286 III. DEvELOPMENT
What Is  Middle Childhood?: 
Having “Sense,” Getting Noticed, 
and Developing Skills for Life
Middle childhood is a period of substantial 
physical, cognitive, social–  emotional, and 
environmental growth and change; these 
changes enable children to display a broad -
er range of personality differences than in 
early childhood and set the stage for the sig -
nificant personality development that is to 
come in adolescence and early adulthood. 
Fifty-five years ago, White (1965) marshaled 
evidence for an important transition at the 
start of middle childhood called “the age 5- 
to 7-year shift.” White argued that children 
across cultures undergo cognitive changes 
during this transitional period that enable 
them to take on greater responsibilities and 
to engage with a broader social world than 
earlier in childhood. Although later research 
has revealed that the transition may be grad -
ual and that children continue to change 
significantly throughout middle childhood, 
White did highlight important changes that 
affect children’s personality development 
during this transition (McAdams, 2015; 
Sameroff & Haith, 1996). In this section, I 
review the significance of middle childhood, 
based on both contemporary empirical re -
search on children’s changing capacities and 
evolutionary investigations into the role of 
this period in the life course.
In terms of biological development, middle 
childhood is most similar to the “juvenile” 
stage observed in other primates between 
infancy and puberty (Campbell, 2011). The 
early part of middle childhood (roughly the 
5- to 7-year shift) is characterized by a wide 
range of biological changes: eruption of the 
first molars, which enables children to eat a 
wider variety of foods; greater motor control 
similar to that seen in adults; brain volume 
nearly reaching its ultimate size; the start of 
cortical maturation and increased reorgani -
zation; and adrenarche —the initial secretion 
of the adrenal glands, leading to increased 
sexual differentiation in brain pathways and 
greater brain plasticity (Campbell, 2011). 
These biological changes are accompanied 
by a variety of cognitive changes: greater 
skill in reasoning and problem solving, 
stronger capacities for adopting multiple 
perspectives ( theory of mind ), and growth in attention and working memory (Del Giu -
dice, 2014; McAdams, 2015). By around age 
4 or 5, children can mentally project them -
selves into the future (Atance, 2008); their 
capacities for future thinking continue to de -
velop during middle childhood. School-  age 
children experience continued growth in the 
ability to both preexperience future events 
(prospection ; Coughlin, Lyons, & Ghetti, 
2014) and plan for the future (Gauvain, 
Perez, & Reisz, 2018), although by the end 
of middle childhood, these capacities for fu -
ture thinking do not yet reach the levels seen 
in adulthood.
During the transition to middle child -
hood, children change along a number of 
social–  emotional dimensions as well. Chil -
dren’s skills in emotion regulation improve 
considerably, both before the start of middle 
childhood and across the middle childhood 
years. Between ages 3 and 5, children’s ex -
ecutive functioning abilities show large im -
provements, leading to significant gains in 
emotion regulation, and school-  age children 
continue to improve in their use of internal, 
cognitive strategies for emotion regulation 
(Eisenberg, Hofer, Sulik, & Spinrad, 2014). 
By around age 8, children develop greater 
understanding of their own characteristics 
(including their traits, interests, and abili -
ties) and are able to use that information to 
evaluate and reflect on their thoughts, emo -
tions, and behaviors (Davis-Kean, Jager, & 
Collins, 2009). Relatedly, across the middle 
childhood years, children become better 
able to compare themselves to others, which 
leads to more accurate and, in many cases, 
less positive evaluations of their own behav -
iors and skills; children’s emerging under -
standing of their own race, gender, sociode -
mographic status, and appearance begin to 
affect their well-being later in middle child -
hood as well (Davis-Kean et al., 2009).
All of these biological, cognitive, and 
social–  emotional changes enable children to 
become a more critical part of their societ -
ies during middle childhood; thus, children’s 
contexts typically change in significant ways 
in middle childhood as well. Based on a 
comprehensive review of the cross-  cultural 
ethnographic record, Lancy (2008; Lancy 
& Grove, 2011) concluded that, across 
cultures, middle childhood is about “mak -
ing sense” and “getting noticed.” “Making 