Hellobee

I’ve mentioned before that Mr. Milk and I chose one book as a focal point for our next few years of parenting – No Bad Kids by Janet Lansbury – and it reminds me that even though my tiny human might act like an insane tyrant, he’s just that – a tiny human who is learning every single day and doesn’t yet have the ability to express himself fully. He’s learning how to do all the things he sees me doing every day – and gets all up in his feels when he can’t do things or gets an inkling that someone is disappointed in his actions. It’s hard! It’s not raising a middle schooler hard (see the article I shared that started it all!) but it’s hard!

This last category of child development – psychosocial development, or our children’s development emotionally and socially – is so huge, this one is split in two. In this post, we’ll talk about the basic stages, as I’ve done in the last two, but then I’ll follow up and close this out with a detailed look at supporting our children’s identity formation, including building their self-esteem and self-concept.

Stage: Trust vs. mistrust (birth to about 18 months old)

• Summary of this stage: Unsurprisingly, the critical elements of the very beginning of our children’s lives are their ability to feel loved and trust the people around them. They develop very strong feelings of trust (or mistrust) with caregivers – parents, daycare teachers, nannies, grandparents – and this sense of security will form the basis of much of their emotional/social development. Babies need predictability to establish trust – they need to know that they will be fed, held, and shown attention in a world that is very uncertain and scary to them (because it’s all brand new, every moment!). If they are given consistent care, the trust they develop with us and others who care for them will help them be more trusting and secure in who they are and with others. It can be seen as an ability to have hope – hope in others, hope in themselves – because they feel good about the now, they can ponder what’s to come. The most important ‘event’ in this stage is feeding – when a child learns to feed him or herself, they form the beginnings of an identity, based on their capability to do this basic act.

• What we as parents can do to support our kids: Provide consistent care. It doesn’t mean we have to be perfect parents – we can get mad, overwhelmed, frustrated – but it also means that if we always return to showing love, offering food and safety (this could be our arms, their car seats, a blanket they learn to love) we’ll build trust and a bond between ourselves and our kiddo. We can also be very diligent about ensuring the caregivers that interact with our children at this age will do their best to maintain the consistent routines and schedules we settle upon – whether it be related to offering food/milk/bottles, what nap or bedtime looks like or something else entirely.
• What we can do to support ourselves: Trust ourselves. If we feed our babies, keep their bums dry when we can, and give them snuggles and  kisses, we’re doing it right. Be ok with letting others also be caregivers. The more people our babies can develop this key sense of trust and security with during this stage, the better off they’ll be in life! So, if you work outside the home, having other caregivers – nannies, grandparents, daycare – is good! If you stay at home and feel guilt about having friends or family watch our baby a few times a week, DON’T! This is good for our kid.  This trust means trusting our instinct too – if we don’t feel good about a caregiver, now is the time to not let it fly. When our kid is five years old and grandma offers a cookie when we just said no – that’s not going to greatly affect our kid’s development. But if we don’t feel comfortable with how how someone does something during this stage, it’s completely ok to come back to “is this endangering my child’s sense of trust in others?” and step in if we need to (with tact, of course.)

Stage: Autonomy vs. shame/doubt (18 months to about three years old)

• Summary of this stage: The balance of encouraging our children to explore and try new things with curbing our reaction when this leads to adverse results is key at this stage. It’s critical to allow, and sometimes push, our kids to learn how to walk, run, climb and use the potty while keeping how we respond when they fail or experience setbacks in check. If children encounter too much challenge, or are not given the right tools – with language or modeled actions – they develop feelings of shame or doubt their abilities to do things ‘right.’ This is especially true  when they begin to act out and see how we respond, and when they learn to control their urine and bowel movements and watch to see how we handle accidents and hiccups along the way. Children during this stage exert their independence and grow their confidence in themselves to do everyday tasks on their own. The most important event is, no surprise, toilet training and marks quite the pinnacle of autonomy and success!
• What we as parents can do to support our kids: Create an environment that encourages independent exploration of abilities that is highly tolerant – and even encouraging – of failures and setbacks. We can try to let them do things that we may know they can’t execute 100% by themselves yet – including letting them try to dress themselves, climb into their carseats, pour their own milk, even when it takes longer, makes a mess or ends in frustration. We can identify our own taglines for building autonomy in our kids and how they should respond when they fail. In the Milk household, we try to respond to Will’s claims of, “I can’t do it!” with “Try one more time by yourself,” or “Let me show you and then you can try again yourself.” We also tend to say “Be aware – you could fall/trip/etc” rather than “no” when we can, and we’re just beginning to try to normalize a phrase for failure like, “You tried very hard but it didn’t work – that’s ok! We’ll try again later/tomorrow/next time.” We are also trying to avoid prescribing something to Will and talking about it in front him; we found that he was exhibiting some shyness sometimes and we were saying, “Oh, are you feeling shy?” and it turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy! We’re trying to instead not ‘explain away’ or assign something to Will- but it’s hard!
• What we can do to support ourselves: Take deep breaths when we can and try to embrace that all the hard work and extra time it takes for our kiddo to accomplish something at this stage will only mean a more capable kid in later years. Give ourselves grace when we get exasperated and step in to fix/finish something that we realize, upon reflection, may have been a great time to let our kid struggle alone. This can be a really stressful phase of parenting too, because our baby is officially grown and things just take longer than they used to – I have found that counting to five, relaxing my jaw (I hold tension in my jaw) and observing my kid when I want to JUMP IN! or GET MAD! when he makes a mess is really helping. I may also be getting into regular yoga practice to help me get better at this, too.

Letting Will pick up the dog food that didn’t make it in the bowl after he fed the dog on his own.

Stage: Initiative vs. guilt (about three to six years old)

• Summary of this stage: Initiative: I WANT TO DO IT! I WANT TO KNOW IT ALL! This stage is focused on assertiveness – our kids begin to truly assert themselves as they feel capable at doing many things. They want to know why, and they like learning new things and meeting new people. It can be easy for this assertiveness and independence to lead to feelings of guilt, though, when they feel that what they naturally feel inclined to do – ask questions or explore new places – is met with our feelings of and desire for protectiveness (or really, overprotectiveness) jumps in and we stop them from doing these things. This is also the time in life when kids need and want boundaries – but exploring beyond these can lead to punishment as they make the wrong choices when asserting themselves. This is the delicate balance of guilt in this stage – we want our kids to take initiative but also follow rules. The big event of this stage is exploring and asserting their independence, built upon the prior stage.
• What we as parents can do to support our kids: Give them lots of positive reinforcement when they assert themselves and take initiative. Check our instinct to jump in and protect when we can step back and allow them to explore things themselves. Pace our punishments and reactions to their misbehavior, so that we help them keep their ‘zest’ for life but also learn how to control their impulses.
• What we can do to support ourselves: Identify our trigger points so that we can manage our reactions and when and how we dole out punishment. Work on identifying our emotions so that we can help name and demonstrate these with our kids, increasing communication with our kids along the way. Take nights away from our kids so they can demonstrate their initiative with others and learn that controlling their every action and desire extends to society and other people, too.

Stage: Industry vs. inferiority (about six to about 12 years old)

• Summary of this stage: The satisfaction of a job well done helps our kids develop feelings of industry as they begin and move through school. The flip to this? When they don’t get something done or do it as well as others, leading to feelings of inferiority. Teachers become very important this stage, along with peers, as each help to encourage, or discourage, effort in places outside the home – which is where the majority of their time is spent in this stage! The desire to win approval (dovetails with kids’ moral developmental stage at this age!) is critical, and lends itself to kids wanting to feel successful in academics, sports, and friendships. The most important event of this age is school, as noted, and kids learn to feel competent as they move through this stage, which lends itself to formation of their identity, self-concept and self-esteem as they get older.
• What we as parents can do to support our kids: Help our children identify things they do well, while exhibiting modesty regarding their accomplishments. Help our kids acknowledge that sometimes they won’t be able to do things as well as others, too and explain how we can’t do everything well, either! Encourage inclusiveness as they interact with peers.   Consider asking the same questions every day – things like, “what did you try that was new to you today?” and “who were you kind to today?” as well as “what did you do well and what did you fail at today?” Encourage free play with friends, so they can explore things at their own pace.
• What we can do to support ourselves: Part of this stage for us as parents is learning what our kids are good at, and what they maybe don’t have talents for – which can be really hard! We can learn to let go of preconceived notions that they will be a good reader or a skilled ballet dancer. We can reflect on what we did well as a child, and how it felt when our parents did or did not encourage us in failure. We can try something new alongside our children, so we can better relate to their feelings of success or inferiority.

Stage: Identify vs. role confusion (adolescence/teenager years – about 12 to 18 years old)

• Summary of this stage: This is the stage that the article I first cited in this series was talking about – the critical time of our children figuring who they are, relative to who they were, who they want to be, and, all importantly, relative to others their age. Teenagers develop ideas about what they believe about societal norms and traditions – things like religion, politics, gender roles, potential occupations, education and more. Teenagers want to both fit in and identify their unique identifiers that will guide their future life – if they pursue college, and what they’ll study, what job they want to pursue, and when and how they’ll choose to partner with another person and create a family. Kids this age slowly develop their feelings of fidelity – can they discover something they believe and be true to exhibiting it or aligning their actions to what they believe? Do others around them do the same thing? The most important element of this stage is our kids’ peer relationships – friends and who they spend their time with become very important and can deeply affect their ability to establish their identity.
• What we as parents can do to support our kids: No pressure, right? The age that is most critical to helping our kids become the adult they, and we, want them to be and we get very little direct impact on it, because friends matter the most! The trickiness of walking the line between encouraging reflection while not pushing too hard, being available for love and support without being overbearing is so, so hard. We can establish good routines before and during this stage to help our children feel supported in action – regular dinners together, ongoing traditions (pizza Fridays! family game night on Wednesdays! church or tennis together on Sunday mornings!), and open sharing of our own struggles, feelings and challenges.
• What we can do to support ourselves: Build a network of parents who can help us get through the teenage years.  As with before, establish an identity for ourselves outside of our kids so when they want nothing to do with us, we have people, hobbies and interests we can look to as they hang out with their friends. Try to get to know our kids’ friends and their caregivers as best we can to alleviate our concerns. Accept that we’re not our kids #1 right now, but we will be a big part of their lives moving forward if we can love them anyway and create a home environment that is welcoming, loving and predictable.

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Adult stages: Intimacy vs. isolation (young adulthood – about 18 years old onward to close to 40 years old); Generativity vs. stagnation (middle adulthood, maybe 40-60 years old); and Ego integrity vs. despair (late adulthood, from about age 60 onward). I’m not going to go very deeply into these stages here, as that would flip this parenting website from parenting our young children to the stage in life when we begin to parent fellow adults and parent our parents! If anyone is at this stage, though, let me know in the comments below and I’ll happily write a follow up post sharing the science of these stages, plus my own anecdotal experiences of going through this with my grandmother and mother!

Next up is the last post in the series – encouraging and building our kids’ sense of identity and self – including their self-esteem!

What strikes you as most critical to remember when considering our children’s developing self-, emotional-, and social- awareness?