Which stage is known for the development of self-concept in children?
2026
Which stage is known for the development of self-concept in children?
Answer: C. Middle childhood — Concept: Self-concept is the organised set of beliefs a person holds about their own attributes, abilities and worth — the working answer to the question "Who…
- A.
Adolescence
- B.
Adulthood
- C.
Middle childhood
- D.
Infancy
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Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
Concept: Self-concept is the organised set of beliefs a person holds about their own attributes, abilities and worth — the working answer to the question "Who am I?". Developmental psychology treats it as something that is built up in stages: a bodily sense of self appears first, then concrete behavioural self-descriptions, and only later a psychological picture of the self in terms of stable traits and competencies. That first organised, comparative form — the point at which a child can describe the self in stable trait terms rather than by isolated acts — is what child-development syllabi mean by "the development of self-concept"; the stages after it refine and reorganise the self-concept rather than build it for the first time.
Application: Between roughly 6 and 12 years — middle childhood, the school-going years — the child is placed for the first time in a sustained field of peers, classroom tasks and assessed performance. Social comparison with age-mates plus feedback from teachers and peers turns scattered self-descriptions ("I can run fast") into an organised, relatively stable self-concept covering academic, athletic, social and behavioural competence. Erikson labels this stage industry vs. inferiority, and Susan Harter’s research locates exactly here the shift from listing concrete acts to describing enduring traits. So the stage known for the development of self-concept in children is middle childhood.
Cross-check — how the four stages line up:
Stage | Approx. age | Hallmark for the self |
|---|---|---|
Infancy | birth to ~2 years | Mirror self-recognition around 18 months; sense of self is bodily, not yet described in words |
Middle childhood | ~6 to 12 years | Social comparison in school builds an organised, trait-based self-concept |
Adolescence | ~11 to 19 years | Self-description becomes more abstract and differentiated as the self-concept is reworked into a personal identity (identity vs. role confusion) |
Adulthood | ~20 years onward | Self-description is organised around settled roles — partner, parent, professional |
Read down the table and the sequence is clear: the self is first sensed (infancy), then compared and described in trait terms (middle childhood), then made abstract and integrated into an identity (adolescence). The self-concept does keep changing after middle childhood — in adolescence it becomes more abstract, more differentiated and tied to identity — but the question asks about children, and among the stages offered it is the school-age middle-childhood band in which an organised self-concept is first built. That is why child-development syllabi credit middle childhood with the development of self-concept in children.
Answer: Middle childhood.