Question

What are the different views of social, emotional, and moral development?

Answer 1

• During middle childhood, children make great strides in terms of their ability to recognize emotions in themselves and others, control their own emotions, and communicate about emotions, both expressively and with language.
• By this age, most children have developed their capacity for regulating their own emotions. In contrast to younger children who require external support from caregivers in order to control their emotions, middle childhood aged kids have increasingly internalized these skills.
• As well, their social knowledge and appreciation of their culture's rules for display of emotions is improved, enabling them to recognize whether or not it is appropriate to express specific emotions in specific situations and then take steps to display an appropriate amount of emotion.
• Most children will have started to be capable of making sense of complex emotional content present in interpersonal situations. As they start to notice other people's conflicting emotion-driven behaviors (e.g., seeing someone cry and laugh at the same time), they begin to appreciate the reality of mixed and complex emotions.
• As children practice interpreting people's complex emotional displays, their perspective taking abilities and their empathy skills increase.
• Moral development is a concern for every parent. Teaching a child to distinguish right from wrong and to behave accordingly is a goal of parenting.
• Piaget found two main differences in how children thought about moral behavior. Very young children's thinking is based on how actions affected them or what the results of an action were. For example, young children will say that when trying to reach a forbidden cookie jar, breaking 10 cups is worse than breaking one. They also recognize the sanctity of rules.
• For example, they understand that they cannot make up new rules to a game; they have to play by what the rule book says or what is commonly known to be the rules. Piaget called this "moral realism with objective responsibility." It explains why young children are concerned with outcomes rather than intentions.
• Older children look at motives behind actions rather than consequences of actions. They are also able to examine rules, determining whether they are fair or not, and apply these rules and their modifications to situations requiring negotiation, assuring that everyone affected by the rules is treated fairly.
• Bandura’s social learning theory, holds that children’s behaviour is influenced by observing others being rewarded (or disadvantaged) both parents and peers for behaving in a certain way, and then imitating those rewarded behaviours. Bandura also believed that this observation, imitation and modelling enabled older children to ‘self-regulate’ their actions.
• Vygotsky (1981) considered the child to be primarily an apprentice who learns higher order functions directly from social interaction with ‘more knowledgeable others’. In addition to parents, these can also be carers, other adults and older children who provide essential support within a cultural environment.
• For Vygotsky, child learners had a ‘zone of proximal development'representing all the skills and knowledge a child alone cannot presently understand, but is potentially capable of learning through some form of guided social interaction. This concept explains, for example, why a child appears to lack certain knowledge, yet demonstrates the expected competence with prompting, or often just in the presence of a teacher or other learners.
• Piaget felt that the best moral learning came from these cooperative decision-making and problem-solving events. He also believed that children developed moral reasoning quickly and at an early age.
• Kohlberg felt that moral development was a slow process and evolved over time. Still, his six stages of moral development, drafted in 1958, mirrors Piaget's early model.
• Kohlberg believed that individuals made progress by mastering each stage, one at a time. A person could not skip stages. He also felt that the only way to encourage growth through these stages was by discussion of moral dilemmas and by participation in consensus democracy within small groups. Consensus democracy was rule by agreement of the group, not majority rule. This would stimulate and broaden the thinking of children and adults, allowing them to progress from one stage to another.