Social Development In Young Children

Susan Isaacs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136343049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

First published in 1999. This is Volume XX of twenty-eight in the Psychoanalysis series. Written in 1933, the bulk of the material which forms the basis of this study in the social and sexual development of children was gathered in the author's work at the Malting House School during the years 1924 to 1927 and focuses on the social development of young children.

PART I

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DATA

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1. Intention and Plan. This book is addressed to the scientific public, and in particular to serious students of psychology and education. It is not intended as a popular exposition, whether of the psychological facts or of the relevant educational theory.

** * * * * *

The main part of the material quoted and discussed was gathered in my school for young children, but in spite of this, I am offering it in the first instance (with the further material from other sources) as a contribution to psychology rather than to education. In order to keep this distinction as clear as I believe it should be, I have divided the book into two parts, the first devoted mainly to a survey of the actual facts of social behaviour in young children which I have had the opportunity of observing or collating, and the place of these facts in psychological theory; the second, to the bearing of the psychological facts upon the question of how the parent and teacher can best help the social development of their children. It seems likely that only by keeping these two realms of discussion apart in our minds can we bring ourselves, on the one hand, to face the facts dispassionately, or on the other, to see clearly what meaning, if any, they have for educational practice. Otherwise, we readily pre-judge the facts in the light of what we would have them be or feel they ought to be.

2. The Value of Qualitative Records. In my introductory chapter to Intellectual Growth in Young Children, I discussed the value of purely qualitative records of children's behaviour, and the particular nature of the records offered there. The chapter was intended to introduce this present volume as well as Intellectual Growth, since the two together constitute a single study of the behaviour primarily of a particular group of children under particular conditions.

I there suggested that not only are such qualitative records an essential preliminary to fruitful experiment in genetic psychology, but that they may well remain an indispensable background and corrective, even when experimental technique is perfected. Without such a background of the total responses of children to whole situations, partial studies of this or that response to limited experimental problems may be no more than sterile and misleading artifacts.

The actual records of children's cognitive behaviour in Intellectual Growth established, I believe, the truth of this contention in the intellectual field. But the consideration holds good of social development even more profoundly. Experimental methods have in fact proved enormously fruitful in the study of intellectual growth, of learning and of language. But in the field of social development they are almost inapplicable. Most attempts to apply them have proved rather sterile. To study the moral development of children by asking for their judgments at different ages on a series of fables or of moral situations, for example, is to consider only one very limited aspect of the problem. To ask children what they think should be done in certain situations, or what they believe they themselves would do, is perhaps to learn something of their ideas of morality, but not of their morality. It is hardly even to study their ideas about it—but only such ideas as they dare to communicate. We can only study their effective morality in its spontaneous action in real situation.

The main development of technique in recent years among serious students of children's social life has been along the lines of systematic observation. Systematic observation has recently been defined by John E. Anderson, in his excellent discussion of The Methods of Child Psychology,¹, as “a technique … in which the observer selects beforehand from a mass of events which are occurring in the development of a child a particular event or series of events for observation, and develops a technique whereby the observations are recorded regularly in accordance with a predetermined plan. Emphasis, however, should be placed upon the fact that the behaviour which is recorded is that which occurs naturally.” Such observations are contrasted with incidental observations, made in a haphazard way under ordinary everyday conditions.

The records offered here from the Malting House School are systematic observations, not so much in the sense that par-ticular series of events were selected out before they happened and then systematically recorded, but rather in the sense that something approximating to the total behaviour (in the large) of the children was noted down, and the whole chronological record then followed through for this and that systematic thread. Moreover, the life of the group was carried on under conditions controlled by a deliberate educational technique.¹

A special type of systematic observation which is being more and more widely adopted, in the field of social behaviour as well as of general learning and language, is the rating method. In this, an attempt is made to arrive at a developmental scale for every sort of behaviour, in the relations of children with each other and with adults. Such a scale, of course, ultimately rests upon qualitative individual judgments, but it attempts by various devices to standardise these judgments and make them more objective and exact than ordinary impressions.

Much of Gesell's work is of this nature. In her important article on The Social Behaviour of the Child,² Charlotte Bühler has surveyed the yield of such studies to the time of her writing. One of the most interesting recent researches on these lines is that of Katherine Bridges, Social and Emotional Development of the Pre-School Child (1931). Professor Bridges holds that “the chief merit of the scales, both social and emotional, lies in the assistance they offer for the qualitative study and analysis of children's social and emotional development. With the help of the scales certain behaviour trends may be brought to light and subsequently given special educational treatment. Rough comparisons may also be made between children of the same group both with regard to general development and the persistence or changes of certain specific trends. Further, parents, teachers and psycho-logists will find the scales particularly helpful as a means of training their own powers of observation. Consideration of results will also give them greater insight into the social and emotional significance of small aspects of children's behaviour which would ordinarily pass unnoticed” (pp. 36–7).

With these views I largely agree, and in due place I shall quote some of the valuable material which Professor Bridges has brought together in the course of her own study. And yet I feel that my own reservations with regard to the method of the rating scale are still justified, and may usefully be repeated here. “… It can never be allowed to take the place of a direct examination of the full concrete behaviour of children. The actual choice of items in the rating scale is again an act of qualitative perception, and systematic scrutiny of the actual events from the psychological point of view (not the ethical or educational) is an essential preliminary. It would be quite sterile to substitute premature quantitative treatment for detailed and concrete study of individual psychological events and their concrete inter-relations—especially if the rating scale were set up with an educational or moral bias, which apparently tends to be the case. The rate of change in children towards behaviour which is considered desirable is not more significant psychologically than the actual behaviour which they do show at any given stage. For instance, it is surely at least as important to investigate the concrete situations which give rise in particular children to aggressiveness or defiance as it is to estimate the degree of their social adaptiveness at a given age, on a conventional scale.”¹

This need for caution in entering upon extensive quantitative studies has, I think, been further reinforced by some of the actual researches recently carried out.

Briefly, the major error into which quantitative studies handling large masses of data readily fall is the over-simplification of the problem, and the treatment of very different situations as being essentially the same. This happens through the overlooking of qualifying differences— differences which most unacademic persons used to observing children and their parents would know to be vital. A few examples may suffice.

One of the most significant, and indeed a classical example, is provided by Watson. In Psychological Care of Infant and Child, Watson advocates that mothers should “condition” their children not to reach out for things they are not intended to have, for example, utensils on the meal table, by rapping them over the knuckle with a pencil. He appears seriously to suggest that such a situation, in which the mother deliberately causes pain to the child (its slightness is irrelevant), is exactly parallel to the child's falling down and bumping his own knee on the floor. That is to say, if the mother makes her attitude impersonal and unemotional, she really becomes as neutral to the child as a piece of furniture is. Such a proposition surely needs only to be stated to be seen as false.

Moreover, as regards the innate fears of young children, the careful recent observations by C. W. Valentine,¹ largely repeating Watson's work, have shown that the stimuli to such fears are never simple. The setting is always all-important, and it is a whole situation which affects the child. The presence or absence of the mother, for instance, may make all the difference to the child's actual response.

This social factor of the child's response to particular adults has again been shown to be important in a recent study of children's day-time habits of sleep, in which it has been elaborately demonstrated that children will settle down to sleep more readily and sleep longer with one particular person in charge, than with another.² My own impression is that the behaviourists generally altogether under-estimate the significance of this type of social factor, because of their predilection for isolated mechanical situations. It is touched upon incidentally here and there, but little significant use is made of it.

The importance of the social factor is again emphasised by one extremely interesting result in Brainard's attempt to repeat Koehler's experiments on apes with his own young child.³ The child's first response to her father's unusual behaviour in putting a proffered chocolate out of the window, in order to see whether she would understand how to get it, was a social one, an exclamation of protest at her father doing such an unheard of thing—“Hi!” she said ; and then a moment later, “Daddy get it!” Only when she had got over the shock of her father's perverse behaviour was she able to deal with the cognitive problem itself.

Those investigators who are attempting to build up rating scales and schedules for social and emotional development do not always seem to me to provide sufficiently against the risk of over-simplification, for example, the neglect of the difference in the reactions of a child according to whether he is at home or in school. Most of us have had experience of how differently a child may behave in these two environments. A single illustration may suffice to show how striking the difference may be.

“My little girl, practically eight years old, is so difficult to manage as to be almost impossible, most of the time (at home). She does not always say‘No’ but either ignores and does not answer—or pretends she has not heard or seen. What worries us far more than that is her excessive cheek and answering back most rudely. She must always have the last word. If she cannot go on being as cheeky and rude as one can possibly be and answering back, she cries in a most babyish way, always making a dreadful noise. She is never spoken to except in a polite, kindly way—has never seen anything but kindness all around her, and we cannot understand where she gets it from. Her little brother, nearly five, adores her and would do anything for her, whereas she can be awfully unkind and cruel to him. She will often say she wished we had not got him—also that she does not love her Daddy or Mummy. Although she is so impossible at home, she behaves quite well at school. In desperation I have been twice to consult her head mistress, and have been told that never had she been punished or even had her name called for the least offence; her teachers have nothing but praise for her and are most satisfied with her progress, behaviour and everything.”

One could take point after point of those appearing on the various rating scales or developmental schedules, and show how far they are from being single trends which can be measured in themselves apart from specified total situations. For instance, rating scales sometimes attempt to quantify and grade the child in cleanliness and control of sphincters. But one finds children who are clean in one respect and very far from clean in another. I have had many cases of children who were perfectly clean and independent as regards the bowel from one and a half years, but difficult and dirty with regard to bladder control up to three or four years and even later. Cleanliness is by no means a single factor. Moreover, the child may be clean and responsible when in the hands of one adult, and not with another. I quote later on (p. 330) a little girl who was obstinately constipated, but volunteered to a new nurse, “I will do my ‘duty’ for you”

At various later points, I shall be able to bring out another set of facts of the greatest relevance to rating scales and developmental schedules, namely, the way in which children who have been “conditioned” to clean habits in the earliest weeks, and appear to have established such habits perfectly, may break down completely later on, and show a further period of months, or even years, in which they are extremely difficult and dirty. These facts are unintelligible on any quantitative approach, and can only be understood in terms of qualitative emotional experience.

In general, one can say with regard to development under five years, that what a child does for one person under certain conditions is no reliable index of what he may do for another person in another situation. The state of flux of the affective-conative trends in the mental life of young children is bound to influence their particular response in any given situation, and that in a way which cannot be predicted on the basis of simple inspection of previous reactions to previous situations, unless the inner aspects of these events in the psychic life of the child have been understood. Moreover, the hair trigger action of external events (for example, loss of the nurse or the mother, severe treatment for bed-wetting, forcible interference with thumb-sucking, unhappy experiences with other children, etc.) causing a profound redistribution of internal force...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• PSYCHOANALYSIS
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• PART I. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DATA
• PART II. THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM
• APPENDIX I
• APPENDIX II
• APPENDIX III
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX OF AUTHORS
• INDEX OF SUBJECTS