In terms of the complexity of the course of the crisis in children of 6-7 years old, it can only be compared with the teenage crisis. At this age, the carefree preschool life of the baby ends, he acquires a new status - a first grader. In many ways, the crisis of children aged 6-7 is due to the responsibilities that have piled on them, with the burden of which young students cannot always cope without the help of their parents.

What is the crisis of the age of seven in children

Around the age of seven, parents are faced with a certain identity crisis associated with the fact that the baby needs to go to school. Here begins a new period in the life of the child - the youngest. Parents, of course, are very concerned about how ready their child is to go to school, whether they will cope with the assimilation of the program, how the new team will accept it.

Due to developmental psychology, it is possible to cope with a crisis in a 7-year-old child only with an integrated approach. Sometimes the involvement of specialists is required. Most parents believe that the most important points learning at school are the ability to do what they say, restrain their emotions, listen to instructions, etc.

At first glance, it may seem that the child gradually reaches the required level of mental development. Indeed, the crisis of 6 years of age is much less frequently mentioned, since during this period the baby has a relatively stable system of relationships with parents, other family members and peers. These relations are regulated by a number of norms and requirements. The child performs a number of specific duties, for example, observes the daily routine, helps parents with housework, etc., in addition, he has a certain amount of free time.

However, after a while, parents are faced with one very important problem - their child becomes naughty, irritable, and increasingly naughty. The crisis of 7 years of the child is manifested by regular conflicts with adults, the younger student ignores those duties that he used to perform almost with pleasure.

Parents notice that their child has stopped interacting with them and does not respond in any way to reminders related to going to bed, meal times, etc. Later, he begins to argue, argue, largely violate the established daily routine, act up.

Instead of painting, you can choose any activity that you enjoy and can channel your energy in a positive direction. At this age, "from the stage" can be even more frustrating for some children. And instead of calming down, he worries. But you can stay in sight and put your attention on something else until it calms down. Children need a model, and if you, as a parent, have tantrums, she will copy you right away. Show him that although you are nervous, you can calm down very quickly without crises.

you can do some breathing exercises, read a book, review it, make it clean. It is difficult to keep your control, but it is worth teaching children how to respond constructively to nerves. In addition, in this way you show the child that you are not afraid of him or his anger. Don't give the impression that these nervous crises are affecting you because they will become more severe and worse.

It is worth noting that during this period of a child’s life, a rather serious stressful situation is observed, due to the fact that the social situation of the baby is changing dramatically. It replaces the relationship between the child and parents, the activities of the younger student are replaced by new ones. Such a transition is often quite painful, it is usually accompanied by stubbornness, various negative manifestations. At this stage, parents come to a certain confusion - if the child stops listening to them, does not comply with a number of elementary rules, then how will he listen to the teacher when he goes to school?

Psychology of the crisis of childhood at 6-7 years old

However, if we consider the current situation from the point of view of psychology, then there is nothing surprising in a crisis for a child of 7 years old. This is a completely natural stage in the development of his personality, when he is going through one of the most important periods of his life. The psychological space of the resulting crisis is the very area where the child begins to test his emerging abilities.

The fact is that before understanding what it is like to act according to certain rules, the child must first become aware of these rules, distinguish them from the existing life situation. This is what causes the crisis and misunderstanding between him and his parents. Children gradually identify the rules that have been set for them, and their first reaction is a violation, which is a completely natural phenomenon.

But how to understand that a crisis has begun at the physiological level in children of 7 years old? A young organism goes through an active stage of biological maturation. By this age, the frontal regions of the cerebral hemispheres are finally formed. Thanks to this, the child acquires the ability of purposeful and voluntary behavior, he is able to plan his further actions.

At the same age, the mobility of nervous processes increases, but the processes of excitation are still key, it is because of them that the baby is restless, his emotional excitability is at an increased level. The development of the crisis of a child at the age of 7 is affected by a number of surrounding unfavorable factors. The baby's psyche begins to react in a new way to all sorts of harmful external stimuli. For example, if the baby is ill, then he has psychomotor agitation, stuttering or tics. At primary school age, many children have increased general emotional excitability, symptoms and fear syndromes regularly appear, and they begin to show aggression more often than before.

The proximity of the school bench also provokes the crisis of the child of the 7th year of life, and this is due to the formation of the internal position of the future first grader. At this age, the child gradually loses his childish immediacy. At a younger age, his behavior is relatively understandable to the people around him, primarily to his parents. When a crisis of seven years of age begins in him, even an outside observer will be able to notice that the baby has lost his naivety and spontaneity in behavior. In communication with other people, both with peers and with elders, certain changes also occur. His actions from this age onwards are not so easy to explain.

The loss of immediacy is associated with the fact that the intellectual component begins to wedge into the behavior of the child. In some cases, actions seem artificial or forced, they are not always clearly manifested. Therefore, the most significant feature of the crisis situation of this age is the separation of the external and internal sides of the personality, due to which a large number of different kinds of experiences arise.

At this age, for the first time, he tries to generalize the emotions that occur inside him. If the situation was repeated with him repeatedly, then the baby is able to comprehend it and draw a conclusion how to relate to himself, his successes and position. He can roughly imagine how others around him will react to one or another of his actions. However, experiences have another side - they often come into conflict with each other, which ultimately leads to the emergence of internal tension. This cannot but affect the psyche of the child.

It is worth noting that the experiences of a child at 6-7 years old have a number of their own characteristics. They acquire a specific meaning, i.e., the child becomes able to understand what kind of experiences occur in his soul - he rejoices, upset, angry, etc.

It often happens that a child's experiences are connected with the fact that for the first time in his life he is faced with new difficult or unpleasant situations from which he has to find a way out. However, the generalization of experiences is one of the key points for the baby to be able to overcome the crisis of seven years of age.

The behavior of the child ceases to be momentary, he gradually begins to realize his capabilities, such vital concepts as pride and self-esteem begin to form in his head. They are very different from what happened to him before. A young child loves himself very much, but self-esteem (if it is perceived as a generalized attitude towards his personality) and self-esteem are not observed in him.

The crisis of development of a child of the 7th year of life: the first time in the first grade

In addition, the crisis of the age of seven in children is associated by psychologists with the formation of a new system of education for the child - the internal position of the first grader. It does not arise every minute, but begins to be laid in the psyche of the baby, starting at about five years of age. Children are gradually realizing that in the near future they will have to go to school, many of them are waiting for this moment as a holiday, serious things that are already getting out of the game process become more attractive for them. Therefore, often the child at this stage begins to violate the established daily routine in kindergarten, the society of younger preschoolers becomes a burden for him. He begins to understand that he needs new knowledge. Thus, there is a need for learning, which can be realized after the baby goes to first grade for the first time.

Sometimes the situation begins to develop in a different way. baby crisis 7 years can also develop if children, under the influence of certain circumstances, do not find themselves on the school bench, however, their position as a schoolboy by this moment has been fully formed. Children have a desire to go to school, they strive to take a new position in society, ordinary preschool activities cease to satisfy them. A child at this age strives for his new social position to be recognized by others. He begins to protest that his parents treat him like a child. At the same time, it does not matter at all where this happens - on the street, among strangers, or at home, when only close people are nearby. This protest can take many different forms.

It goes without saying that the crisis of the age of seven is not formed every minute, so psychologists distinguish several stages in the formation of the position of the future student at once. First of all, they note that closer to seven sodas, children begin to perceive school positively, even though the main meaningful moments of the educational process remain a mystery to them. By and large, such a position of the child is still preschool, he simply transfers it to school soil. The child wants to go to school, but is not going to change his usual way of life. A positive image of this is formed in his mind. educational institution due to external attributes: he becomes interested in whether there is a certain form of clothing there, how his successes will be evaluated, how he will have to behave there.

The next stage in the development of a positive position of the future student in relation to the school is the emergence of an orientation towards the reality of the educational institution, in particular, towards its meaningful moments. However, first of all, the child pays attention not so much to the learning process itself, but to socialization in the team.

The last stage, connected with the formation of the crisis of 7 years of age, is the direct emergence of the child's position, when he is already forming social orientation and a final focus on the key components of life in the school itself. However, as a rule, the student is fully aware of this only closer to the beginning of the third grade of elementary school.

The crisis of the junior school student and the motives of the first grader

The crisis of a junior schoolchild is largely provoked by the active development of the motivational sphere, when he has new motives to commit or not to commit this or that act. Here, the key role is played by the motives that can induce the future first grader to go to school:

• cognitive activity, expressed in the educational process;
• motives aimed at the emergence of new acquaintances, in addition, they are associated with the acceptance as a given that it is necessary to learn;
• the child seeks to take a new position in relations with the people around him, that is, he, by and large, moves from one social group (preschoolers) to a new one (secondary school students);
• motives that have an external orientation, because the child has to somehow obey the requirements imposed on him by adults; V game motif, transferred in his mind to a new sphere, which now represents study;
• competitive motive based on getting a higher grade compared to other students in the class.

To study in detail all the motives that drive the behavior of a child, you can use one well-tested psychological method. Offer the baby short story, where each of the characters in his own way explains his desire to go or not go to school. In this case, the child will have to choose one of the proposed versions. As child psychologists say, children around the age of six have a high motivating force of the game motive, which is often combined with a social or positional motive. In learning conditions (if a 6-year-old child is already attending school), this motive gradually fades into the background, and it is replaced by positional and cognitive ones. This process is much slower than for a six-year-old who is not yet in school.

These data suggest that sending a child to school until he reaches a certain age should not be done. The so-called "crisis of the first class" can have a very negative impact on its development.

Psychologists have noticed that between preschool and primary school age, a child dramatically changes his self-esteem. Before reaching the age of six or seven, he perceives himself exclusively positively, and this does not at all depend on the area in which he evaluates himself. Psychologists clearly demonstrate the manifestation of the crisis of childhood at 6-7 years old with the help of a simple exercise called "Ladder". The child is offered to determine his skills and abilities and put them on a certain rung of the ladder, depending on how he evaluates himself. Children under six years of age always put themselves on the highest rung and define their development as the highest.

Before entering school, the child's responses begin to change dramatically. In many ways, the crisis of a first-grader is connected with the fact that he begins to distinguish between the I-real (the person he really is in this moment) and I-ideal (what he would like to become or what skills to master). The self-esteem of a growing personality becomes more adequate, the baby is no longer going to position himself at the highest level, however, the level of claims that is dictated to him by his ideal self remains very high.

At the same age, the attitude of the child to adults changes greatly. Around the age of seven, children gradually begin to distinguish their behavior when communicating with loved ones and other adults, even strangers. If you ask a six-year-old child what a stranger can talk to him about, he will answer that he will offer to play, call him somewhere. It turns out that children at the age of six perceive strangers as adults as friends or as relatives. But just a couple of months after the child turns six years old, he can offer several options at once regarding communication with a stranger, tell what exactly he expects from the treatment of a stranger. For example, children often report that an outsider might try to get their address, name, and phone number. They begin to gradually distinguish the difference between communication between loved ones and strangers.

At the age of seven, voluntary mental activity and behavior begin to form. It is at this age that the child becomes able to perceive and retain a number of certain rules, and their significance increases significantly. All these abilities appear due to the fact that a rather complex chain of concepts arises in the mind of the child.

The article has been read 5,352 times.

Essay on developmental psychology

Moscow State University them. M.V. Lomonosov

psychology faculty

Department of General Psychology

Moscow, 1999

Introduction.

The process of child development must first of all be considered as a stage-by-stage process. The most essential thing for child psychology is the elucidation of the transition from one stage (or period) to another.

What childhood, period? Are there objective signs, criteria for these periods? Some authors consider this process in time coordinates, dividing time into intervals without distinguishing stages.

A certain age in a child's life, or the corresponding period of his development, is a relatively closed period, the significance of which is determined primarily by its place and functional significance on the general curve of child development. Each age, or period, is characterized by the following indicators:

1) a certain social situation of development or that particular form of relationship that the child enters into with adults in given period;

2) the main or leading type of activity (there are several different types of activity that characterize certain periods of child development);

3) basic mental neoplasms (in each period they exist from individual mental processes to personality traits).

The indicators listed are in difficult relationship. Thus, neoplasms that have arisen in this period change the social situation of child development: the child begins to demand a different system of relations with adults, looks at the world in a different way, and with the help of adults changes the system of relations with them. In other words, having arisen in a certain social situation, new formations come into conflict with it and naturally destroy it.

The problem of periodization of childhood has long attracted the attention of psychologists. There are many classifications of childhood periods. They can be divided into two types.

1. Monosymptomatic allocation of periods (according to one specific feature). Such a classification was proposed by P. P. Blonsky, who introduced the concept of “energy balance”. The latter is related to the degree of ossification of the skeleton. An indicator of ossification can be the presence and condition of the teeth. Therefore, the periods of childhood proposed by him are called as follows: toothless, milk-toothed and permanently toothed childhood. By ossification, of course, one can imagine the calendar age of the child, which, however, has no direct relationship to the psychological period of childhood, this sign has nothing to do with the development of the psyche.

A similar classification was proposed at the time by V. Stern (1922) according to the symptom of speech development. However, is it possible to judge development by any one symptom? In addition, all these classifications do not reveal what lies behind some of the symptoms of childhood periods.

2. Polysymptomatic classifications are typical of the descriptive stage of child psychology. But they also do not give grounds to judge what psychological processes lie behind the description of individual periods of childhood.

At the same time, empirical observations made it possible to discover two types of periods in the development of the child. Some flow very slowly, with imperceptible changes (these have been called stable periods). For others, on the contrary, rapid changes in the child's psyche are characteristic (they were called critical periods). These types of periods seem to intersperse each other.

The history of the discovery of critical periods is peculiar. First, puberty was identified, then a crisis three years of age. The next was the crisis of seven years, associated with the transition to schooling, and the last - the crisis of one year (the beginning of walking, the emergence of words, etc.). Finally, they began to consider the fact of birth as a critical period.

A common symptom of the critical period is the growing difficulty in communicating between an adult and a child, which is a symptom that the child already needs a new relationship with him. At the same time, the course of such periods is extremely individual and variable (this depends, in particular, on the behavior of adults).

At present, the following periodization of childhood can be imagined:

neonatal crisis;

infancy (first year of life);

crisis of the first year;

early childhood;

crisis of three years;

preschool childhood;

crisis of seven years;

primary school age;

crisis 11-12 years;

teenage childhood.

Some psychologists have recently introduced a new period into the periodization of childhood - early adolescence.

General characteristics of crises of child development.

Crises of child development are characterized from a purely external side by features that are the opposite of those periods that are called stable or stable ages. In these periods, over a relatively short period of time, numbering several months, a year, or at most two, sharp and major shifts and shifts, changes and fractures in the personality of the child are concentrated. The child is very short term changes the whole as a whole, in the main features of his personality. Development assumes a stormy, impetuous, sometimes catastrophic character. During these periods, it resembles the revolutionary course of events both in the pace of the changes taking place and in the meaning of the changes taking place. These are turning points in child development, which takes the form of an acute crisis.

The first feature of such periods is that the boundaries separating the beginning and end of the crisis from the adjacent ages are extremely indistinct. The crisis occurs imperceptibly - it is difficult to determine the moment of its onset and end. On the other hand, a sharp aggravation of the crisis is characteristic, usually occurring in the middle of this age period. The presence of such a culminating point, at which the crisis reaches its apogee, characterizes all critical ages and sharply distinguishes them from stable epochs of child development.

The second feature of these ages is what served as the starting point for their empirical study. A significant part of children who are going through critical periods of their development find it difficult to educate. Children seem to fall out of that system pedagogical impact which until quite recently ensured the normal course of their upbringing and education. At school age, during critical periods, children show a drop in school performance, a weakening of interest in schoolwork, and a general decrease in working capacity. At critical ages, the development of the child is often accompanied by more or less acute conflicts with others. The inner life of a child is sometimes associated with painful and painful experiences, with internal conflicts.

Admittedly, this is not always the case. Different children have critical periods in different ways. In the course of a crisis, even among children closest in type of development, in terms of the social situation of children, there are much more variations than in stable periods. Many children at these ages do not have any clearly expressed educational difficulties or decline in school performance. The range of variations in the course of these ages in different children, the influence of external and internal conditions on the course of the crisis itself are so significant and great that they have given rise to many authors to raise the question of whether crises of child development in general are not the product of exclusively external conditions that adversely affect the child. and should they not therefore be considered the exception rather than the rule in the history of child development (Busemann et al.).

External conditions, of course, determine the specific nature of the discovery and flow of critical periods. Different in different children, they cause an extremely variegated and diverse picture. various options critical age. But it is not the presence or absence of any specific external conditions, but the internal logic of the development process itself that determines the need for critical turning points in a child's life. The study of relative indicators convinces us of this.

So, if we move from an absolute assessment of difficult education to a relative one, based on a comparison of the degree of ease or difficulty of raising a child in a stable period preceding or following the crisis, with the degree of difficulty in education during a crisis, then it is impossible not to see that every child at this age becomes relatively difficult to raise. compared to himself at an adjacent stable age. In the same way, if we move from an absolute assessment of school performance to its relative assessment, based on a comparison of the rate of progress of a child in the course of education in different age periods, then it is impossible not to see that every child during a crisis reduces the rate of progress compared to the rate characteristic of stable periods.

The third and, perhaps, the most theoretically important feature of critical ages, the most obscure and therefore difficult to correctly understand the nature of child development during these periods, is the negative character of development that distinguishes them. Everyone who wrote about these peculiar periods noted first of all the fact that development here, in contrast to stable ages, does more destructive than creative work. The progressive development of the child's personality, the continuous construction of the new, which was so distinct at all stable ages, during periods of crisis, as it were, fades and goes out, is temporarily suspended. The processes of withering away and curtailment, disintegration and decomposition of what has developed at the previous stage and distinguished the child of this age come to the fore. During these periods, the child not only acquires, but loses much of what was previously acquired. These ages are not marked at their onset by the appearance of new interests of the child, new aspirations, new types of activity, new forms of inner life. The child entering these periods is rather characterized by the opposite features: he loses interests that yesterday still had a guiding influence on all his activities, which recently absorbed most of his time and attention, and now, as it were, freezes; the previously established forms of external relations and internal life, as it were, are being abandoned. L. Tolstoy figuratively and accurately called one of these critical periods of child development the "desert of adolescence."

This is what they mean in the first place when they talk about the negative nature of critical ages. By this they want to express the idea that development during these periods, as it were, changes its positive, creative meaning, forcing the observer to characterize such ages mainly from a negative, from a negative side. Many authors are even convinced that the whole meaning of development in critical periods is exhausted by this negative content. This belief is enshrined in the very names of critical ages (another such age is called the negative phase, another - the phase of obstinacy, etc.).

The concepts of individual critical ages were introduced into science empirically and randomly. Earlier than others, the crisis of seven years was discovered and described (the seventh year in a child's life is a transitional period between preschool and adolescence). A child of 7-8 years old is no longer a preschooler, but not a teenager either. A seven-year-old is different from both a preschooler and a schoolchild. Because of this, the seven-year period presents educational difficulties. The negative content of this age is manifested, first of all, in the violation of mental balance, in the instability of the will, in an unstable mood, etc.

Later, a three-year-old crisis was discovered and described, called by many authors the phase of obstinacy or stubbornness. During this period, limited to a short period of time, the child's personality undergoes drastic and sudden changes. The child becomes difficult to educate. He shows obstinacy, stubbornness, negativism, capriciousness, self-will. Internal and external conflicts often accompany this entire period.

Still later, the crisis of thirteen years was studied, which is described under the name of the negative phase of the age of puberty. As the name itself shows, the negative content of this period comes to the fore and, on superficial observation, seems to exhaust the entire meaning of development in this period. The drop in academic performance, the decline in performance, disharmony in the internal structure of the personality, the curtailment and withering away of the previously established system of interests, the negative protesting nature of behavior - all this allows us to characterize this period as a stage of such disorientation in internal and external relations, when the human "I" and the world are separated more than in other periods.

Relatively recently, it was theoretically realized that the transition from infancy to early childhood, well studied from the actual side, which takes place about one year of life, is in essence a critical period characterized by hallmarks which are familiar to us general description this particular form of development.

In order to obtain a complete chain of critical ages, we would propose to include in it as the initial link that, perhaps, the most peculiar of all periods of child development, which bears the name of the newborn. This well-studied period stands apart in the system of other ages and is, by its very nature, perhaps the most striking and undoubted crisis in the development of the child. A spasmodic change in the conditions of development in the act of birth, when the newborn quickly finds himself in a completely new environment, changes the whole structure of his life, characterizes the initial period of extrauterine development.

The neonatal crisis separates the embryonic period of a child's development from infancy. The crisis of one year separates infancy from early childhood. The crisis of three years is a transition from early childhood to preschool age. The crisis of seven years is a connecting link between preschool and school age. Finally, the crisis of thirteen coincides with the turning point in development during the transition from school to puberty. Thus, a natural picture is revealed before us. Critical periods are interspersed with stable ones. They are turning points in development, once again confirming that the development of the child is a dialectical process in which the transition from one stage to another is accomplished not by evolution, but by revolution.

If critical ages had not been discovered in a purely empirical way, the concept of them would have to be introduced into the scheme of development on the basis of theoretical analysis. Now the theory remains only to realize and comprehend what has already been established by empirical research.

At these turning points in development, the child becomes relatively difficult to educate due to the fact that the change in the pedagogical system applied to the child does not keep pace with the rapid changes in his personality. Pedagogy of critical ages is the least developed in practical and theoretical terms.

Just as all life is at the same time dying (Engels), so child development - this is one of the complex forms of life - necessarily includes the processes of curtailment and death. The emergence of the new in development necessarily means the death of the old. The transition to a new age is always marked by the decline of the old age. These processes of reverse development and the withering away of the old are concentrated primarily at critical ages. But it would be the greatest delusion to believe that this is the end of the significance of critical ages. Development never stops its creative work, and in these critical periods we observe the constructive work of development. Moreover, the processes of involution, so clearly expressed at these ages, are themselves subordinate to the processes of positive personality building, are directly dependent on them and form one inseparable whole with them. Destructive work is done during these periods to the extent that it is caused by the need to develop the properties and traits of the personality. Actual research shows that the negative content of development during these periods is only the reverse or shadow side of the positive personality changes that make up the main and basic meaning of any critical age.

positive value three year crisis affects the fact that there are new character traits child's personality. It has been established that if the crisis of three years, due to any reasons, proceeds sluggishly and inexpressively, then this leads to a deep delay in the development of the affective and volitional side of the child's personality at a subsequent age. With regard to the seven-year crisis, all researchers noted that, along with negative symptoms, there are a number of great achievements at this age. During this period, the independence of the child increases, his attitude towards other children changes.

During the crisis at thirteen, the decrease in the productivity of the student's mental work is due to the fact that here there is a change in attitude from visualization to understanding and deduction. This transition to the highest form of intellectual activity is accompanied by a temporary decrease in efficiency. This is also confirmed by the rest of the negative symptoms of the crisis: behind every negative symptom lies a positive content, which usually consists in the transition to a new and higher form.

Finally, there is no doubt that there is positive content in the crisis of one year. Here, the negative symptoms are obviously and directly related to the positive acquisitions that the child makes by getting on his feet and mastering speech. The same can be applied to the neonatal crisis. During the period, the child degrades at first even in relation to his physical development. In the first few days after birth, there is a drop in the average weight of the newborn. Adaptation to new form life makes such high demands on the viability of the child that "a person never stands so close to death as at the time of his birth" (Blonsky). Nevertheless, during this period, more than in any of the subsequent crises, the fact comes through that development is a process of formation and the emergence of something new. Everything that we encounter in the development of a child in these days and weeks is one continuous neoplasm. Symptoms negative character, which characterize the negative content of this period, stem from the difficulties caused precisely by the novelty of the first emerging and highly complex form of life.

The most essential content of development at critical ages is the emergence of neoplasms. But these neoplasms, as a concrete study shows, are highly original and specific. Their main difference from neoplasms of stable ages is that they are of a transitional nature. This means that in the future they are not preserved as such in the form in which they arise during the critical period, and are not included as a necessary component in the integral structure of the future personality. They die, as if absorbed by new formations of the next stable age, entering into their composition as a subordinate instance that does not have an independent existence, dissolving and transforming into them so much that without a special and deep analysis it is often impossible to discover the presence of this transformed formation of a critical period in the acquisitions of the subsequent stable age. As such, these neoplasms of crises die off with the onset of the next age, but continue to exist in a latent form within it, not living an independent life, but only participating in that underground development, which at stable ages, as we have seen, leads to a spasmodic, emergence of neoplasms. .

Filling with concrete content these general laws on neoplasms of stable and critical ages should form the content of the subsequent sections of this work, devoted to the consideration of each individual age.

Neoplasms should serve as the main criterion for dividing child development into separate ages in our scheme. The sequence of age periods in this scheme should be determined by the alternation of stable and critical ages. The terms of stable ages, which have more or less distinct boundaries for them, their beginning and end, are most correctly determined precisely by these boundaries. Critical ages, due to the different nature of their course, are most correctly determined by marking the culminating points or peaks of the crisis and taking the nearest six months of the previous age to this period as the beginning of the crisis, and the nearest six months of the next age as its end.

Stable ages, as established by empirical research, have a clearly expressed two-term structure, breaking up into two stages - the first and second. Critical ages have a clearly expressed three-member structure, consisting of three phases connected with each other by lytic transitions: precritical, critical, and postcritical.

neonatal crisis

Birth is, of course, a crisis, because the born child finds himself in completely new conditions of his existence. Psychoanalysts called birth a trauma and believed that the whole subsequent life of a person bears the stamp of the trauma experienced by him at birth.

The cry of a newborn is his first breath; there is still no psychic life here.

The transition from intrauterine to extrauterine life is, first of all, the restructuring of all the physiological mechanisms of the child. It enters a colder and lighter environment, switches to a new form of nutrition and oxygen exchange. What is happening requires a period of adjustment. A sign of this adaptation is the loss/child in weight in the first days after birth.

After the first breath, the child's breathing apparatus begins to work automatically. The situation with the mechanism of adaptation to cold is somewhat worse. The only mechanism that works is the adoption of an “intrauterine” posture if the child is swaddled, that is, nothing more than a decrease in the heat transfer area.

Some scientists believe that a child is born with a ready-made feeding mechanism. No, the baby must learn to suck. This is a very complex mechanism: the oral cavity acts as a vacuum suction pump, the lips provide alternate pressure equalization and create a pressure difference.

The human child is most helpless of all babies at the moment of its birth. This is the immaturity of not only higher regulatory, but also many underlying physiological mechanisms, which leads to the emergence of a new social situation.

During this period, it is generally impossible to consider the child separately from the adult. What has been said is extremely important, because the child does not yet have any means of interacting with adults.

This existence of a child has its own distinct symptoms. A newborn baby spends most of his life

In sleep (approximately 80% in the first two months). Sleep is polyphasic; no concentration at night. Therefore, doctors recommend strictly observing the diet of the newborn, which creates the frequency of sleep, its concentration at night.

Many psychophysiological studies are devoted to the timing of the appearance of the first conditioned reflexes in a newborn child. At the same time, the question of when the neonatal period ends is still controversial. There are three points of view.

1. According to the reflexology, this period ends from the moment the child develops conditioned reflexes from all the main analyzers (end of the 1st-beginning of the 2nd month).

2. The physiological point of view is based on the assumption that this period ends when the child regains its original weight, i.e., from the moment the balance of exchange with the environment is established.

3. The psychological position is associated with determining the end of this period through the appearance in the child of at least a hint of his interaction with an adult (1.6-2.0 months).

The primary forms of such interaction are the specific expressive movements of the child, which for adults are signals inviting them to perform some actions in relation to the child, and the appearance of a smile in the child at the sight of a human face is considered to be such the first expressive movement. Some psychologists believe that this is imprinting, others see some "social need" here. In our opinion, these are incorrect assumptions. Unity with an adult represents a situation of maximum comfort for the child. The signal of discomfort causes appropriate actions in the adult. Moreover, signals can be given both in connection with the lack of comfort, and its presence. The face of an adult causes a state of "bliss" in the child - he smiles. Some authors (in particular, L. I. Bozhovich, 1968) believe that the basis of such unity is the child's need for external stimuli. But the facts do not support this. The child does not have an orienting reaction to the new. She appears at about 4 months.

The smile on the face of a child is the end of the neonatal crisis. From that moment on, his individual mental life begins (1.6-2.0 months). The further mental development of the child is primarily the development of the means of his communication with adults.

That which causes the appearance of a corresponding neoplasm in a critical period is the general line of subsequent development in a stable period.

Let us present some facts confirming what has been said.

Revitalization complex. The child does not just smile, he reacts to the adult with movements of the whole body. The baby is in motion all the time, he responds emotionally. Children who are lagging behind in development lag behind, first of all, precisely in the appearance of the revitalization complex. The revitalization complex, as the first specific behavioral act of the child, becomes decisive for all of his subsequent mental development. Research conducted under the guidance of M. I. Lisina showed that the revitalization complex is the first act of communication between a child and an adult (1974). And only then (by 4 months) does the baby have a reaction to the new. It acts as a prerequisite for all manipulative activity of the child.

Crisis of the first year of life.

The empirical content of the crisis of the first year of life is extremely simple and easy. It was studied before all other critical ages, but its crisis nature was not emphasized. It's about about walking, about such a period when it is impossible to say about a child whether he is walking or not walking, when, using a highly dialectical formula, one can speak of the formation of this walking as a unity of being and non-being, i.e. when she is and is not.

child in early childhood- already walking: poorly, with difficulty, but still a child for whom walking has become the main form of movement in space. The very formation of walking is the first moment in the content of this crisis.

The second point concerns speech. Here again we have such a process in development when it is impossible to say whether the child is a speaker or not. This process is also not completed in one day. This is the latent period of speech formation, which lasts about 3 months.

The third point is from the side of affects and will. E. Kretschmer called them hypobulic reactions. In connection with the crisis, the child has the first acts of protest, opposition, opposing himself to others, "intemperance", in the language of family authoritarian education. It was Kretschmer who suggested calling these phenomena hypobulic in the sense that, relating to volitional reaction, they represent a qualitatively completely different stage in the development of volitional actions and are not differentiated according to will and affect.

Such reactions of the child in crisis age sometimes come to light with very great force and sharpness, especially with improper upbringing, and acquire the character of uniform hypobulic seizures, the description of which is associated with the doctrine of difficult childhood.

Here are three main points that are described as the content of the crisis of the first year of life.

Let us approach the crisis primarily from the point of view of speech, since it is most connected with the emergence of the child's consciousness and with the child's social relations.

Even in infancy, when the child does not have a language in the proper sense of the word, the social situation of development itself leads to the emergence in the child of a very large, complex need to communicate with adults. Due to the fact that the baby himself does not walk, cannot bring an object closer and further away from himself, he must act through others. None of the childhood ages requires such a huge number of forms of cooperation, the most elementary, as infancy. Actions through others are the main form of the child's activity. This is an extremely peculiar contradiction in the development of the infant. The child creates a number of speech surrogates. He has gestures that lead to such, from the point of view of the development of speech, an important gesture as a pointing one. Thus, communication with others is established.

Between the first period (it is called languageless in the development of the child) and the second, when the child develops basic knowledge mother tongue, there is a period of development, which BB. Eliasberg proposed to call it autonomous children's speech. Eliasberg says that before the child begins to speak our language, he forces us to speak his language. This period helps us to understand how the transition from the speechless period, when the child only babbles, to the period when the child masters speech in the proper sense of the word is decided. The transition from the languageless to the linguistic period of development is accomplished through autonomous children's speech.

Two main facts that now form the basis of the doctrine of autonomous children's speech:

1) Autonomous children's speech is not a rare case, not an exception, but a rule, a law that is observed in the speech development of every child. The law can be formulated in the following form: before the child passes from the languageless period of development to mastering the language of adults, he discovers in development the autonomous speech of children. Thus, autonomous speech is a necessary period in the development of any normal child.

2) With many forms of underdevelopment of speech, with disorders speech development autonomous children's speech appears very often and determines the features of abnormal forms of speech development.

In any normally occurring child development, one can observe autonomous speech, which is characterized by three points:

1) Speech is motor, i.e. from the articulatory, phonetic side, does not coincide with our speech.

2) The meanings of autonomous speech do not coincide with the meaning of our words.

3) Along with his own words, the child has an understanding of our words, i.e. Before the child begins to speak, he understands a number of words.

Finally, the last.

Autonomous speech and its meanings are developed with the active participation of the child.

It is a fact that in the development of every child there is a period of autonomous children's speech. Its beginning and end mark the beginning and end of the crisis of the first year of life. It is really impossible to say about a child who has autonomous speech whether he has speech or not, because he does not have speech in our sense of the word, and there is no wordless period, since he still speaks, i.e. we are dealing with the desired transitional formation, which marks the boundaries of the crisis.

Autonomous children's speech not only represents an extremely unique stage in the development of children's speech, but this stage also corresponds to a unique stage in the development of thinking. Depending on the stage of development of speech, thinking reveals certain features. Before the child's speech reaches a certain level of development, his thinking cannot go beyond a certain limit either. This stage equally characterizes both a peculiar period in the development of speech and a peculiar period in the development of children's thinking.

Acquisitions of a child at a critical age are transient. The acquisition of a critical age will never remain for later life, while the acquisitions that a child makes at a stable age are preserved. At a stable age, the child learns to walk, talk, write, etc. AT transitional age the child acquires autonomous speech. If it persists for life, then this is abnormal.

In the autonomous speech of children we find various forms typical of the crisis of the first year. The beginning of this form and the end of children's speech can be regarded as symptoms of the beginning and end of a critical age.

True speech arises, and autonomous speech disappears with the end of the critical age; although the peculiarity of the acquisition of these critical ages is their transient nature, they have a very great genetic significance: they are, as it were, a transitional bridge. Without the formation of autonomous speech, the child would never have moved from the languageless to the linguistic period of development. Truly, the acquisitions of critical ages are not destroyed, but only transformed into a more complex formation. They perform a certain genetic function during the transition from one stage of development to another.

The transitions that occur at critical ages, and in particular, autonomous children's speech, are infinitely interesting in that they represent areas of child development in which we see a naked dialectical pattern of development.

Crisis of three years.

Traditional for Soviet psychology is the analysis of the age-related crisis of development, which involves a description of those neoplasms that arise during this period. Neoplasms of the crisis of 1 year are considered motivated representations, activity; neoplasm crisis 7 years - the emergence of personal consciousness and specific self-esteem; junior school age- reflection, teenage - a sense of adulthood, self-determination.

For all researchers who have studied the crisis for 3 years, it is obvious that the main changes during this period are concentrated around the “I axis”. Their essence is in the psychological emancipation of the I of the child from the surrounding adults, which is accompanied by a number of specific manifestations - stubbornness, negativism, etc. The emergence of the I system, the appearance of "personal action" and the feeling "I myself" is also called the neoplasm of the crisis of 3 years.

It should be noted that the researchers rather identified the area of ​​the essential, the scope of the search, rather than really revealed the psychological content of these neoplasms. Therefore, it is not yet possible to answer the question of how these concepts correlate. Does the ego system, for example, include two other new formations, or do they only partially coincide, or, perhaps, are they completely independent? What are the central concepts among them or their meaning is equivalent?

As a rule, when talking about a crisis of 3 years, stubbornness, negativism, protest against close adults, obstinacy, and the desire for despotic control of others are traditionally called as its symptoms. The analysis of these negative symptoms allowed researchers to identify dissatisfaction with relationships with adults, the desire to take a different position in the outside world as the cause of these manifestations.

At the same time, a number of psychological observations show that a certain number of children show practically no negative manifestations at the indicated age or easily and quickly overcome them, and their personal development proceeds normally. These data encourage us to pay special attention to the positive symptoms of the crisis of 3 years, because without it the picture of development is incomplete, and the understanding of ongoing personal processes is one-sided. However, it is precisely this - positive - side of the crisis that turned out to be the least studied.

In connection with what has been said, it seems productive to distinguish between an objective crisis - a turning point in mental development and the subjective picture of behavior that accompanies this fracture. An objective crisis is a mandatory and natural stage in the development of a personality in ontogeny, which reveals itself in the appearance of personality neoplasms. Outwardly, according to the subjective picture of the course, it will be characterized by positive symptoms, indicating a restructuring of the personality of children, and will not necessarily be accompanied by negative behavior. The appearance of the latter is associated with adverse conditions life and child rearing.

In our work, we tried to discover something qualitatively new in the behavior of children that appears during a period of crisis, to prove that this is a form of manifestation of a personality neoplasm, the formation of which completes the transition to an older age. The main criterion for a qualitatively new childish behavior during the crisis, M. I. Lisina proposed to consider the appearance of an unexpected behavior in a child in a familiar situation, usually accompanied by an affective reaction that does not correspond in strength to the reason and situation that caused it.

In the course of observations, a very peculiar complex of children's behavior was clearly manifested. Firstly, the desire to achieve the result of their activities: they manipulated the subject for a long time and persistently, sorted out options for actions with it, searched for the right one, practically did not get distracted. Failure, as a rule, did not lead to the abandonment of what was planned: the children turned to an adult for help or looked for other, easier solutions, without changing their intention, the ultimate goal.

Secondly, having achieved the desired, they sought to immediately demonstrate their successes to an adult, without whose approval these successes largely lost their value, and joyful feelings about them were significantly overshadowed. The negative or indifferent attitude of an adult to the demonstrated result caused affective experiences in them, prompted them to seek attention and a positive assessment with redoubled energy.

Thirdly, children have a heightened sense dignity, this was expressed in increased resentment and sensitivity to the recognition of achievements by adults, emotional outbursts over trifles, bragging, exaggerations.

The described behavioral complex, at the suggestion of M. I. Lisina, was called pride in achievements. According to our data, it unfolds in three planes of relations - to the objective world, to other people, and to oneself. Considering them in interconnection allows us to see here the knot that is tied in the process of personal development. However, we did not have the necessary evidence for the truth of this. They were supposed to be obtained in an experiment simulating the natural conditions for the emergence of the studied behavioral complex.

When analyzing the psychological literature, criteria were identified according to which the “pride in achievements” complex described by us can be legitimately considered as a correlate of a personality neoplasm. Evidence of this are the transformations in behavior, which simultaneously cover three main aspects of a person's attitude to reality and, at the same time, have the character of not a quantitative, but a qualitative change that occurs at a fairly high pace.

The productive side of activity is becoming more and more significant for children, and the fixation of their success by adults is an important element in its implementation. Accordingly, the subjective value of what is being done also increases, which brings to life the appearance of affective forms of behavior, such as exaggeration of one's achievements, attempts to devalue one's failure. The activity of children in the search for an assessment of an adult is also increasing, and the means of this search are being improved.

In the younger age group children, as a rule, indifferently perceive the assessment of an adult: the behavior in response to a positive and negative assessment does not change significantly. In the middle age group, however, a negative assessment, even if it is fair, gives rise to a whole range of affective manifestations. At the same time, there is special treatment to an unfair opinion. Undeserved praise makes children feel embarrassed and embarrassed. In the older age group, the brightness of affective manifestations weakens somewhat, the ability to resist unfair assessment, to argue the value of one's activity, comes to the fore more and more.

In general, the results obtained, meeting the criteria put forward, indicate that during the crisis period of 3 years, a personal neoplasm is formed, which manifests itself as pride in one's achievements.

The development of attitudes that determine the formation of a personal neoplasm during the crisis period of three years

According to literary sources, in early age the child's attitude to the objective world is substantially transformed. The basis of this transformation is the mastery of the actual objective action, i.e., the socially developed method of its use, which forms in the child an objective attitude to reality. In close connection with this is the development of the child's relationship to an adult: “... the process of mastering an objective action has for the child the meaning of those relations that he enters into with an adult, it is precisely because of this that a tendency arises to follow the pattern of action shown by an adult ... The result obtained after the implementation of the objective action cannot serve as a criterion for the correct use of the object-tool. Such a criterion can only be compliance with the model, the carrier of which is an adult. In other words, a young child develops an attitude towards an adult not only as a source of warmth and care, but also as a role model. Much less is known about how a child's attitude toward himself develops at an early age. As a rule, only the role of speech in this process is noted: the use of personal pronouns and names is assessed as an indicator of the development of children's self-awareness. The actual lack of knowledge of the genesis of self-attitude in children of this age, which does not allow us to fully reveal the specifics of personality neoformation during the crisis period of 3 years, prompted us to investigate this issue with special attention. This is all the more important, since it is the new sense of self that is recognized as the most important neoplasm during the crisis of 3 years.

It was experimentally established that in the first year of life a very peculiar attitude of the child towards himself develops. It develops mainly in the course of communication with adults, quite adequately and directly reflecting those feelings of love, care, unconditional acceptance of the personality that come from others and are addressed to the baby. As a result of this, the baby develops an emotionally positive self-awareness of his significance for others. The authors call this attitude of the child towards himself general self-esteem. However, the role of the experience of object-manipulative activity in the development of the image of oneself is still very insignificant. Although the infant experiences the result of his actions - he pleases or upsets him - but this experience does not have the character of "success" or "failure" in psychological meaning these terms on a personal level. On the contrary, a preschooler is able to experience the result of his actions as personally significant: he is proud of what he has achieved, and failure can hurt him. Attitude towards oneself, the image of oneself begins to be more and more corrected by experience independent activity, and by the end preschool age self-esteem becomes an independent motive of behavior.

At an early age, the direct, emotional relationship of an adult to a child, which is characteristic of the infantile period, begins to become more complicated due to the demands made by adults on the achievements of the child in the subject area against the background and while maintaining the previous forms of relations. This practice, reflected in the child's self-image, in turn changes it. In children of early age, differentiating from general self-esteem, an attitude towards themselves is formed, based on their real achievements, that is, on the basis of a specific self-esteem. In other words, the differentiation of the relationship of an adult to a child - direct and indirect in the form of an assessment of a specific achievement - leads to a differentiation of the child's self-assessment into a general and mediated achievement - this is the essence of the processes that take place in early childhood along the line of development of the child's relationship to himself.

The experimentally obtained data made it possible to conclude that in the mind of a 2-2.5-year-old child, the attitude of adults to his achievements has not yet been singled out as an independent one, but is immersed in the context of general relations between them, which, being colored emotionally positively, communicate the same modality to experiences and any specific assessment of the experimenter, regardless of its sign.

With age (2.5-3 years), children's reactions to an adult's assessment become more and more stable, gradually separating themselves from the context in which they were included. This is revealed in the nature of the influence of an adult's assessment on the activities of children: if in the younger children negative assessments reduced its attractiveness and upset activity, while positive assessments, on the contrary, stimulated cooperation and contributed to the development of children's initiative, then older children, in response to a negative assessment, began to vary the means aimed at search for a way out of the created difficulty, while maintaining a generally positive attitude towards the activity itself and communication with adults.

In parallel with this, the nature of children's experiences of the events of the experiment changed. They acquired an increasingly personal coloration: failure, even before an adult's assessment, caused embarrassment in older children, a feeling of awkwardness, a desire to avoid it, to make sure that it was not noticed; the experience of joy with good luck was accompanied by a range of other feelings - the children involuntarily demanded attention and recognition of their good luck by others, experienced a sense of pride associated with it.

The children's attitude to a particular assessment turned out to depend not only on the direct attitude of adults towards them, but also on the assessment strategy that the experimenter implemented in different situations. The previous positive experience gained in situations where only good luck was noted increased the children's desire to look at the pictures, prompting them to diversify the content of contacts with an adult. Children practically did not refuse joint activity, did not try to evade it. In contrast to this negative experience, obtained in situations where only failures were noted, weakened the motivation of children to carry out and continue activities. sharply reduced speech utterances, they, as a rule, were determined only by the scope of the “naming” task. Often there were cases of refusal of the proposed activity or its replacement by emotional communication.

The strategy of evaluating children, in which only failures, mistakes of the child are noted, is emotionally very difficult for them and therefore, one might think, unproductive for development. The negative evaluation strategy, conflicting with the child's previous experience, gives rise to a feeling of unhappiness in him, directs children's activity to find a way out of the situation, often returning him to genetically earlier forms of attitude - direct affective-personal connections, contributes to the transfer of negative experiences to the sphere his subject activity.

So, the given data show that during the crisis period of 3 years, a new personality formation appears, manifesting itself in the form of pride in achievements. It integrates the objective attitude towards reality that developed in children during early childhood, the attitude towards an adult as a model, the attitude towards oneself, mediated by achievement.

The difficulty of finding an exact term that allows us to express with sufficient clarity the specifics of a personality neoplasm that occurs at the turn of early and preschool childhood, a new vision of the world and oneself in it, forces us to resort to a detailed description.

The new vision of oneself consists in the fact that the child for the first time discovers the material projection of his Self, which can be embodied outside, and his achievements can serve as its measure. Therefore, each result of the activity becomes for the child and the affirmation of his Self. age period an adult appears, the child transforms his attitude towards him - the adult appears as a connoisseur and connoisseur of children's achievements. Therefore, the baby begins to perceive assessments with a special predilection, seek and demand from him the recognition of his achievements and thereby assert himself. The approval and praise of an adult gives the child a sense of pride, self-esteem. In turn, the recognition of others transforms his feelings when he achieves the result: from joy and sorrow, these feelings turn into experiences of success or failure. The objective world for the child becomes not only the world of practical action, the world of knowledge, but also the sphere of self-realization, the sphere where he tries his strength, possibilities and asserts himself. The novelty of the emerging vision and the sharpness of feelings associated with this give rise to the appearance of a child of a critical age.

The formation of a new personal structure, in which one's own self is projected into various forms of activity and onto others in connection with it, has important consequences for further development child. The sphere of achievements, merging with the sphere of attitude towards oneself, I of the baby, contributes to the emergence of children's pride - a powerful incentive for self-development and self-improvement. Due to the fact that the child's self can now be projected outward, molded into the form of achievement, objective prerequisites are created for the emancipation of children's assessment of themselves from the opinions of others about them, for the development of internal criteria for self-esteem, for the development of its adequacy, realism. The liberation of attitudes towards oneself from the opinions of adults serves as the basis for the development of a sense of self-esteem in children, which becomes a source of development and an internal regulator of independent activity and relationships with others. The connection “I and my achievements”, which is tied up during the crisis, becomes an impetus for the development of children's self-awareness. The self of the child, being objectified in the product, the result of activity, can appear before him in the form of an object that needs to be recognized and analyzed.

The activity of the personality structure gives rise to a number of specific age-related phenomena described in psychological literature. Thus, for example, the phenomenon of sensitivity to property reveals a special partiality of children to the possession of things. This is based on a peculiar fusion of the object and the I.

L. I. Bozhovich, calling the emergence of the I system a personal neoplasm that takes shape during the crisis of 3 years, wrote: “In order to say something more meaningful about the structure of the “I system”, special studies on this problem are needed. What is the content of the new it brings to the understanding of the emerging system of "I"? The ego system, which emerges at the turn of early and preschool age, can be understood as the most important step in the development of self-awareness. Prior to its occurrence, during infancy, the child's self exists directly, in the stream of being, and is realized by the baby in the form of experiencing its existence. In early childhood, there are episodic situations of getting out of direct absorption in being. The most famous example of such situations is the child's perception of himself in the mirror and in photographs. The main preparation for a new form of self-awareness takes place not in the sphere of direct self-perception and self-knowledge, but in the course of the development of the subject practice of the child and business communication with adults, the content of which is the acquisition of cultural experience. During the critical period, a system is formed that generalizes the entire experience of early childhood and allows the child's ego to get out of the state of direct absorption in being, to appear as an object, to carry out reflection. The peculiarity of this age-related form of self-awareness lies in the fact that it is mediated - by an achievement in activity - in nature and is not performed on an internal, ideal plane as an act of introspection, but has an externally developed character of the process of assessing one's achievement and comparing one's assessment with the assessment of others, but by yourself with other people.

The formation of such a system of the Self, where the starting point is the achievement obtained in interaction with the outside world, marks the transition to preschool childhood, which A. N. Leontiev called "the period of the actual folding of the personality."

Crisis of seven years.

On the basis of the emergence of personal consciousness, a crisis of 7 years arises

The main symptoms of the crisis:

1) loss of immediacy. Wedged between desire and action is the experience of what significance this action will have for the child himself;

2) mannerisms; the child builds something out of himself, hides something (the soul is already closed);

3) a symptom of "bitter candy": the child feels bad, but he tries not to show it. Difficulties in upbringing arise, the child begins to withdraw and becomes uncontrollable.

These symptoms are based on the generalization of experiences. A new inner life has arisen in the child, a life of experiences that is not directly and immediately superimposed on the outer life. But this inner life is not indifferent to the outer, it influences it. The emergence of inner life is an extremely important fact; now the orientation of behavior will be carried out within this inner life. The crisis requires a transition to a new social situation, requires a new content of relations. The child must enter into relations with society as a set of people who carry out compulsory, socially necessary and socially useful activities. In our conditions, the tendency towards it is expressed in the desire to go to school as soon as possible. Often the higher stage of development that a child reaches by the age of seven is confused with the problem of the child's readiness for schooling. Observations in the first days of a child's stay at school show that many children are not yet ready to study at school.

D. B. Elkonin, who worked as a teacher for many years primary school, recalled how a child in first grade in the first lesson was asked to draw 4 circles, and then color three in yellow and one in blue. Children painted with different colors and said - "So beautiful." This observation shows that the rules have not yet become the rules of the child's behavior; we still need to work with such children, bring them to the appropriate school form.

Another observation: after the first lessons, the teacher does not assign homework. Children say: "And the lessons?" This shows that the lessons are important for them, as they put them in a certain relationship with others. One more observation:

change at school The teacher is a "bunch of grapes", the student must definitely touch the teacher. These are the remnants of former relationships, former forms of communication.

However, the school is a special institution, it is a public institution where, according to Hegel, the spirit must be led to the rejection of its whims, to knowledge and desire for the common. This transformation of the soul is education in the proper sense of the word.

The “symptom of the loss of immediacy” (L. S. Vygotsky) becomes a symptom that cuts through the preschool and primary school ages: between the desire to do something and the activity itself, a new moment arises - an orientation in what the implementation of this or that activity will bring to the child This is internal orientation in what meaning the implementation of activities can have for the child - satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the place that the child will take in relations with adults or other people. Here, for the first time, the emotional-semantic orienting basis of the act appears. According to the views of D. B. Elkonin, where and when an orientation toward the meaning of an act appears, there and then the child passes into a new age. The diagnosis of this transition is one of the most actual problems modern developmental psychology. This problem is directly related to the problem of the child's readiness for schooling. The studies of N.I. Gutkina, E.E. Kravtsova, K.N. Polivanova, N.G. Salminova and many other psychologists are devoted to a detailed analysis of this complex phenomenon. L. S. Vygotsky said that readiness for school education is formed in the course of education itself. As long as the child has not begun to be taught in the logic of the program, there is still no readiness for learning; usually readiness for schooling develops by the end of the first half of the first year of schooling.

In recent years, there has been an increase in preschool education, but it is characterized by an exclusively intellectualistic approach. The child is taught to read, write, count. However, you can be able to do all this, but not be ready for schooling. Readiness is determined by the activity in which all these skills are included. The assimilation of knowledge and skills by children at preschool age is included in the game activity, and therefore this knowledge has a different structure. Hence the first requirement that must be taken into account when entering school is that readiness for schooling should never be measured by the formal level of skills and abilities, such as reading, writing, counting. Owning them, the child may not yet have the appropriate mechanisms of mental activity.

How to diagnose the readiness of a child for schooling? According to D. B. Elkonin, first of all, attention should be paid to the emergence of voluntary behavior - how does the child play, does he obey the rule, does he take on roles? The transformation of a rule into an internal instance of behavior is an important sign of readiness.

Under the leadership of D. B. Elkonin, an interesting experiment was carried out.

There are a lot of matches in front of the child. The experimenter asks to take one at a time and shift them to another place. The rules are deliberately made meaningless.

The subjects were children 5, 6, 7 years old. The experimenter watched the children through Gesell's mirror. Children who are getting ready for school scrupulously do this work and can sit at this lesson for an hour. Smaller children continue to move matches for a while, and then they begin to build something. The youngest bring their own task to these activities. When saturation occurs, the experimenter enters and asks to work more: "Let's agree, we'll do this bunch of matches and that's it." And the older child continued this monotonous, meaningless work, because he agreed with the adult. The experimenter said to children of middle preschool age: "I will leave, but Pinocchio will remain." The child's behavior changed: he looked at Pinocchio and did everything right. If you perform this action several times with a substitute link, then even without Pinocchio, the children obey the rule. This experiment showed that behind the fulfillment of the rule lies a system of relations between a child and an adult. When a child obeys a rule, he meets the adult with joy.

So, behind the fulfillment of the rule, D. B. Elkonin believed, lies the system of social relations between the child and the adult. First, the rules are executed in the presence of an adult, then with the support of an object that replaces the adult, and, finally, the rule becomes internal. If the observance of the rule did not include a system of relations with an adult, then no one would ever follow these rules. The readiness of the child for schooling involves the "growing" of the social rule, emphasized D. B. Elkonin, however, a special system for the formation of internal rules in modern system preschool education is not provided.

The transition to the school system is a transition to the assimilation of scientific concepts. The child must move from a reactive program to a program of school subjects (L. S. Vygotsky). The child must, firstly, learn to distinguish between different aspects of reality, only under this condition can one proceed to subject education. The child must be able to see in an object, in a thing, some of its separate aspects, parameters that make up the content of a separate subject of science. Secondly, in order to master the basics of scientific thinking, the child needs to understand that his own point of view on things cannot be absolute and unique.

J. Piaget singled out two important characteristics of the thinking of a child of preschool age. The first concerns the transition from the pre-operational thinking of a preschool child to the operational thinking of a schoolchild. It is carried out through the formation of operations; and an operation is an internal action that has become reduced, reversible and coordinated with other actions into an integral system. The operation comes from external action, from the manipulation of objects.

As we have repeatedly noted, human action is characterized by a complex relationship between the orienting and executive parts. P. Ya. Galperin emphasized that the characterization of an action only in terms of its executive part is insufficient. This remark, first of all, refers to J. Piaget, since he, speaking about action, does not single out the psychological and objective content in it.

Under the leadership of P. Ya. Galperin, studies were carried out that made it possible to reveal the process of transition from preschool to the beginnings of the school worldview. As you know, the thinking of a preschooler is characterized by a lack of ideas about invariance. Let's carry out, following Piaget, a simple experiment. Two identical vessels are placed on the table in front of the child, up to the same height, filled with a colored liquid. Already four or six years old children recognize that the amount of liquid in two vessels is the same. After that, the liquid is poured from one large vessel into two small ones (the level of liquid in them is higher than in the original vessel) and the child is asked whether there will be as much liquid in two small vessels together as in a larger vessel. Usually children of four or six years old do not recognize equalities (invariance). They clearly see that the level of water in a large vessel is lower than in small ones and therefore conclude that there should be less liquid in it. Sometimes children note that there are two small vessels, which means there is more liquid in them. Even at six or seven years old, some children think that the amount of fluid is not retained by a transfusion if the differences in level are very pronounced. It is only at the age of seven or eight that the child recognizes the conservation of quantity. J. Piaget associated the disappearance of this phenomenon with the formation of operations.

Research carried out under the direction of P. Ya. Galperin showed that the absence of invariance is based on the child's global representation of the object. In order to overcome the direct relation to reality, it is necessary to select the parameters of the object, and then compare them with each other.

In the study, children were taught to apply various measures to the object, with the help of which the child could select the appropriate parameter and, on this basis, compare the objects with each other. It turned out that after the selection of individual parameters was formed, the phenomena of J. Piaget disappeared. Qualitative changes took place not only in the sphere of thinking, but also in speech, imagination, memory and even perception of children.

Standards in the field of perception, measures in the field of thinking are means that destroy the direct perception of an object. They allow indirect, quantitative comparison different sides reality.

By mastering the means for isolating the parameters of things, the child masters socially developed methods of cognition of objects. At an early age, the child masters socially developed methods of using objects; in the transition from preschool to primary school age, he masters socially developed methods of cognition of objects. This realm of human means cognitive activity has so far been little studied, and the special merit of P. Ya. Galperin lies in the fact that he showed what

mastering the means of cognitive activity is of great importance, which deepened the concept of L. S. Vygotsky.

The second phenomenon described by J. Piaget is the phenomenon of egocentrism, or centralization. In order for the transition from pre-operational thinking to operational thinking to become possible, it is necessary for the child to move from centering to decentering. Centering means that the child can only see the whole world from his own point of view. There are no other points of view for the child at first. A child cannot take the standpoint of science and society.

Exploring the phenomenon of centralization, D. B. Elkonin suggested that in the role-playing collective game, that is, in the leading type of activity of a preschool child, the main processes associated with overcoming "cognitive egocentrism" take place. Frequent switching from one role to another in a variety of children's games, the transition from the position of a child to the position of an adult leads to a systematic "shattering" of the child's ideas about the absoluteness of his position in the world of things and people and creates conditions for the coordination of different positions. This hypothesis was tested in a study by V. A. Nedospasova.

Thanks to decentration, children become different, the subject of their thoughts, their reasoning becomes the thought of another person. No learning is possible until the teacher's thought becomes the subject of the child's reasoning. Decentration is formed in such a way that at first many centrations are formed, then there is a differentiation of oneself from the other and his point of view without actually becoming aware of it, but only assuming it.

So, by the end of preschool age, we have three lines of development.

1 -- line of formation of arbitrary behavior,

2 - the line of mastering the means and standards of cognitive activity,

3 - the line of transition from egocentrism to decentration. Development along these lines determines the child's readiness for schooling.

To these three lines, which were analyzed by D.B. Elkonin, it is necessary to add the child's motivational readiness for schooling. As was shown by L. I. Bozhovich, the child strives for the function of a student. For example, during the "play at school" children younger ages take on the function of a teacher, older preschoolers prefer the role of students, since this role seems to them especially significant.

L. S. Vygotsky identifies some features that characterize the crisis of seven years:

1) Experiences acquire meaning (an angry child understands that he is angry), thanks to this, the child develops new relationships with himself that were impossible before the generalization of experiences.

2) By the crisis of seven years, for the first time, a generalization of experiences, or an affective generalization, the logic of feelings, arises. There are deeply retarded children who experience failures at every step, lose. A generalization of feelings arises in a child of school age, i.e., if some situation has happened to him many times, he develops an affective formation, the nature of which is related to a single experience or affect in the same way as a concept is related to a single perception or memory.

By the age of 7, a number of complex formations arise, which lead to the fact that the difficulties of behavior change dramatically and radically, they are fundamentally different from the difficulties of preschool age.

Such neoplasms as pride, self-esteem remain, but the symptoms of the crisis (manipulation, antics) are transient. In the crisis of seven years, due to the fact that a differentiation of the internal and external arises, that for the first time a meaningful experience arises, an acute struggle of experiences also arises. A child who does not know whether to take bigger or sweeter candies is not in a state of internal struggle, although he hesitates. The internal struggle (contradictions of experiences and the choice of one's own experiences) becomes possible only now.

Crisis 11-12 years.

The description of the critical age of 11-12 years is given very briefly, since this crisis has been studied so far very little.

Junior school age

This is an important period of childhood, in which educational activities become the leading one. From the moment the child enters school, it begins to mediate the entire system of his relations. One of its paradoxes is the following: being social in its meaning, content and form, it is at the same time carried out purely individually, and its products are the products of individual assimilation.

In the process learning activities the child masters the knowledge and skills developed by mankind. But the child does not change them. What then does he do? It turns out that the subject of change in educational activity is its subject itself. Of course, the subject changes in every other activity, but nowhere else does it become a special subject of change. It is the subject of learning activity who sets himself the task of changing through this extended realization.

The second feature of this activity is the child's acquisition of the ability to subordinate his work in various classes to a mass of rules binding on all as a socially developed system. Obedience to rules forms in the child the ability to regulate his behavior and thus higher forms of arbitrary control of it.

The learning activity has the following structure:

learning objectives

learning activities

control action

assessment action

This activity is associated primarily with the assimilation by younger students theoretical knowledge, i.e., those in which the main relations of the studied subject are revealed. When solving educational problems, children master common ways orientation in such relationships. Educational activities are aimed at the assimilation of these methods by children.

An important place in the overall structure of educational activity is also occupied by the actions of control and evaluation, which allow students to carefully monitor correct execution just mentioned learning activities, and then identify and evaluate the success of solving the entire learning task.

The main neoplasm of primary school age is abstract verbal-logical and reasoning thinking, the emergence of which significantly restructures other cognitive processes of children; thus, memory at this age becomes thinking, and perception becomes thinking. Thanks to such thinking, memory and perception, children are able to successfully master authentic scientific concepts and operate on them. Another important new formation of this age is the ability of children to arbitrarily regulate their behavior and control it, which becomes an important quality of the child's personality. After primary school age comes a critical period of 11-12 years, and then adolescence and early youth. These ages are of great interest both for psychology and for practical pedagogy. And, as you know, there is a lot of material here (especially about teenagers).

Conclusion.

At some ages, development is characterized by a slow, evolutionary or lytic course. These are the ages of a predominantly smooth, often imperceptible internal change in the child's personality, which takes place through minor "molecular" movements. Here for more or less long term, usually covering several years, there are no fundamental, abrupt shifts and changes that rebuild the entire personality of the child. More or less noticeable changes in the personality of the child occur here only as a result of a long-term course of a latent "molecular" process. They come out and become accessible to direct observation only as the conclusion of long processes of latent development.

At these relatively stable or stable ages, development occurs mainly through microscopic changes in the personality of the child, which, accumulating to a certain limit, are then abruptly revealed in the form of some kind of age-related neoplasm. These ages are occupied, judging purely chronologically, most of childhood. Since within such ages development proceeds, as it were, along an underground path, when a child is compared at the beginning and at the end of a stable age, enormous changes in his personality come out especially clearly.

These ages have been studied much more fully than those characterized by a different type of development - crises. They were discovered in a purely empirical way and have not yet been brought into the system, not included in the general periodization of child development. Many authors even question the inner necessity of their existence. They are inclined to take them more as "diseases" of development, for its deviation from the normal path, than for internal necessary periods of any child's development. Almost none of the bourgeois researchers could theoretically realize their real significance. An attempt to systematize and theoretically interpret them, to include them in the general scheme of child development, undertaken by L.S. Vygotsky, should therefore be regarded as perhaps the first attempt of this kind.

None of the researchers can deny the very fact of the existence of these peculiar periods in child development, and even the most non-dialectically inclined authors recognize the need to admit, at least in the form of a hypothesis, the existence of crises in the development of the child, even in the earliest childhood (Stern).

Bibliography

1) Vygotsky L.S. Collected works in 6 volumes. Volume 4

2) Vygotsky L.S. article "Problems of age periodization of child development"

3) Elkonin D.B. "Selected Psychological Works"

4) Guskova T.V., Elagina M.G. article "Personal neoplasms in children during the crisis of three years".

5) Obukhova L.F. textbook "Children's (age) psychology".