Middle Childhood: A Case Study

Children in middle childhood are growing psychosocially at a quick rate. During middle childhood, they become diligent, develop a self-concept, dealing with self-esteem, and learn how to be friends with their peers. In Erickson’s Stages of Development a child in middle childhood, move through the industry versus inferiority stage. This stage is when children become capable of doing useful work as well as their own self-directed projects, unless the adults around them are too critical of their efforts, leading them to develop a sense of inferiority instead. A child who is successful in their attempts will gain confidence in themselves and move on into adolescence firmly on the industrious side. Their success or failure in the development of …show more content…
They are changes during middle childhood from the external to the internal and from the psychosocial to the physical (Arnett & Maynard, 2013). In the beginning of middle childhood, children describe themselves in terms of external, physical characteristics. Continuing through middle childhood, children add more internal, personality-related traits to their self-descriptions. Toward the end of middle childhood, they become more complex, recognizing that they may be different. An individual’s self-concept in middle childhood is affected by peer relationships in how they differentiate and validate (Blakely-McClure & Ostrov, 2015). A child’s physical appearance, academic abilities, and athletic competence is always being evaluated by their peers or their friends. Another important change in self-concept in middle childhood is that children engage in more accurate social comparison. Social comparison is how a child determines their own social and personal worth based on their peers. As a result, children are constantly making self and other evaluations across a variety of domains (attractiveness, wealth, intelligence, and success). Children start to rank themselves in school, comparing each other’s abilities. Schools have a big impact on social comparisons. The age grading in school places children in a setting where they spend most of the day with children the same age. Teachers also compare children to one another by …show more content…
When making friends, children gravitate towards other children that have the same likes and dislikes. Sociable children are attracted to each other as friends, as are shy kids; aggressive kids tend to form friendships with each other as friends, as do kids who refrain from aggression (Arnett & Maynard, 2013). Not only do children become friends with each other based on the same interests, but also they become friends with each other based on trust. Becoming friends with someone that you can trust in school during middle childhood is hard to find. Children have to trust theirs friends that they wouldn’t judge them if they did something wrong or that they will always be for them when needed. Sex similarity plays a key role in peers’ implications about their classmates’ relationships. J. Neal, Z. Neal, and Cappella (2014) suggested that peers rely heavily on sex as an indicator of how they choose their friends. Boys gravitate towards other boys to form a friend group and girls gravitate towards girls to form a friend group. During middle childhood girls believed that boys had “cooties.” They were considered to have a disease that would give the girls a reason to not be around them. Girls value trust in middle childhood friendships than boys do, and that boys’ friendships focus more on shared activities. Children look for four kinds of social support from their