Introduction

• Toddlers face two important tasks:
1. Move from near-total dependence on their parents toward greater self-reliance.
2. Begin to comply with social rules and expectations by starting to internalize the standards of the family and society (socialization).
• Toddlerhood also differs from infancy due to the major cognitive changes that occur, including the emergence of language and other forms of symbolic thought.

• Appropriation -- idea that children naturally take on the rules and values of their culture as part of their participation in relationships with caregivers. From this perspective, socialization is said to occur "from the inside."
• Socialization from the Outside
1. Socialization occurs because parents and other adults impose rules and values on an unwilling, impulsive child. Freud called the blocking and redirection of biological drives and impulses sublimation.
2. This direct view was also held by early social learning theorists (selective rewards and punishments); contemporary social learning theory emphasizes the importance of imitation and vicarious rewards--many elements of socialization from the inside.
• Socialization from the Inside
1. Socialization occurs because children possess a built-in desire to comply with their parents' requests and expectations, as long as their parents have been responsive to them in the past. Ainsworth's research provides support for this view for children as young as 12 months of age.
2. It is also normal, however, for toddlers to show some negativism because of their expanding abilities and their growing self-reliance (terrible twos).

• Increased independence from parents and increased self-reliance
• Increased sociability and more mature forms of social interaction
• Increased awareness of the self and other people
• A broader range of emotional responses
• Moving toward Independence
1. Mobile toddlers readily separate from their caregivers to play and explore. The infant's need for physical contact with the caregiver is increasingly replaced by the toddler's reliance on psychological contact--exchanges of words, smiles, and looks. Preparedness for separation is helpful.
2. Active experimentation with mastery over objects leads to developing a sense of mastery (personal agency) known as executive competence. Adults also are used as props for problem solving and mastery.
• The Growth of Sociability
1. Toddlers become both more social and more competent in their interactions with adults and with other children. Greater capacity to observer and interpret other people's actions, to imitate others, and to maintain sequences of social action.
2. Sharing Experiences
   Toddlers persistently point at things, talk about them, and bring them to others for inspection. They also frequently engage in affective sharing, where they share positive emotions almost exclusively with attachment figures.

3. Social Referencing
   In novel or ambiguous situations, toddlers engage in social referencing--using a caregiver's facial expressions or tone of voice as a cue for how to behave.
   
4. Interaction between Toddlers
   Interactions with other children become increasingly prevalent during the toddler period. Between 15 to 24 months, children develop the ability to behave in a complementary manner with a peer. Characterized by object-centered play, imitation, and social pretend play (acting out interrelated roles).
   
• Awareness of the Self and Others
1. Awareness of Self
• Toddlers become aware that their own behaviors and intentions are distinct from those of others.
• Self-awareness is part of toddlers' expanding cognitive abilities (mental representational capacity) and can be seen in their reaction to their own reflection in a mirror (by 20 months they show self-recognition in the rouge dot test) as well as their increasing use of "I" in their heightened awareness of their own intentionality and direction of actions.
2. Understanding of Others

True understanding of others as independent agents emerges gradually and can be seen in interactions with both caregivers and peers which become increasingly more sophisticated.
1. Children, around age 1, recognize that others can do things they cannot.
2. By age 2, children grasp the boundaries between their own actions and other people's actions (genuine turn-taking).
3. By about age 3, children have a true understanding that people are independent agents.
• Emotional Changes
1. Growing sensitivity to others' feelings.
2. Feelings, Social Sensitivity, and the Beginnings of Morality
• As toddlers become aware of the rules and expectations of adults, their initial attempts at compliance and beginning self-control are guided by primitive, undifferentiated emotional reactions. Toddlers become increasingly aware of and responsive to negative emotional signals from others, an early sign of empathy.
• Toddlers display deviation anxiety when they do or are about to do something forbidden (react to specific negative emotional signals to their own transgressions). Show spontaneous self-corrections-beginning of conscience and morality.
3. Changing Emotions and New Emotions
• "Fundamental" emotions from infancy (such as anger, fear, and joy) undergo important changes and they can withstand higher levels of emotional arousal.
• Become increasingly able to differentiate self from others, allowing for new ways to express both anger and joy to caretakers (see prototype of love).
• "Secondary," self-conscious emotions, requiring some objective sense of self, emerge: shame, a sense of the self-vulnerable and bad; positive self-evaluation, a forerunner of pride.

• The Parents' Tasks
1. Parents need to adjust their own behavior to the child's new abilities and limitations. They face the tasks of:
• Supporting their child's exploration of the world - create an arena in which children have space and support to develop. Can participate in their toddler's efforts to communicate with language, and to share emotions when discovering new things.
• Setting appropriate limits for the child - limits reassure the toddler that parents will not let their impulses go too far, a sort of safety zone. Can effect this through commands, comments, and questions that make use of toddlers' increasing comprehension of language.
• The process by which parents support the child in new tasks by offering developmentally appropriate guidance, limits, and advice is often called scaffolding.
• Parents' support of toddlers' exploration and problem-solving can also be regarded as a process of guided self-regulation.
• The general approach toward the child is important. Negative control leads to defiance.
• Changes in Caregiving During the Toddler Period
  In Western industrialized societies, fathers become increasingly involved with their children during the toddler period. Fathers' behavior during interaction with toddlers often differs from that of mothers and may play an important role in promoting toddlers' growing independence.
  

• The self-awareness that emerges in toddlerhood includes individual expectations about the self that influence the child's responses to the environment. This individual pattern of adaptation forms the roots of personality.
• Becoming a Separate Person
1. According to Mahler, the separation-individuation process occurs as infants gradually come to understand the relationship between themselves and their caregivers.
2. In Erikson's theory, the defining issue for the toddler period is autonomy versus shame and doubt. Basic trust--the toddler's confidence that the parent-child relationship is secure--supports the development of autonomy and the separation-individuation process.
3. Self-reliance can be compromised with insecure relationships with caregivers, when autonomy is forced too early, or when independence is met with negativity. May see timidity, preoccupation with caregiver, power struggles, angry interactions, general emotional detachment.
• The Influence Of Parent-Child Relationships
1. The Attachment History
   Clear links exist between quality of infant-caregiver attachment and toddlers' later functioning. Toddlers with a history of secure attachment show greater effectiveness at problem-solving, while toddlers with a history of anxious attachment have difficulties with problem-solving tasks.
   
2. The Role of Ongoing Support
• In addition to a toddler's secure attachment history, parental support and stimulation during the toddler period itself also promote positive functioning.
• The failure to provide clear guidelines has been found to be very different from the actions of caregivers whose toddlers are securely attached as infants. It is much more appropriate and clear.
• How Children Affect Their Own Adaptations
1. By the end of the first year, individual styles of behavior that are relatively consistent across situations result in differences among toddlers in the treatment they receive and in how they respond to it.
2. Children with different temperament characteristics may respond differently to the same situation, a phenomenon called organismic specificity. These differences in toddlers' responses can affect how caregivers perceive them and behave toward them (e.g., limit setting, degree of punishment used).
3. Positive and negative cycles can develop. With the latter, several forms can result. Toddlers who need more support and consistent handling tend to be those who are harder to care for and whose parents have more difficulty being consistent; parents' responses tend to perpetuate the difficult aspects of these children. In another, toddlers are more detached from the parents, and at the same time the parents are emotionally distant, making cooperative partnerships increasingly unlikely.
• Individual Adaptations And The Broader Developmental Context
1. The transactional model is important to consider in toddler development.
2. The larger social environment in which a parent and child live can impose additional challenges or offer support. Adequate social support can offset economic or social stresses to some extent; a supportive relationship with an adult partner seems to be particularly helpful. A parent's own developmental history can also have an impact on a parent-toddler relationship. Changes in a parent's circumstances can have a great impact on the parent-toddler relationship.

• More than two million cases of physical battering, sexual abuse, or gross neglect of children are reported in the United States each year. Children under age 3 are particularly vulnerable to abuse and neglect, due to challenges of raising toddlers who assert independence and explore their environments. Misinterpretation of toddler's behavior can result in harsh treatment, and toddlers have not yet learned how to avoid mistreatment or meet their own needs.
• Problems Related to Child Maltreatment
1. Consequences vary depending on the nature of the maltreatment. Physical neglect tends to produce devastating health consequences, a lack of competence in dealing with the world of objects, and major problems of achievement in school. Physical abuse often promotes behavioral and emotional problems, including aggression. Emotional unavailability often results in a marked decline in functioning and a child who is apathetic, devoid of joy or pleasure, and easily frustrated and upset.
2. One reason the correlates of maltreatment are so varied is that it takes many forms, and each form has its own set of consequences.
• Physical neglect is the failure to meet the child's basic needs for food, warmth, cleanliness, and medical attention. It tends to produce devastating health consequences, a lack of competence in dealing with the world of objects, and major achievement problems in school.
• Physical abuse is deliberately causing physical injury to the child. It often promotes behavioral and emotional problems, including avoidant and disorganized attachment relationships, lack of social sensitivity, as well as aggressiveness with peers, and blunted emotions. It predicts later aggressiveness by influencing child's perceptions of others as hostile or threatening and their social competency, which leads to problem-solving inadequacies.
• Emotional unavailability is often the result of depression in the parent. Over time, children who experience this form of maltreatment show a marked decline in functioning, eventually becoming apathetic, devoid of joy or pleasure, and easily frustrated and upset.
• Verbal abuse is a pattern in which caretakers continually criticize their children, yell at them, or subject them to demeaning comments. It is associated with problems of self-esteem and school adjustment.
• Sexual abuse has been studied more often with older children and adolescents, for whom it is an especially strong predictor of later psychopathology.
• Searching for Causes of Maltreatment
1. Maltreatment is generally associated with parents who are poor, young, lacking in education, and unprepared for raising a child but it is not limited to persons of these characteristics.
2. Characteristics of the Child
• In the past, it was proposed that abused children may have inherent characteristics that elicit maltreatment from adults. Prospective, longitudinal studies discredit the idea that some children by nature draw forth abuse from otherwise nurturant parents.
• Exploration of coercive cycles; appropriation (taking into themselves aspects of the relationship system around them) and internal working models help researchers understand the direction of causality between child maltreatment and child aggressiveness.
3. Characteristics of the Parent
• The vast majority of parents who abuse suffer no psychotic disorder and no single personality trait is shared among abusive parents. There is a broad set of adult characteristics associated with child maltreatment.
• Parents who abuse are less able to cope with the ambivalence and stress inherent in a first pregnancy.
• They appear to have less understanding of what is involved in caring for a baby. Some will even suspect that the baby is being deliberately contrary.
• Parents who were abused themselves as children are, as a group, dramatically more likely to abuse their own children than parents who were not abused. However, in one study, 30% of mothers with histories of childhood abuse were able to provide fully adequate care.
1. Many of them had compensated for their abusive parent by forming a stable, supportive relationship with some other adult during childhood.
2. Many had undergone extensive psychotherapy.
3. All were currently involved in a stable partnership.
• Overall, child abuse is best viewed as a pattern of care that develops when parents who are subject to unusual stress, including the stress of child rearing, lack the knowledge and social support needed to cope effectively with their stress.
4. The Environmental Context
   Child maltreatment is associated with poverty, lack of education, and parental youth, but it is not confined to families with those characteristics. Social isolation and the high level of violence in our culture also contribute to child maltreatment.
   

During toddlerhood, the child begins to acquire views of the self and of social relationships. These views, which are heavily influenced by the quality of care the toddler has experienced, can affect the child's future social and emotional development.