, including conversation, classification skills,
mathematical reasoning, and the child's ability to understand and monitor his or her own knowledge and
understanding.
Children's abilities to analyze and manage social relationships, including friendships, are linked to their ability to
solve other kinds of problems.
Guides thought by imposing logical rules on ones judgments leading to the acceptance of certain inferences
that adhere to the logic as more compelling or convincing.
3. Skill learning
Middle childhood brings impressive growth acquisition of skills. Skills are the basis of intellectual competence.
They combine knowledge and practice directed toward identifying and solving significant meaningful problems.
4. Self-evaluation
Children strive to match their achievements to internalized goals and external standards. Simultaneously, they
receive feedback from others about the quality of their performance.

Self-efficacy the persons sense of confidence that s/he can perform the behaviors demanded in a specific
situation.

Four sources of information contribute to judgments of self-efficacy:

Enactive attainments prior experiences of mastery in the kinds of tasks that are being confronted. There is a
bidirectional relationship between achievement in a domain and ones confidence about being able to perform
well in that domain. High confidence will lead to better performance and better performance will increase ones
confidence.
Vicarious experience seeing a person similar to oneself perform a task successfully may raise ones sense of
self-efficacy; seeing a person similar to oneself fail at a task may lower it.
Verbal persuasion children can be encouraged to believe in themselves and try a new task. Persuasion is
likely to be most effective with children who already have confidence in their abilities and it helps boost
performance level.
Physical state people monitor their body states in making judgments about whether they can do well or not.
When children feel too anxious or frightened, they are likely to anticipate failure. In contrast, children who are
excited and interested but not overly tensed are more likely to perceive themselves as capable of succeeding.

5. Team play
Participation in team sports provides socialization experiences that have both positive and negative
consequences.
Children begin to participate in team sports and, as a result, gain a sense of team success as well as personal
success.
Psychosocial Crisis
Industry vs. Inferiority
Industry is an eagerness to acquire skills and perform meaningful work. It develops the sense of industry and
belief on strength and abilities.
Many aspects of work are intrinsically motivating during middle childhood because the skills are new and it
brings the child closer to the capacities of adults. These new skills allow the child to have some degree of
independence and may bring new responsibilities that heighten her sense of worth.
Inferiority is a sense of incompetence and insecurity and lack of appreciation of talents and skills.
If children compare themselves unfavourably with others, or do not attain mastery, they might develop a sense
of incompetence and feel unproductive hence, a sense of inferiority.
- The focus is on competence in meeting challenges presented by parents, peers, school, etc.
- Children need to cope with new social and academic demands.
- Child learns to do things well or correctly in comparison to a standard or to others.
- Success leads to a sense of competence.
- While failure results to inferiority.
- Child becomes a conformist at this stage and is easily manipulated. At some point in this stage, a child
desires to complete a productive goal over fulfilling playful whims. If the child is successful with technology and
industrious pursuits, s/he gains self-esteem; if s/he fails she feels inferior, which might lead to isolation and
family rivalry.
Central Process
Education
- Children experience the sense of mastery and accomplishment with industry and the critical feedback
or negative evaluations that are associated with inferiority.
- The goal of education is character development.
- Education focuses on an individuals acquisition of knowledge and skill development, typically gained
within the context of school or a formal program of instruction.
Prime Adaptive Ego Quality
Competence
- A belief of ones ability to make sense of and master the demands of a situation.
- Dexterity and intelligence in the completion of tasks, unimpaired by infantile inferiority.
- It is the basis of cooperative participation in technologies, and it relies, in turn, on the logic of tools and
skills.
- Competence provides the child with a deep confidence in his ability to engage in new situations and do
well.
Core Pathology
Inertia
- A paralysis of action and thought that prevents productive work.
- If the struggle between industry and inferiority favors either inferiority or overabundance of industry,
children are regress to an earlier stage of development and spend most of their time in non productive play.
This regression is called inertia- the antithesis of competence and the core pathology of school age.