Bedtiming by Marc D. Lewis

Author:Marc D. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2009-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Stage 11 Self-Consciousness: 3½ to 4 years

The last pendulum swing we cover in this book takes place for most children at 3½ to 4 years of age. As described in the last section, individual variability is now the rule. Children’s styles, temperaments, and personalities promote a wide spectrum of differences in language and social development, in habits of self-control, and in interpersonal skills ranging from toilet training to cooperative play. Children are now feeling like members in good standing in their families. They are so attuned to the social rituals of family life that they lead their toy animals and dolls through the same routines, cajoling them to be good, to share their toys, to listen to their parents—in short, to conform to the same rules that preoccupy them. But they now have the capabilities to be cooperative and obedient. They have developed the critical skills of impulse control, and they can use these skills to ward off or modify their feelings of anger, frustration, greed, and jealousy. Things are going well for the average child at this age. And then along comes another cognitive advance, rocking the boat once more.

When we described the cognitive changes of this age in the last chapter, we noted that developmentalists now tend to focus on particular domains of development: cross-domain or general changes in development (the kind we saw at 18 to 20 months) just aren’t clearly evident by this age. However, one of the most important changes, usually observed at 3½ to 4 years, is broad enough to apply to some rather diverse features of children’s social cognition: that is, perspective taking. We described this as the capacity to shift one’s perspective (or to see that another person can shift her perspective) in order to see things from a different point of view—sometimes a more objective point of view. And one particularly important aspect of perspective taking takes place underneath the skin, in the psychological realm of thoughts, beliefs, and consciousness itself: false-belief understanding—the last major milestone in the acquisition of theory of mind. As you may recall, theory of mind is the understanding that other people have their own goals, feelings, internal states, thoughts, and opinions. In short, they have minds of their own, and the contents of those minds are very often different from the contents of one’s own mind. False-belief understanding marks the culmination of theory of mind: the child can now predict that other people will believe whatever they perceive through their own senses, regardless of whether it’s true or false. Many studies have demonstrated that 4-year-old children understand this basic principle of human perception, while 3-year-olds do not. By the age of 3½ to 4, children can predict that a puppet will look for hidden chocolates where the puppet thinks they are located—where he last saw them hidden—rather than in a new location where they were hidden a second time, outside this puppet’s awareness. When children can separate their own beliefs from the beliefs of others, they have undertaken a remarkable shift in social understanding.

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