Appraising the Human Developmental Sciences: Essays in Honor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

10. Paying Attention to and Not Neglecting Social Withdrawal and Social Isolation

10 Paying Attention to and Not Neglecting Social Withdrawal and Social Isolation Kenneth H. Rubin and Robert J. Coplan 156 The study of peer interaction has a long and rich history. We have long sought to understand how children learn to get along with one another and why this is important. Implicitly and explicitly enmeshed with our studies of peer interaction is the question of children who tend not to interact with peers. In this commentary we trace some of the origins of research on children’s social withdrawal. Significantly, this topic was largely nonexistent in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, but it has more recently emerged as a phenomenon that is publication rich, research supported, and much discussed among parents and teachers. In the latter half of this chapter we take stock of current research issues in the etiology of social withdrawal and outline some future directions for researchers to consider. Historical Trends in the Study of Peer Interaction Approximately twenty-five years before the first issue of MerrillPalmer Quarterly, Jean Piaget proposed that children learn a great deal about their social and impersonal worlds through exploration, construction, discussion, negotiation, and the expression and resolution of differences of opinion with age-mates. Moreover, in the 1920s and 1930s researchers were already studying such topics as the social interactions of infants and toddlers, social participation among preschoolers, sympathy and altruism in the peer group, antisocial tendencies, leadership, friendship, and peer-group networks and social structures. Much of this work was developmental in perspective , although the vast majority of published research focused on the early years of childhood. Of the research conducted on how children spent their lives among peers, few early theorists and researchers speculated about the potential role of individual differences in peer-oriented behav- iors or relationships. After World War II, however, a small number of investigators began to use now-familiar labels to identify children who could be “classified” on the basis of their reputation in the peer group. Moreno (1934) wrote about peer-group structure and composition , as well as interpersonal attraction, repulsion, and indifference. Bronfenbrenner (1943) described three sociometric status groups within which children might fall—high, average, and low. But other than Piaget, Mead, and Sullivan, few reflected on the significance of peer exchange for normal growth and development. Interacting with peers was viewed as developmentally appropriate insofar as everyday life is concerned. In many ways peer interaction, like play, was either neglected in its entirety or deemed superfluous. Consequently, those seriously interested in the socialization of adaptive thinking, feeling, and doing kept their investigatory efforts focused on the child’s home life and, more specifically, on the mother-child relationship or on maternal behavior. And those seriously interested in developmental psychology as science pursued the understanding of children’s development in such “measurable” and “controllable” areas as learning, memory, perception, cognition, intelligence, and achievement. A quick glance at the content of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s supports these reflections on the relatively short history of our science. Eventually, however, researchers outgrew the once-beloved “marble-dropping,” learning theory–derived experiments of the 1960s and moved forward into studying learning in social contexts. After all, all learning does take place in a more or less social environment . Schools are filled not only with teachers and counselors but also with children, many of whom share a given classroom for seven hours per day, five days per week. In addition to parents, many homes also contain younger and older siblings—other children ! With the recognition of the putative significance of children’s peers, both directly (as in reinforcing or punishing one another on continuous or partial reinforcement schedules) and indirectly (as in seeing how others are reinforced or punished for various and sundry social behaviors), the field of social development entered an emergent growth period. The strikingly rich work of Bandura, Walters , and their students and protégés led researchers to recognize that peers could serve as both direct and subtle influences. And eventually, with the help of both empirical research and the publication of timely reviews by Campbell (1964) and Hartup (1970), the study of children’s interactions, relationships, and groups found itself on a swiftly accelerating trajectory during the last decades of the Paying Attention to Social Withdrawal and Social Isolation 157 Kenneth H. Rubin and Robert J. Coplan 158 20th century. Indeed, the “Bible” of our...