If someone asked you to pick the best years of the entire life span, you might choose the years from 7 to 11 and defend your choice persuasively. This life stage is often referred to as the "tween years". We often view these years as a wonderful time of life! To begin with, physcial development is usually smooth and unremarkable, making it easy to master dozens of new skills.

With regard to cognitive development, most children are able to learn quickly and think logically, providing that the topic is not too abstract. Moral reasoning has reached that state where right seems clearly distinguished from wrong, with none of the ambiguities that complicate moral issues for adolescents and adults.

Finally, the social world of middle childhood seems perfect. Most school-age children think their parents are helpful, their teachers fair, and their friends loyal. The future seems filled with promise- at least most of the time it does. This is a critical time in the development of a positive sense of self.

However, school and friendships are so important at this age that two common events can seem crushing: failure in school and rejection by peers. Some lucky children escape these problems; others have sufficient self-confidence or family support to weather them when they arise; and some leave middle childhood with painful memories, and feeling inadequate, incompetent, or inferior. Researchers have explored what most children can accomplish during the given school years. These charts are called developmental trackers.

The School Years: Physical Development

For most children, the school years are a time of stable growth and notable improvement in physical skills. For some, unfortunately, it is a time when certain types of disabilities become more pronounced in their consequences. During middle childhood, children grow more slowly than they did during infancy and toddlerhood or than they will during adolescence. Increased strength and heart and lung capacity give children the endurance to improve their performance in skills such as swimming and running. Slower growth contributes to children's increasing bodily control, and children enjoy exercising their developing skills of coordination and balance. Which specific skills they master depends largely on culture, gender, and inherited ability.

Physical Size and Shape

Children grow more slowly during middle childhood than at any other time until the end of adolescence. There is much more variation in the size and rate of maturation of healthy North American children, primarily as a result of genetic, rather than nutritional, differences. Overweight children suffer from peer rejection and low self-esteem. More exercise, rather than severe dieting, is the best solution, along with new attitudes toward food and recreation.

Many influences throughout the life span interact to cause obesity. Hereditary factors, overfeeding in infancy and late childhood, repeated dieting, lack of exercise, and other factors contribute to the incidence of obesity.

Motor Skills

School-age children can perform almost any motor skill, as long as it doesn't require much strength or refined judgment of distance or speed. The activities that are best for children are ones that demand only the skills that most children of this age can master.

The School Years: Cognitive Development

During the school years, children's cognitive development enables them to focus their thinking less intuitively and more accurately on the facts and relationships that they perceive in the world. They become astute observers who can organize objects according to their particular characteristics and understand ideas of time and distance.

Beginning at about age 7 or 8, children develop the ability to understand logical principles, including the concepts of reciprocity, classification, class inclusion, seriation, and number. They also become better able to understand and learn, in part because of their growing memory capacity and increasing ability to use mnemonics. At the same time, metacognition techniques enable children to organize their learning.

Children's increasing ability to understand the structures and possibilities of language enables them to extend the range of their cognitive powers and to become more analytical in their use of vocabulary. Most children develop proficiency in several language codes, and some become bilingual.

Formal schooling begins worldwide, with the specifics of the curriculum depending on economic and societal factors.

Concrete Operational Thought

According to some developmental psychologists, the years from ages 5 to 7 are a time of transition, when new memory skills, reasoning abilities, and capacity to learn appear. During this period, children sometimes intuit the right answers to logical questions without knowing how they got them.

According to Piaget, beginning at about age 7 or 8, children are able to think using the logical operations of concrete operational thought. They can apply their logic to problems involving classification and seriation and can use reversibility and reciprocity. Mathematics and scientific principles are also better understood, as are others' points of view.

While Piaget's ideas about the sequence of cognitive development have been generally acknowledged to be correct, many researchers believe that cognitive changes occur more gradually and more heterogeneously than Piaget's theory suggests.

The Information-Processing Perspective

Information-processing theorists seek to explain development in learning, thinking, and problem-solving in middle childhood in terms of the growth of selective attention, the acquisition of memory skills, an increase in the child's processing capacity, a growing foundation of knowledge, and a developing awareness of cognitive strategies.

The study of developmental changes in specific mental components has helped researchers delineate aspects of cognitive growth with important educational implications. However, it has not yet provided a picture of how these components are integrated in the child's development.

Learning Disabilities

Children with problems such as dyslexia (severe reading problems) or with attention-deficit disorder (high activity levels with low concentration ability) need special attention and help to learn to cope with their problems.

Some learning disabilities may originate in genetic or physical problems of some sort, but whether or not the cause is organic, many educational and psychological programs can help children with these disabilities. Psychoactive drugs also help some children, but these should be used carefully and cautiously.

Language

Language abilities continue to improve during middle childhood, partly because schools and families encourage this learning, and partly because increased cognitive development makes it easier to understand difficult grammatical and pragmatic distinctions.

The ability to understand that language is a tool for communication makes the school-age child more able to use different forms of language in different contexts. For example, a child can use Black English on the playground and standard English in the classroom.

Teaching children a second language can be accomplished by a number of different methods-from total immersion in the new language to gradually increasing exposure. However, the most important factors seem to be the commitment of home and school.

Thinking, Learning, and Schooling

The school-age child is someone who is thoughtful, eager to learn, able to focus attention, to master logical operations, to remember interrelated facts, and to speak in several linguistic codes.

Although basic literacy is universally sought, who receives instruction, the curriculum offered, and pedagogical techniques very widely.

School-age children are active learners, which means that passive learning is not the most appropriate means of instruction. Recent developmental research has shown the pedagogical benefits of greater classroom interaction, both between teachers and students and among the students themselves.

Cross-cultural studies show that effective education depends not only on how time is spent in the classroom but also on how education is valued in the home and the larger culture.

The School Years: Psychosocial Development

During the school years, emotional and social development occurs in a much more elaborate context than the closely supervised and circumscribed arenas of the typical younger child. As school-age children explore the wider world of neighborhood, community, and school, independent of parental control, they experience new vulnerability, increasing competence, ongoing friendships, challenging, and sometimes troubling, rivalries, deeper social understanding, and conflicting moral values. Personality attributes, coping mechanisms, and future aspirations are all formed by their developing social cognition.

Erikson sees the crisis of this stage as one of industry versus inferiority, while learning theorists suggest that children's greater awareness of the actions and attitudes of others makes them more susceptible to reinforcement and modeling techniques. The peer group becomes increasingly important to children as they become less dependent on their parents and more dependent on friends for help, loyalty, and sharing of mutual interests. A child's specific personality traits can make peer acceptance or rejection an important aspect of life. Children are also increasingly aware of, and involved in, family life, as well as in the world outside the home, and therefore are more likely to feel the effects of family, economic, and political conditions. Whether or not particular situations will be stressful for a child will depend, in part, on the child's temperament, competence, and the social support provided by home and school.

An Expanding Social World

All the major perspectives recognize the importance of children's growing independence and competence during the school years. Freud believed that, during middle childhood, most of the child's emotions are quiet or latent, especially their sexual and aggressive urges.

Erikson calls middle childhood the stage of industry versus inferiority, because children are busy learning new skills. As they attempt to develop the competencies their society values, they gain self-esteem, or else come to see themselves as inferior and inadequate.

In various ways, learning, cognitive, and humanist theorists stress school-age children's increasing ability to master new skills and develop new abilitie, particularly in understanding others and themselves.

Social Cognition

School-age children develop a multistep theory of mind, becoming increasingly aware that other people have complex personalities, motives, and emotions that are different from their own. At the same time, they become better able to adjust their own behavior to interact appropriately with others.

Children also develop theories about themselves and their own behavior. As they become more knowledgeable about their abilities and shortcomings, both personal and academic, they become more self-critical, and their self-esteem often dips.

School-age children also create their own subculture, with language, values, and codes of behavior. The child who is not included in this society often feels deeply hurt, for social dependence on peers is strong at this age, even as independence from adults is valued.

As children develop their own social codes, they become increasingly aware of the principles of the larger society. They do not necessarily follow these principles, however, especially if acceptance within their group or loyalty to their friends is at stake.

Friendships become more selective and exclusive as children grow older. Social problem-solving skills also develop during this period, as children acquire more sophisticated strategies for resolving differences and gaining social goals.

Family Structure and Child Development

Family functioning is far more crucial to children's well-being than family structure is. Whether a child lives in a two-parent, one-parent, or blended family is less important than whether the child's home situation is relatively stable, conflict-free, and supportive.

While functioning is key, nonetheless certain structures-especially one-parent,low-income homes and family arrangements that change dramatically from year to year-tend to be stressful on development. Since more than half of all American children will spend some of their childhood in a single-parent home, and since many children must undergo several family transitions, community attitudes and practical support from family and friends can play a crucial role to ensure children's well-being.

During middle childhood, poverty can be especially detrimental to cognitive and social development. One reason is that school-age children increasingly compare themselves with others, particularly on visible signs of status. This often leads children in poverty to feel ashamed and hopeless.

Another problem is that many very poor children live in violent neighborhoods, which restricts their independence and limits their willingness to plan ahead. Homeless children are especially vulnerable, because they experience not only poverty but often a dangerous, unstable life.

Coping With Life

Almost every child has some difficulties at home, school, or in the community during middle childhood. Most children cope quite well, as long as the problems are limited in duration and degree.

How well particular children cope with the problems in their lives depends on the number and nature of the stresses they experience, the strengths of their various competencies, and social support they receive. Those children who seem "invulnerable" are usually those who have some special skills-intellectual, social, or artistic-and some person-parent, teacher, friend-to help them overcome whatever difficulties life presents.

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