An Observation of Middle Childhood

Mekayla Brooks

HBSE 2100

Middle Childhood Ethnography

For this ethnography I observed a group of five children about seven to eight years old.

There were three girls and two boys in this group and the observation occurred at a playground. I have chosen five different concepts about middle childhood to discuss. They are broken into the dimensions below.

Biophysical:

To begin with, I will discuss the idea that “boy’s gross motor skills exceed that of girl’s.” I could not see this from my own observation. It seemed to me that both the boys and girls ran, climbed, crawled, jumped from high places, and fell down equally. However, the boys were a little more rough with each other than the girls; they shoved each other out of the way to get to the same slide and started whacking each other with two sticks.

The HBSE textbook states that “at this age, children can create their own new rules (in games)”. I observed this when a game of tag between two girls and two boys turned into a game of hop-over-the-rock-and-race-to-the-slide-before-I-catch-you. The kids just made up those specifications all by themselves, right there, in an on the fly compromise. So I do think I observed that concept as true.

Psychological:

Another idea about middle childhood is that children generally become more adept at using language beyond “yes and no”. From the five children I observed, I believe this. They did not just point at what they wanted or use a few words to say what they meant, like younger children. They had fairly large vocabularies, at least large enough to invent the game described in the previous paragraph. Although their speech was a little grammatically incorrect, such as “I founded that stick!” it was much better than a younger child.

Social:

A characteristic of middle childhood, according to the textbook, is that children spend less time with parents and more time with peers. The parents of the children I observed were all with their children at the playground, but they were not actively playing with them. They were only watching to make sure their kids were safe. A couple of children, about four years old, were also at the playground, and their parents were near them all the time. However, the seven year olds would still sometimes look to see if their parent was still there, or to show them something they could do, like swing by themselves.

So what I collected from that was they were becoming a little more independent, but still wanted their parents there for security.

The book also talks about gender roles and how children begin to understand whether they are male or female and whether they want to be. Of the three girls and two boys I observed, I could see a few of these stereotypes. For example, two girls had pink jackets on, while the third had a yellow jacket with a purple butterfly on the back. The boys had short haircuts and one had a dark blue jacket while the other wore a camouflage patterned one. These varying colors, patterns, and symbols could all be generalized into “male” or “female” categories. I thought these could be marks of gender roles, but then there is the question of whether the children picked those clothes for themselves or if the parents did.

In the end, my observations were pretty close to the theories and milestones described in the

HBSE textbook, except for boys having better motor skills than girls.