Middle Childhood Development

Introduction

Research on child development is carried out under the main developmental areas of the human being. These can be listed as physical growth and motor skills, cognitive development, social-emotional development, moral development, and sexual development. Middle childhood is the period of a lifetime, which sets the stage for some crucial milestones such as developing self-identity; mastering critical thinking, reasoning and decision making; learning health literacy; gaining the habit of healthy nutrition and regular exercise, improving communication skills at school, developing peer relations, etc.

The theoretical perspective of the developmental areas concerning the middle childhood period will be presented one by one and the knowledge that forms the fundamentals of the period will be supported by the research about each developmental area.

During middle childhood, physical development is in progress. In this period, children's bones broaden and lengthen dramatically, which may result in pain in their arms or legs. At the beginning of the period, boys are taller while girls grow by leaps and become taller by the end of the period. They lose their baby teeth and replace them with permanent adult teeth during middle childhood. Both boys and girls build muscles and while their growth is similar in the early stages of the period, at the end of the period their physical growth vary in shape as they approach puberty. Girls tend to retain more fatty tissue than boys and look rounder (Berk, 2006). The children of this period improve both their fine and gross motor skills. They can run faster or master the skills such as hop, skip or jump in terms of gross motor skills. As a piece of evidence in the improvement of the fine motor skills, middle childhood children develop the ability to write rigorously, draw complex pictures, use their hands to accomplish complex crafts with small-sized materials such as beads, use tools under the supervision of an adult, like a hammer or needle involving high levels of eye-hand coordination (Lindon, 2010). This is the period in which they commonly become experts of games on computers, tablets or mobile applications.

Comparing to physical development, cognitive development during middle childhood is recognized and considered more frequently. The changes in the cognitive development of the children in the middle childhood period are noticeable. They become more logical and organized in this period. Piaget’s cognitive development theory suggests that children in the middle childhood period constitute “Concrete Operational” thinking stage. They are capable of operating on the “concrete” contents which implies the actual people and places or the objects they can observe. According to Piaget’s cognitive theory, children in middle childhood begin to master some mental skills such as conservation, reversibility, decentration, classification, spatial reasoning or seriation (Berk, 2006; Lindon, 2010; Biehl, Park, Brindis, Pantell, & Irwin, 2002). The details of these operations will be presented in the following sections of the chapter.