Welcome to Your Child's Brain: How the Mind Grows From Conception to College (32 page)

As children grow older, they socialize outside the family more and more. At all ages, children are most likely to choose friends whose characteristics are similar to their own. The earliest peer relationships in toddlers are one-on-one interactions characterized by turn-taking and mutual imitation, an early form of cooperation, and by frequent conflict, usually over toys. Group interactions are not well developed
at this age. Older preschoolers increasingly participate in imaginative play and games with rules, both of which require the prefrontal cortex. Helping and sharing become more common during the preschool years, and aggression declines after age three. At this age, conflicts are more likely to involve ideas and opinions than struggles over things, and language becomes progressively more important to social relationships. Social competence is already associated with social success at this age, probably through a feedback loop in which better socialized children make more friends, which allows them to improve their social skills still more.

Successful socialization involves both formation of individual friendships and acceptance into peer groups. Friendships are the major source of affection, while group interactions are the main source of power and status. These two forms of socialization are both associated with good psychological health across cultures, though different societies may emphasize one aspect more than the other.

Once children enter school, their peer interactions become more frequent and less closely supervised by adults. In this age range, verbal aggression (threats, gossip, and insults) largely replaces physical aggression, and positive interactions also increase. Hostility begins to be expressed as persistent dislike of a particular person, rather than being restricted to a situation. The frequency of rough-and-tumble play peaks during the early school years. Competitive interactions via formal or informal games become more common. Children’s concepts of friendship become more sophisticated, moving from shared activities in preschool to shared values, self-disclosure, and loyalty by early adolescence. Social interaction between boys and girls drops off sharply around age seven (see
chapter 8
) and resumes again in early adolescence. Almost all children in this age range are members of a group of three to nine children who rarely play with anyone outside the group.

As children near adolescence, their group memberships usually become more fluid, as they interact with a larger number of other people in a variety of contexts. At this age, attempting to figure out what other people think and feel requires more prefrontal cortex activity than the same task in adulthood, as these parts of the brain continue to develop until the late teens (see
chapter 9
). Romantic relationships start to appear by age twelve, and their duration and frequency increase through the teen years. The quality of earlier friendships, particularly those involving negative interactions, moderately predicts the quality of later romantic relationships.

Both the major components of social competence—sociability and behavioral
appropriateness—are strongly influenced by the culture in which your child is raised. Within a given culture, certain children are more inclined to shyness than others, probably due to genetic biases, but identical twins raised in different cultures behave differently. Societies that encourage social interaction (such as the U.S. and Italy) produce children who tend to be less shy or inhibited than children whose societies value modesty and cautiousness (such as rural China and India). These differences can already be observed in toddlers. In the former countries, shyness (especially in boys) is met with disapproval or punishment from parents and rejection from peers, while in the latter countries parents and peers react to shyness with acceptance and approval. These differences mean that extroversion gives people an advantage in some societies but not in others. For example, in the U.S., shyness predicts lower educational and professional achievement, but in Sweden shyness has no such effect.

The value placed on behavioral appropriateness also varies across cultures. In traditional, agrarian societies made up of extended families, group harmony is considered very important, and children are mainly cooperative and compliant. Mothers in these cultures spend a lot of time in physical contact with their young children, expecting and receiving a high level of obedience. Older children, beginning as early as age five, are assigned household tasks, and their responsibilities increase substantially as they get older, to as much as six to seven hours per day at age ten to twelve.

In urban and industrial societies, individual accomplishment and competition are more highly valued, and children are more likely to be defiant or aggressive. In general, displays of anger toward other people are more common in societies where parents respond to them by trying to coax the child into feeling better and less common where parents express disapproval of such behavior. Children also respond to their peers’ attitudes about aggression, which may increase children’s status in individualistic cultures but decrease it in group cultures.

Of course, not all peer relationships are positive. About a third of school-age children report having a relationship characterized by mutual dislike, which can have significant developmental effects. Children with such negative relationships are more likely to have problems, ranging from depression and withdrawal to aggression. They are also less likely to do well in school and more likely to experience a variety of difficulties with their peers, including being bullied, being unpopular, and having trouble forming friendships. Girls and boys are equally likely to have negative relationships, and these relationships are equally likely to be between children of the same sex or different sexes.

PRACTICAL TIP: PROMOTING CONSCIENCE

The first stirrings of moral behavior in children come from the brain’s emotional system, which remains an important contributor to our moral sense in adulthood. Some precursors of the moral sense are probably built into the brain—even young babies like agents who help others better than those who hinder (see
chapter 1
)—but parenting has clear effects on its development.

The earliest precursor of conscience is your child’s desire to please you, which tends to be stable across situations, whether you’re teaching her to count or asking her not to write on the walls. Before age two, children begin to show individual differences in their likelihood of feeling guilty when they’ve done something wrong, which is linked to their ability to follow rules when no one is watching. Receptiveness to parental guidance predicts individual differences in conscience at later ages, including older children’s ability to reason about moral situations.

You might think that children would be more likely to obey strict parents, but this approach is actually more likely to produce a rebel. Parents who repeatedly assert their power interfere with the development of guilt and later conscience, producing children who blame external factors for their faults. The parents who receive the most obedience are the warm ones, whose children comply willingly with their parents’ wishes from a desire to make them happy (see
chapter 29
). Mutually positive parent-child interactions are a strong predictor of later moral behavior, particularly in securely attached children.

As you might expect, your child’s characteristics also influence the development of conscience. Children with strong self-control show more mature moral abilities than impulsive children of the same age. Children who are temperamentally fearful are prone to guilt, which leads to more compliant behavior, so for them warm and sensitive parenting is the most effective path to conscience, as the development of excessive guilt can lead to later anxiety disorders. For children who are less fearful, attachment security, which leads to an interest in pleasing the parent, is the best predictor of later conscience.

Social withdrawal in childhood may also lead to trouble. On average, behaviorally inhibited children show higher than normal activity in the right frontal cortex, the area associated with emotions that lead to withdrawal (see
Myth: The right hemisphere is the emotional side
). Children who are reluctant to interact with other children miss opportunities to practice their social skills, so the condition is often self-perpetuating. In the U.S., for example, social withdrawal at age seven is a risk factor for depression, loneliness, and negative self-image at fourteen. Shyness is equally prevalent in boys and girls, but the costs are higher for shy boys, who experience more stress and more peer rejection than shy girls, presumably because of different cultural expectations for male and female behavior. About a quarter of socially withdrawn children are targeted for bullying. (For comparison, about half of overly aggressive children are targeted.)

What can you do to help an inhibited child to avoid these problems? As we said earlier, warm and sensitive parenting with lots of physical contact promotes secure attachment, which predicts improved social competence for inhibited children. It’s not helpful to micromanage your child’s behavior; that can interfere with the development of social skills. But gentle encouragement to join groups of other children can be useful. Children who rarely express negative emotions like sadness and anxiety to their peers tend to be better accepted and less likely to be bullied, so improving emotional regulation might be one useful avenue to explore. Poor emotional regulation predicts poor social adjustment across the lifespan. Participation in organized sports or other extracurricular activities may be helpful, as talents valued by other children also promote peer acceptance. Early intervention is preferable because it is easier for children to catch up when their social skills haven’t yet gotten too far behind those of other children of the same age.

In all cases, building a connection with your children while respecting their individual temperaments provides a solid foundation for socialization and many other forms of learning. As with most aspects of child development, some factors that contribute to your child’s socialization are beyond your control, but there are ways that you can help. Anyway, building a warm relationship with your child should be a worthwhile goal in itself.

PART SIX
YOUR CHILD’S BRAIN AT SCHOOL

STARTING TO WRITE THE LIFE STORY
LEARNING TO SOLVE PROBLEMS
TAKE IT FROM THE TOP: MUSIC
GO FIGURE: LEARNING ABOUT MATH
THE MANY ROADS TO READING

Chapter 21
STARTING TO WRITE THE LIFE STORY

AGES: TWO YEARS TO EIGHTEEN YEARS

Considering that young brains are so good at learning, it’s odd that children can’t remember what happens to them in the first few years of life. You know that memorable episode involving chocolate pudding, your fancy clothes, and your two-year-old? He won’t recall it when he’s ten. What’s going on here?

The brain has many different types of learning, only one of which is dedicated to facts and events that we can consciously recall. Early experience makes a strong impression on brain function in many ways, as we discussed in the first few chapters of this book. In contrast, memory for events develops comparatively late, so the life story does not start to be reliably recorded until age three or four.

All kinds of learning are driven by cellular mechanisms that alter neurons and the synapses that connect them. Children and adults undergo similar cellular changes during everyday experience, but they function somewhat differently in children. The properties of these learning mechanisms may explain why we never forget how to ride a bike and why taking breaks from study can aid learning.