VIEWED superficially, the part of youth that the psychologist Jean
Piaget called middle childhood looks tame and uneventful, a quiet patch
of road on the otherwise hairpin highway to adulthood.
Said to begin around five or six, when toddlerhood has ended, and concluding when the teen years begin, middle childhood lacks the physical flamboyance of the epochs fore and aft: no gotcha cuteness of babydom, no secondary sexual billboards of pubescence.
Yet as new findings from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, paleontology and anthropology make clear, middle childhood is anything but a bland placeholder. To the contrary, it is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus on threading together its private intranet service - on forging, organising, amplifying and annotating the tens of billions of synaptic connections that allow brain cells and brain domains to communicate.
Subsidising the deft frenzy of brain maturation is a distinctive endocrinological event called adrenarche, when the adrenal glands begin pumping out powerful hormones. Researchers have only begun to understand adrenarche in any detail, but they see it as a signature feature of middle childhood.
Middle childhood is when the parts of the brain most closely associated with being human finally come online: our ability to control our impulses, to reason, to focus, to plan for the future. Young children may know something about death and see monsters lurking under every bed, but only in middle childhood is the brain capable of practising so-called terror management, of accepting one's inevitable mortality or at least pushing thoughts of it aside.
Other researchers studying the fossil record suggest that a prolonged middle childhood is a fairly recent development in human evolution, a luxury of unfolding that our cousins the Neanderthals did not seem to share. Still others have analysed attitudes towards middle childhood historically and cross-culturally. The researchers have found that virtually every group examined recognises middle childhood as a developmental watershed, when children emerge from the shadows of dependency.
The anatomy of middle childhood can be subtle. Adult teeth start growing in, allowing children to diversify their diet beyond the mashed potatoes and parentally dissected Salisbury steak stage. The growth of the skeleton, by contrast, slows from the vertiginous pace of early childhood - much of the remaining growth awaits the super-spurt of puberty. ''Adulthood is defined by being skeletally as well as sexually mature,'' says Jennifer Thompson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. ''A girl may have her first period at 11 or 12, but her pelvis doesn't finish growing until about the age of 18.''
With her colleague Andrew Nelson of the University of Western Ontario, Thompson analysed fossil specimens from Neanderthals, Homo erectus and other early hominids, and concluded that their growth pattern was more like that of a chimpanzee than a modern human: By age 12 or 14, they had reached adult size.
Life for Neanderthals was nasty and short, Thompson says, and children had to get big fast, which is why they hurtled through adolescence. Our extreme form of dilated childhood did not appear until the advent of modern Homo sapiens, roughly 150,000 years ago, Thompson says, when adults began living long enough to ease pressure on the young to hurry up and breed.
In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organised enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. Children have lost the clumsiness of toddlerhood and can become physically gymnastic, too, and start practising their fine motor skills.
Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. ''This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighbourhood context,'' Benjamin Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, says.
The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines. They have an avid appetite for learning local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behaviour. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.
The mental and kinesthetic pliancy of middle childhood can be traced in part to adrenarche, researchers say, when signals from the pea-size pituitary at the base of the brain prod the adrenal glands to unleash their hormonal largesse.
Evidence also suggests that the adrenal hormones divert glucose in the brain to foster the maturation of brain regions vital to interpreting social and emotional cues.
In middle childhood, the brain is open for suggestions. What do I need to know? What do I want to know? Well, you could take up piano, chess or juggling, learn another language or how to ski. Or you could go outside and play with your friends. If you learn to play fair, friends will always be there.
Said to begin around five or six, when toddlerhood has ended, and concluding when the teen years begin, middle childhood lacks the physical flamboyance of the epochs fore and aft: no gotcha cuteness of babydom, no secondary sexual billboards of pubescence.
Yet as new findings from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, paleontology and anthropology make clear, middle childhood is anything but a bland placeholder. To the contrary, it is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus on threading together its private intranet service - on forging, organising, amplifying and annotating the tens of billions of synaptic connections that allow brain cells and brain domains to communicate.
Subsidising the deft frenzy of brain maturation is a distinctive endocrinological event called adrenarche, when the adrenal glands begin pumping out powerful hormones. Researchers have only begun to understand adrenarche in any detail, but they see it as a signature feature of middle childhood.
Middle childhood is when the parts of the brain most closely associated with being human finally come online: our ability to control our impulses, to reason, to focus, to plan for the future. Young children may know something about death and see monsters lurking under every bed, but only in middle childhood is the brain capable of practising so-called terror management, of accepting one's inevitable mortality or at least pushing thoughts of it aside.
Other researchers studying the fossil record suggest that a prolonged middle childhood is a fairly recent development in human evolution, a luxury of unfolding that our cousins the Neanderthals did not seem to share. Still others have analysed attitudes towards middle childhood historically and cross-culturally. The researchers have found that virtually every group examined recognises middle childhood as a developmental watershed, when children emerge from the shadows of dependency.
The anatomy of middle childhood can be subtle. Adult teeth start growing in, allowing children to diversify their diet beyond the mashed potatoes and parentally dissected Salisbury steak stage. The growth of the skeleton, by contrast, slows from the vertiginous pace of early childhood - much of the remaining growth awaits the super-spurt of puberty. ''Adulthood is defined by being skeletally as well as sexually mature,'' says Jennifer Thompson of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. ''A girl may have her first period at 11 or 12, but her pelvis doesn't finish growing until about the age of 18.''
With her colleague Andrew Nelson of the University of Western Ontario, Thompson analysed fossil specimens from Neanderthals, Homo erectus and other early hominids, and concluded that their growth pattern was more like that of a chimpanzee than a modern human: By age 12 or 14, they had reached adult size.
Life for Neanderthals was nasty and short, Thompson says, and children had to get big fast, which is why they hurtled through adolescence. Our extreme form of dilated childhood did not appear until the advent of modern Homo sapiens, roughly 150,000 years ago, Thompson says, when adults began living long enough to ease pressure on the young to hurry up and breed.
In middle childhood, the brain is at its peak for learning, organised enough to attempt mastery yet still fluid, elastic, neuronally gymnastic. Children have lost the clumsiness of toddlerhood and can become physically gymnastic, too, and start practising their fine motor skills.
Middle childhood is the time to make sense and make friends. ''This is the period when kids move out of the family context and into the neighbourhood context,'' Benjamin Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, says.
The all-important theory of mind arises: the awareness that other people have minds, plans and desires of their own. Children become obsessed with social groups and divide along gender lines. They have an avid appetite for learning local social rules, whether of games, slang, style or behaviour. They are keenly attuned to questions of fairness and justice and instantly notice those grabbing more than their share.
The mental and kinesthetic pliancy of middle childhood can be traced in part to adrenarche, researchers say, when signals from the pea-size pituitary at the base of the brain prod the adrenal glands to unleash their hormonal largesse.
Evidence also suggests that the adrenal hormones divert glucose in the brain to foster the maturation of brain regions vital to interpreting social and emotional cues.
In middle childhood, the brain is open for suggestions. What do I need to know? What do I want to know? Well, you could take up piano, chess or juggling, learn another language or how to ski. Or you could go outside and play with your friends. If you learn to play fair, friends will always be there.
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