Middle Childhood
Ages 6 - 12
Middle Childhood
• Beginning at about age 6 and continuing to age 12, children go
through middle childhood. This period is often referred to as the
"school years".
• In what ways do children grow during the school years, and what
factors influence their growth?
Physical Growth
• Compared with the swift growth during the first 5 years, physical
growth during middle childhood is slow but steady.
• School-aged children grow, on average, 2 to 3 inches per year.
• This is the only time during the life span when girls are, on average,
taller than boys.
• By age 11, the average girl is 4' 10".
• The average 11-year-old boy is 4' 9 1/2 ".
Physical Growth
• During middle childhood,
both boys and girls gain 5
to 7 pounds a year.
• Variations of a half a foot in
children the same age are
not uncommon.
• Height and weight
variations can be affected
by poor nutrition, and
racial or ethnic background.
Artificial Growth Hormones
• Available only the last decade, prototropin and other
artificial human growth hormones are being taken by over
20,000 abnormally short children.
• Some developmentalists question whether shortness is serious
enough to warrant drug intervention.
• The drug is costly and may lead to premature puberty
(which can restrict later growth).
• These artificial hormones are effective for adding over a foot
of height.
Nutrition & Physical Growth
• Good nutrition is linked to both healthy physical
development and positive personality traits:
• More involved with peers
• Positive emotions displayed more often
• Less anxiety
• More investigative
• More alert
• More energy
• More persistent
• More self confidence
Nutritional Benefits
• Children with better
nutrition have higher levels
of energy and selfconfidence.
Nutrition and Physical Development
• Undernutrition & Malnutrition definitely lead to physical,
social and cognitive difficulties for children in middle
childhood
• BUT overnutrition (the intake of too many calories) also
presents problems!
Eating Disorders Develop Early
• Despite growing rates of obesity, Western society places a strong
emphasis on thinness.
• Concern about weight increasingly borders on obsession in the
United States (especially for girls).
• Research indicates that a substantial number of 6 year old girls worry about becoming “fat”
• 40+% of 9 & 10 year olds are trying to lose weight!
Despite the emphasis on thinness, the
number of obese children is on the rise.
•
Obesity can be caused by a combination of genetic and social
characteristics.
•
School-age children tend to engage in little exercise and are not
particularly fit.
•
The correlation between TV viewing and obesity is strong
Even without regular exercise, gross & fine motor
skills will develop substantially at this time
• Fine Motor Skills
• Increased levels of myelin around the nerve cells raise the speed of
messages traveling to muscles
• Gross Motor Skills
• Important advances, including muscle coordination
• Gender differences likely the result of societal messages/expectations
rather than motor skill
Gross
Motor
Skills
Health During Middle Childhood
• For most children in the U.S., the common cold is about the
most serious illness that occurs during middle childhood.
• BUT colds are not uncommon during middle childhood.
• 1 in 9 has a chronic, persistent condition.
• Although life threatening illnesses have declined over the past
50 years, some chronic illnesses have become more
prevalent.
Asthma
• Asthma, a chronic condition characterized by periodic
attacks of wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath, has
increased significantly in the last several decades.
• Asthma attacks are triggered by a variety of factors:
•
Respiratory infections
•
Allergic reactions to airborne irritants
•
Stress
•
Exercise
Asthma
•
Children can use an aerosol
container with special
mouthpiece to spray drugs
into the lungs.
•
Some researchers believe the
increase in asthma is due to
pollution, dust due to better
insulated buildings, and
poverty
Asthma
• Since the 1980’s, the rate of asthma
among children has almost doubled!
• Pollution, and better methods of
detecting the disease are reasons
this is so.
Health During Middle Childhood:
Psychological Disorders
~ It is important that psychological disorders not be ignored in school age children
(which often occurs because symptoms are different than those of adults)
~ Childhood depression is one psychological issue often overlooked by teachers
and parents.
~ 2-5% of school age children suffer from depression
~ For 1 %, depression is severe (express suicidal ideas)
Childhood Depression
• All kids are sad sometimes. This is different than depression (depth of sadness,
length distinguish)
• Childhood depression is also characterized by the expression of exaggerated
fears, clinginess, or avoidance of everyday activities.
• In older children it may produce sulking, school problems, and acts of
delinquency.
• It can be treated with a variety of approaches.
Childhood Depression - Treatment
• Psychological Counseling
• Effective!
• Drugs
• Controversial!
• About 200,000 Prozac prescriptions written in 1996 for kids aged
6-12 (a 300% increase over the previous year!)
• Criticisms: not approved for use with children and teens; lack of long
term effectiveness of the drug; consequences to developing brains; lead
in for further drug use
Childhood Anxiety (8-9% of All Children)
• Intense, uncontrollable anxiety about situations that most
people would not find bothersome
• Specific stimuli (germs, school)
• Generalized anxiety (source can not be pinpointed)
• It is important not to ignore psychological issues during
childhood!
• disruptive to the child’s life
• children with psychological problems are at higher risk for future
disorders during adulthood
Children With Special Needs
• One student in a thousand requires special education services
relating to VISUAL IMPAIRMENT, legally defined as
difficulties in seeing that may include blindness (less than or
20/200 after correction) or partial sightedness (20/70
after correction).
• Visual impairments can also include the inability to see upclose and disabilities in color, depth, and light perception.
Children With Special Needs
• AUDITORY IMPAIRMENT, a special need that involves the loss of
hearing or some aspect of hearing, affects one to two percent of
school-age children and can vary across a number of dimensions.
• The loss may be limited to certain frequencies.
• Loss in infancy is more severe than after age 3.
• Children who have little or no exposure to the sound of language
are unable to understand or produce oral language themselves.
• Abstract thinking may be affected.
Children With Special Needs
• Auditory impairments are sometimes accompanied by
SPEECH IMPAIRMENTS, speech that is impaired when it
deviates so much from the speech of others that it calls
attention to itself, interferes with communication, or
produces maladjustments in the speaker.
• 3 to 5% of school-age children have speech impairments.
• STUTTERING, a substantial disruption in the rhythm and fluency of
speech is the most common speech impairment.
Children With Special Needs
• Some 2.3 million school-age children in the U.S. are officially
labeled as having LEARNING DISABILITIES, difficulties in the
acquisition and use of listening, speaking, reading, writing,
reasoning, or mathematical abilities.
• Some suffer from dyslexia, a reading disability that can
result in the reversal of letters during reading and writing,
confusion between left and right, and difficulties in spelling
Children With Special Needs
• ATTENTION-DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER (ADHD) is
a learning disability marked by inattention, impulsiveness, a
low tolerance for frustration, and generally a great deal of
inappropriate activity.
• 3 to 5 percent of school-age children are estimated to have
ADHD (3.5 million Americans under age 18!).
• Ritalin or Dexadrine are stimulants used to reduce
hyperactivity levels in children with ADHD.
Children With Special Needs
• If a child is suspected of having ADHD or a learning
disability, it is important that she or he be evaluated by a
specialist.
• Teachers & parents should be alert to the possibility that
speech, auditory, and visual problems may be impacting a
child (grades, friendships, etc.)
Intellectual
Development
Intellectual Development – Jean Piaget
• The school-age child enters the CONCRETE OPERATIONAL
STAGE, the period of cognitive development between 7 and
12 years of age
• Characterized by the active, and appropriate use of logic.
• Children at this stage can easily solve conservation problems—logic
used over appearance.
• For example, whether the amount of liquid stays the same although
poured into different shaped containers.
Intellectual Development - Piaget
•
Because they are less
egocentric, they can take
multiple aspects of a situation
into account, a process known
as DECENTERING
•
They attain the concept of
reversibility, realizing that a
stimulus can be reversed,
returning to its original form.
Concrete Operational Stage (Piaget)
• Children at this stage can
understand such concepts as
relationships between time and
speed…
• At the beginning of the concrete
operational stage, kids reason that
the 2 cars on these routes are
traveling the same speed even
though they arrive at the same
time. Later, they realize the correct
relationship between speed &
distance.
• Despite the obvious advances that occur during the concrete
operational stage, children still experience a big limitation in
their thinking: They are still tied to concrete physical reality!
• No understanding of abstract/hypothetical/logic!
Criticisms of Piaget’s Thoery
• Piaget is criticized for underestimating children's abilities
and for exaggerating the universality of the progression
through the stages.
• Research suggest that Piaget was more right than wrong.
• Cross-cultural research increasingly implies children
universally achieve concrete operations, and that training
with conservation tasks improves performance.
Information Processing
• Children become increasingly able to handle information because
their memories improve.
• MEMORY is the process by which information is initially encoded,
stored, and retrieved.
• Encoding is the process by which information is initially recorded
in a form usable to memory.
• The information must be stored, or placed and maintained in the
memory system.
• Information must be retrieved, located and brought into
awareness.
Information Processing
•
During middle childhood, short-term memory capacity improves
significantly.
•
META-MEMORY, an understanding about the processes that
underlie memory emerge and improve during middle childhood.
•
Children use control strategies, conscious, intentionally used tactics
to improve cognitive functioning.
•
Children can be trained to use control strategies and improve
memory.
Cognitive Development - Vygotsky
• Vygotsky's approach has been particularly influential in the
development of several classroom practices.
• Classrooms are seen as places where children should have the
opportunity to try out new activities.
• Specifically, Vygotsky suggests that children should focus on
activities that involve interaction with others.
Cognitive Development - Vygotsky
•
Cooperative learning is a strategy used in education that
incorporates several aspects of Vygotsky's theory (kids work
together to achieve goals).
•
Reciprocal teaching, a technique where students are taught to
skim the content of a passage, raise questions about its central
point, summarize the passage, and finally, predict what will
happen next, help lead students through the zone of proximal
development.
•
Significant success rates with raising reading comprehension levels
Language Development
• Vocabulary continues to increase during the school years.
• School-age children's mastery of grammar improves.
• Children's understanding of syntax, the rules that indicate
how words and phrases can be combined to form sentences,
grows during childhood.
• Certain phonemes, units of sound, remain troublesome (j, v,
h, zh).
Language Development
• School-age children may have difficulty decoding sentences
when the meaning depends on intonation, or tone of voice.
• Children become more competent in their use of pragmatics,
the rules governing the use of language to communicate in a
social context.
• Language helps children control their behavior.
• One of the most significant developments in middle
childhood is the increase in METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS,
an understanding of one's own use of language.
Language Development
• BILINGUALISM is the use of more than one language.
• English is a second language for more than 32 million
Americans.
• Being bilingual may have cognitive advantages.
• Greater cognitive flexibility
• Greater metalinguistic awareness
• May improve scores on IQ tests
Language Development
• The effectiveness of language immersion programs where
subjects are taught in a foreign language show mixed results.
• All subjects in a school taught in a foreign language!
~Benefits include increased self esteem
~Negative results common when minority groups
immersed in English only programs
~Positive results when children (especially majority group
children) are learning languages not spoken by the
dominant culture
Schooling
•
School marks the time when society formally attempts to transfer its body
of knowledge, beliefs, values, and accumulated wisdom to new generations.
•
In the U. S., a primary school education is both a universal right and a legal
requirement.
•
More than 160 million of the world's children do not have access to
education.
•
Close to a billion people (2/3 of them women) are illiterate throughout their
lives.
Illiteracy Rates Around the World
Illiteracy & Gender
• In developing countries, females receive less formal education
than males.
• In developed countries, women still receive less education
than men on average, particularly in science & technology
topics.
~Why? Widespread cultural & parental biases favoring
males over females
When Are Kids Ready for School?
• Recent research suggests that age is not a critical indicator of when
children should start school.
• Some research suggests that delaying children’s entrance into school
based on age may actually be harmful!
~Developmental readiness is a better measure (family support, etc.)
Reading
• Development of reading skill generally occurs in several
broad, frequently overlapping stages.
• Stage 0
• lasts from birth to the start of first grade
• children learn the essential prerequisites for reading, including
identification of the letters in the alphabet, writing their names, and
reading a few words.
Reading Development
• Stage 1
• first and second grade
• is the first real reading, but it is largely phonological decoding skill
where children can sound out words by sounding out and blending
letters
• Stage 2
• typically around second and third grades, children learn to read aloud
with fluency.
Reading Development
•
Stage 3 extends from fourth to eighth grades where reading
becomes a means to an end and an enjoyable way to learn.
•
Stage 4 is where the child understands reading in terms of reflecting
multiple points of view.
Friendship
Friends
• During middle and late childhood, children spend an
increasing amount of time in peer interaction. In one study,
children interacted with peers 10 percent of their day at
the age of two, 20 percent at age four, and more than 40
percent between the ages of seven and 11. Episodes with
peers totaled 299 per typical school day. Researchers have
devised five peer status categories to describe peer
interactions:
Friends
1.) Popular children are frequently liked by their peers and are
frequently nominated as a best friend. They show high rates of
positive behaviours and low rates of negative behaviours.
2.) Average children are moderately liked by their peers and
moderately often nominated as a best friend. They show
moderate levels of positive behaviours and negative behaviours.
Friends
3.) Rejected children are actively disliked by their peers and
infrequently nominated as a best friend. They show high rates
of negative behaviours and low rates of positive behaviours.
4.)Neglected children are not disliked by their peers and are
infrequently nominated as a best friend. They show low levels
of positive and negative behaviours.
5.) Controversial children are frequently disliked by their peers
but are often nominated as a best friend. They show high
rates of both positive and negative behaviours