Chapter 5 Middle and Late Childhood

• Middle and late childhood

  Approximately 6 to 11 years old
• Peer influence in middle and late childhood

  • Peers start to take center-stage, often prompting changes in the parent-child relationship
  • Peer acceptance influences children's perception of self and may have consequences for emotional development beyond these years
• Physical development in middle and late childhood

  • Growth rate becomes slow
  • Slims down, gains muscle strength and lung capacity
  • Growth spurt > females: 9 y/o, males: 11 y/o
  • Gross motor skills: boys outperform girls, fine motor skills: girls outperform boys
  • Between 6 and 8 years old, fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination is improved
  • Between 10-12 years, frontal lobes become more developed
  • Improvements in logic, planning, and memory are evident due to myelination
  • 6-12: nerve cells are almost myelinated
  • Better control in emotional outbursts
  • Increased myelination in hippocampus (responsible for transferring information from short to long term memory) shows improved memory
  • Prefrontal cortex: attention
• Sports in middle and late childhood

  • Emphasis on competition and athletic skill can be counterproductive leading children to grow tired of the game and want to quit
  • Children's activities are no longer children's activities once adults become involved and approach the games as adults rather than children
  • Advantages: Higher satisfaction levels with family and overall quality of life in children, Improved physical and emotional development, Better academic performance
  • Suburban children had a much higher participation of sports than boys and girls living in rural or urban centers
  • Children drop out of organization sports because it was no longer any fun
  • Due to coaches' lack of received training
  • Esports: form of competition with the medium being video games
  • One in 4 children between the ages 5-16 consider playing computer games with their friends as a form of exercise
  • Specializing in only one activity can increase the chances of injury while playing multiple sports is protective
  • Physical education in school is a key component in introducing children to sports
• Childhood obesity


  • Factors: decreased PE and youth sports participation
  • Body Mass Index (BMI): measurement for determining excess weight and expresses relationship of height and weight
  • Overweight: at or above 85th percentile
  • Obese: at or above 95th percentile
  • Associated with high blood pressure, insulin resistance, inflammation, depression, and lower academic achievement
  • Large amounts of processed sugars and saturated fat can impair brain functioning
  • Overweight children show less inhibitory control which makes it more difficult for them to avoid unhealthy foods
  • Increased risk for cognitive decline as one ages
  • Oblivobesity: lack of recognition from parents that children are overweight or obese
  • High socioeconomic status, decrease in misconception frequency: families with more resources were more conscious of what defines a healthy weight
  • Parents can help the best when they are warm and supportive without using shame or guilt
  • Can also act as a child's frontal lobe until it is developed by helping tem make correct food choices and praising their efforts
  • Parents should take caution against emphasizing diet alone to avoid development of eating disorders
• Cognitive development in middle and late childhood


  • Children are learning to think symbolically about the world
  • Understand concepts such as past, present and future, giving them the ability to plan and work toward goals
  • Piaget's Concrete operational stage (7 to 11): mastering the use of logic in concrete ways
  • Able to make use of logical principles in solving problems involving the physical world
  • Still has trouble solving hypothetical problems or more abstract problems
  • Inductive reasoning: A logical process in which multiple premises believed to be true are combined to obtain a specific conclusion
  • Classification: build schemata and are able to organize objects in many different ways
  • Can also understand hierarchies
  • Identity: objects have qualities that do not change even if the object is altered in some way
  • Reversibility: some things that have been changed can be returned to their original state
  • Conservation: changing one quality can be compensated for by changes in another quality
  • Decentration: no longer focus on only one dimension of any object and instead consider the changes in other dimensions too
  • Seriation: arranging items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or width, in a methodical way
  • Changes in myelination and synaptic pruning increase processing speed and ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli
  • Math and reading learning disability -> difficulty in working memory
  • Use more familiar vocabulary, shorter sentences, repeating task instructions more frequently, and chunking
  • Changes in attention and working memory contribute to having more strategic approaches to challenging tasks
  • Steady increase in using memory strategies from ages 6-10
  • By age 10, children were using two or more memory strategies
  • Children who utilized more strategies had better memory performance
  • Mediation deficiency: when a child does not grasp the strategy being taught, and thus, does not benefit from its use
  • Production deficiency: does not spontaneously use a memory strategy and must be prompted to do so
  • Utilization deficiency: using an appropriate strategy, but it fails to aid to their performance
  • New memory strategies acquired before 8 y/o often show utilization deficiencies with gradual improvement in using the strategy
  • Knowledge base: knowledge in particular areas that makes learning new information easier
  • Metacognition: knowledge we have about our own thinking and our ability to use this awareness to regulate our own cognitive processes
  • Older children start to prioritize what is significant and what is not
  • Critical thinking: A detailed examination of beliefs, courses of action, and evidence (how to think)
  • Purpose: evaluate information in ways that help us make informed decisions
  • Skills: Analyzing arguments, Clarifying information, Judging source's credibility, Making value judgments, Deciding on an action
• Language development in middle and late childhood

  • One of the reasons children can classify objects is due to acquiring vocabulary to do so
  • 5th grade: 40, 000 words
  • Language explosion difference from previous stage: ability to associate new words with those already known
  • Fluency disorders: affect the rate of speech (may be labored and slow, or too fast for listeners to follow)
  • Stuttering: speech disorder in which sound, syllables, or words are repeated or last longer than normal
  • Dysfluency: break in the flow of speech
  • Developmental stuttering: persist as a lifelong communication disorder
  • Articulation disorder: inability to correctly produce speech sounds (phonemes) because of imprecise placement, timing, pressure, speed, or flow of movement of the lips, tongue, or throat
  • Voice disorders: problems with pitch, loudness, and quality of the voice
• General Intelligence Factor (g)


  The construct that the different abilities and skills measured on intelligence tests have in common
• Specific Intelligence (s)


  A measure of specific skills in narrow domains
• Triarchic (three-part) Theory of Intelligence (Sternberg)

  • Analytical intelligence: academic problem solving and performing calculations
  • Creative intelligence: the ability to adapt to new situations and create new ideas
  • Practical intelligence: the ability to demonstrate common sense and street-smarts
• Convergent thinking


  Thinking that is directed toward finding the correct answer to a given problem
• Divergent thinking


  The ability to generate many different ideas or solutions to a single problem
• Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Gardner)


  • 8 intelligences (9th: existential)
  • Linguistic: the ability to speak and write well
  • Logical-mathematical: the ability to use logic and mathematical skills to solve problems
  • Spatial: the ability to think and reason about objects in three dimensions
  • Musical: the ability to perform and enjoy music
  • Kinesthetic: the ability to move the body in sports, dance, or other physical activities
  • Interpersonal: the ability to understand and interact effectively with others
  • Intrapersonal: the ability to have insight into self
  • Naturalistic: the ability to recognize, identify, and understand animals, plants, and other living things
• Autistic savants


  People who score low on intelligence tests overall, but who nevertheless may have exceptional skills in a given domain
• Standardization


  Giving an intelligence test to a large number of people at different ages and computing the average score on the test at each age level
• Flynn effect


  The observation that scores on intelligence tests worldwide have increased substantially over the past decades
• Kinesthetic


  The ability to move the body in sports, dance, or other physical activities
• Interpersonal


  The ability to understand and interact effectively with others
• Intrapersonal


  The ability to have insight into self
• Naturalistic


  The ability to recognize, identify, and understand animals, plants, and other living things
• Teachers have used these to teach differently to different students
• Some argue that these seem more like abilities or talents than real intelligence
• Reliable


  Consistent over time
• Validity


  They actually measure intelligence rather than something else
• Standardization


  Giving it to a large number of people at different ages and computing the average score on the test at each age level
• Flynn effect: the observation that scores on intelligence tests worldwide have increased substantially over the past decades
• Thus, intelligence tests should be regularly standardized
• Average increase: 3 IQ points per decade
• Due to better nutrition, increased access to information, more familiarity with multiple-choice tests
• Mental age


  The age at which a person is performing intellectually
• Intelligence Quotient (IQ)


  A measure of intelligence that is adjusted for age
• IQ


  Mental age / chronological age * 100
• Most modern intelligence tests are based on the relative position of a person's score among people of the same age
• Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)


  The most widely used intelligence scale for adults
• WAIS-IV


  • Current version, standardized on 2,200 people ranging from 16 to 90 years old
  • Four domains: verbal, perceptual, working memory, and processing speed
  • Reliability = more than 0.95
  • Shows significant correlations among people with intellectual disabilities
• Intellectual Disability (Intellectual development disorder)

  Based on cognitive capacity (IQ) and adaptive functioning (how well the person handles everyday life tasks)
• Down syndrome: a chromosomal disorder caused by the presence of all or part of an extra 21st chromosome
• Giftedness


  • May have adjustment problems that make it more difficult for them to create social relationships
  • Above average on physical health, taller and heavier, social relationships and less likely to divorce
• Family capital


  A form of power that can be used to improve a child's education
• Wait time


  The gap between the end of one person's comment or question and the next person's reply or answer