ABSTRACT
Our charge in this chapter is to consider indicators of psychological, social, and emotional development in middle childhood. Middle childhood is the period from about age 5 or 6 to age 11 or 12. Over a century ago, Freud relegated middle childhood to the status of an uninteresting “latency” period between the psychosexual developments of the early years and the emergence of adult sexuality at puberty. In recent years, both scholars and policymakers have rekindled interest in middle childhood as a period in which children develop or fail to develop the foundations for adult competence, responsibility, and independence. That change is reflected in the editor’s decision to commission chapters for this volume that focus specifically on middle childhood-a change from the last volume on child indicators (Hauser, Brown, & Prosser, 1997), in which the age span was divided into early childhood and adolescence.
