Overview

The age range of middle childhood is typically five or six to approximately age 12.  Since the experiences of a six-year-old vary from the experiences of an eleven-year-old, consider the nuances of the experiences of children during middle childhood. Keep in mind trauma impacts a child’s physical, cognitive, social, and psychological development.

pHYSICAL  DEVELOPMENT

The physical development of children continues gradually until they experience puberty (Hutchison, 2017). Physical development includes:

• Muscle mass
• Weight
• Coordination skills
• Height

Important things to remember about physical development:

• Each child is unique and physical development will depend on access to nutrition, genetics (e.g., body shape, height), and hormones (e.g., level of testosterone, estrogen).
• Environmental factors can also impact growth (e.g., lead exposure, pollution, chemical exposure).

During puberty, children experience what is referred to as a growth “spurt”; some children can experience puberty during middle adolescence. Sometimes social workers may need to provide education to parents about normal development, as some parents may not be aware of what may be normal development for their children.

The following content is shared and adapted from Lifespan Development: A Psychological Perspective by Martha Lally and Suzanne Valentine-French. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

Children gain greater control over the movement of their bodies (gross and fine motor skills) and experience greater reasoning and flexibility of thought. School becomes a significant role of middle and late childhood, and peer relationships start to become important. Peer acceptance also influences children’s perception of self and may have consequences for emotional development beyond these years.

Overall Physical Growth: Rates of growth generally slow during these years. Typically, a child will gain about 5-7 pounds a year and grow about 2-3 inches per year. Children gain muscle strength and lung capacity, making it possible to engage in strenuous physical activity for long periods of time. The beginning of the growth spurt occurs prior to puberty; this typically occurs two years earlier for females than males. The mean age for the beginning of the growth spurt for girls is nine and for boys, 11.

Children of this age tend to sharpen their abilities to perform both gross motor skills, such as riding a bike, and fine motor skills. In gross motor skills (involving large muscles) boys typically outperform girls, while with fine motor skills (small muscles) girls outperform the boys. These improvements in motor skills are related to brain growth and experience during this developmental period.

Brain Growth: Two major brain growth spurts occur during middle/late childhood. Between ages 6 and 8, significant improvements in fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination are noted. The frontal lobes become more developed and improvements in logic, planning, and memory are evident between 10 to 12 years of age. Myelination is one factor responsible for these growths. From age 6 to 12, the nerve cells in the association areas of the brain, that is those areas where sensory, motor, and intellectual functioning connect, become almost completely myelinated. This myelination contributes to increases in information processing speed and the child’s reaction time.

The hippocampus, responsible for transferring information from the short-term to long term memory, also show increases in myelination resulting in improvements in memory functioning . Children in middle to late childhood are also better able to plan, coordinate activity using both left and right hemispheres of the brain, and regulate their emotions. The ability to pay attention for some children is also improved as the prefrontal cortex matures.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

There are many developmental experiences that take place during middle childhood.

Pre-Operational: Substage 2 – Intuitive (4-7 years)

• Language is used to represent objects
• Egocentrism (believe themselves to be the center of existence)
• Transductive reasoning
• Unable to recognize other perspectives about a situation

Concrete Operations (7-11 years)

• Ability to solve concrete problems
• Logical problem solving
• Ability to think about questions and ideas

Formal Operations (11 through maturity)

• Ability to think about the future
• Ability to hypothesize
• Decision making

The following content is shared and adapted from Lifespan Development: A Psychological Perspective by Martha Lally and Suzanne Valentine-French. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

From ages 7 to 11, children are in what Piaget referred to as the concrete operational stage of cognitive development. This involves enhancing the use of logic in concrete ways. The word concrete refers to that which is tangible; that which can be seen, touched, or experienced directly. The concrete operational child is able to make use of logical principles in solving problems involving the physical world. For example, the child can understand principles of cause and effect, size, and distance. The child can use logic to solve problems tied to their own direct experience, but has trouble solving hypothetical problems or considering more abstract problems.

The child uses inductive reasoning, which is a logical process in which multiple premises believed to be true are combined to obtain a specific conclusion. For example, a child has one friend who is rude, another friend who is also rude, and the same is true for a third friend. The child may conclude that friends are rude. This way of thinking tends to change to deductive reasoning during adolescence.

Note: Click the drop down icons.

These new cognitive skills increase the child’s understanding of the physical world, however according to Piaget, they still cannot think in abstract ways. Additionally, they do not think in systematic scientific ways. Children in the concrete operational stage understand how to classify organisms experiments, most children younger than 12 perform biased experiments from which no conclusions can be drawn.

Information Processing

Source of the following content: 12.2: Cognitive Development is adapted and shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

During middle childhood, children are able to learn and remember due to an improvement in the ways they attend to and store information. As children enter school and learn more about the world, they develop more categories for concepts and learn more efficient strategies for storing and retrieving information. One significant reason is that they continue to have more experiences on which to tie new information. New experiences are similar to old ones or remind the child of something else about which they know. This helps them file away new experiences more easily.

They also have a better understanding of how well they are performing on a task and the level of difficulty of a task. As they become more realistic about their abilities, they can adapt studying strategies to meet those needs. While preschoolers may spend as much time on an unimportant aspect of a problem as they do on the main point, school aged children start to learn to prioritize and gauge what is significant and what is not. They develop metacognition or the ability to understand the best way to figure out a problem.

Language Development

Source of the following content: 12.2: Cognitive Development is adapted and shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

One of the reasons that children can classify objects in so many ways is that they have acquired a vocabulary to do so. By 5th grade, a child’s vocabulary has grown to 40,000 words. It grows at the rate of 20 words per day, a rate that exceeds that of preschoolers. This language explosion, however, differs from that of preschoolers because it is facilitated by being able to association new words with those already known and because it is accompanied by a more sophisticated understanding of the meanings of a word.

The child is also able to think of objects in less literal ways. For example, if asked for the first word that comes to mind when one hears the word “pizza”, the preschooler is likely to say “eat” or some word that describes what is done with a pizza. However, the school-aged child is more likely to place pizza in the appropriate category and say “food.”

This sophistication of vocabulary is also evidenced in the fact that school-aged children are able to tell jokes and delight in doing do. They may use jokes that involve plays on words such as “knock-knock” jokes or jokes with punch lines. Preschoolers do not understand plays on words and rely on telling “jokes” that are literal or slapstick such as “A man fell down in the mud! Isn’t that funny?”

School-aged children are also able to learn new rules of grammar with more flexibility.

Psychosocial and emotional development

Source of the following content: 12.4: Psychosocial Development is adapted and shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

Self-Concept: Children in middle childhood have a more realistic sense of self than do those in early childhood. That exaggerated sense of self as “biggest” or “smartest” or “tallest” gives way to an understanding of one’s strengths and weaknesses. This can be attributed to greater experience in comparing one’s own performance with that of others and to greater cognitive flexibility. A child’s self-concept can be influenced by peers and family and the messages they send about a child’s worth. Contemporary children also receive messages from the media about how they should look and act. Movies, music videos, the internet, and advertisers can all create cultural images of what is desirable or undesirable and this too can influence a child’s self-concept.

Industry vs. Inferiority: According to Erikson, children in middle childhood are very busy or industrious. They are constantly doing, planning, playing, getting together with friends, achieving, etc. This is a very active time and a time when they are gaining a sense of how they measure up when compared with friends. Erikson believed that if these industrious children can be successful in their endeavors, they will get a sense of confidence for future challenges. If not, a sense of inferiority can be particularly haunting during middle childhood.

Peer Relationships: During middle childhood, children spend less time with parents and more time with peers. Most children want to be liked and accepted by their friends. Children who are not accepted are more likely to experience conflict, lack confidence, and have trouble adjusting. Friendships take on new importance as judges of one’s worth, competence, and attractiveness. Friendships provide the opportunity for learning social skills such as how to communicate with others and how to negotiate differences. Children get ideas from one another about how to perform certain tasks, how to gain popularity, what to wear, say, and listen to, and how to act. This society of children marks a transition from a life focused on the family to a life concerned with peers. Peers play a key role in a child’s self-esteem at this age as any parent who has tried to console a rejected child will tell you. No matter how complimentary and encouraging the parent may be, being rejected by friends can only be remedied by renewed acceptance.

Social Development and Social Experiences

Underlying assumptions of Western culture include:

• Value and worth are dependent on what people do (e.g., grades, honor roll, activities) and have (e.g., letters behind their name, material items, cognitive abilities), and these values are used to measure success.

Person-In-Environment

• Some children are exposed to environments (e.g., groups, families, communities, schools) that do not foster opportunities for them to build their self-efficacy and self-esteem; these experiences can impact them throughout their life span.

Supporting children

• Caregivers (e.g., parents, guardians) play an essential role in the development of children. Adults can assist children with coping skills and how to adapt. Adults should always seek to use authentic and genuine communication with children versus comments said to children just to try and make a child “feel better.”

Peer Relationships

• Peer relationships begin to influence children including what their peers think about them; children seek to be accepted by their peers. How children are treated by peers can impact their psychological health; Hutchison (2017) pointed out the following, “…across gender and culture, peer acceptance is a powerful predictor of psychological adjustment (p. 418). Bullying occurs during middle childhood and should be addressed by adults; some adults may excuse bullying behaviors as “kids being kids.”

Resources

• Successful anti-bullying program identified by UCLA

• Who Is Likely to Become a Bully, Victim or Both? (APA Press Release)

Emotional Development: Children during middle childhood are able to engage in cognitive control of emotional arousal and have the ability to mentally organize and articulate emotional experiences. Internalized feelings can affect their behaviors, and there is an increase in the use of defense mechanisms classified as effective.

Cultural identity development: Children in middle childhood do experience cultural development, and they have increased awareness once they advance in their cognitive development. Ethnic identity might not play as an important role in the lives of European American children/adolescents as children/adolescents from other racial groups (Hutchison, 2017). The primary way culture identity is transmitted to children is family.

sexual development

Source of the following information: 2.2: Chapter 12 – Sexual Development Through the Lifespan is adapted and shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Erika Goerling & Emerson Wolfe (OpenOregon).

Although Freud determined that middle childhood was simply a time of latency, that it’s a time when children’s sexual interests are dormant, modern understanding of sexuality tells a different story. Even Erikson noted that this stage of development is significant and that the objective is to move through industry vs. inferiority. In other words, kids are intent on gaining a sense of self and ability, of competency in their tasks and relationships. If not, Erikson argued that they may experience inferiority. With regard to sexual development, children this age may not experience the wide-eyed curiosity of their earlier years, but they also may not have entered puberty yet. In one survey, men and women, regardless of sexual orientation, reported that the average age of their first sexual attraction was around 10 years old, which reflects that there are more factors impacting school-aged children than early theory suggests.

In many Western societies, school-aged children are often given their first set of educational information about their upcoming changing bodies, puberty, and reproduction. For trans youth, this time can be challenging based on concerns about physical changes at the onset of puberty. Early messages about bodies, sex, and sexuality can affect later attitudes and behavior. There is ongoing evidence that comprehensive sex education before young people become sexually active results in a delay in the onset of sexual activity AND an increase in sexual well-being. Additionally, support for trans youth regarding available health options is imperative for their ongoing physical and mental health outcomes.

Impact of Out-of-home placement

Reference

Hutchison, E.D. (2017). Essentials of human behavior: Integrating person, environment, and the life course (2nd. ed.) SAGE Publications, Inc.