How Do Families Shape Children's Development

This paper will look at the differences in high-status children and low-status children. The author will discuss two children who exhibit these behaviors with and how differently they react to people and situations. Using the readings and theories of Erikson, Piaget, Vygotsky, Bandura, and Kohlberg to address their characteristics. These theorists have researched and developed insight into children’s stages and readily explain their behaviors, thereby allowing for a greater understanding and insight into children.

Socially and Emotionally the family is a big influence in a child’s development. Parents have a big role by providing care and guidance for their development. Unfortunately some families cannot promote the development of a child because of the conflict among the parents. A single parent can have difficulties in boosting a better development in children and young people, sometimes a child is separated from its siblings and this can affect them too.

Regardless of social class most parents wish for their children to be happy, healthy, and successful; however, parents disagree on the best way to raise their children to be all of those things, which is when social class determines the parents’ child rearing method. Whether a child comes from a working class or middle class family affects the child’s development and socialization; and consequently the child’s future.

Social class is a division of a society based on social and economic status which can include levels of wealth, success, power of authority, and influence. Status is can be defined or grouped having common economic, cultural, or political interests.

Much emphasis has been placed in the field of child development and the role that early providers possess when it comes to the needs of children at the early stages of life. Whether conceptualizing socialization and priming with Locke’s “tabula rosa/blank slate” or Rousseau’s “preassembled moral schema” approach to child development, this “window of opportunity” is both fleeting and permanent. Every interaction molds the individual into the person they are to become, and the bond that the dependent child forms with the caregiver is a precedent to the numerous relationships and attachments they will create as an adult. Granted that the provider/nurturer fulfills the needs of attachment and attentiveness for the offspring, this will determine the success of progressing through child developmental stages, and leads to a higher propensity of social adaptiveness. Inversely, if the aforementioned things are absent in a child’s early years, detrimental effects could occur, including stints in physical, social, and mental development. This is dependent upon the severity and duration of neglect, and has been seen in clinical cases that appears as psychological phenomena to both the general public, and researchers alike.

• Uninvolved parenting: children of uninvolved parents develop a sense that other aspects of the parents’ life are more important than they are. The child often attempt to provide for themselves, sometimes halt dependence on the parent to have a feeling of independence and mature beyond their years. Child from this environment often withdraw from social situations, this also impacts there relationships later on in life and they show patterns of truancy and delinquency.

Annete Laureau’s article, “Concerted Cultivation and the Accomplishment of Natural Growth” and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital both touch upon the way that social class affects child-rearing practices, and how these practices essentially impact the educational success and social mobility of an individual.

Through many years, children growing up in single family homes has been discovered as problems. “At first glance, defending single mothers and their children. Raised by a strong and resourceful single mother, I turned out OK” (Wilcox). Being raised up with one parent seems to be stressful and impossible, but for decades its become possible to happen. In the society today, there are children growing up overcoming emotional stages and achieving their goals whether if they have both parents to show them difficult paths in their life that they will overcome as a growing human being. The problems that occurs within raising a child in a single family home compared to a married home can be different or the same depending on the disciplinary actions. There are many questions asked, does a child need both parent figures to be raised? Does a son need a father figure, does a daughter need a mother figure? Among all the questions asked, is there a person taking care the main responsible with much undertaking, on the single parenting topic it has become an interesting argument. People need to be more informed with raising a child. Raising a child does not rely on the structure of a family, it is more to how a parent is discipline and having a proper process of teaching their child with learning how to be mature and respectful. Children of a single home can be progressive with the same emotional, social able, and interactive behavioral skills that is raised with both parents.

In many societies, there are people with different assets and prestige in the world. Many people in higher social classes have different ways in raising their children than people in lower classes. The reason behind this inequality is due to social classes that exist. Social classes are groups of people with different statuses. Social classes are important because it helps determine the way a child will be raised. In addition, it is shown to significantly affect a child’s future. Furthermore, social class is shown to affect people’s families such as with child rearing. Child rearing has changed over time during the colonial era there were no classes that were defined, both parents were responsible for child rearing. During the industrial era, most of the responsibility belonged to the mother. In a society, the social class of a parent impacts a child’s life. Therefore, due to the parents social class children would be able to go to better schools such as private schools to better their education and later have better jobs in the future. As a result, this impact on a child’s life due to social classes brings up the questions how does a social class affect the financial incomes of a family for raising a child? As well as how do social classes affect the ways of child rearing in a nuclear family?

Socioeconomic status is often determined as a combination of education, income and occupation. Depending on the social class an individual is in, it affects the power,privileges, and care they are receiving. When looking at lower class, it shows a greater percentage rate of problems that rise in that category. One seemingly growing issue that is seen more in the lower class than any other social class is how many individuals are affected by the HIV/AIDS virus due to unstable living conditions. Though there are many cases of people that have contracted the virus in the other following classes, there is a disproportionately higher rate in the lower class.

In most of the societies about a century ago, the family was the most valued system in almost all spheres of life and human living. Family is the only institution which provides the security and support without any rewards in return. The effectiveness of family functioning in conditioning the children's personality and social development has an outstanding importance (Roelfse and Middleton, 1985). The family interactions play an important role in the development of an individual. These interactions and interpersonal relationships are seen between parents, parent and child, siblings, and any other relative or person living in the household. The healthy functioning of these interaction patterns enhances mental health of the individual Children need a happy and stable family environment and a conductive social network for their overall growth and development. Yet, happy families are not happy all the time. Disagreements and conflicts are a necessary part of living closely together. Both love and hate are to be expected in the intensity of family life and peers interactions, but it is the way negative emotions are handled that makes a difference to family life and social interactions (Parke and Buriel, 1998). Parenting has long been recognized as making an important contribution to the development of competencies and problem behavior among children and adolescents. However, recently researchers have begun to develop attention to understanding variations in parenting in different

The development of children can depend on many factors, one of the important ones being socioeconomic status (SES). SES can be defined as a multidimensional construct, including measures of social factors such as power, prestige and hierarchical social status, and economic resources (Hackman and Farah, 2009). Child development can be studied from multiple dimensions such as physical, mental, social, and emotional development among others. For the purposes of this study, I will be focusing on how socioeconomic status affects child cognitive development.

The way a parent parents a child has a dramatic effect on a child’s development. In fact, research has revealed that parenting styles can impact a child’s cognitive, psychological, and social growth, which affects children in the childhood years, teenage years and adolescence. The reason is that children develop through a number of stimuli, communication, and conversation, which surround them. Families provide a structured environment in which a child lives while parents serve as role models and have a influence on their growth which can influence them either in a positive or negative way. This paper discusses the four parenting styles Diana Baumrind identified through extensive observation, interviews and analyses.

Attention to every stage of a child’s physical, emotional and educative development is “both critical and vital” (Alison Dunn, 2004). Research shows that the care young children receive has dramatic long-term effects on how children develop and learn, how they cope with stress, and how they react to the world around them. “Science tells us that consistently positive and stimulating experiences in their early years helps children’s brains to grow” (Frank Oberklaid, 2008); it can also affect how they continue to learn later on in life.

In this paper, I will examine how parenting style affects an individuals relationship with his or her children. According to Baumrind, there are four main parenting styles, differentiated on levels of support and expectations. This paper focuses on parents with high support and high expectations,who are known as authoritative parents and those who are supportive with low expectations, who are are permissive. These four different styles of parenting lead to very different developmental outcomes for children in social, academic and emotional domains. However, this model does not fully explain parent-child interactions because it neglects to reference the environmental context of the relationship along with any personal differences in temperament of the child. This context introduces complexity such as personality differences, age of child and marital status of the parents. This is an important topic to investigate because of the impact parenting style can have on developmental outcomes for both the immediate child and for future generations.