Socialisation Outside The Family

Peer Sociability
1. Between 1 and 2 years toddlers increasingly view one another as playmates. As a result coordinated interactions occur more often therefore promoting peer engagement. Peer sociability is promoted by parent child bond. From interacting with adults they learn to send and interpret emotional signals. Social development proceeds in a 3 step sequence: 1) nonsocial activity - onlooker behaviour and solitary play. 2) Parallel play - children play near each other but don't try to influence each others behaviour. 3) Associative play - Children play separately but exchange toys. 4) Co-operative play - Children orient towards a common goal. All of these types of play exist during preschool years. Non social play is the most common type amongst 3-4 year olds.
2. Only certain types of nonsocial activity are concerning - Aimless wandering, hovering near peers and functional play involving immature repetitive motor action.
3. Sociodramatic play is common during preschool years and supports cognitive, emotional and social development.
4. Rough and tumble play - friendly chasing and play fighting. it is more common among boys. For boys it consists of playful wrestling, restraining and hitting, for girls it is mainly running and chasing. It helps children establish a dominance hierarchy (a stable ordering of group members that predicts who will win when conflict arises). Once this is established, hostility is rare. Children use play fighting to assess a peers strength before challenging their dominance. Rough and tumble in adolescence is linked to aggression. And boy girl R&T serves as a means to playfully initiate heterosexual interaction.
5. Influences - Parents influence peer sociability indirectly and directly. Direct - Pre-schoolers whose parents frequently arrange informal peer play activities have larger peer networks and are more socially skilled.They also offer guidance on how to act towards others. Parental monitoring protects children from antisocial behaviour. Indirect - Inductive disciplining and authoritative parenting offer a firm foundation for social competence. In contrast, coercive behavioural control and harsh physical punishment engender poor social skills and aggressive behaviour. Secure attachments are linked to responsive, harmonious peer interactions, larger peer networks, and more supportive friendships. The quality of parents social networks is also related to children's social competence.
  1. Age - In mixed age settings children acquire new competencies from olden companions. In same age relationships they learn to cooperate and resolve conflicts and develop vital moral understandings of reciprocity and justice.
Friendship
1. 1) Friendship as a handy playmate (4 to 7 years) - Friendship does not yet have a long term enduring quality. Friendship can dissolve when one partner refuses to share, hits or isn't available to play. 2) Friendship as mutual trust and Assistance (8 - 10 years) - Friendship becomes more complex and psychologically based.It is a mutually agreed upon relationship where children like each other's personal qualities and respond to each others needs and desires. Violations of trust are seen as serious breeches of friendship. 3) Friendship as intimacy, mutual understanding and loyalty (11 to 15 years) - Psychological closeness and loyalty are the most important aspects. True mutual understanding implies forgiveness, therefore only extreme fallings out can terminate a friendship.
2. Characteristics - As mutual trust increases, children's friendships become more selective. By age 8 children have only a handful of good friends. Number of best friends declines from 4-6 in early adolescence to 1-2 in early adulthood. Preschoolers give twice as much reinforcement to friends. Adolescents are less possessive of their friends than in childhood. Friends not only behave more pro socially but also disagree and compete more often. Children who bring kindness and compassion to friendship promote prosocial tendencies and form lasting ties. Aggressive children are more at risk for breakups. Aggressive girls relationships are high in self disclosure but full of relational hostility. from middle childhood, friends resemble each other in personality, popularity, academic achievement, prosocial behaviour and judgements of other people. In adolescence friends tend to be alike in identity status, educational aspirations, political beliefs and willingness to try drugs.
3. Sex differences - In middle childhood emotional closeness is more common between girls than boys. Girls are more exclusive in their friendships. Boys more often gather for an activity. Friendship closeness comes at a cost, when they focus on deeper thoughts they mull over negative emotions (crimination). Girls closest same sex relations tend to be shorter in duration than boys. Young people who are very popular or unpopular tend to have more other sex friends in adolescence. Girls have more other sex friends than boys.
4. Warm friendships that are high in trust, intimate sharing and support contribute to psychological health because they provide opportunities to explore the self and develop deep understandings of others. They also provide a foundation for future intimate relationships. They help young people deal with stresses of everyday life and improve attitudes towards and involvement in school. Children who have no friends usually have undesirable personalities: easily angered, shy, anxious or self centred.
Peer Acceptance
1. Likablity - The degree to which a child is viewed by age mates as a worthy social partner. It is not a mutual relationship but one sided perspective. Better accepted children have more friends. There are 4 types: Popular children who are well liked, rejected children who are disliked, controversial children who are both liked and disliked, neglected children who are forgotten. Peer acceptance is a powerful predictor of psychological adjustment. Rejected children are anxious, unhappy, disruptive, poorly achieving, with low self esteem.
2. Social behaviour plays a powerful role in peer acceptance. Popular children - 2 type exist: Popular-prosocial children combine academic and social competence. A smaller subtypes are popular-antisocial children. They emerge in late childhood and include tough boys, they are athletically skilled but poor students who cause trouble and defy adult authority, or relationally aggressive who enhance their own status by ignoring and excluding others or spreading rumours. Rejected children - They display a wide range of negative social behaviours. Rejected-aggressive children show high rates of conflict,physical and relational aggression, hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattentive behaviour. They blame others for their social difficulties and are antagonistic. Rejected-withdrawn children are passive and socially awkwards. They fear being scorned and attacked. Most have few friends with bonds low in mutual support. both types of rejected children are likely to be victimised.
  1. Rejected withdrawn children are likely to adopt a learned helpless approach due to their lack of awareness about their own social issues.
3. Controversial children show positive and negative social behaviours. They are usually assertive and dominant and have as many friends as popular children, but they engage in relational aggression to maintain dominance. Neglected children are usually well adjusted. They engage in low interaction and are considered shy but are normal on social skills. They are not unhappy about their social life and can cooperate and form friendships when they want to.
4. Bullying - Bullies display social cognitive defects such as overly high self esteem, pride in their acts, indifference to harm done to their victims. Chronic victims tend to be passive when active behaviour is expected. When bullied they cry, give in and assume defensive postures. An inhibited temperament and frail appearance increase victimisation. Victims have a history of maternal overprotection and controlling child rearing. Many victims are also aggressive.
Peer Groups
1. First Peer Groups - Collectives that generate unique values and standards for behaviour and a social structure or leaders and followers. Originally peer groups organise around proximity.
2. Cliques and crowds - In early adolescence peer groups become more tightly structured. They are organised into cliques (groups of 5-8 members). Clique membership is more important to girls. Several cliques with similar values form a larger 'crowd'. Membership in a crowd is based on stereotype and reputation.
Dating
1. At age 12-14 relationships usually only last 5 months. By 16 they continue for about 2 years. These older teens date for personal compatibility, companionship, affection and social support. Early frequent dating is related to drug use, delinquency and poe academic achievement. Because of intense prejudice homosexual teenagers often retreat into hetrosexual dating. Hihg school couple that do survive graduation find that they have little in common later.
Peer Pressure
1. Resistance to peer pressure strengthens with age. People who feel confident, worthwhile and ar low sensation seekers are less likely to succumb. Children who's parents exert too little or too much control are highly peer orientated.
The Meidia
1. Television - Preschoolers watch 10-18 hrs a week, school age 24 hours a week and adolescents 32 hours a week. Boys watch slightly more TV than girls. Low SES households are likely to leave the TV on all the time. Low educated parents are more likely to eat meals intron of the tv and fail to limit children's tv access.Children with TV's in their bedroom watch 40-90 mins more per day. Violent content is 9% above average in children's cartoons! TV violence increases the likelihood of hostile thoughts and aggressive behaviour. Young children are especially likely to imitate tv violence because they believe tv fiction is real.Aggressive children have a greater appetite for TV and media violence as do boys compared to girls. TV violence hardens children to aggression making them more likely to tolerate it in others.
  1. Ethnic minorities are underrepresented in TV and when they do appear they are more likely to be portrayed in lower class roles or as criminals. Women also appear less often than men especially in main roles. Woman are often sexualised and victimised, where as men are shown as dominant and powerful. Advertising - By age 3 children can distinguish tv ads from normal programs by its loudness, fast past action and sound effects. However they don't grasp the selling purpose of Ads, they think they are meant to help people. By 9 they understand that their aim is to sell products. and by age 11 they realise that advertisers will use clever tactics to achieve these sales.
  2. prosocial Behaviour - TV that includes acts of helping, cooperating and comforting increases children's prosocial behaviour.
  3. Education - Sesame street is the most widely viewed children's program in the world. Watching educational programs is associated with gains in early literacy and maths skills. persistent background TV distracts children from play and reduces focused attention.
2. Computers & the internet - Non game computer use is associated with literacy progress. Searching the web for info for assignments is linked to academic achievement. Boys spend more time using computers by the end of primary school and use them to download games and music, trade and sell things, create web pages. Girls prefer to social network and information gather
3. Video Games - Adolescent boys spend nearly 1/3 of their computer time playing games, three times as much as girls. Speed and action games foster selective attention and spatial skills. Extensive game playing is related to poor school performance. Passionate game players tend to be anxious and withdrawn.
4. Mobiles - Girls use mobiles to text and call their friends more than boys. These interactions support the closeness of their friendships. In unmonitored chat rooms teenagers likely come across degrading ethnic slurs and sexually obscene remarks. Troubled youths who use the internet to avoid rejection and isolation are vulnerable to exploitation.
5. Protecting children from the media - Limit Tv and computer time, avoid using tv or computer time as a reward, encourage child appropriate media experience, when possible watch tv with children, link tv content to everyday learning experience, model good tv and computer practises,explain internet technology and safety practises, monitor and limit cell phone use, use an authoritative approach to child rearing.
Schooling
1. By school graduation, children have spent 14000 hours at school.
2. Class sizes - Lower class sizes predicted substantially higher achievement and increased likelihood of graduating. With fewer students, teachers spend less time disciplining and more time teaching. Also children show better concentration, higher quality class participation and more positive school attitudes. School size is a better predictor once children reach high school.
3. Teaching Philosophies - In traditional classrooms the teacher is the sole authority for knowledge, rules and decision making. Progress is evaluated by how well they keep pace with a uniform set of standards. Constructive classrooms encourage children to construct their own knowledge. they are evaluated by considering their progress in relation to their previous development. Montessori education - multiage classrooms, long time periods for child chosen activities, equal emphasis on social and academic achievement.
4. Social Constructivist classrooms - Teachers and children as partners in learning, experience with many types of symbolic communication in meaningful activities, teaching adapted to each child's zone of proximal development.
5. School Transitions - With each school transition, adolescents grades decline. Girls fair less well than boys with an increased drop in self esteem.
6. Teacher student interaction - Well behaved high achieving students get more encouragement and praise whereas unruly students receive more criticism. Teachers attitudes can create educational self fulfilling prophecies.

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	Created by Wendy Frogley about 11 years ago