Three- and 4-year-old children tend to understand and describe themselves concretely, using observable descriptors including appearance, general abilities, favorite activities, possessions, and simple psychological traits (Harter, 2012). For example, Wanda explains, “I’m 4 years old. I have black hair. I’m happy, my doggie is white, and I have a television in my room. I can run really fast. Watch me!” Wanda’s self-description, her self-concept, is typical of children her age. Soon children begin to include emotions and attitudes in their self-descriptions, such as “I’m sad when my friends can’t play,” suggesting an emerging awareness of their internal characteristics (R. A. Thompson & Virmani, 2010).
Children’s conceptions of themselves are influenced by their interactions with parents and the cultural context in which they are raised. In one study, preschool through second-grade U.S. and Chinese children were asked to recount autobiographical events and describe themselves in response to open-ended questions (Q. Wang, 2004). The U.S. children often provided detailed accounts of their experiences. They focused on their own roles, preferences, and feelings and described their personal attributes and inner traits positively. In contrast, Chinese children provided relatively skeletal accounts of past experiences that focused on social interactions and daily routines. They often described themselves in neutral or modest tones, referring to social roles and context-specific personal characteristics. These differences are consistent with cultural values of independence in the United States and collectivism in China. In another study, U.S. preschool children reported feeling more sadness and shame in response to failure and more pride in response to success than did Japanese preschool children (Lewis, Takai-Kawakami, Kawakami, & Sullivan, 2010). The Japanese preschool children displayed few negative emotions in response to failure but showed self-conscious embarrassment in response to success. Culture, then, influences how children come to define and understand themselves and even the emotions with which they self-identify (R. A. Thompson & Virmani, 2010).
Self-Esteem
Young children tend to evaluate themselves positively. That is, they generally have a high sense of self-esteem. For example, 3-year-old Dorian exclaims, “I’m the smartest! I know all my ABCs! Listen! A, B, C, F, G, L, M!” Like Dorian, many young children are excited but also unrealistically positive about their abilities, underestimating the difficulty of tasks and believing that they will always be successful (Harter, 2012). Preschoolers often fail to recognize deficits in their abilities and tend to view their performance favorably, even when it is not up to par (Boseovski, 2010). Even after failing at a task several times, they often continue to believe that the next try will bring success.
Young children’s overly optimistic perspective on their skills can be attributed to their cognitive development, attachment with caregivers, and the overwhelmingly positive feedback they usually receive when they attempt a task (Goodvin, Meyer, Thompson, & Hayes, 2008). These unrealistically positive expectations serve a developmental purpose: They contribute to young children’s growing sense of initiative and aid them in learning new skills. Young children maintain their positive views about themselves because they do not yet engage in social comparison. In other words, they do not compare their performance with that of other children. With advances in cognition and social experience, children begin to learn their relative strengths and weaknesses, and their self-evaluations become more realistic (Rochat, 2013). Between ages 4 and 7, children’s self-evaluations become linked with their performance. For example, in one study, children’s self-evaluations declined when they failed tasks assigned by an adult as well as those they perceived as important (Cimpian, Hammond, Mazza, & Corry, 2017). Sensitive parenting that supports children’s attempts at difficult tasks emphasizes the value of effort and helps children identify and take pride in success that promotes self-esteem.
Thinking in Context 8.1
Recall from Chapter 1 that individuals are active in their development, influencing the world around them. How might children’s psychosocial development and their emerging sense of self illustrate this principle of lifespan development?
Emotional Development in Early Chlidhood
Young children’s advances in cognitive development and growing sense of self influence the emotions they show and the contexts in which they display these emotions. Moreover, young children come to understand people and social relationships in more complex ways, leading to new opportunities for emotional development. Emotional development includes an increasing awareness and management of emotion, as well as an ability to recognize others’ emotions and infer causes and consequences of others’ emotions (Camras & Halberstadt, 2017).
Emotional Understanding
Donald begins to cry as his mother leaves, dropping him off at preschool. Watching Donald, Amber explains to her mother, “Donald is sad because he misses his mommy,” and she brings Donald a toy. “Don’t be sad,” she says. By 3 to 4 years of age, children recognize and name emotions based on their expressive cues. By age 4, children begin to understand that external factors (such as losing a toy) can affect emotion and can predict a peer’s emotion and behavior (such as feeling sad and crying or feeling angry and hitting things) (Goodvin, Thompson, & Winer, 2015).
The emergence of theory of mind has profound implications for emotional development. As children begin to take other people’s perspectives, they can apply their understanding of emotions to understand and help others, such as recognizing that a sibling is sad and offering a hug. Children’s growing understanding of the mind leads them to appreciate the role of internal factors, such as desires, on emotion and behavior (Wellman, 2017). By age 5, most children understand that desire can motivate emotion, and many understand that people’s emotional reactions to an event can vary based on their desires.
Theory of mind influences the development and expression of self-conscious emotions, such as pride and guilt. Self-conscious emotions emerge as children become aware of rules and standards that define socially appropriate behavior and that others have expectations for their behavior (Muris & Meesters, 2014). For example, in response to success, children’s joy may be accompanied by the self-conscious emotion of pride. Likewise, shame results from recognizing that poor outcomes are the result of their behavior.
Interactions with others play an important role in advancing children’s understanding of emotions. When parents talk to their preschoolers about emotions and explain their own and their children’s emotions, the children are better able to evaluate and label others’ emotions (Camras & Halberstadt, 2017). Preschool teachers also engage in emotion coaching, helping young children to understand the emotions they feel and see in others (Silkenbeumer, Schiller, & Kärtner, 2018). Young children often discuss emotional experiences with parents and peers. They also often enact emotions in pretend sociodramatic play, providing experience and practice in understanding emotions and their influence on social interactions (Goodvin et al., 2015). Pretend play with siblings and peers gives children practice in acting out feelings, considering others’ perspectives, and implementing self-control, improving the children’s understanding of emotion (Hoffmann & Russ, 2012). In one study, preschoolers’ engagement in sociodramatic play predicted their expressiveness, knowledge, and regulation of emotion 1 year later (Lindsey & Colwell, 2013). Children’s interactions with siblings offer important opportunities to practice identifying emotions, decoding the causes of emotions, anticipating the emotional responses of others, and using their emotional understanding to influence their relationships and affect the behavior of others (Kramer, 2014).
Emotion Regulation
Over
