The Child as Social Person

Sara Meadows

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415451994
• eBook ISBN: 9781135173548
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Questions about how children grow up in their social worlds are of enormous significance for parents, teachers, and society at large, as well as for children themselves. Clearly children are shaped by the social world that surrounds them but they also shape the social worlds that they, and those significant to them, encounter. But exactly how does this happen, and what can we do to ensure that it produces happy outcomes?

This book provides a critical review of the psychological literature on the development of personality, social cognition, social skills, social relations and social outcomes from birth to early adulthood. It uses Bronfenbrenner's model of the development of the person and up-to-date evidence to analyse normal and abnormal social development, prosocial and antisocial behaviour, within and across cultures. As well as outlining the theory, the book addresses applied issues such as delinquency, school failure, and social exclusion.

Using a coherent theoretical structure, The Child as Social Person examines material from across the biological and social sciences to present an integrated account of what we do and do not know about the development of the child as a social actor.

The Child as Social Person provides an integrated overview of the exciting field of developmental social psychology, and as such will be essential reading for advanced undergraduate students in psychology, education and social work, as well as postgraduates and researchers in these disciplines.

Chapter 1
Beginning to look at the development of the child as social person

1.1 Introduction

The study of ‘the child as social person’ is one of the major areas of child psychology—a complement to the study of ‘the child as thinker’ which I wrote about in an earlier book (Meadows 2006)—and it is also at the core of discussions of what causes and what can prevent mental health problems and antisocial behaviour. The aim of this book is to provide an informed and accessible overview of the area that will encourage the reader to think usefully about what children do as social persons and how their different social careers build up, allowing the reader access to research literature and current burning issues. There have been various interesting shifts and widenings in what children’s social development is thought to be, and this book is intended to review the field and, as far as possible, suggest what answers to the issues involved might be like. In this chapter I present the core psychological model that I am going to use in an attempt to synthesise different bodies of evidence, and raise some issues from other standpoints.

There is relevant research in a wide range of disciplines. These have tended to be isolated from each other, and I am convinced that workers in each field need to be better informed about each other’s progress. Recent work has generated new data and new explanatory models that I want to juxtapose, and it has shown that some of the assumptions we have left unquestioned need to be re-examined. I hope to give students who are new to the field of social development a sense of what is going on, to allow researchers who are more dug into it to access the relevant research flowering outside their own areas, and to fork over and refresh the general compost heap: which may all, finally, help us to grow children’s social lives better than we do at present.

Here, in the first chapter, I will present, briefly, some of the issues that will surface for closer examination elsewhere. The first is fundamental for how we describe people’s social lives; it is the question of what a ‘social person’ is. This may seem to be capable of a clear answer, but there are different components. We act socially, interacting with other people—for example we talk to our children. We have social agency, social purposes, goals and intentions—for example we encourage our children to work hard in school so that they will get into good universities. And we tell a narrative of ourselves and of our social partners, a combination of autobiography and biography of others—for example that our talking to our child early in her life has contributed to, but not entirely caused, her academic success. These components interact, but do not have identical developmental paths, as we will see. Nor do our frames of reference include them all easily. In fact there are a number of problems in the background, stretching right back to psychology’s unresolved tension between its two definitions as ‘the science of mental life’ and ‘the science of behaviour’. At one level when we look at the ‘social’ or the ‘person’ we are concerned with what people can be observed to do when they act socially or think of themselves or other people or social systems and so forth; at another it is the system behind these different abilities. Researchers tend to focus on one level rather than another, the within-person or the interpersonal or the group or the culture, with less commitment to understanding how different levels interact. Sometimes this is because different researchers are using different, albeit allied, disciplines; the user of neurophysiological research is probably not dealing with quite the same question about personality or emotional functioning as the users of research in social psychology or anthropology. I am going to argue that there would be more progress in the study of children’s social development if practitioners who differed in their focus on the subject nevertheless took into account the illumination that other focuses provided. The study of emotional resilience in childhood and adulthood is a shining example of the advances that arise when different disciplines, in this case developmental psychology, cognitive neurophysiology, and comparative psychology, are brought together intelligently.

Another uncertainty stretching back to the early days of psychology is about what the limits of social psychology are in the sense of what is not ‘social’. Virtually every human action involves both oneself and other people and will therefore be both social and personal. One nineteenth century division of psychology’s subject matter, still perceptible in the literature, was into ‘affective’ (or emotional), ‘conative’ (or motivational) and ‘cognitive’ (or intellectual). The problem with this division is that it underplays the links between cognition, emotion and motivation, and these links have been largely neglected in research, which is regrettable. Nor does the traditional division easily accommodate the social dimension of behaviour, and here another problematic issue about psychology is relevant: is it a matter of each individual constructing his or her own individual social and personal system, or are such systems constructed within and by social interaction? Again, much of the literature tends to focus on either individual or social without giving the other adequate consideration, and many of the descriptive studies do not help with the problem because they seek to describe a generalised child and do not examine the variation between individuals with different powers of construction or different experience of social interaction. Further, there is ambivalence among us all, psychologists included, about whether to deal with humanity as part of the animal kingdom, subject to the same general biological laws, or as a unique species, whose similarities to for example primates or laboratory rats are trivial and uninteresting. And these debates happen also in the other social sciences, often with an even stronger dismissal of the relevance of biology.

A whole set of even more unresolved issues arise about the parallel question of what ‘development’ is. These interact with the problems of the nature and limits of ‘the social’ that I have just mentioned; if these are difficulties when we look at completed social development in adults, they are much more delicate when we look at social development in childhood, because in childhood we have to explain both development and stability. Even when we have a stable state of social behaviour or personal identity, it may be the result of dynamic processes that maintain that stability within a permanent process of change. Development is not just about how X becomes Y or gives rise to Y, but about how X maintains itself as X. As I will discuss, there are theoretical accounts of both development and stability which need to be brought to bear on descriptions of the ways in which children behave.

The introduction is not the place to discuss these difficult issues. They will be implicit (occasionally explicit) in my description of ‘the child as social person’, and are more fully addressed in the later parts of the book, in which I look at accounts of ‘social development’ and what pushes, pulls and mauls it. I hope readers will read the descriptive sections to get a reasonably firm sense of what has to be explained, but be able to enjoy a bit of uncertainty about what sorts of explanation might work. Very little indeed is at the level of scientific certainty that we would like, but there is enough clarity to allow some suggestion of what further knowledge is needed, and quite often of what practice should be.

There are, I think, three good reasons for studying the development and acquisition of social cognition, skills, attitudes and practices, and of personhood, in childhood. First, they are there, interesting in themselves. Second, understanding them is going to make a major contribution to understanding human social life: as J.M.Baldwin (1895) said ‘the study of children is often the only means of testing the truth of our mental analyses’. Third, understanding development should illuminate our activities as people interacting with children and influencing their social functioning in both formal and informal settings. I think we can already draw ideas from the field about how to facilitate toheir social development, and about what could impede it, even though we are some way from a rigorous understanding (and even further from implementing it).

There is a vast and varied range of phenomena and theory about ‘children as social persons’, diverse as to intellectual roots, methods and applications. This raises problems of organisation for a book like this. It is impossible to produce a linear account with a series of one-off discussions topic by topic. Dealing with children as social persons topic by topic—friendships separate from sibling relationships, attachment separate from achievement, bullying separate from prosocial behaviour—risks overlooking the associations between different areas of behaviour and may miss opportunities to clarify common processes. A chronological organisation, all about each age in succession, is equally unsatisfactory. Talking about ‘the infant’, ‘the toddler’, middle childhood’, ‘adolescence’ would misrepresent the variation that there is in individuals’ development (there is much evidence of developmentally significant differences between individuals of the same age); and would also obscure the important and fascinating issues that arise over what continuity and what change there is over time. Studies of social behaviour and social development develop from a wide range of theoretical roots, and dealing with these discipline by discipline would make it harder to see where disciplines overlap or reinforce or contradict each other, which in my view is one of the most important things we need to clarify in order to progress. They reflect a wide range of practical issues, and again it is often the case that we cannot solve a social problem by addressing only one aspect of it. Because of all of this, many topics need to be addressed from more than one angle, and relate to other topics. No single way of cutting the cake appeals: none easily incorporates ideas from outside mainstream Anglo-American psychology, and none easily ties development and social action to coherent theory. I have come to the conclusion that the only intellectually honest course is to insist on the need for continual cross-referencing between topics, approaches and ages.

I have therefore organised my material in terms of the child in different contexts or social systems, with copious cross-references to where similar topics are addressed in different settings. The index is also constructed in such a way as to facilitate finding relevant work on a topic even if it is embedded in another section. In general, I hope readers will read with an eye to making comparisons and constructing links across fields, and in particular will test the assertions made within fields against those from other disciplines. (Part of my writing process has been to seek advice from specialists in different areas about whether my non-specialist account of their field made adequate sense in the context of this book: I have been grateful for their corrections and reassurance.)

The book is long, full of cross-references and linked to an enormous bibliography. A reviewer of my last book, The Child as Thinker, said it was more like an enormous Victorian novel than something from which ‘the important stuff’ could be filleted out in the half hour between lectures. The Child as Social Person is even more like this, inescapably because the different aspects of ‘social personhood’ are intricately inter-related; it would be a serious mistake to think that there are ‘important bits’ that make sense all by themselves and irrespective of much else. However, just as there is in even the longest Victorian novels, there is a plan to the book. The core of the structure derives from the theory proposed by Urie Bronfenbrenner. This is presented in the first chapter, which also briefly presents the disciplinary approaches to children’s social action that modulate a Bronfenbrenner approach—ways of understanding social development as influenced by evolution, genes, social systems and culture. With Bronfenbrenner’s model and the range of relevant disciplines always in mind, I have tried to provide niches for detailed discussion of important topics such that a reader will find related theories or topics following on from each other. The cross-referencing should make it easier to find where the same character turned up or will re-appear.

Because we all experience life as social persons, we all have experience and opinions to draw on when we think about the subject matter of this book. We are also dealing with issues that have big personal repercussions for ourselves, and enormous social implications. I have therefore been anxious above all to tie my assertions to systematic evidence. The text is lavishly referenced, and my intention is that interested readers will be able to use these references to test how substantial what I say really is. ‘Lavish’ has not meant unselective, but neither does it necessarily mean that I have cited only what is most important—being especially vivid, or especially current, or addressing a neglected area, or being among the most cited papers or authors in the field, all entered into decisions about what to keep in. The bibliography contains important books but primarily useful review papers, theoretical critiques, and empirical papers from a wide range of journals—thank you to my university for buying us access to so many. Readers will, I hope, develop an awareness of big themes, key authors, and unanswered questions that will take them forward into their own developing understanding of ‘the child as social person’. I hope they will also develop the enthusiasm to search out their own material.

As I will describe shortly, Bronfenbrenner proposed a model of concentric or overlapping social settings, with the child at the centre amid successively wider and more varied patterns of interaction and influence. This is the basis for the organisation of this book. Things about being a social person that we commonly think of as being located largely within the child are discussed first. Successive chapters begin with the child and what he or she brings to social settings; move on to social interaction in which the parents are the other main players; then to relationships of the child and others within the wider family, the peer group, the school; then to the influence of social settings which affect the child although the child does not act in them. Typically within chapters and sections earlier periods of development are discussed before later ones. Resilience has a chapter of its own at the end of the book, which allows for explicit recapitulation of the themes derived from Bronfenbrenner and the base disciplines, and brings together considerations of all sorts of factors discussed earlier.

Throughout, I have been interested in both accounts of current social behaviour and experience and in how these carry forward in the life history of the individual. Developmental principles begin to appear here, and get some discussion in terms of how well they could account for children’s social behaviour. But whatever general principles there are in development and in social functioning, they result in an important and fascinating range of individual differences—differences which result from individuals being innately different from each other, from individuals meeting different circumstances within the same social system, from individuals living in different social systems—and, no doubt, from developmental principles being probabilistic rather than extremely deterministic. I have tried to deal with both generality and variation in a principled way.

1.2 Bronfenbrenner’s model of Person-environment interaction in development

The book that is the main intellectual ancestor of this book is Bronfenbrenner (1979), which sets out the parameters of an understanding of children’s development as social persons that would be full enough to guide our efforts to make that development a positive process reaching positive ends. Describing Bronfenbrenner’s ideas is my next task, and his distinctions structure my book. After doing that, I turn briefly to three other areas of theory that have also been influential, evolutionary psychology, developmental behaviour genetics, and the sociology of childhood, whose ideas will crop up at intervals throughout the book.

The core of Bronfenbrenner’s model is the position that individuals and environments have to be seen as mutually-shaping systems, each changing over time, each reacting to changes in the other. Although it is possible to look at components of systems separately, and I will use research that does, there are enormous benefits for our understanding if we can maintain this view. Bronfenbrenner was sometimes quite caustic about research that conceived of children in ways far removed from the everyday realities of their experience in social settings—‘much of contemporary research can be characterized as the study of development-out-of-context’ (Bronfenbrenner 1979:21). The more we understand the multiple contexts of any piece of behaviour, the better we understand that behaviour.

Bronfenbrenner developed his model of the ecology of human development from psychological and anthropological studies of children, and from his own experience of children growing up in Soviet Russia and in the USA in one of its most anti-communist periods (e.g. Bronfenbrenner 1971), but it obviously relates to the evolution of the human species, which has also been a matter of adaptation between individual and environment. I develop this point later in this chapter (pp. 20–22).

In his book-length account of his model (Bronfenbrenner 1979) he begins by offering a series of definitions. Firstly,

The ecology of human development involves the scientific study of the progressive, mutual accommodation between and active, growing human being and the changing properties of the immediate settings in which the developing persons lives, as this process is affected by relationships between these settings, and by the larger contexts in which the settings are embedded. […] the growing person is viewed not merely as a tabula rasa on which the env...

Table of contents

• Contents
• A note for the reader
• Chapter 1 Beginning to look at the development of the child as social person
• Chapter 2 Beginning with the child
• Chapter 3 Qualities of microsystems 1: Child and parents
• Chapter 4 Qualities of microsystems 2: Child and other children
• Chapter 5 Bigger social systems with child participants
• Chapter 6 Risk and resilience
• Chapter 7 Reflections
• Bibliography
• Author index
• Subject index