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The phase known as “mid-childhood” extends, approximately speaking, from the age of six and a half to the age of nine. At this point in the child’s life, he is ready to discover the world and how it really works. While he still likes to pretend, he is also ready to accept the objective truth, use his reasoning skills, and accept real facts without undue emotion. He no longer will personalize objects, such as the moon or clouds, or imagine that the sun shines only for him, but will recognize them as existing on their own. This becomes obvious to the parent when they ask him certain questions during daily interaction. They notice that the child is now more direct and frank about his perceptions, and more probing in his questions. For the parent, the apparent contrast with the child’s previous approach to reality becomes very obvious, and the child will clearly express a desire to know how things really work. What is not real comes to hold less and less interest for him and is eventually reduced to a minimum form. As this happens, the image of the world becomes noticeably more realistic throughout the period of mid-childhood. The child evaluates everything he hears people say on the basis of what he knows reality to be like. Only real or possible facts attract his interest, and he categorically rejects what is not real. The beginnings of realism can be seen clearly in two characteristic phenomena: the end of the age of fairy tales, and the wide-ranging development evident in the child’s drawings. As stories of this kind presuppose invention, something unreal, they stand in complete contradiction to the realistic attitude which we have described. This explains why the child stops believing in children’s stories of this sort between the age of eight and ten. Children who are not imaginative by nature put the age of storytelling behind them before the more imaginative ones do; boys do so earlier and more radically than girls. For parents who are desirous of teaching children about the Catholic faith, they should not be surprised should the child express doubts about Guardian angels, Jesus, Mary, or other truths about the spiritual world. He will also express uncertainty in regards to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. This tendency to realism is also noticeable in the way the children’s drawings change during this phase. It is true that in mid-childhood the child does not yet manage to reproduce things faithfully, but the general trend apparent from his drawings is in that direction. The ability to see the world in a realistic manner is the result of the child’s maturation. The child at this age becomes capable of thinking in a logical and systematic manner. For this reason, the child becomes extremely observant. The child’s increased ability to observe and note can often result in surprise or embarrassment to the parent or adult. They register innumerable details which adults fail to notice and they relate them to things which interest them. This gift of observation is an essential requirement for the rich experiences which await children at this age.
Only that which the child can perceive with his senses, e.g. hearing, seeing, smelling, touching, and tasting, can be handled by the child in a logical manner: everything has to pass though this means of learning. Even “understanding” itself has first to pass through watching and feeling. When we take this into account, we find ourselves making more allowances for children’s curiosity, and for their games. they have to put their nose into everything, touch everything, try everything out for themselves. This method of thinking and learning, which has not yet moved beyond only that which can be sensed, is known as concrete-objective. Here is an example: the six-year old child can count perfectly when he has to share ten apples with his brother; but if you ask him what ten divided by two is, he may be well unable to answer you. He will have to work it out using his fingers, or , if larger numbers are involved, an abacus, or you could try suggesting that he should imagine certain objects. This way of thinking, which relies always on sensory impressions or the representations which are their results, has been described as intuitive. This feature of the way children think is the reason why the principle of intuition is now used in teaching. There is nothing new about this notion - it was Comenius (1592-1670) who established the “golden rule for educators” which states that “the senses must be taken into account as much as possible.” At this stage, the child’s thought processes learn to cope with operations which have both a concrete and a logical aspect. This is expressed in the capacity for relating and classifying concrete objects.
A marked growth can be observed in the capacity for retention, which is liked with the mechanical-associative memory. Children record items in their memory without inquiring as to their meaning. They may also retain things which they have not understood, because they only relate them to one another associatively. This ability to easily learn by rote can prove disadvantageous to the teacher because the child may not understand just what it is he has learned. Understanding of logical and real relationships is missing. The way the teacher instructs the child will have a direct effect upon what the child learns and retains. The teacher should, as a consequence, take into account what the child has already learned, offering new material to expand upon what the child already knows, while also seeing to it that the child investigates the subject material so that he may experience the truth of what he is learning before he is asked to cosign it to memory, since most things learned by rote tend to be forgotten, whereas one can easily reconstruct things which have been properly understood for oneself at some later date. The schoolteacher’s fundamental task will therefore always be to teach children to think. In children of mid to late childhood, the sensory or intuitive memory normally dominates, since what has entered through the door of the senses is retained without any difficulty. Children of this age have mental images which are very lively and rich in detail, as they do not find it difficult to imagine intuitively something that they have previously seen or heard, or indeed anything that they have registered through the senses. Between the ages of six and eleven, children have a great capacity for remembering what they have perceived. Mid-Childhood Part 2: The Impulses & Their Direction In mid-childhood, there is an increase in energy. This shows itself in a persistent desire for activity. The child of this age is constantly playing energetically, running. jumping around and constructing all manner of objects. This unceasing activity is often too much for the adults who surround him. If he does not have to perform some specific task, his activities are constantly changing. Even when he is engaged in some specific task or game he will persist in random movement. The typical toy for a child of this age is a kind of escape valve for this powerful impulse to rush about, a reaction to his superabundance of vital energy. The educator must find ways of relieving the nervous tension which has built up in the child as a result of having to sit in the same place for a long time. All this activity is directed, as one would expect when one considers the extrovert character of mid-childhood, towards the outside world, the world of the people and things which surround the child. He will frequently desire to be with others more than in the past. This desire focuses on people beyond the narrow limits of the family: playmates with whom the child shares certain interests and exchanges impressions. there is a compelling need for comradeship (more in boys than girls). The child now tends to join particular groups formed by other children of his own age, and he vies with them both physically, testing his strength against theirs in games, and also intellectually, in his conquest of the outside world. But this comradeship is still fairly unstable: the child makes friends with a boy, then perhaps has a fight with him, or leaves him go off with someone else. The intense desire for companionship results in a preference for communal games. The child also plays alone, but nothing quite measures up to playing in the company of his friends, in the fresh air if possible, somewhere there is enough room to allow him to rush around, and where he will be free from the direct supervision from his parents or elders. His favorite games are those based on movement. Moreover, these games are subject to a strict set of rules which permit of no change on the part of the individual. In these games with rules, the impulse to move is channeled along set routes. The groups formed for such games are now considerably larger than those among smaller children. We are now talking of groups of ten to fifteen children, rather than five to nine as was formerly the case. The realism of the child at this stage has an ever-increasing influence on the way he plays. He now wants his toys to correspond to reality. Thus girls are, for example, no longer satisfied with the bundle of rags which formerly served as a doll- they want a real one. Boys are not content to drag an old cardboard box behind them as a “car”- they now want to have a real car. This sense of reality also drives children to make toys which are as realistic as possible: girls make clothes for their dolls with needle and thread; boys construct all kinds of things using tools. Children learn a lot in a functional way from these activities. parents ought therefore to give these children the opportunity to satisfy their urge to build and make, and not to repress this impulse because they are worried that the children will ruin their clothes or the materials they want to use. The interests of the child are now more objective in their direction. They are not so interested in what something can do for them, but what it is like and how it is made. This is where the child’s learning instincts are now directed. The child frequently becomes enthusiastic about learning new things. This is expressed by the child’s innumerable questions, his enjoyment of reading and tinkering, as well as his increased capacity for learning. As children also have a good memory at this age, they become more amenable to study. This is why children start school at this age. The desire to learn and know makes children attentive pupils, willing to assimilate what they are taught.
During the earliest years of childhood, there was no separation between work and play. play could take on the character of work, or work that of play, and the child’s activities could even combine both aspects, or alternate between them, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The child would suddenly convert a game into work, putting all his effort into doing what was needed. Then again, if some particular activity threatened to mean work, he would turn it into play if he thought there was no point in carrying it through to the end, or if that seemed impossible. Now, in mid-childhood, a definitive separation was made between play activity and the attitude proper to work. On the one hand, the child is now aware that work is characterized by obligation and demands, and that it is therefore necessary to perform it with an adult, an agreeable form of relaxation and a reward which can be expected when one’s work is done. This latter aspect explains why the child often hurries to finish his work so that he will be free to play. It is necessary for the child to determine the attitude proper to work in order to study effectively. By learning the difference, the child will be able to participate objectively in his education with a responsible attitude that will enable him to learn without constant guidance and observation. When children start school, they have to be coaxed slowly away from the attitude of play to that of work. The attitude of work must be cultivated right from the beginning of their school life. Children need to learn to work at the proper time, and so the first-year teacher’s task is to turn learning through play into a form of work. The idea that learning has to be play throughout all the years of primary school is a false interpretation of child psychology. It is the school’s duty to teach children as soon as possible that we may even dislike. Even though it is so important that the child should learn how to work, this does not mean that the educator has the right to demand that he does an excessive amount of work. The child still needs to play. In his play periods, he can rest, but he can also fulfill other needs: he learns; he exercises his abilities and skills; he can work off his surplus energy; he can rid himself of psychic tensions. All this boosts his ability to concentrate on his schoolwork and allows him to experience the joy of childhood.
Mid-Childhood part 3: The Feelings
The child is now becoming gradually less dependent on the family as the amount of contact he has with people outside is increasing. The school’s role in helping the child develop social skills is enormous. The child enters into a circle of people whom he does not know at all. At school, not only does he have to conform to certain norms of behavior and to the school timetable (until this point, he has been subject only to the rules within the family, and has lived at his own pace), but he is also faced with a new authority figure in the form of his teacher, and new companions in the form of his classmates. The class, like so many institutions, is an artificial construction, and it takes a long time to become a community. This means that the child starting school feels no emotional bond with the class as a whole, or with any of his fellow pupils. The fact that the members of the class often denounce each other shows that there is as yet no true feelings of solidarity between them. The pupils in the first year of school need special attention. The teacher must carefully get them used to the atmosphere of the class, allaying their first fears and suspicions, which is not always easy when dealing with children brought up by over-protective parents, or only children who have been spoiled excessively. The teacher must try to win their confidence as soon as possible, and for this he needs to create a warm and affectionate atmosphere. Children have great respect for the teacher’s authority. It is the parents’ duty to back up this authority by refraining from uttering even the slightest criticism of the teacher in front of their children, even if criticism would be in order, because unconditional respect for the teacher is, at this age, absolutely necessary if the child is to progress in his work and his education. At this stage, collaboration and cooperation between parents and the school is vital to the success of the child’s education. In this age, children no longer express the same degree of affection and attachment to their parents as they had when they were younger. Boys in particular will find it embarrassing to express affection to their parents in the presence of their peers. But while they will no longer express themselves physically as much, they are still just as glad and appreciative when they are given good answers to their questions. The more the “heart” fades into the background, the more importance the “head” gains. As part of the process of achieving intellectual mastery of reality, there is now an increase in idea-related feelings: astonishment and admiration are to be found, and rational thought, which has been developing at the same time, gives rise to doubt and conviction. The child thus takes pleasure in his newly-acquired knowledge. If one remembers that admiration and doubt constitute the origin of philosophical thought, the importance of this phase of development will be easy to understand.
The development of thought up till now has had favorable consequences for the child’s behavior and moral sense. The ability to think analytically makes it easier for the child to differentiate good and bad, and helps him to form moral judgments, relating to both his own behavior and that of others. The notion which the child of seven has of good and bad begins little by little to turn into an abstract concept. This idea no longer refers only to certain actions which are permitted or forbidden by his parents, but also implies the beginnings of a general awareness of good and evil. If the child has had a religious upbringing, he will now be able to see morality in relation to divine precepts. The child can thus associate good and evil with God’s supra-personal authority. This is a decisive step on the way to the formation of a personal conscience, although as yet we cannot properly speak of a conscience in the fullest sense of the word. Education should refine the moral faculty, which distinguishes between good and evil. If this goal is to be reached, the example set by educators and the formative influences of family life are of key importance. Bad examples and, more particularly, any sign of moral ambiguity, can be devastatingly counterproductive. |
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