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Socioemotional Development in early childhood

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Socioemotional Development in early childhood

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Your perception and awareness of who you are, including your sense of identity, emotions, and your moral code, is known as your sense of self, and begins to develop around the age of 2 years old (Santrock, 2021). After gaining self-awareness, a child moves onto to comprehending social emotions, like pride, guilt, shame or embarrassment, and empathy as well as sympathy and empathy. This helps them form opinions, solve problems, and make judgements.

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Early childhood emotional development includes the ability to express and understand emotions as well as regulate them. Between the ages of 2 through 4, children learn more about the causes and effects of feelings and use an increasing vocabulary to define them. Between the ages of 4 and 5, children show an increased capacity for self-analysis and an understanding that events can produce different emotions in different people. They also demonstrate an increasing awareness of the need to manage emotions in social settings, such as in school or out in public (Santrock, 2021).

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Positive emotions, such as empathy, also contribute to a child's moral development. Moral development involves thoughts, feelings, and behaviors regarding rules and conventions about what people should do in their interactions with others (Santrock, 2021). This helps build a child's character and can affect if they have a positive or negative impact on themselves and their community.

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Kohlberg’s 6 Stages of Moral Development

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Gender schema theory emphasizes the role of cognition in gender development. Gender refers to the social and psychological aspects of being male or female. Parents influence children's gender development. Peers are particularly skilled at rewarding gender-appropriate behavior (Santrock, 2021).

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Cognitive and Social Learning Theories of Gender Role Formation

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Piaget came to the conclusion that "children go through two distinct stages in how they think about morality" based on his theory of moral development (Santrock, 2021). In Chapter 8, Santrock (2021) discusses these two stages.

Heteronomous morality is displayed from ages 4-7, the first stage of moral development. This is where children think of justice and rules as unchangeable properties of the world, removed from the control of people. From 7-10 they transition between both stages. At 10 years and up they show autonomous morality. They become aware of laws and rules are created and judge an action based off of what they believe a person's intentions are. A sense of self is an important component in how children view themselves and others, and thus solve problems.

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Sociocultural theory expanded from the work of Lev Vygotsky, who proposed and believed that parents, caregivers, peers and the culture at large are responsible for developing higher-order functions. According to Vygotsky, learning has its basis in interacting with other people (Powell et al., 2017). When it comes to Vygotsky, and Piaget it is important to note that the fundamental difference between the two psychologists is that Piaget believed in the constructivist approach of children, or to put it simply, how the child interacts with the environment, whereas Vygotsky stated that learning is taught through culturally and socially.

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Hoose, N. A. (n.d.-b). Development of Self | Child Psychology. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/child/chapter/development-of-self-2/

Mcleod, S., PhD. (2023). Lev Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/vygotsky.html

Mr Ting. (2020, May 7). Cognitive and social learning theories of Gender Role Formation [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2RwcRQFjAU

Santrock, J. W. (2021). Life-span development (18th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Sprouts. (2019, November 29). Kohlberg’s 6 Stages of Moral Development [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bounwXLkme4