Megan Baur is a 6-year-old Caucasian female who currently attends the first grade at a private school, Rolland Park School for girls. She lives with her birth parents and her 4-year-old brother, Kyle, in a suburban house on the outskirts of Baltimore City. Her father is a successful chiropractor and her mother works part time as a dental hygienist.
Her mother was a stay home mom from Megan’s birth till very recently, when she decided to return to work only during the hours while Kyle, the youngest attends nursery school. Megan is a very bright young girl who seems to be progressing in the middle childhood level already. A child in this level must deal with demands to learn new skills or risk a sense of inferiority, failure and incompetence. The opinions of their classmates’ matter more than ever before and they begin to feel the effects of peer pressure. In this stage a person can do mental operations but only with real (concrete) objects, events or situations.
Logical reasons are understood. For example, Megan can understand the need to go to bed early when it is necessary to get up early the next morning. Children that are in this stage attend school and they enjoy mastering lots of new physical skills. They learn rapidly in school. She does very well in school and is always will to do school work without even being provoked.
She is working on abstract ideas of adding and subtracting things and sounding out words for reading. She is above her age group at reading and has a very extensive vocabulary. Megan seems to enjoy the challenge of reading and it makes her feel grown-up and superior to her younger sibling, since he is too young to read. She is always trying to teach him what she did in class that day, by reenacting the lesson plan of the class.
In doing so, she unintentionally reviews and reinforces the material in her own head, helping her to obtain a better grasp on it. Megan acts very old for her age and is always trying to do adult like things; her new favorite hobby is to talk on the phone to her classmates. She is very friendship orientated and labels everyone as her best friend; many girls at school that come over to play, and she also uses it when describing peers in conversation. She appears to very friendly to all children she comes in contact with.
Megan is a very active child and has many structured events during the week aside from her normal daily schooling. Every Monday night she has gymnastics class right after school, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays she plays soccer during the fall. During the spring she plays softball instead of soccer. While Megan enjoys her soccer games she is very sensitive to the failure of her team and overcritical of herself when reevaluating the game. She expects an almost perfection like standard for herself in all areas of her life and some times is easily defeated if she does not meet her desired expectations.
This seems to steam from her parents disciplinary system of, rewarding her successes, yet; they are very sympathetic and understanding of her failures also and do not scold her or punish her for them. Her parents are not over critical, or over bearing of her, they only have normal expectations for their children. My prediction is that she will resolve this over-criticalness with time; she is just not use to failure because she has not had to deal with it much in her short life span. According to Erikson’s theory of psychosocial crisis, Megan is progressing adequately toward the direction of industry.
She strives very hard to accomplish goals and tasks that are assigned to her. When given a 25-piece puzzle she tediously works on it until it is completed. Megan often chooses to do cognitive things, such as: puzzles, coloring book pages, building blocks, and board or card games, in her spare time. Megan receives a lot of positive reinforcement from her parents when she successful completes a task at school or in her extra curricular actives, which enforces her to .
