Unisa Study Notes



PART 3: INFANCY AND TODDLERHOOD

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT DURING THE FIRST THREE YEARS

Infant memory

▪ Infantile amnesia: ‘The inability to remember early events’

▪ Piaget: “Early events are not stored in memory because brain is not yet developed enough”

▪ Freud: “Early memories are stored but are repressed because they are emotionally troubling”

▪ Some suggest children cannot store events in memory until they can talk about them

▪ Operant conditioning with non-verbal age appropriate tasks – infants’ memory process may not differ fundamentally from older children and adults, except: infants retention time shorter ~ repeat action days or weeks later if reminded periodically of situation in which task learned

▪ Carolyn Rovee Collier’s: operantly conditioned infants to kick in order to activate a mobile attached to an ankle by ribbon – babies (2 – 6 months) repeated kicking when shown the mobile, even though their legs weren’t attached ~ memory of behaviour seems to be linked specifically to the original cue, 2 – 6 months only repeat behaviour when original mobile shown, 9 – 12 months ‘try out’ behaviour on different train if no more than 2 weeks had gone by since training – Context effects recollection when behaviour has weakened: 3, 9 and 12 month old could initially recognise mobile or train in different setting from one in which they had been trained, but not after long delays

▪ Length of time conditioned response retained increases with age

▪ Infants’ memories don’t last because crucial match between situation something learned, and situation in which it can be recalled is lost after long period of time (in which child relies more on verbal cues than non-verbal)

Socioeconomic status and IQ

▪ Correlation between socioeconomic status and IQ: Family income associated with cognitive development, achievement, and behaviour in preschool years and beyond

▪ Poverty limits parents’ ability to provide educational resources and may exert negative psychological effect on parents and their parenting practises

▪ Combination of environmental and genetic factors influences children’s vulnerability to economic deprivation and their ability to surmount it cognitively and behaviourally

▪ Children in deprived families tended to have lower IQ’s and were more likely to engage in antisocial behaviour

Assessing the impact of the home environment

▪ Intelligence influenced by inheritance and experience

▪ Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME): Instrument to measure influence home environment has on children’s cognitive growth ~ Assesses and gives credit to:

|Parental responsiveness |Parent of infant/toddler for caressing/kissing child during examiners visit |

| |Parent of preschooler for spontaneously praising |

| |Parent of older child for answering child’s questions |

| |Positive correlation between parents’ responsiveness to 6 month olds and the children’s IQ, achievement test scores and |

| |teacher-related classroom behaviour through age 13 |

|Enriched home environment |Number of books in home |

| |Presence of play-things that encourage development of concepts |

| |Parents involvement in children’s play |

Early Intervention

6 conditions for normal cognitive and psychosocial development:

1) Encouragement to explore the environment

2) Mentoring in basic cognitive and social skills (labelling, sequencing, sorting and comparing)

3) Celebration of accomplishments

4) Guidance in practising and expanding skills

5) Protection from inappropriate punishment/teasing/disapproval for mistakes or unintended consequences of exploring and trying out skills

6) Stimulation of language and other symbolic communication

Fostering competence:

1) In the early months, provide sensory stimulation but avoid overstimulation and distracting noises

2) As babies grow older, create an environment that fosters learning – one that includes books, interesting objects (which do not have to be expensive toys), and a place to play

3) Respond to babies’ signals. This establishes a sense of trust that the world is a friendly place and gives babies a sense of control over their lives

4) Give babies the power to effect changes, through toys that can be shaken, moulded, or moved. Help a baby discover that turning a doorknob opens a door, flicking a light switch turns on a light, and opening a faucet produces running water for bath

5) Give babies freedom to explore. Do not confine them regularly during the day in a crib, jump seat, or small room and only for short periods in playpen. Baby-proof the environment and let them go!

6) Talk to babies. They will not pick up language from listening to the radio or television; they need interaction with adults

7) In talking or playing with babies, enter into whatever they are interested in at that moment instead of trying to redirect attention to something else

8) Arrange opportunities to learn basic skills (labelling, sorting, comparing objects, putting items in sequence, observing consequences of actions)

9) Applaud new skills and help babies practise and expand them. Stay nearby and do not hover

10) Read to babies in warm, caring environment from early age. Reading aloud and talking about stories = preliteracy skills

11) Use punishment sparingly. Do not punish or ridicule results of normal trial-and-error exploration

Piagetian approach: The sensorimotor stage

▪ Sensorimotor stage: Piaget’s first stage in cognitive development, during which infants learn about themselves and their environment through sensory and motor activity ~ from birth to age 2

▪ Babies change from creatures who respond primarily through reflexes and random behaviour into goal-oriented toddlers

Substages of the sensorimotor stage

• The six stage follow onto one another as a baby’s schemes (organised patterns of behaviour used in particular situations) become more elaborate

• First five stages babies learn to coordinate input from senses and organise their activities in relation to their environment ~ process: organisation, adaptation and equilibration

• Sixth substage progress from trial-and-error learning to the use of symbols and concepts to solve simple problems

• Representational ability: capacity to store mental images or symbols of objects and events

• Deferred imitation: reproduction of observed behaviour after passage of time by calling up stored symbols

• Pretend play: play involving imaginary people/situations ~ fantasy/dramatic/imaginative play

6 Substages of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development:

|Substage |Age |Description |

|Use of reflexes |Birth – 1 |Infants exercise inborn reflexes and gain some control over them – do not coordinate information from their senses – do not |

| |month |grasp objects they look at |

|Primary circular |1 – 4 months |Infants repeat pleasurable behaviours that first occur by chance – activities focus on infant’s body rather than effects of |

|reactions | |behaviour on environment. Infants make first acquired adaptations; that is, suck different objects differently – start |

| | |coordinating sensory information and grasp objects |

|Secondary circular |4 – 8 months |Infants become more interested in environment; repeat actions that bring interesting results and prolong interesting |

|reactions | |experiences – actions are intentional but not initially goal-directed |

|Coordination of |8 – 12 months |Behaviour more deliberate and purposeful (intentional) as infants coordinate previously learned schemes and use previously |

|secondary schemes | |learned behaviours to attain their goals – they anticipate events |

|Tertiary circular |12 – 18 months|Toddlers chow curiosity and experimentation; they purposefully vary actions to see results – they actively explore their |

|reactions | |world to determine what is novel about an object, event or situation – they try out new activities and use trial and error |

| | |in solving problems |

|Mental combinations |18 – 24 months|Since toddlers can mentally represent events, they are no longer confined to trial and error to solve problems – symbolic |

| | |thought enables them to begin to think about events and anticipate their consequences without always resorting to action – |

| | |they begin to demonstrate insight – can use symbols (gestures and words) and can pretend |

Development of knowledge about objects and space

Object concept: idea that objects have their own independent existence, characteristics and locations in space – fundamental to an orderly view of physical reality ~ basis for children’s awareness that they exist apart from objects and other people

o Object permanence: understanding that a person or object still exists when out of sight (peek-a-boo)

← Piaget: “infants develop knowledge about objects by watching results of own actions (coordinating visual and motor information)”

← Develops gradually during sensorimotor stage: at first infants have no such concept; by 3rd substage (4 – 8 months) they will look for something they’ve dropped and if they cannot see it they act as if it no longer exists; 4th substage (8 – 12 months) look for an object in place where they first found it after seeing it hidden even if seeing it moved later: A, not-B error: sign of incomplete understanding of object concept, together with an egocentric (self-centred) view of spatial relations; 5th substage (12 – 18 months) no longer make this error – search in last place hidden (will not search in a place they did not see it hidden); 6th substage (18 – 24 months) object permanence fully achieved (look for object even if hadn’t seen it hidden

o Locating objects in space: egocentrism helps explain young infant’s limited ability to locate objects in space ~ can only see things from own point of view, given immobility = limited ~ no idea objects exist in space independent of them, not until 6th substage: egocentrism declines and mental representations develop – babies develop an allocentric(objectively consider relationships among objects and people) ~ consider relationships among all objects in given space including themselves (women in window) – not clear whether increasing accuracy of special judgements stems from decline in egocentrism or growing ability to coordinate information about infant’s own position with information about the environment – some suggest improvements near end of first year are related to development of self-locomotion

o Symbolic Development and Spatial Thinking: Growth of representational thinking enables children to make more accurate judgements about objects and spatial relationships – using hands to explore pictures (paintings) – 2 year olds understand that the picture is a representation of something else and use this to guide them to the actual location of something shown in the photograph; young children have difficulty using a scale models as they see the model as an object itself – Dual representation hypothesis: Proposal that children under 3 years have difficulty grasping spatial relationships because of need to keep more than one mental representation in mind at the same time (big room: little room)

o Estimation of scale: Scale errors: momentary misperceptions of relative sizes of objects – 2 different brain systems normally work together during interactions with familiar objects, one system enables child to recognise and categorise an object and plan what to do with it, a separate system involved in perceiving size of object and using this information to control actions pertaining to it – a breakdown of the ‘teamwork’ between these immature brain systems may explain young children’s frequent scale errors, or lack of impulse control due to immaturity of the prefrontal cortex

What abilities may develop earlier than Piaget thought?

• Piaget: Imitation ~ invisible imitation: imitation using body parts baby cannot see (mouth) develops at 9 months, after visible imitation: use of hands/feet (which babies can see) – study showed babies less than 72 hours old appeared to imitate adults by opening their mouths and sticking out their tongues as well as duplicating adults’ head movements – review: imitative movement of sticking out tongue disappears at 2 months

• Piaget: “children under 18 months lack cognitive memory structures to engage in deferred imitation of an act seen before – underestimated infants’ and toddlers’ memory because of their limited ability to talk about what they remember

• Deferred imitation of novel or complex events seems to begin by 6 – 9 months: findings agree with operant conditioning – infants do seem capable of remembering after a delay

• Elicited imitation: research method in which infants or toddlers are induced to imitate a specific series of actions they have seen but not necessarily done before; 9 month olds can reproduce a simple 2-step procedure, more reliable during 2nd year of life, can repeat unfamiliar, multistep sequence as much as a year later – prior practise helps reactivate children’s memories

• 4 factors determining young children’s long-term recall:

1) Number of times sequence of events experienced

2) Whether child actively participates or merely observes

3) Whether given verbal reminders of experiences

4) Whether sequence of events occurs in logical, causal order

• Object permanence: Piaget may have underestimated young infants’ grasp of object permanence – babies may fail to search for hidden objects as they cannot yet carry out a two-step or two-handed sequence of actions, repeated opportunities = able to do so ~ perform better when tested with age-appropriate procedure; methods based only infants’ looking behaviour eliminating need for any motor activity and thus can be used earlier ages – Piaget may have been wrong in emphasis on motor experiences as primary engine of cognitive growth

Information processing approach: Perceptions and representations

▪ Concerned with individual differences in intelligent behaviour and aims to describe the mental processes involved in acquiring and remembering information or solving problems

▪ Analyses separate parts of a complex task (Piaget’s object search tasks), to figure out abilities necessary for each part of task and at what age these abilities develop

▪ Measure and draw inferences from what infants pay attention to and for how long

Habituation

• Type of learning in which familiarity with stimulus reduces, slows or stops response ~ study by presenting stimulus and monitoring responses (heart rate, sucking, eye movements and brain activity) – the repetition makes the object lose its novelty and no longer creates reaction from baby

• Dishabituation: ‘increase in responsiveness after the presentation of a new stimulus

• Gauge efficiency of infants’ information processing by measuring how quickly babies habituate to familiar stimuli, how fast their attention recovers when exposed to a new stimuli, and how much time they spend looking at the new and the old

• Efficiency of habituation correlates with later signs of cognitive development (preference for complexity, rapid exploration of environment, sophisticated play, quick problem solving and ability to match pictures ~ speed of habituation and other information-processing abilities show promise as predictors of intelligence

Visual and auditory processing abilities

• Visual preference: tendency of infants to spend more time looking at one sight than another – based on ability to make visual distinctions (babies less than 2 days prefer curved lines, complex patterns, 3-D objects and pictures of faces, and new sights to familiar ones) ~ latter tendency = novelty preference

• Visual recognition memory: ability to distinguish a familiar visual stimulus from an unfamiliar one when shown both at the same time – depends on comparing incoming information with information the infant already has (ability to form and refer mental representations of previous visual experience

• Habituation and novelty preference studies suggest that at least rudimentary representational ability exists at birth or very soon after and quickly becomes more efficient – individual differences in information processing = speed infants form and refer to mental images

• Study attention development – from birth to 8/10 weeks, amount of time infants gaze at new sight increases, between 3 and 6 months, looking time becomes shorter as infants learn to scan objects more efficiently and shift attention, after 7 months, when sustaining attention becomes more voluntary and task-oriented, looking time plateaus or slightly increases ~ 5 month olds have been trained to distribute attention more efficiently and thus improve processing – capacity for joint attention or joint perceptual exploration (may contribute to social interaction, language acquisition and understanding of others’ mental states) develops by 12 months (when babies respond to adults’ gaze by pointing in same direction

• Watching TV in infancy and toddlerhood may impede attentional development

• Auditory discrimination based on attentional preference: newborns can tell sounds they have already heard from those not (even remember sounds from within womb)

• Piaget: “senses are unconnected at birth and are only gradually integrated through experience” ~ if so, integration occurs immediately: neonates will look at source of sound indicates an association with hearing and sight

• Cross-modal transfer: ability to use information gained by one sense to guide another (finding way by feeling surroundings in a dark room)

• Speed of processing increases rapidly during first year of life and continues in second and third years as toddlers become better able to separate new information from information they have already processed – pre-term and low-birth-weight babies process information more slowly than those born full term

Social-contextual approach: learning from interactions with caregivers

▪ Influenced by Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory and study how cultural context affects early social interactions that may promote cognitive competence

▪ Guided participation: Participation of adult in child’s activity in manner that helps structure activity and bring child’s understanding of it closer to that of adult ~ inspired by Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and his view of learning as a collaborative process ~ it often occurs in everyday activities and shared play where children learn informally the skills, knowledge, and values important in culture

▪ Cultural differences affected types of guided participation researchers observed ~ cultural context influences way caregivers contribute to cognitive development: direct adult involvement in children’s play and learning may be better adapted to middle-class urban community than rural, underdeveloped ones

▪ Differences reflect variations in goals of child raising

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Classic theories of language acquisition: The nature-nurture debate

▪ Skinner: “language learning is based on experience”

▪ Classic learning theory: “children learn language through operant conditioning”

▪ Social-learning theory: “babies imitate sound they hear adults make, and reinforced for doing so”

▪ Word learning depends on selective reinforcement – children are reinforced for speech that is more and more adultlike – sentence formation is more complex process: child learns basic word order and then learns other words can be substituted in each category

▪ Observation, imitation and reinforcement contribute to language development but, Chomsky argued “cannot fully explain it”: Word combinations and nuances are so many and so complex they cannot all be acquired by specific imitation and reinforcement – then caregivers often reinforce utterances that are ungrammatical (but makes a little sense) ~ learning theory does not account for children’s imaginative ways of saying things they have never heard

▪ Chomsky’s view = Nativism: theory that human beings have an inborn capacity for language acquisition – LAD (language acquisition device): inborn mechanism enabling children to infer linguistic rules from language they hear ~ babies are born with perceptual mechanisms that are tuned to the properties of speech; all children master their native language in same age-related sequence without formal teaching; brain of human contain structure larger on one side than other, suggesting an inborn mechanism for sound and language processing localised in larger hemisphere (left)

▪ Aspects of Nativism and learning theory used to explain how deaf babies learn sign language, which is structured much like spoken language and acquired in same sequence: just as hearing babies of hearing parents copy utterances of parents, deaf babies of deaf parents copy sign language of parents – babbling/hand-babbling occurs at same times in hearing and non-hearing infants – suggests an inborn language capacity tied to brain maturation

▪ Language acquisition depends on intertwining of nature and nurture, inborn capacity to acquire language may be activated or constrained by experience

Social interaction: The role of parents and caregivers

Prelinguistic period:

o At babbling stage, adults help infant advance toward true speech by repeating sounds baby makes – baby soon joins game and repeats sounds back

o Parents’ imitation of babies sounds affects pace of language learning – helps babies experience social aspect of speech (conversation takes turns)

o By 13 months, responses to verbal initiatives especially important

Vocabulary development

o Vocabulary gets a boost when adult seizes opportunity to teach a child a new word (repeating first words and pronouncing them correctly)

o Adults help toddler who has begun to put words together by expanding on what child says

o Babies learn by listening to what adults say – strong relationship between frequency of various words in mothers speech and order in which children learn these words, as well as between mothers’ talkativeness and size of toddlers’ vocabulary – mothers with higher socioeconomic status use richer vocabularies and longer utterances, their 2 year olds have larger spoken vocabularies

o Sensitivity and responsiveness to a child’s level of development count more than number of words mother uses

o Bilingual children often use elements of both languages in same utterance = code mixing; when they have the ability to switch between languages according to who they are speaking to = code switching

Preparing for literacy: The benefits of reading aloud

▪ Frequency children are read to and way they are read to can influence how well children speak and eventually how well and how soon they read

▪ Children who learn to read early = parents who read to them frequently – offers opportunities for emotional intimacy and fosters parent-child communication

Styles of reading:

Adjusted to needs of child

|Describer |Comprehender |Performance-oriented |Dialogic/shared reading |

|Focus = describing what is |Encourages child to look more |Reads story straight through, |Child = storyteller while the adult acts as active listener, |

|going on in pictures and |deeply at meaning of story and to |introducing main themes and |asking questions (open-ended) and follow up answers with extended |

|inviting child to do so |make inferences and predictions |asking questions afterward |questions – gives alternative suggestions and gives praise and |

| | | |encouragement |

o Children who read often in dialogic manner (1 to 3years) show better language skills at 2 ½, 4 ½ and 5

PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT DURING THE FIRST THREE YEARS

Temperament

▪ Characteristic definition or style of approaching and reacting to situations ~ the HOW of behaviour: not What people do, but HOW they do it

▪ Affects the way children approach and react to the outside world, way they regulate own mental, emotional and behavioural functioning

▪ Emotional basis – relatively consistent and enduring

▪ Individual differences in temperament (thought to derive from person’s basic biological makeup) form core of developing personality

Aspects and patterns of temperament: New York longitudinal study

• NYLS – researchers followed 133 infants into adulthood, interviewing, testing and observing them, and interviewing their parents and teachers ~ looked at how active children were, how regular they were in hunger, sleep and bowel habits, how readily they accepted new people and situations, how they adapted to changes in routine, how sensitive they were to noise, bright lights, and other sensory stimuli, how intensely they responded whether their mood tended to be pleasant, joyful and friendly or unpleasant, unhappy and unfriendly, and whether they persisted at tasks or were easily distracted = the children differed in all these characteristics and almost from birth and differences tended to continue

• Categories: 40% “easy children” (generally happy, rhythmic in biological functioning and accepting of new experiences), 10% “difficult children” (more irritable and harder to please, irregular in biological rhythms and more intent of expressing emotion), 15% “slow-to-warm-up-children” (mild but slow to adapt to new people and situations) – many children (35%) do not fit into these categories (normal variations)

3 Temperamental Patterns (according to the NYLS):

|“Easy” Child |“Difficult” child |“Slow-to-warm-up” child |

|Has moods of mild to moderate intensity |Displays intense and frequently negative moods; cries |Has mildly intense reactions, both positive and |

| |often and loudly; laughs loudly |negative |

|Responds well to novelty and change. Quickly develops |Responds poorly to novelty and change. Sleeps and eats| |

|regular sleep and feeding schedules |regularly |Responds slowly to novelty and change. Sleeps and eats|

| | |more regularly than the difficult child, less |

|Takes to new foods easily. Smiles at strangers. Adapts|Accepts new foods slowly. Is suspicious of strangers. |regularly than the easy child |

|easily to new situations. Accepts most frustrations |Adapts slowly to new situations. Reacts to frustration|Shows mildly negative initial response to new stimuli |

|with little fuss. Adapts quickly to routines and rules|with tantrums. Adjusts slowly to new routines |(first encounter with a new person, place or |

|of new games. | |situation). Gradually develops liking for new stimuli |

| | |after repeated, unpressured exposures |

Effects of temperament on adjustment: “Goodness of fit”

• Key to a healthy adjustment = goodness of fit: appropriateness of environmental demands and constraints to a child’s temperament

• Trouble may occur if:

o Active child required to sit still

o ‘Slow-to-warm-up’ child constantly pushed into new situations

o Persistent child taken away from absorbing projects

• Parents’ responses to children may reflect amount of control they have over child’s behaviour: parents who see themselves as having little control over 12-month-olds are more likely than others to play directively with their babies (urging, reminding, restraining, questioning and correcting them) ~ mother considers infant difficult

• When parents recognise that child acts in a certain way, not out of wilfulness, laziness, stupidity or to spite their parents, largely out of inborn temperaments – less likely to feel guilty, anxious, hostile, loss of control, be rigid, impatient ` can anticipate child’s reactions and help child adapt

How stable is temperament

• Early temperament can predict adult personality

• Temperament = largely inborn, hereditary and fairly stable (not fully formed at birth)

• Newborns show different patterns of sleeping, fussing and activity ~ persist to some degree

• Develops as various emotion and self-regulatory capacities appear can change in response to parental attitudes and treatment

• Studies using IBQ in infancy, CBQ at 7 found strong links between infant temperaments and childhood personality ~ temperament at age 3 predicts personality at age 18 and 21

• Frequent similarity in temperament between children and adults ~ environment parents create reinforce genetic tendencies they pass on to their children ~ continue to seek out environments that strengthen their natural tendencies: temperamental patterns (healthy and unhealthy) tend to persist

The mother’s role

▪ Harry Harlow experiments with the two kinds of surrogate mothers (wire mesh and cloth – monkeys)

▪ Mothering includes comfort of close body contact and satisfaction of innate need to cling

The father’s role

▪ Social construction ~ culturally dependent

▪ In some societies fathers are more involved in their young children’s lives (economically and emotionally and in time spent) than in others

▪ Fathers around the world differ in the way they play with their infants – cross cultural variations suggest rough play is not a function of male biology, but instead is culturally influenced

How parents shape gender differences

▪ Gender: measurable gender differences in infancy are few ~ newborn boys and girls react differently to stress (suggesting genetic, hormonal or temperamental differences)

▪ Boys and girls are equally sensitive to touch and tend to teethe, sit up and walk at about the same ages – also achieve other motor milestones on infancy at about same times

▪ Mothers constantly have higher expectations for son’s success in crawling – identical levels of performance between boys and girls evident

▪ Parental shaping of boy’s and girls’ personalities begins very early

▪ Father’s promote gender typing: socialisation process by which children at an early age learn appropriate gender roles ~ treat boys and girls differently than mothers do (including 1st year) – in the 2nd year fathers talk more and spend more time with sons than daughters

▪ Mothers talk more, and more supportively to daughters than fathers who are less talkative and supportive, also less talkative than mothers

▪ Fathers play roughly with sons and show sensitivity to daughters

Developing trust

▪ Human babies are dependent on other food, protection and their lives

▪ Erikson: ‘early experiences are key to knowing their needs will be met’

▪ Erikson’s first stage of psychosocial development ~ Basic trust versus mistrust: infants develop a sense of the reliability of people and objects

▪ If trust predominates: children develop ‘virtue’ = hope (belief they can fulfil needs and obtain their desires

▪ If mistrust predominates: children view world as unfriendly and unpredictable and will have trouble forming relationships

▪ Critical element in developing trust = sensitive, responsive, consistent care giving (feeding situation as setting for establishing right mix of trust and mistrust)

▪ Trust enables infant to let mom out of sight because she has become an inner certainty as well as outer predictability – inner trust forms a solid foundation for more difficult periods ahead

Developing attachments

▪ Attachment: Reciprocal, enduring tie between infants and caregiver, each of whom contributes to the quality of the relationships

▪ Has adaptive value for babies, ensuring psychosocial and physical needs are met

▪ Ecological theory: infants and parents are biologically predisposed to become attached to each other – attachment promotes a baby’s survival

Studying patterns of attachments

• Bowlby: ‘convinced of importance of mother-baby bond and warned against separating mother and baby without providing good substitute care

• Ainsworth: ‘Strange Situation’ ~ laboratory technique used to study attachment – adult is the mother (though other adults have taken part) and infant 10-24 months old

• Consists of sequence of 8 episodes (occurs in less than half an hour) where mother leaves the baby twice in an unfamiliar room, first time with a stranger, second time alone, and the stranger returns first. Mom encourages baby to explore and play again and gives comfort if baby seems to need it ~ each particular concern is baby’s response each time mother returns

• 4 patterns of attachment:

|Secure attachment |Pattern in which an infant cries or protests when the primary caregiver leaves and actively seeks out the caregiver upon his return |

| |Gloria plays and explores freely when her mother is nearby. She responds enthusiastically when her mother returns. |

|Avoidant attachment |Pattern in which an infant rarely cries when separated from the primary caregiver and avoids contact upon his return |

| |When Sam’s mother returns, Sam does not make eye contact or greet her. It is almost as if he has not noticed her return |

|Ambivalent (resistant) |Pattern in which an infant becomes anxious before the primary caregiver leaves, is extremely upset during hi absence, and both seeks and|

|attachment |resists contact upon his return |

| |James hovers close to his mother during much of the Strange Situation, but does not greet her positively when she returns. Instead he is|

| |angry and upset. |

|Disorganised-disoriented |Pattern in which an infant, after separation from the primary caregiver, shows contradictory behaviours upon his return |

|attachment |Erica responds to the Strange Situation with inconsistent contradictory behaviour. She seems to fall apart, overwhelmed by the stress |

How attachment is established

• On basis of baby’s interactions with mother, baby builds a ‘working model’ of what can be expected from her

• Various patterns of emotional attachment represent different cognitive representations that result in different expectations ~ as long as mom behaves in same way, model holds up – if behaviour changes consistently, baby revises model and security of attachment changes

• Baby’s working model of attachment related to Erikson’s concept of basic trust ~ secure attachment evolves from trust, insecure attachment reflects mistrust

• Securely attached babies have learned to trust not only caregivers but own ability to get what they need ~ babies who cry a lot and whose mothers respond by soothing them tend to be securely attached infants and toddlers tend to be sensitive and responsive – equally important = mutual interaction, stimulation, a positive attitude, warmth and acceptance and emotional support

The role of temperament

• Both a mother’s sensitivity and her baby’s temperament influence attachment patterns

• Neurological/physiological conditions may underlie temperamental differences in attachment

• Baby’s temperament may have not only a direct impact on attachment but also an indirect impact through its effect on parents

• Irritability on an infant’s part may prevent development of secure attachment but not if mother has skills to cope with baby’s temperament

• Goodness of fit between parent and child may be key to understanding security of attachment

Intergenerational transmission of attachment patterns

• Way adults recall early experiences with parents or caregivers affects emotional well-being and may also influence way they respond to and deal with children

• Mother who was securely attached or understands why she was insecurely attached to her mother can accurately recognise baby’s attachment behaviours, respond encouragingly and help baby form secure attachment to her

• Mothers preoccupied with past attachment relationships tend to show and intrusiveness in interaction with children

• Depressed mothers who dismiss memories of their past attachments tend to be cold and unresponsive to their children

• Parents attachment history also influence perceptions of their baby’s temperament and those perceptions often affect parent-child relationship

Stranger anxiety and separation anxiety

• Stranger anxiety: wariness of strange people and places, shown by some infants during second half of first year

• Separation anxiety: distress shown by infant when a familiar caregiver leaves

• These are emotional and cognitive milestones of second half of infancy reflecting attachment to mother

• Although typical they are not universal: whether baby cries when parent leaves or new person approaches may say more about baby’s temperament/life circumstances than security of attachment

• Babies rarely react negatively to strangers before 6 months, common 8/9 months, do so more and more throughout first year of life

• Separation anxiety may be due, not so much to separation itself as to the quality of substitute care ~ when substitute caregivers are warm and responsive and play with 9 month olds before they cry, babies cry less than when with less responsive caregivers

• Stability of care important ~ need for substitute care to be as close to good mothering ~ institutionalised children

• Value of continuity and consistency in care giving, so children can form early emotional bonds with caregivers, as long as care giving situation stable

• Intense fear of strangers or protest when mom leaves is considered a sign of secure attachment ~ measured more by what happens when mother returns and by how many tears are shed upon her departure

Long-term effects of attachment

• Security of attachment seems to affect emotional, social, and cognitive competence ~ the more secure a child’s attachment to a nurturing adult, the easier for child to become independent of adult and to develop good relationships with others

• Link between attachment in infancy and characteristics observed years later underscores continuity of development and interrelationships of its various aspects

• If on basis of early experience, children have positive expectations of their ability to get along with others and engage in social give and take and if they think well of themselves, they may set up social situations that reinforce these beliefs; and if children, as infants, had secure base and could count on parents or caregiver’s responsiveness, they are likely to feel confident enough to be actively engaged in their world

• Analysis of 7 studies found substantial association between quality of infant attachment and language development as well as smaller association with cognitive development

• Securely attached toddlers tend to have larger more varied vocabularies ~ also more sociable – positive interactions with peers, and friendly overtures are more likely to be accepted

• Insecurely attached toddlers tend to show more negative emotions (fear, distress, anger) while securely attached children are more joyful

• 3-5 year olds securely attached children likely to be more curious, competent, empathic, resilient and self-confident, to get along better with other children, and to form closer friendships than children insecurely attached as infants – interact more positively with parents, preschool teachers, and peers and are better able to resolve conflicts ~ have more positive self-image

• Secure attachment prepares children for intimacy of friendship; in middle childhood and adolescence, securely attached children have closest most stable friendship and also tend to be more self-reliant, self-assured, adaptable, resilient and emotionally healthy

• Insecurely attached infants have inhibitions and negative emotions in toddlerhood, hostility toward other children at 5, and dependency during school years ~ disorganised attachment have behaviour problems at all levels of schooling and psychiatric disorders at 17

• Correlation between attachment in infancy and later development stem, not from attachment itself, but from underlying personality characteristics that affect both attachment and parent-child interactions after infancy

The emerging sense of self

▪ William James described two selves: I-self and Me-self:

o I-self: subjective entity that constructs and seeks to know the Me-self; emerges in the context of infant-caregiver relationship, as infant begins to form rudimentary sense of self and others

o Me-self (self-concept): sense of self; descriptive and evaluative mental picture of one’s abilities and traits

o Between 4-10 months – learning to reach, grasp and make things happen – may experience sense of personal agency (feature of I-self): realisation that one can control external events – a forerunner in Bandura’s self-efficacy: sense of capability to master challenges and achieve goals – infants develop self-coherence (sense of being physical whole with boundaries, within which agency resides)

o Emergence of self-awareness builds on perceptual discrimination between self and others

o Early perceptual discrimination = foundation of Me-self, the conceptual awareness that develops between 15-18 months

o Once infants recognise themselves (mirror) they show interest in their own features

o By 20-24 months, toddler begin use first-person pronouns (sign of self-awareness)

o Between 19-30 months they apply descriptive terms (curly) and evaluative (pretty) to themselves

o Self-evaluation and evaluation by others are steps toward development of conscience

Developing autonomy

▪ Erikson: Autonomy versus shame and doubt: 18 months to 3 years ~ second stage in personality development ~ children achieve balance between self-determination and control by others – virtue = will

▪ Toilet-training (completed most rapidly at 27 months) is an important step to autonomy and self-control

▪ Children need parents to set appropriate limits ~ shame and doubt help them to recognise need for limits

▪ Terrible two’s (negativism): for the sake of resisting authority (not so common)

Socialisation and internalisation: developing a conscience

▪ Socialisation: development of habits, skills, values and motives shared by responsible, productive members of society

▪ Internalisation: process fundamental to socialisation by which children accept societal standards of conduct as their own

Developing self-regulation

• Self-regulation: child’s independent control of behaviour to conform to understood social expectations ~ foundation of socialisation – links all domains of development (physical, cognitive, social and emotional)

• By ‘reading’ parents emotional responses to their behaviour, children continually absorb information about conduct their parents approve of

• As children process, store and act upon this information, their strong desire to please their parents leads them to do so as they know their parents want them to, whether or not their parents are there to see

• Mutual regulation of emotional states during infancy contributes to development of self-control, especially in temperamentally ‘difficult’ children, who may need extra help in achieving it

• Before they can control their own behaviour, children may need to be able to regulate, or control, attentional processes and modulate negative emotions ~ attentional regulation enables children to develop will power and cope with frustration

• Growth of self-regulation parallels development of self-conscious and evaluative emotions (empathy, shame and guilt) ~ requires ability to wait for gratification ~ correlated with measures of conscience development, (resisting temptation and making amends for wrong-doing)

• Full development of self-regulation = 3 years

Origins of conscience: committed compliance

• Conscience: initial standards of behaviour, which usually control one’s conduct and produce emotional discomfort when violated

• Depends on willingness to do the right thing because the child believes it is right, not (as in self-regulation) because someone else said so

• Inhibitory control: conscious, or effortful, holding back of impulses, mechanism of self-regulation that emerges during toddlerhood ~ contributes to development of conscience by first enabling child to comply voluntarily with parental dos and don’ts

• Committed compliance: Kochanska’s term for wholehearted obedience of a parent’s orders without reminders or lapses

• Situational compliance: Kochanska’s term for obedience of parent’s orders only in the presence of signs of ongoing parental control

• Committed compliers = majority are girls, beginning as early as 8-10 months

• Committed compliance increases with age while situational compliance decreases

Factors in the success of socialisation

• Factors in success of socialisation: security of attachment, observational learning of parents’ behaviour, mutual responsiveness of parent and child, as well as socioeconomic and cultural factors

• Importance to conscience development of a close, mutually binding and cooperative relationship between mother and child, in which both share positive emotions and are responsive to each other’s emotional signals

• Mothers and children who have mutually responsive relationships maintain them over time ~ children tend to show moral emotions, moral conduct and moral cognition

• Secure attachment and a warm, mutually responsive parent-child relationship fosters committed and compliance and ultimately conscience development ~ committed complier’s mothers rely on gentle guidance rather than force or threats

• Children more readily comply when parents repeatedly affirm their autonomy

CONTACT WITH OTHER CHILDREN

Siblings

▪ Longest lasting relationships are with your siblings – share roots

The arrival of a new baby

• Children react in various ways to the arrival of a new sibling – the variation in adjustment depends on older child’s age, quality of relationship with mom and the family atmosphere ~ attachment to mom often becomes less secure

• Birth of younger sibling changes way mother acts toward older sibling, at least until newcomer settles in ~ mother may play less, be less sensitive to their interests, give more order, more confrontation, use physical punishment and initiate fewer conversations and games that help develop skills

• If mother takes maternal leave, she can spend more time with child – financial worries may affect sources of learning for older child, and emotional well-being of mother which contribute to negative interactions with older sibling

• Arrival of new baby tends to enhance older child’s language development as the child starts to talk more than before with other family members

How siblings interact

• Sibling conflicts = vehicle for understanding social relationships outside home as well

• Young children are attached to their older siblings ~ although rivalry present, so is affection ~ the more securely attached siblings are to parents, the better they get along with each other

• Sibling conflict increases dramatically after 18 months – next few months they begin participating in more family interactions and become more involved in family disputes – become more aware of others’ intention and feelings – recognise what behaviour upsets and annoys siblings, and what is considered good or naughty

• As cognitive and social understanding grows, sibling conflict tends to become more constructive – younger sibling participates in attempts to reconcile ~ constructive conflict helps children recognise each others needs, wishes and point of view – helps them learn how to fight, disagree and compromise within the context of a safe, stable relationship

Sociability with non-siblings

▪ Infants and toddlers show interest in people, especially own size ~ first few months show interest in other babies (smiling, cooing and looking), last half they increasingly smile, touch and babble to another baby

▪ 1 year – learning to walk and manipulate objects, toys = object of attention more than people ~ lasts until 1 ½ years until 3 where they pay more attention to what other children do and increase understanding of how to deal with them

▪ Toddlers learn by imitating one another – imitation of each other’s actions leads to more frequent verbal communication which helps peers coordinate joint activity

▪ Conflict can have purpose of helping children negotiate and resolve disputes

▪ Some children = more sociable than others – temperament

▪ Sociability influenced by experience

Effects of parental employment

▪ 1994 NLSY data: little or no effect of early maternal employment on children’s compliance, behaviour problems, self-esteem, cognitive development, or academic achievement – no significant effect of fathers working hours

▪ NICHD: negative effects on cognitive development at 15 months – 3 years when mothers worked 30 or more hours a week by child’s 9th month

▪ Maternal sensitivity, quality of home environment, quality of child care makes difference but does not fully account for findings

▪ Suggest need for generous family-leave policies to help mothers – and fathers – combine parenting and work

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