From Neurons to Neighborhoods The Science of Early Childhood Development (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 94-124
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From page 94... ...
The reason for considering each a component of developing self-regulation is that these are the earliest ways that infants and toddlers learn to manage themselves and begin to acquire the behavioral, emotional, and cognitive self-control that is essential to competent functioning throughout life (Bronson, 2000; Kopp, 2000~. Each is important also because it reflects the growing maturity and integration of several brain areas (particularly in the frontal regions)
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From page 95... ...
ACQUIRING SELF-REGULATION 95 behavior, whether this is manifested in their success at "Simon Says," their ability to wait for a cookie, their capacity to remain quiet and still during religious services, or their capacity to ignore distractions while concentrating on a task. Further advances in the same brain regions are thought to be related, at older ages, to the growth of higher-level reasoning, problem solving (Case, 1992)
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From page 96... ...
In the short term, it seems likely that both cultural and individual differences in caregiving influence what caregivers view as regulatory problems in this early period. Unfortunately, most of what is known about this has been based on studies in North America and Europe, where two regulatory concerns permeate the pediatric and child development literature: (1)
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From page 97... ...
. There is a general consensus that the lower the birthweight, the more difficult the adjustment to extrauterine life, especially for the babies who are small for their gestational age and for those born to mothers with low educational attainment (Georgieff et al., 1989; Ment, 2000; Saigal et al., 1991~.
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From page 98... ...
98 FR OM NE UR ONS TO NEIGHB ORHO ODS of the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (Dickstein et al., 1998a)
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From page 99... ...
On one hand, it is instructive to recognize that human infants have remarkable capacities to adapt to a wide range of caregiving practices. On the other hand, understanding practices that have evolved and been sustained around the world, but are less common in the United States, can be extremely valuable.
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From page 100... ...
100 FR OM NE UR ONS TO NEIGHB ORHO ODS Learning to Regulate Crying Crying serves to signal caregivers. Infants of many species produce calls that serve similar functions.
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From page 101... ...
ACQUIRING SELF-REGULATION 10 settled down, spend less of their days crying, seem easier to read, and much easier to soothe. There is also some evidence that individual differences in caregiving can affect crying in the earliest months of life.
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From page 102... ...
102 FR OM NE UR ONS TO NEIGHB ORHO ODS of the data suggest that no more than 5 percent of colic can be attributed to identifiable pathologies (Gormally and Barr, 1997~. That's not much, especially considering that the rate of colic may be as high as 10 to 20 percent in Western cultures.
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From page 103... ...
have recently linked this physiological pattern at 9 months of age to continuity in behavioral inhibition up to age 4. We refer to the same physiological pattern when we discuss the developmental consequences of maternal depression in Chapter 9.
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From page 104... ...
At the same time, understanding the development of emotion regulation requires a broader understanding of emotional development. Early emotional development provides the foundation for psychosocial well-being and mental health.
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From page 105... ...
As more is learned, we are struck by the richness and complexity of young children's emotional lives, as well as by the remarkable accomplishments that they make in this area prior to school entry. The ways in which researchers learn about emotional development are diverse and, in some cases, ingenious.
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From page 106... ...
progressively mature and become interconnected with these early-developing brain regions to contribute to the development of more accurate emotion appraisals, growing capacities for emotion self-regulation, complex emotional blends, and other developing features of mature emotional experience. Individual differences in emotion, insofar as they derive from differences in temperament, are also biologically rooted.
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From page 107... ...
better. In the years that follow, a child's emotional life is shaped by relational influences as diverse as the security of attachment relationships (Cassidy, 1994; Laible and Thompson, 1998)
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From page 108... ...
Emotional development is thus a window into how, early in life, developmental change and responsive relationships are entwined. The cultural meanings expressed in these relationships also profoundly affect how children learn to construe and react to their emotional experiences (Eisenberg, 1986; Miller, 1994; Miller et al., 1996; Ochs, 1986~.
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From page 109... ...
ACQUIRING SELF-REGULATION 109 children from homes with serious marital conflict, or who are raised by a depressed parent, or who are maltreated are more likely than children who are spared these experiences to experience difficulties in emotion regulation and, for a small but significant minority, to develop affective disorders of their own. What has not been appreciated until recently is that these disorders can be apparent early in life, as emotional experience is becoming organized in infancy and early childhood (Emde et al., 1993~.
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From page 110... ...
Research on children with developmental disabilities indicates that such conversations are crucially important. However, looking specifically at children with Down syndrome, their mothers are significantly less likely to refer to inner states (feelings and cognitive states)
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From page 111... ...
Eventually children also begin to understand how a person can experience simultaneously multiple or conflicting emotions, but this is a conceptual achievement beyond the grasp of most preschoolers. These are momentous achievements, but the more important point is that children's emotional and cognitive development support each other.
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From page 112... ...
By the middle of the second year, toddlers can already be observed making active efforts to avoid or ignore emotionally arousing situations, engaging in encouraging or reassuring self-talk, changing or substituting goals that have been frustrated, and other quite sophisticated behavior strategies for managing emotions (Braungart and Stifter, 1991; Bretherton et al., 1986; Buss and Goldsmith, 1998; Calkins and Johnson, 1998; Cummings, 1987; Groinick et al., 1996; Smolek and Weinraub, 1979; Stein and Levine, 1989, 1990~. By the time of school entry, children's regulatory repertoires have become increasingly proficient and flexible as they learn, for example, that their interpretations of events can affect how they react and that they can camouflage their emotions if need be (Harris, 1993~.
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From page 113... ...
. Equally important, however, are the more subtle ways in which the reassurance that young children derive from their attachments to caregivers constitute an important resource for emotion regulation (Cassidy, 1994, 1995; Cassidy and Berlin, 1994; Nachmias et al., 1996~.
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From page 114... ...
Research is revealing the large extent to which the task of learning how to manage one's emotions and integrate them into daily life is a different challenge for children with different temperaments, as well as for their parents. The ability to inhibit a response one is all set to perform, sometimes called effortful control, has been of special interest to researchers who seek to understand how individual differences in children's tendencies to respond to stressful or exciting events affect the growth of emotion regulation.
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From page 115... ...
There is very little evidence as yet that relates data obtained from these methods to activity in the anterior cingulate or other areas in the frontal lobes. Thus, the link to brain development is still only a theoretical one.
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From page 116... ...
Despite difficulty in establishing a clear definition, there is growing consensus among researchers as to what executive functions entail: self-regulation, sequencing of behavior, flexibility, response inhibition, planning, and organization of behavior (see Eslinger, 1996~. Control and modulation of behavior are fostered by the abilities to initiate, shift, inhibit, sustain, plan, organize, and strategize ~ D enckla, 1989 ~ .
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From page 117... ...
Research aimed at linking the emergence of goal-directed behavior to early brain development has provided evidence that frontally mediated, goal-directed, planful behavior is present as early as 12 months in infants (Diamond, 1988; Diamond and Goldman-Rakic, 1989; Goldman-Rakic, 1987~. At about the same time, children learn to use language and to represent the world through symbols.
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From page 118... ...
The capacity to use developing executive function to regulate behavior and emotions in the service of social goals and situational demands is sometimes referred to as inhibitory or effortful control, as discussed above. Because many skills, competencies, and experiences affect whether a child can regulate his or her emotions and behavior, researchers have used a wide variety of tasks to assess individual differences in effortful control.
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From page 119... ...
, but researchers have yet to identify the mechanisms that account for individual differences among young children. Research on school-age children demonstrating that it is possible to teach attentional skills and executive functions to individuals with developmental disabilities (Borkowski and Burke, 1996; Graham and Harris, 1996)
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From page 120... ...
Because these constructs are hard to define and have overlapping boundaries, there is a pressing need to develop more refined definitions of executive function and its component skills, and for valid measures of early manifestations of pertinent behaviors and abilities (Weinberg et al., 1996~. The capacity to map specific executive functions onto specific areas of the brain and to distinguish normal development from emerging disorders is dependent on such efforts to lend greater precision to the analysis of task demands and individual children's responses.
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From page 121... ...
Research on this transition has focused on the triad of regulatory tasks captured by emotion regulation, behavior regulation, and attention regulation. In reality, however, these dimensions of self-regulation are highly interrelated.
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From page 122... ...
Recent attention to problematic regulatory behavior has, in fact, been prompted by growing concern about early precursors of conduct problems, attention deficits, depressive and anxiety disorders, and other psychological problems of childhood. While emerging evidence suggests that regulatory problems can offer early warning signs, there are many pitfalls on the road to early diagnosis.
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From page 123... ...
These cultural dimensions have important yet unexplored implications for children whose home culture is not the same as the dominant culture in other settings they inhabit (e.g., child care, homes of friends, intervention programs) and for adults who work with diverse groups of young children and whose responses to their behaviors are highly contingent on their own cultural expectations.
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From page 124... ...
Preschoolers who speak clearly and communicate their ideas more effectively are better able to sustain bouts of play with other children (Guralnick et al., 1996~. Even before children enter school, weak academic skills are associated with, and over time appear to exacerbate, behavioral and attention problems (Arnold, 1997; Hinshaw, 1992; Morrison et al., 1989~.
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