31 Aug For your thread, you will take on the role of advocate and educator to present an introduction to your impact assignment topic. You have spent this week researching your topic and have

Chapter 5

The Emerging Self and Socialization in the Early Years

Angie is 4 years old; her sister, Mary, just had her second birthday. Their mother, Jennie, and father, Jim, have been somewhat nomadic over the last few years. It started when Jim decided not to re-enlist in the Army and to try for a good paying job in “sales.” He tried large appliance sales, swimming pool sales, lawn service sales, and a few others. Often, when he left a company it was not because he couldn’t hold the job but because he was bored, not making much money, and certain that he was leaving to chase a better opportunity, in a different industry and usually in a different location. Between jobs, his family is essentially homeless. Jennie works as a health care aid. She can usually find work wherever they land, and she faithfully follows Jim on his endless quest. They often stay with family or friends in between Jim’s jobs, but occasionally they live in their car.

Angie seems to adapt well to every change. She is quiet but attentive, and she rarely disobeys or is out of sorts. Little Mary is a different story. She was highly active and reactive as an infant, and her parents regard her now as “impossible,” always getting into things, running off, reacting with temper tantrums when she is prevented from having what she wants, and disregarding the admonitions of the stream of different adults who house the family. The parents manage the two sisters quite differently. They are usually gentle with Angie, showing some warmth and affection, but they tend to just let her play quietly. If she does something “wrong,” such as accidentally breaking a lamp, they react with irritation, but Angie is so cautious that such things rarely happen. The parents are occasionally amused by Mary’s boisterousness, but more often they respond negatively: yelling at her to eat or to stop crying, pulling her roughly away from what they consider dangerous, often expressing anger or disappointment. Their own lives are unpredictable and difficult, and they usually find Mary’s rambunctious impulsiveness a heavy burden.

You can probably see the potential for Angie and Mary to develop rather different ideas about themselves from their different experiences of parenting. Their shared experiences –such as repeated relocations, periods of privation, reactions from people who do (or do not) take them in—are also likely to affect their early self-views.

In this chapter, we will describe the earliest roots of self-development. The role of caregivers is of major significance, but the causal influences are multidimensional. As you can see with Angie and Mary, a child’s temperament impacts parents’ typical responses and management strategies. And these interactive processes unfold within and are influenced by the context of the family and the broader culture. Let’s begin our examination of self-development by considering the rather elusive notion of “self” itself.

The Self-System

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the real me, after all?” Philosophers, poets, wicked stepmothers, and ordinary human beings have pondered versions of this question ever since the ancient Greeks advised, “Know thyself.” The search for self embodies within it many of the profound questions at the heart of the human condition: What is the nature of self-awareness? Are we the same or different across situations and over time? How do people come to understand and accept who they are? Modern cultures are not the first to express interest in these matters, but critics have raised concerns that the level of attention directed toward the self has increased in recent decades. Note the amount of press devoted to the ideas of self-concept, self-esteem, self-enhancement, and self-actualization, and you might agree that we have become downright self-centered!

Those of us in the helping professions are no exception to this trend. Even a cursory review of the professional literature in clinical and educational fields reveals an intense interest in topics related to the self. Therapeutic approaches that emphasize self-development are very common. Educational institutions struggle to incorporate self-development into their more traditional academic objectives. Popular magazines are saturated with advice about self-concept and self-esteem. All together, the pieces add up to a crazy quilt: part folklore, part research, part anecdote,

and part good intention. Our task in this chapter is to unscramble some of this information and present the self in its developmental context. Helpers need to understand the research findings in this critically important area lest they assume that all of our popular, contemporary notions about self-development are valid.

Traditional Conceptions of the Self-System

What constitutes a self? To address this question, theorists and researchers have had to account for the fact that selves are multifaceted and possess elements of both stability and change. If you have ever said that you are not the same person that you were some time ago, you can understand this point. Writers often use the term self-system to replace “self,” because the latter seems too unidimensional. The self-system includes such things as self-as-agent, self-recognition, self-concept, self-regulation, and self-esteem.

The notion of an independent entity called “self” is such a deeply embedded concept in Western psychology that we tend to take it for granted. It may be surprising to learn that in some cultural views of the psyche, mind and matter are seen as changing continually, and this impermanence is viewed as being influenced by surrounding conditions (Bodhi, 1999). In Buddhist psychology, this is the concept of “no self” (anatta). It does not imply that our conventional use of “self” is not helpful or that you and I are not real in some way. Rather, it emphasizes the transient nature of our phenomenological experience as human beings. The self is constantly being constructed in the moment-to-moment flow of experience. This insight is at the core of recent therapies that offer ways to alleviate the suffering that can come from our human tendency to protect and defend reified concepts about ourselves (Chadha, 2017; Olendzki, 2014). The view of “no-self” is quite different from that of classic Western psychology, which assumes a relatively permanent construct that can be studied over time.

We will begin our look at the nature of the self-system within Western psychology with a brief description of the classic work of James, Cooley, and Mead. William James (1890) made a distinction between the “I” and the “Me,” a distinction that still guides contemporary research about the self (Harter, 2013; Prebble, Addis, & Tippett, 2013). That part of the self called “I” refers to the I-self/self-as-subject, as the active agent, or as the knower. It is that part of the self that experiences a sense of subjective self-awareness. The part called “Me” is that part of the self that is the object of self or others’ observations, or in other words, the part that is known. One might think of the “Me” part of the self (Me-Self) as the Me-self/self-concept.

More recently, writers have developed alternative ways of categorizing the classic “I–Me” distinction. Among these are Lewis’s (1994) subjective and objective self-awareness, Case’s (1991) implicit and explicit self, Neisser’s (1993) ecological and remembered self, and Gallagher’s (2000) minimal and narrative self. All the newer contrasts share the original distinction between the self as knower and the self as known. Furthermore, there is consensus between classic and contemporary theorists that the “I” self emerges first.

The “I” is the side of the self that experiences continuity over time. Even though we all grow and change, we know we embody core elements of the same “self” throughout our lifetime. The “I” also recognizes the distinctiveness of the self as a person compared to other persons. You know where you end and the person sitting next to you begins. Finally, the “I” reflects agency; it is the part of the self that engages in self-directed activity, self-control, and contemplation of the “Me.” The “Me” includes all those attributes that are used to define the self and that make up the self-concept. In James’s typology, these are the “material self,” the “social self,” and the “spiritual self,” ranked in that order of importance from lowest to highest. The material self encompasses a person’s physical characteristics and material possessions. The social self includes her social standing, her reputation, and those personal characteristics that are recognized by other such as gregariousness or stubbornness. The spiritual self, viewed by James as the most precious, incorporates her qualities of character, beliefs, and personal values.

Self-esteem is distinct from self-concept but still part of the “Me.” Whereas self-concept is a person’s knowledge of her personal attributes, self-esteem is her evaluation of these attributes. In other words, she assigns a valence to her characteristics, judging them to be good, bad, or neutral. James believed that self-esteem is more than just the measure of accomplishments. Rather, he believed that it depends upon the number of successes we enjoy relative to our aspirations, or, in his terminology, pretensions. Pretensions are goals that we choose to meet for ourselves because of their personal importance. For example, if it is highly important to you to be popular and socially active, the lack of a date for an important New Year’s Eve party can be a real blow to your self-esteem. However, if you really care more about earning enough money to become rich at an early age, you might consider working overtime on New Year’s Eve to be highly congruent with your aspirations. Your dateless condition is less damaging to your self-esteem. Failures or even successes in areas that are relatively unimportant to us may be discounted and will have less effect on self-esteem.

James’s ideas about the structure of the self are usually part of contemporary theorizing (e.g., Verschoor & Hommel, 2017). Another early theorist whose ideas suffuse modern work is Charles Cooley (1902). He introduced a developmental perspective that describes how interactions with others help construct the self-system. Using his now-famous metaphor of the “looking-glass self,” Cooley described the process of self-development as one that originates from observing the reflected appraisals of others, primarily attachment figures. Cooley hypothesized that this process consists of three steps. As we interact with others, we first imagine how we must appear to the other person on a certain dimension, such as intelligence. Then, we interpret or imagine how that other person evaluates us on that certain dimension. Finally, we experience some emotional response to that perceived evaluation. The resulting interpretation and its affective valence are building blocks for constructing self-knowledge. Our self-representations are shaped and given affective valences by the significant people in our life.

Let’s consider a simplified example of a young child’s display of affection for a parent. Imagine that Angie or Mary approaches her father to give him a hug. The father, preoccupied with searching the web for new job opportunities, looks annoyed by the interruption. He gives her a quick hug and returns to his search. If this type of sequence is repeated on a regular basis across various situations, the child may come to develop a “self-idea” that she is bothersome and not important enough to interrupt her father. She may begin to construct a vague impression of herself as unappealing or possibly too emotionally expressive or dependent. Because the child perceives the emotion and interprets her father’s response as impatient and irritated, her view of the event includes a self-appraisal—presumably that she is irritating—that is incorporated into her self-system. With repeated experience, the youngster comes to regard herself in certain ways by looking at the mirror of her parent’s view of her, warped though that mirror might be. The emotional valence associated with this aspect of the child’s self-image can be unpleasant or uncomfortable. This self-representation may serve as a standard for her behavior in social interactions (e.g., in her willingness to express her need for attention and affection from others) and inform her sense of right and wrong.

Now imagine this same little girl in another family. She interrupts her father to give him a hug, and he beams, expressing evident satisfaction in his daughter’s affectionate nature. This child’s self-concept is likely to include a positively valenced sense of being emotionally expressive. The same child and the same behavior could lead to different social responses in different families, setting the child’s developing sense of self, relationships, and morality on a different pathway. Thus early attachment and parenting interactions of many sorts have been viewed as instrumental in the development of individual differences in self-concept (Sroufe, 2016).

Although the development of the self is obviously influenced by many factors and is extraordinarily complex, Cooley believed that it was largely the product of social influences. Recent researchers have investigated the possibility that the sequence Cooley proposed can also operate in reverse order, namely that a positive appraisal of oneself can generate positive interpretations of others’ appraisals.

George Herbert Mead (1934) expanded on Cooley’s work, enlarging the scope of social influence to include the role of language and society in shaping the self-system. He held that children adopt descriptive information about the self, based on what is emphasized in their cultural milieu. They also incorporate those standards, rules, and goals that their family and their culture have determined to be appropriate ways of behaving and thinking. The “ingredients” of people’s self-concepts across cultures can be rather different as a result. In a classic study, for example, Markus and Kitayama (1991) found that Japanese participants were more likely to describe themselves by emphasizing their affiliations, such as family membership, whereas Americans used self-descriptors that emphasized their individuality.

These classic formulations of the self as multidimensional, as influenced by the reflected appraisals of significant others and as shaped by the cultural milieu, provide a foundation for current Western thinking about the self-system. As you will find in this and subsequent chapters, conceptions of self and of morality overlap in these models. Damon and Hart (1992) noted:

Children cannot know themselves without some sense of the other. Nor can they forge their self-identities without an awareness of their own values. Moreover, at all developmental periods, social activities derive from—and in turn shape—judgments about the self, other, and morality. In these and many other ways, self-understanding, social interaction, and morality are intertwined in a developing psychological system that grows and changes throughout the life span. (p. 421)

Self-understanding is one of the key building blocks of personality, social, and moral development. How does this mysterious “self” begin? In the next section, we will review the earliest stages of developing self-awareness.

The Early Development of the Self-System

The Beginnings of the “I” and the “Me”

You learned in Chapter 3 that studying a young infant’s ability to think and to understand the world is very challenging. Learning about the infant’s developing self-system is equally challenging. A child cannot describe herself as “smart” or “funny” until several years after birth. Does this mean there is no sense of self until then? To find out, we have to look for nonverbal indicators of what an infant is experiencing. As you have seen, when behavior has to be interpreted, researchers can disagree about what those behaviors mean. But on the whole, developmental scientists tend to agree that the self-system gradually unfolds, beginning at birth and continuing throughout life. (Discussions of self-development are part of many of the later chapters in this text.) What are the competencies of the infant that make self-development possible? How do these competencies interact with the social relationships that ultimately give birth to the self?

Precursors of Self-Awareness in Infancy—the “Pre-Self” and the “I-Self”

The newborn’s capacities for rudimentary information processing and social bonding provide the building material out of which the self is born. For example, one early competency is the infant’s ability to imitate. As you saw in Chapter 3, babies can imitate the facial and hand gestures of adults within their first few months of life. When a baby imitates an adult who is clapping his hands, she is detecting, at least at a behavioral level, similarity between herself and the adult model. She probably does not yet have a sense of herself as separate from the other person, but noticing these parallels may help her start the process of building that sense.

There are many other experiences and abilities that should help with that process as well. For example, when the baby acts, she feels the bodily states that go with that action; when another person acts, she does not have the same experience. As Meltzoff (2007, p. 28) suggests, “these first-person experiences contribute to a detailed . . . map linking internal states and behavior,” and they support the process of separating the self from others.

As you saw in Chapter 4, sensitive caregivers respond to their infants’ signals. They establish predictable, reliable interactive routines as they meet their babies’ needs and help them to manage their emotions. The regularity and reliability of caregiver–infant interactions may help babies begin to extract notions of “self-invariance” and “other invariance,” which precede self-awareness.

Overall, in the first half year we might say that the infant comes to possess a pre-self, composed of early inklings that she has a body, that it is separate from others, and that her actions affect events. Gradually, over the second half year, the infant appears to gain more control over when and how she signals the caregiver to provide for her needs. Imagine the lesson learned by an infant who, when she coos and babbles, regularly attracts the smiles and responsive vocalizations of her caregivers. This baby’s world, in some small way, begins to come under her control. She might encode the message, “When I am upset or need attention, my parent responds and takes care of me.” Clearly, young infants do not represent these ideas linguistically, but rather encode these kinds of organized sequences as procedural models or patterns of the self-in-relationship. Affective responses, such as feelings of love and relief, also become associated with these sensorimotor patterns. The infant’s self-system is under construction.

By 8 to 12 months, several cognitive and social developments you have learned about in previous chapters indicate that the I-self is emerging. Babies engage in intentional, planned behavior. To obtain an out-of-reach toy, for example, a baby might first set aside a barrier, or she might vocalize to get a parent’s attention, then reach or point toward the toy. Intentional action is considered a hallmark of feelings of agency (e.g., Prinz, 2012; Verschoor & Hommel, 2017). Doing things on purpose, making choices and plans, requires an I-self.

At about the same time, babies show other signs of an increasing sense of self as separate from others. They begin to display separation anxiety, signaling the formation of an attachment to the primary caregiver. For example, they might show distress even at an impending separation from an attachment figure, perhaps by looking anxiously at the door when the babysitter arrives. Many babies cry and cling to a departing caregiver. These behaviors demonstrate the infant’s recognition that the caregiver is separate from herself.

As you learned in Chapter 4, attachment theorists like Bowlby assume that the attachment between infant and caregiver gives rise to a sense of security and optimism in an infant, what Erikson described as a burgeoning trust in others and an early sense of self-worth. From this perspective, when the 1-year-old begins to use the caregiver as a secure base from which to explore the environment, we are seeing the emergence of a kind of preliminary sense of self-worth. Once again, the infant’s self-development evolves from her experience in relationships.

We also saw in the last chapter that late in the first year, caregivers’ facial expressions influence infants’ reactions to situations. Suppose, for example, that Mom opens the door to a stranger. Imagine how differently her 1-year-old might react if she sees her mother smile happily versus if Mom looks frightened and wary. Such social referencing not only implies recognition of the separateness of the other person, but it also provides the baby with a context in which she is sorting out experiences of the self from experiences of the other and from the combined experiences of the “we” (Emde & Buchsbaum, 1990). Social referencing demonstrates how transactional the self-development process really is. The child uses the caregiver’s emotions to discern meaning in events and to regulate her own feelings in different situations.

Suppose now that the mother reliably responds to the approach of a stranger in one way: either with smiles or with wariness. When caregivers communicate consistent emotional signals about environmental events, infants are also likely to develop certain pervasive emotional dispositions. These emotional dispositions often are integral to a family’s or even a culture’s “value system,” and they can affect how infants learn to approach questions such as “Can I trust other people?” “Is it safe to take risks?” Furthermore, caregivers’ emotional signals may affect the process of emotion regulation and emotional self-knowledge well beyond infancy. For example, suppose a family tends to be unsympathetic to indications of incompetence in other people, often expressing anger or blame. When the child herself struggles with a task and fails to complete it despite her effort, she is likely to conclude that she should feel guilty or ashamed (Campos, Frankel, & Camras, 2004).

Early Socialization: Parenting and the Development of the Self-System

Theorists from Cooley (1902) to Bowlby (e.g., 1969/1982) and Erikson (1950/1963) have assumed that many parts of the self-system grow out of our social interactions. As we saw in the last chapter, the available data do suggest that our earliest relationships create a trajectory for the development of self-concept and self-esteem. For example, when babies are securely attached to their mothers, they tend to be appropriately independent as 4-year-olds and to be self-confident and socially skilled as 10-year-olds (e.g., Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005; see Thompson, 2015, for a review).

To briefly review: We know that early caregiving quality can make an important contribution to the quality of babies’ attachments. Infants are likely to become securely attached to caregivers who respond promptly and consistently to crying; who react appropriately to babies’ facial expressions, eye contact, and other signals; who handle their infants sensitively, and who hold them often during the first year, providing the contact comfort that helps infants modulate their emotions. Such caregiving requires patience and a child-centered approach that can be difficult for any parent sometimes, but is especially challenging if the baby has a difficult temperament or other special needs or if the parent is stressed or depressed. But the effort and self-sacrifice required for parents to create a “good fit,” as Thomas and Chess (1977) described it, between their caregiving and a baby’s needs does appear to contribute to attachment quality and to the direction that self-knowledge and self-evaluation will take. This process continues after infancy, as the description of self-development in the last section indicates. In this section, we will take a close look at parent–child relationships in the toddler and preschool years. We will focus especially on the characteristics of parenting that may be most conducive to helping young children to develop positive self-esteem and adaptive self-regulatory mechanisms. One way to think about parents is to consider them as having a basic set of caregiving responsibilities or tasks, beyond meeting their children’s physical requirements for food, clothing, shelter, health care, and so on.

We just summarized the caregiving responsibilities parents have toward their infants, and these are captured by the first three parenting tasks listed in Table 5.2. You can see in the table that as the infant becomes a toddler, gaining cognitive, communicative, and motor skills, the list of parenting tasks expands. There are new challenges for parents who are trying to be sensitive and responsive and seeking to create a good fit between their care and the child’s needs. First, caregivers are faced with the need to grant more autonomy to the child. As toddlers become capable of doing more on their own, they are motivated to practice and expand their growing competencies. The strong dependency that characterizes young babies is gradually replaced by a capacity and need for independent action and mastery. Erikson theorized that toddlers’ emerging feelings of worth are benefited when they can use their growing skills to function at least somewhat autonomously, whether it is by feeding themselves or by buttoning their own buttons, or more subtly, by saying “NO!”—that is, refusing to do what someone else requires (see Table 1.2 in Chapter 1). Thus, although the earliest feelings of worth grow out of an infant’s trust in others to meet all her needs, those feelings of worth grow in the toddler years when the child begins to experience self-sufficiency, or autonomy, a sense that “I can do it myself.”

Second, also because the child’s behavioral and cognitive skills are growing, the caregiver must begin to socialize the child, that is, to prepare the child to be a competent member of society, from providing opportunities to interact with people beyond the family to imposing discipline. Discipline involves limiting some behaviors and demanding others, so that the child will be safe (“Don’t climb on the counter”) and so that she will behave in ways that are conventionally acceptable (“You must wear clothes”). Parents generally impose more discipline on the child as they perceive her to be more and more capable of self-control. When parents tell a child to do, or not to do, something, they are depending on the child’s ability to initiate or to stop her own actions. The only way to make a young infant do, or not do, something is to rely on physically moving or restraining the child. Parents do a lot of that with infants, but they rely more and more on controlling by request or command during early childhood, as the requisite abilities (such as representational and comprehension skills) develop.

Thus, caregiver–child relationships are reorganized in the post-infancy period, with the additions of children’s autonomy seeking, on one hand, and parents’ imposition of discipline, on the other hand. What are the important features of this more complex relationship between parent and child? What role does the parent–child relationship play in the child’s developing self-system? Let’s bgin by examining what research indicates are the most important dimensions or features of a parent’s behavior in this relationship.

The Dimensions of Parenting Style

Studies of parenting after infancy have a long history and have produced many complicated findings. Remarkably, researchers from very different theoretical traditions have repeatedly identified two major dimensions or aspects of parents’ behavior that seem to characterize the quality of parenting. These can be thought of as the primary contributors to what is called parenting style (for reviews see Baumrind, 1989, 1993; Bornstein, 2015; Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Pinquart, 2017).

The Warmth Dimension—Parental Responsiveness

In the post-infancy period, parents continue to create an emotional climate for their children. Contributing to a positive climate is the warmth dimension (parental responsiveness): listening to the child, being involved and interested in the child’s activities, accepting the child, making positive attributions toward the child, being “tuned in” and supportive (e.g., Baumrind, 1989; Bornstein, 2015). In essence, high levels of warmth with toddlers and older children are comparable to high levels of responsive, sensitive care with infants. But some of the child’s needs have changed. With toddlers, as we have seen, autonomy needs begin to be important, and responsive parents accept these needs, acquiescing when possible to their children’s reasonable demands for autonomy (Baumrind, 1993). So, when 25-month-old Amanda begins to insist that she can dress herself, her mother tries to accommodate her by setting aside extra time for the morning dressing ritual. She also ignores the inconvenience and the sometimes strange-looking results and gives Amanda positive messages about the process: “You’re getting to be such a big girl to put on your own clothes!” Her attitude is child centered, sidelining parental needs (for time, convenience, and coordinated outfits) when possible to meet Amanda’s developmental needs.

Some parents create a more negative emotional climate. Their behavior is often parent centered: They show little responsiveness to their children’s concerns and are unlikely to do things just to meet those concerns. They may even make hostile attributions when children’s needs are out of line with their own. When 20-month-old Jessie wants to feed herself her morning cereal, for examp