for the psych folks

[swan_tower]

yhlee got me thinking about this one by linking to Harry Harlow -- if I needed to read up on the social and emotional development of children, what names should I be looking for?

Specifically, the story situation I'm working with involves children raised from birth in what amounts to an orphanage: professional caretakers (well-meaning ones, not Dickensian sadists), but no parents as such, and the children have to depend on each other for affection. I'd like to know what effects that would generally have on their behavior, and also what kinds of practices the Powers That Be might institute to keep the kids from growing up too warped. (Would it help if they slept in dormitory arrangements, at least until a certain age? Etc.)

I'll be asking my psych-major husband, too, but until he gets home from work, you guys are it. :-)


Edited to add: I've read enough to come across Bowlby and Ainsworth, but I'm a) looking for more recent models and b) trying to work out the behavior of an adult character raised in such a situation; the specific behavior of toddlers is of less interest to me.

Comments

[kleenestar.livejournal.com]

Well, there are three major schools of thought you could draw on here.

1. Mischel's research seems to indicate that kids as young as 4 have a self-discipline "temperament" that predicts their ability to control themselves throughout their lives.

2. Piaget and other developmental researchers would argue that most kids are simply not capable of making certain kinds of decisions until they have reached a certain developmental stage.

3. The Montessori approach believes that kids can be self-regulating if you work with their natural instincts and rhythms. (Keirsey has some work on this too, around the notion that praise and punishment are BOTH bad for a kid unless they are deployed very intelligently.)

You could end up with a school that is highly behaviorist, focused on a system of rewards and punishments that control behavior. You could end up with a relatively permissive school that tries to use psychological methods and self-governance to control the kids. Or you could end up with a school that relies heavily on neurological methods - for example there's research that shows that helping kids reflect on their decision-making ability based on the stage they are at actually helps them make better decisions. Which of these sounds most appealing to you? I can point you at more names/references, or you can take it from here. :)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Well, if Mischel's right, the people trying to train these kids are screwed. Or maybe the kids with the wrong temperament just blow themselves up and solve the problem that way. :-)

I lean toward the self-governance idea primarily because the schools are ultimately trying to produce adults who can be trusted off the reservation, so to speak. There won't always be someone standing there with rewards and punishments, so while I do know the system has at least one rather severe punishment they deploy often enough for the kids to be scared of it, what they really need is for the kids to internalize and become responsible for their own control. The neurological example you describe sounds useful for that.

[kleenestar.livejournal.com]

Take a look through Wrightsman, then, and drop me a line when you're done; I can email you some work on the development of self-regulation (though in terms of what works, the research is VERY mixed).