8 Childhood: 2-12 Years

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

– Lisel Mueller (“Sometimes, When the Light”; 1924-2020; National Book Award, 1981; Pulitzer Prize, 1997)

TABLE OF CONTENTS (TOC)

• Mind and culture
• The emergence of the creative mind
• The centrality of schooling
• Emotions and interactions with others

Introduction

One school of psychology associated with the pioneering work of Alexander Luria demonstrated that human nature was the result of social and cultural processes. Luria (1902-1977) was the founder of the field of neuropsychology and placed emphasis on multiculturalism, which seeped into the evolving field of cross-cultural psychology. Whereas cross-cultural psychology looks at the similarities of humans across cultures worldwide, an even newer field, cultural psychology, looks at how culture shapes our psychology and belief systems and how this varies across the world.

Of course, cultural knowledge changes over time and Luria argued that we must examine cognitive processes (“thinking”) in particular historical periods or cultural contexts.

Luria was heavily influenced by one of his instructors, Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), barely his senior. Vygotsky believed that thinking was shaped by language and various cultural “tools.” Thought, according to Vygotsky, was a creation of mediated activity and occurs through both interpersonal interaction with others as well as interaction with objects (such as a pen and paper). Literacy–whether numerical or linguistic–can be said to “mediate” culture because such mediation is a key to human development and occurs in bringing the outside (culture) to the inside (mind/brain).

Vygotsky introduced the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which refers to the gap between a child’s current level of development and the level they are capable of reaching with tools provided by adults. He viewed play as a crucial aspect of children’s development in which the child learns about mediated tools (such as sand, a pail, and a scoop).

Nonetheless, there is no evidence that literacy creates the capacity for abstract thought and reasoning, in and of itself. For instance, writing leads rather to certain forms of “context-dependent thought” such as textual understanding, written logic, and writing and the ability to distinguish what is said, from what is meant.

By the 1930s, Alexander Luria began to study peasant families in Central Asia during the midst of a cultural revolution in the USSR, which had as its goals the elimination of illiteracy, the restructuring of the economy, and the industrialization of the country.

His overarching claim was that cognition (“thinking”) depends upon the dominant modes of activity within a culture. So, for instance, in traditional societies, practical thinking–the physical manipulation of objects–will dominate. In technological societies, however, schooling will engender what is known as “decontextualized knowledge” or the ability to think even when the context is removed from the knowledge.

In Luria’s experiments, his subjects consisted of illiterate peasants with no education and workers living on a collective farm with 1-2 years of formal schooling. The materials were syllogisms based on factual premises or syllogisms devoid of practical content.

A syllogism is a kind of logical argument in deductive reasoning in order to arrive at a conclusion based on two propositions that are asserted.

For example, knowing that all men are mortal (major premise) and that Socrates is a man (minor premise), we may validly conclude that Socrates is mortal.

• Major premise: All men are mortal.
• Minor premise: Socrates is a man.
• Logical conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Subjects were asked to give explanations for their answers. Interestingly, the peasants refused to make deductions from non-factual premises, but the schooled workers were able to answer and explain most syllogisms whether factually based or not.

So, what’s going on here? Illiterate peasants didn’t understand the task demands because of cultural constraints whereas only through school instruction does theoretical activity begin to develop.

However, in African traditional thought, people use theoretical entities to link natural effects in the visible, tangible world with their natural causes. This is also true of Western science. It must be the nature of those theoretical entities and the activity that accompanies them that is crucial.

According to the cross-cultural psychologist, Sylvia Scribner, illiterate peasants fail to reduce the syllogism to the logical interrelations of the sentences alone. That is, not what they do or do not refer to in the real world. Instead, they evaluate it on their own terms.

Thus, unschooled peoples are incapable of applying the logical genre because the experimental context has not provided the appropriate cues to elicit the desired performance. But such tasks simply reflect school-type tasks.

In another experiment, schooled and unschooled Wolof tribe children in Senegal, West Africa, and urban and rural children in France were compared.

Materials consisted of a Piagetian task, conservation of liquid quantity. Conservation refers to a logical thinking ability that allows a person to determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size, according to the psychologist Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980). His theory proposes that this ability is not present in children during the preoperational stage, ages 2 – 7,  but develops in the concrete operational stage from ages 7 – 11.

Nonetheless, there is actually a wider gap between schooled and unschooled groups than between rural and urban groups. For instance, unschooled Wolofs are “perceptually seduced” by the experimenter’s actions. They lack experience in handling the physical aspects of the task and the cultural relevance of these activities. But this effect is suppressed with schooling. Schooled Wolofs encode the relations symbolically whereas unschooled Wolofs encode the relations enactively. Enactivism is an approach in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment, that is, through mediated engagement as we discussed above.

In a similar manner, while individualist cultures (“particle” or “independent” cultures such as the US and Western Europe) stress individuality, self-sufficiency, control of the environment, and the emotion of guilt, communitarian cultures (“field” or “interdependent” cultures such as in East Asia) stress community, sympathy and compassion for others, transcendence, and the emotion of shame. Likewise, African-Americans stress orality (i.e., storytelling, preaching, and song), time, improvisation (i.e., problem-solving in difficult circumstances), rhythm, and spirituality in their culture.

The Emergence of the Creative Mind

Creative Thought

I elaborate on the contribution of the body to creative thought building on my own theory of the development of early creative (metaphoric) abilities in infants and young children. I argue that creativity emerges out of a matrix of activities of the mind, brain, and body.

What does creativity have to do with metaphor? Metaphor is now believed to be an essential cognitive process in the human mind/brain, not just an aspect of figurative language. Metaphorical thought is seeing one thing in terms of another. Let’s look at the development of metaphorical thought in childhood and the emergence of the creative mind.

Perceptual Metaphor

It has been amply documented that, early on, very young children at the beginning of the third year of life are able to exploit the perceptual features of shape, color, texture, and size in making metaphorical associations in renaming single objects or pictures. For instance, a preschool child may refer to a plate of spaghetti as a “bunch of worms” or a vehicular caution sign as a “lemon ice cream cone.” They can note these correspondences both in language as well as in match-to-sample tasks and similar nonverbal formats in which they must choose an analogous object from an array of pictorial or non-verbal choices.

Enactive Metaphor

Correspondingly, young children can make use of movement and motion information—that is, exploit enactive components of metaphor—in both categorizing moving objects and in making metaphorical associations. For example, a preschool child can note the metaphorical similarity between a spinning top and a dancing ballerina in a match-to-sample or similar non-verbal (filmed) format. Likewise, infants eighteen to twenty-four months can note the enactive similarity between a paper crayon cover that has slipped off and the putting on of an article of clothing, “I am putting your clothes on crayon.”

Cross-Modal (Synesthetic) Metaphor

Infants and young children can also perceive likeness in different sensory modalities. An instance of such a synesthetic or cross-modal association would be a three-month-old infant that dishabituates or shows interest in the synchrony between a toy monkey and its complementary sound, a three-year-old that applies the polar adjectives light/dark to an object (sandpaper) felt while blindfolded or a preschooler who indicates that red is a warm or hot color. The distinguished art historian, Ernest Gombrich, has long observed that such natural metaphors—bright sounds or cool colors—arise spontaneously in perception because they are part of our innate constitution.

Physiognomic Metaphor

During the very early preschool years, rudimentary physiognomic experiences or the attribution of affective properties to visually perceived objects and other sensory experiences gain prominence. Examples include identifying the front grille of an automobile as a “smiling face” or a piece of music as “cheerful.”

In one large study, child and adult responses to physiognomically suggestive visual metaphors were examined in photographs. Preschoolers, 3 and 4 years of age, normal and high IQ children, 6 and 8 years of age, and adults were shown 10 photographs of cars, rocks, plants, and other inanimate objects, and their responses were categorized by type of metaphor. Preschool and 6-year-old children demonstrated significant levels of physiognomic responding, although high IQ, older children, and adults showed even higher levels of physiognomic responding presumably as a result of more advanced narrative abilities. All groups displayed high consistency in physiognomic object responses across photographs. It, therefore, appears that physiognomic metaphor is a robust phenomenon across the lifespan, originating in the very early childhood years, at least as early as the second half of the third year of life.

The Centrality of Schooling

Altricial species, like humans, are those in which the young are underdeveloped at the time of birth, but with the aid of their parents mature after birth. Precocial species are those in which the young are relatively mature and mobile from the moment of birth.

Human infants and young children need to acquire complex social skills, including language, empathy, morality, theory of mind, the ability to read and write, as well as compute with numbers. Successful development of these skills depends on information and tutoring from adults. Evolution has conveniently outsourced the necessary skills and information to parents. Moreover, prolonged altricial development may give species the ability to adapt to changing or new environments,

Formal schooling is a prime example as we’ll see below.

In 1994, a major international cross-cultural study of education was published by the University of Michigan. The results were startling.

• Asian children: Learn from errors
• American children: Avoid errors

Stereotypes of Asian Families and Schools

1. Asian children are under great stress. But, not evident in preschool and elementary years; pressure builds during high school years.
2. Asian children are innately docile. No, lively and assertive students.
3. Asian teaching stresses rote learning. No, just exaggerates levels of American creative abilities.
4. Asian parents push children at a very young age. No pressure on young children.

What the study did demonstrate was the need for a vast expansion of early childhood education in the US to increase readiness for the first-grade curriculum.

And noteworthy was the finding that in Asian schools, recesses punctuate the Asian elementary school day and occur after every 40-45” period of teaching. Not surprisingly, American children have more difficulty paying attention.

Mathematics Education

The study compared students in Sendai (Japan), Taipei (Taiwan), Beijing (China), Chicago, and Minneapolis.

American students from the 1st to the 5th grade slip significantly behind Asian students in mathematics.

The following computational skills were evaluated.

• Understanding of basic mathematical operations
• Ability to apply knowledge to meaningful problems
• Facility with number concepts
• Comprehension of information in graphs and tables
• Skills in estimation and measurement
• Spatial reasoning abilities

Results of the study

Americans were poorer in all areas. They were poorer even in kindergarten. Thus, the results can’t be due solely to schooling but involve the children’s homes and parents.

Reading Education

American children do not display exceptional problems in reading achievement. They are, however, overrepresented among poor readers. Unfortunately, 17% of 17-year-olds in the US are functionally illiterate, that is, the inability to read on a fourth-grade reading level or above.

Psychometric Intelligence (“IQ”)

Psychometric intelligence (as measured by standardized intelligence tests) did not vary across Japan, Taiwan, and the US when corrected for the location of residence (urban/rural) and socioeconomic status (SES).

Science and Geography

American students have fared badly in international studies of achievement in science.

Children’s Lives

Asian Homes and Classrooms

Asian teachers assign large amounts of homework, but workbooks are more frequently assigned for home use in Asian schools. That being so, studying hard may accentuate feelings of accomplishment, self-image, and self-mastery.

In Asian homes, homework takes precedence over television viewing and children do fewer chores. Indeed, there are newspapers written especially for children and, as a result, children come to value reading and newspapers.

Children are taught basic skills for success in school during the elementary school years. Children learn to move from one activity to another. How to arrange the content of their desks. How to pay attention. How to follow directions. How to speak loudly and clearly and classroom discipline shared with children.

Intelligence is distributed in the classroom in groups so that each child has something to contribute, an important insight.

American Homes and Classrooms

For instance, lack of group participation leads to more loneliness in American children. They tend to seek other children for after-school play, talk inappropriately in class to other children, and school is not perceived to be a special pleasant place.

Comparison between American and Asian Classrooms

Schoolwork is the responsibility of teachers and students in American classrooms but in Japanese and Chinese schools, each child carries a small notebook back and forth between school and home. Schoolwork is the responsibility of teachers, students, and parents.

Why? There are different cultural assumptions about the role of parents in Asian and American classrooms, but it is not the result of 2-parent earners or the breakdown of the nuclear family in US society.

Unlike American classrooms, in Asian cultures, children are confronted with tier upon tier of models (not just sports and entertainment figures). Also, social shame is an important social emotion in Asian cultures. Within the classroom, the performance of all children becomes the responsibility of each member of the group.

In Asian cultures, teachers act as guides (“scaffolding” each individual student) typically asking children to come up with their own solutions and calling on other children to evaluate their accuracy or relevance. Peer acceptance and approval is a powerful motivator.

Moreover, Asian teachers explicitly teach component skills.

• Underlining
• Outlining
• Organizing
• Summarizing

Americans emphasize innate ability whereas Asians emphasize effort.

Achievement consists in never giving up. If there is no dark and dogged will, there will be no shining accomplishment. If there is no dull and determined effort, there will be no brilliant achievement.

Hsun Tzu (310 B.C.E. – 238 B.C.E., Chinese philosopher)

The effort model emphasizes that learning is gradual and incremental. Errors are seen as a natural part of the learning process. Not an aberration. And persistence is central.

Moreover, in Asian classrooms, all levels of skill are represented in each group, but in American classrooms.

• Slow learners are identified
• Then, placed in slower tracks (called “tracking” or “ability grouping”)
• Teachers thus have lower expectations
• Students buy into lower expectations
• Drop out of school

Special education settings, however, estrange students from peers, discourage motivation to succeed, and encourage stigmatization. Self-esteem is built on managing a challenging task. Tracking is not done in Asian schools, nor is there special education. Children are most likely to learn from each other if all levels of ability are represented in the group.

In American classrooms, educators believe native ability limits academic achievement. American mothers tend to have lower standards than Chinese or Japanese mothers. Most children are recorded as doing quite well because standards are so low including parental expectations.

Training of Teachers in Asian Cultures

Teachers receive a liberal arts education, study within a discipline, have extensive training after college, and teach no more than 4 hours a day.

American Classrooms

Textbooks are overwhelming in size, the format is distractive, and the material is redundant from year to year. And American classrooms overemphasize time spent alone studying.

The “Hidden Curriculum”

• Schools are only minimally concerned with the transmission of knowledge.
• Rather, schools are socializing agents that inculcate obedience, conformity, and compliance.
• There is a premium placed on certain styles of dress and behavior.
• There is an overemphasis on grades and tests.
• Dictate certain forms of knowledge.
• Elite tools for manipulating oppressed groups.
• Result: More parents are sending their children to private and parochial schools as well as homeschooling.

Emotions and Interactions with Others

Individuation (autonomy) begins to emerge during the end of infancy and the beginning of early childhood. The integrity of the parent-child relationship and strong support from parents of the child’s emerging developmental challenges are key. The child’s emotional temperament becomes more pronounced expressing their reserved or aggressive, cooperating or friendly ways of interacting with others.

As pretend (symbolic) play kicks in around 18-24 months–feeding breakfast to a doll or talking on a toy phone to an imaginary friend–young children are often not directly playing with another child but playing in parallel or what is known as parallel play. Nonetheless, cooperative play has not emerged yet. The young child may imitate other child’s play and even look at what s/he is up to in play, but the young child cannot yet play in a cooperative, imaginative way with another child. During preschool years, the young child learns to manipulate his subjective emotions into more socially accepted gestures. For example, she may use a “poker face” and exaggerate or minimize emotions her emotions for social effects. So, she might say “thank you: for a present, she didn’t like. The young child begins to refer to herself as “I” or “me” and uses possessive nouns such as “mine” and negatives, such as “no.”

To be sure, play has the following emerging characteristics.

In sensorimotor play, in the first two years of life, the infant masters motor skills and uses his or her sensory modalities via repeated actions with and on objects, known as “circular reactions.” But in the third year of life, symbolic (pretend) play abets the young child’s ability to encode the world into symbols. For example, pretending a broom handle is a horse. Indeed, 10-17% of play is pretend play in preschool years but by kindergarten (5 years), 33% of play is pretend play. But once the child enters the school setting, games with rules emerge as the child begins to acquire the knowledge of basic social concepts of competition and cooperation. Likewise, ritual play, an intimate social situation providing a framework for continued interaction (i.e., repetition & repetition + variation) emerges, such as “ring-around-the-roses.”

Between 30 and 54 months, impulse control, gender roles, and peer relationship issues emerge. A caregiver plays a major role in helping preschoolers define values and learn flexible self-control. What behaviors are acceptable and how much autonomy may they exert? The child’s sense of initiative and concerns with anxiety from loss of control are fostered by thoughtful parenting that helps the child make intelligent choices.

Play scenarios become more complex with themes and storylines by three years-of-age. The young child engages more in interactive play, begins to master aggressive urges, and learns cooperation and sharing. By this point, the child can play with 1 or 2 peers and engage in turn-taking play and joint goals. More advanced symbolic plays schools emerge such as imaginative and fantasy play: Pretending to be a cat. Role-play skills also develop. The child, however, cannot yet distinguish between reality and imagination and it is common to be afraid of imaginary things. They master this skill to differentiate between real and imaginary around 4 years of age. They enjoy playing tricks on others and are worried about being tricked themselves. Imaginary scenarios and play skills are developing and becoming more complex. At this point, they can play with 3 to 4 peers and inject more complex themes and pretend skills.

By 5- and 6-years of age, the child can follow simple rules and directions. They are beginning to learn adult social skills like giving praise and apologizing for unintentional mistakes. But they also like to spend more time with peers. Imaginative play becomes more complex.

By 7- and 8 years of age, the child fully understands rules and regulations in games and interactions with others. The child shows a deeper understanding of relationships and responsibilities and, as a result, can complete simple chores. Moral development also grows and the child learns more complex coping skills. The child begins to explore new ideas and activities and peers may test his beliefs. At this age, children identify more with children of similar gender and often seek out a best friend.

By 9- and 10 years of age, peer groups take precedence over family. Children at this age will show increasing independent decision-making and a growing need for independence from family. Setting up a reasonable balance between independence and house rules builds self-confidence and self-assurance in children of this age. Promoting supportive adult relationships and increasing opportunities to take part in positive community activities increases resilience.

Greater independence and commitment to peer groups drive the transition to adolescence. This will include indulging in risky behavior to explore uncertain emotions and impress peer groups. Social interactions include complex relationships, disagreements, breakups, new friendships, and long-lasting relationships. Normally the adolescent will learn to cope with these stresses with healthy adult relationships and guidance to make independent decisions. As young adulthood approaches, school success and work-related activities become important. For a healthy transition to adulthood, positive and supportive adult guidance and opportunities to take part constructively in the community play a pivotal role.