L10 - Child Development in Social Context

Question 1

How is the child is a social being?

Answer 1

• Treat the child not as an isolated entity but as a social being, formed by and forming part of a network of relationships which are crucial to its integrity
• We do not think about children in their day to day life when we study them

Question 2

What are social contexts in which a child develops?

Answer 2

• Family
  
  • Peer groups
  • School
  • Hospital, childcare settings
  • Neighbourhoods

Question 3

What is the bioecological model?

Answer 3

• Child as developing within a complex system of relationships
• Env is a series of nested structures
• Complex set of relations exist between the developing person and the persons developmental setting
• Whole is greater than sum of its component parts

Question 4

What characteristics are in the centre? (the child)

Answer 4

• Genes
• Sex
• Gender
• Age
• Appearance
• Temperament
• Intelligence
• Motivation
• How they interact with env and how env interacts with them

Question 5

What is the microsystem?

Answer 5

• Immediate layer
• Activites, roles, relationships child participates in directly in particualr setting inc parents
• More complex over time as child becomes more active and interactive
• Relationships are bidirectional e.g parent to child, child to parent
• Negative: hostile parenting, peer rejection, sibling antagonism, poor teaching practices
• Positive: Supportive parenting, positive sibling and peer relations, effective teachers

Question 6

What is the mesosystem?

Answer 6

• Connections among microsystem elements
• e.g parents and siblings
• Adaptive connections theorised to foster child well-being

Question 7

What is the exosystem?

Answer 7

• Indirect effects
• e.g parent’s work, neighbourhoods etc.
• Can be very strong - doesn’t interact with directly

Question 8

What is the Macrosystem?

Answer 8

• Embedded in values, customs and laws of wider society in which child exists
  e.g general culture, social class, ideologies

Question 9

What is the Chronosystem?

Answer 9

• Societies change over time with implications for child development = child development should be viewed in a temporal context e.g exposure to social media
• Children change over time = more active in shaping development

Question 10

What is Bronfenbrenner’s self criticism?

Answer 10

Too much context, not role of person in their own life

Question 11

What is the process part of the Process-Person-Context-Time model?

Answer 11

• Development takes place through reciprocal interactions between the individual and their immediate external env e.g baby and parent smiling
• Interactions become complex and occur over extended periods of time
• Enduring forms of interaction are called proximal processes

Question 12

What is the person part of the Process-Person-Context-Time model?

Answer 12

• What personal characteristics an individual beings with them into social situations
• Demand characteristics: age, gender, physical appearance
• Resource characteristics: mental and emotional resources, past experiences, skills, social and material resources
• Force characteristics: temperament, motivation, persistence

Question 13

What is the time part of the Process-Person-Context-Time model?

Answer 13

• Micro-time: what occurs during the course of an interaction or activity
• Meso-time: how consistent are those activities or interactions
• Macro-time: The Chronosystem: Processes vary according to historical events occurring as the developing individual is at one age or another

Question 14

Caveats of the PPCT model:

Answer 14

• Struggle to test PPCT models with traditional approaches in psychological: difficult to accommodate
• 25 papers published between 2001 and 2009 claiming to test theory, only 4 used updated theory and adequately tested it

Question 15

How is ecological perspective useful to us? (A good model)

Answer 15

• Useful way of thinking about child development
• No assumption of universality of ecological system - each is dynamic and there is variation across world
• Relations are not just linear
• Systems are more complex

Question 16

How does theory meet practise?

Answer 16

• Children develop within ecological contexts
• Shifted narrative about mental health and mental illness from individual issues to include the social and env responsibility of others
• Over time, we have seen an increased recognition of rights of children within contexts enshrined in law both nationally and internationally - UN convention on the rights of the Child

Question 17

What is the policy that benefits children?

Answer 17

• Being and becoming: understanding needs of child = as important as using features of child to predict or improve adult outcomes
• Children’s rights: rights-based approach that is in step with UNCRC standards - incorporating children’s rights into the development and evaluation of government policy
• Voice of child: Incorporating children’s voices into development and evaluation of gov policy while paying due regard to equality, inclusion and diversity of experience and opinion

Question 18

How do we bridge theory and policy?

Answer 18

Mass of evidence (textbook chapters, reports etc.) helps us consider what matters in child development, how processes unfold, why and when.