Toddlerhood

• Psychosocial development


  • Foundations of Psychosocial Development
  • Developmental Issues in Infancy and Toddlerhood
  • Relationships with Other Children
  • Children of Working Parents
  • Maltreatment, Abuse, and Neglect

  
• Foundations of Psychosocial Development

  • Emotions
  • Temperament
  • Early Social Experiences
  • Gender
  • Personality
• Personality


  Relatively consistent blend of emotions, temperament, thought, and behavior that makes a person unique
• Development is intertwined with social relationships
• Emotions


  • Promote survival
  • Show attraction to pleasant stimulation and withdrawal from unpleasant stimulation for infants
  • Crying, smiling and laughing are the first signs of emotion as they gain responses from the people around them when they show these behaviors
• Primary Emotions


  • Contentment
  • Interest
  • Distress
• Crying


  • Unhappy emotions are expressed and an honest signal of need
  • Uncomfortable for adults which prompts a response – function of crying
  • Four patterns of crying (Wolff, 1969): Basic hunger cry, Angry cry, Pain cry, Frustration cry
• Some parents worry that picking up a baby will spoil the infant
• It may become more difficult to soothe the baby with the inconsistency of picking them up when they are in distress
• Smiling and Laughing


  • Social smiling: Beginning the 2nd month, newborn infants gaze at their parents and smile at them, signaling positive participation in the relationship
  • Laughter signifies the most intense positive emotion and becomes more common between 4-12 months
  • Anticipatory smiling: Infant smiles at an object and then gazes at an adult while still smiling
  • Positive affective processes are reciprocal between parents and babies
  • Positive interactions with parents at 3 and 6 months are more likely to show secure attachment
• Altruistic Behavior and Empathy

  • Altruistic behavior: activity intended to help another person with no expectation or reward
  • The tendency to share with, help, and comfort others seem to be unrelated with each other, but may collectively reflect empathy
  • Empathy: the ability to imagine how another person might feel in a particular situation
  • Mirror neurons: neurons that fire when a person does something or observes someone else do the same thing which may be letting people see other people's perspective
  • Collaborative behaviors is observed when motivation to help and share and the ability to understand others' intentions are present
• Temperament


  • Characteristic disposition or style of approaching and reacting to situations
  • Three temperamental patterns (NY longitudinal study, 1984): "Easy" children, "Difficult (challenging)" children, "Slow-to-warm-up" children

  
• Research suggests that temperament is a relatively stable individual difference, perhaps because it is largely inborn (not fully formed) and strongly influenced by genetics
• Goodness of fit


  Appropriateness of environmental demands and constraints to a child's temperament
• Goodness of fit is key to healthy adjustment
• Temperament has great influence of parenting
• Behavioral inhibition


  • How boldly or cautiously a child approaches unfamiliar objects and situations
  • High inhibition: over-aroused by unpleasantness of novel stimuli (unusually excitable amygdala)
  • Low inhibition: relaxed
• Early Social Experiences: Family

  • Adult-infant interaction patterns are mostly culture-based
  • Mother's role: Food is not the only need (unlike with earlier theorists' claim) that drives development of relationship with mothers, but also warmth and prompt care
  • Father's role: Urbanization and maternal employment are changing traditional roles of fathers, seeking more intimate relationships with their children
• Gender

  • Girls' social behavior: relatively (small difference) more cuddly and interested in faces; better at discriminating facial expressions and regulating distress, show fewer externalizing emotions
  • Toy preference: relatively innate, emerge at around 3 months, sex-typed toy preferences have been found in non-human primates, testosterone levels in infancy predict later preference
  • Play: Preference for same-sex playmates, style of play is likely influenced by prenatal androgen exposure
  • Gender-typing: Children learn behavior their culture considers appropriate, commonly promoted by fathers
• Developing Trust


  • Basic sense of trust vs. mistrust
  • Erikson's first psychosocial stage of development in which infants form a sense of reliability of people and objects
  • Balance of trust and mistrust to form intimate relationships and protect the self respectively
  • Predominant trust: development of hope and belief that they can fulfill their needs and obtain their desires
  • Predominant mistrust: view of the world is unfriendly and unpredictable, and may have trouble forming intimate relationships (withdrawal)
• Developing Attachment


  • Attachment: reciprocal, enduring tie between two people – especially between infant and caregiver – each of whom contributes to the quality of the relationship
  • Bowlby's ethological theory of attachment: Recognizes the infant's emotional tie to the caregiver as an evolved response that promotes survival, Internal working model: children's enduring affectionate tie to the caregiver that they use as a secure base in the caregiver's absence
  • Four phases of attachment development: Preattachment phase, "Attachment-in-the-making" phase, "Clear cut" phase, Reciprocal relationship formation phase

  
• Measuring Attachment Security


  • Strange Situation (Ainsworth) experiment: through observing the infants reaction to the caregiver's return, Secure, avoidant, ambivalent (resistant), disorganized-disoriented attachments
  • Attachment Q-set (AQS) test: caregivers sort a set of descriptive words or phrases into categories ranging from most to least characteristic of the child and compare with expert descriptions of prototypical secure child
  • Neurological studies saw certain areas of the mother's brain activating at the sight of their own infant smiling and crying compared to seeing other infants

  
• Factors affecting Attachment Security

  • Social referencing
  • Early Availability of a Consistent Caregiver
  • Quality of caregiving: Sensitive caregiving, Abuse and neglect
  • Infant characteristics: Emotionally reactive babies, Genetics with insensitive parenting
  • Family circumstances: SES, Stress, Parents' internal working models (Intergenerational transmission of attachment patterns)
• Long-term Effects of Attachment

  • Secure attachment: High self-esteem, empathy, and social skills, Improved cognitive, emotional, and social competence, Launch of a positive parent-child relationship
  • Insecure attachment: Inhibitions and negative emotions in toddlerhood, More externalizing behaviors, Behavioral problems

  
• Sense of Self


  • Self-concept: sense of self, descriptive and evaluative mental picture of one's abilities and traits
  • 3 months: attention to mirror image
  • 4-9/10 months: interest in others' images – perceptual discrimination may be the foundation of conceptual self-awareness at 15-18 months
  • experience of personal agency with realization of control of external events (e.g., grasping)
• Factors contributing to insecure attachment

  • Genetics with insensitive parenting
  • Infant characteristics
  • SES
  • Stress
  • Parents' internal working models (Intergenerational transmission of attachment patterns)
  • Family circumstances
• Secure attachment


  • High self-esteem, empathy, and social skills
  • Improved cognitive, emotional, and social competence
  • Launch of a positive parent-child relationship
• Insecure attachment

  • Inhibitions and negative emotions in toddlerhood
  • More externalizing behaviors
  • Behavioral problems
• Self-concept


  Sense of self, descriptive and evaluative mental picture of one's abilities and traits
• Development of self-awareness


  1. Attention to mirror image at 3 months

  2. Interest in others' images - perceptual discrimination may be the foundation of conceptual self-awareness at 15-18 months

  3. Experience of personal agency with realization of control of external events (e.g., grasping objects) - making things happen
• Self-awareness


  • Conscious knowledge of the self as a distinct identifiable being
  • Explicit self-awareness: aka self-coherence or self-recognition
  • Understanding that the self is a unique object in a world of objects
• Prone to scale errors at infancy and toddlerhood
• Joint attention shows difference in reaction between the infant's self and caregiver
• Cultural variations may influence development of self-awareness
• Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt

  Erikson's second psychosocial stage in which children achieve a balance between self-determination and control by others
• Developing autonomy


  1. Shift from external control to self-control

  2. Toilet training and language are events that let them make their wishes known and make them powerful

  3. Balance of autonomy and shame and doubt to have appropriate confidence to explore and recognition of limits respectively
• Predominant autonomy


  • Development of will which lets them try their ideas, exercise preferences, and make decisions - negativism: resisting authority
• Predominant shame and doubt

  • Development of compulsion which makes them scared to try novelty and stick to what is familiar which may hinder growth
• Socialization


  Development of habits, skills, values, and motives shared by responsible, productive members of a society
• Influences on moral development

  • Child's temperament
  • Attachment style
  • Emotional socialization
  • Maternal sensitivity
  • Constructive conflict