This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Social competence refers to the ability to engage in meaningful interactions with others. It is a crucial skill potentially malleable to interventions. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to select which children, which periods in a child’s life, and which underlying skills form optimal targets for interventions. Development of social competence is complex to characterize because (a) it is by nature context- dependent; (b) it is subserved by multiple relevant processes that develop at different times in a child’s life; and (c) over the years multiple, possibly conflicting, ways have been coined to index a child’s social competence. The current paper elaborates upon a theoretical model of social competence developed by Rose-Krasnor (Rose- Krasnor, 1997; Rose-Krasnor and Denham, 2009), and it makes concrete how underlying skills and the variety of contexts of social interaction are both relevant dimensions of social competence that might change over development. It then illustrates how the cohorts and work packages in the Consortium on Individual Development each provide empirical contributions necessary for testing this model on the development of social competence.
Keywords: Social competence, Development, Model, Skills, Contexts, CohortsSocial competence can be characterized as the effectiveness of a child to engage in social interactions with peers and adults (Fabes et al., 2006; Rubin et al., 1998). It is the behavioral manifestation of a child’s emotional and regulatory competencies while interacting with other people. Social competence does not represent a fixed quality but should be viewed as a construct that in itself marks development: Society expects more sophisticated interactions with older children. When children are growing up, interaction contexts beyond the home environment gain importance and become increasingly broader. Moreover, being effective in a variety of social interactions requires children to master many skills that underlie social competence, such as perspective taking, social problem solving, and emotion regulation, which possibly also differ in developmental stadia. Knowledge about (a) these underlying skills, (b) the interaction contexts, and (c) these developmental stadia all contribute to a better understanding of social competence, which is why we consider these three types of knowledge as relevant dimensions, that is, as crucial building blocks of social competence.
Although research on social competence has made great progress in understanding underlying skills and relevant interaction contexts in key periods in children’s lives (see e.g., Rubin et al., 2009; Bukowski et al., 2018), how these building blocks of social competence connect to each other over the course of development is less well understood: still missing is a detailed model of the development of social competence from infancy to adolescence. The aim of the Consortium on Individual Differences (CID) is to contribute to such a model that captures the development of social competence in a changing society.
In what follows next, we first describe why the field is in need of a developmental model of social competence (Section 2). We then give a brief overview of the development of social competence from infancy to adolescence (Section 3). In Section 4, we explain the approach that CID takes towards building a developmental model, which is an elaboration upon a theoretical model of social competence developed by Rose‐Krasnor (1997; Rose-Krasnor and Denham, 2009). In Section 5, we show how each of the cohorts and the individual work packages from CID are contributing pieces of evidence to steer the theoretical model. Finally, in Section 6, we conclude by suggesting how the cohorts and work packages in CID can complement each other in building a developmental model.
Developing social competence is essential for future functioning in society and for reducing risk of behavioral and emotional problems. Indeed, there is ample evidence that variation in social competence in childhood is linked to prowess in other domains in present and later life. For instance, people who as children easily develop good relationships with others are more likely to grow into adults with better health (they live longer; are more resilient to mental health problems, and function better in society; Luthar, 2006; Masten and Coatsworth, 1995). Socially competent children are more likely to advance in academics (Caprara et al., 2000; Denham, 2006; Wentzel, 1991), or rate themselves as happier (Ryan and Deci, 2001). Reversely, deviances in social competence can be a symptom for many forms of psychopathology emerging in child development. If social competence appears deviant, many other problems are typically observed, such as peer rejection (in ADHD; Larson et al., 2011), social anxiety (La Greca and Lopez, 1998), bullying and aggression (Warden, and Mackinnon, 2003; for overviews, see Happé and Frith, 2014; Trentacosta and Fine, 2010). Together, this suggests that the construct of social competence is a key factor in explaining individual variation, both in typical and atypical child populations.
The construct of social competence is a developmental construct: it emerges from meaningful interactions with various others in a variety of contexts (Rose‐Krasnor, 1997). Such interactions shape children’s competence: children learn how to behave in their social worlds both through direct instruction as well as by observing others in interactions. As a result, the type and quality of interactions children experience become increasingly more varied and complex over time. Moreover, children’s concepts of the relevance of interactions mark clear progression. Clearly, the construct of social competence changes over time, but a unified model of how social competence emerges from infancy to adolescence remains missing.
There are several reasons why we need a better understanding how social competence unfolds. First, indexes of social competence from early childhood have been shown to be predictive of social competence later in life (e.g., Howes, 1987; Monahan and Steinberg, 2011; Rubin et al., 1998; but see Masten et al., 1995). In fact, there appears to be a Matthew effect for social competence: for example, those competent in making friends early in life are becoming more competent in forming friendships, while the less-competent ones are becoming even less competent in forming friendships (Flannery and Smith, 2017; Ladd, 1999; Monahan and Steinberg, 2011). Research further documents reciprocal links across various underlying skills of social competence. For example, positive experiences in building friendships early in life foster the development of prosocial behavior, which in turn increases the chance to form friendships later in life (Flannery and Smith, 2017; Ladd, 1999). Such self-reinforcing links between the underlying skills of social competence underscore the need to view the development of social competence as a dynamic, complex process in which children are actively regulating their own experiences and creating their own contexts (Sameroff, 2010). Yet to fully grasp the complexity of the development of social competence we need to better understand how and when social competence becomes self-reinforcing along development. Researchers should therefore start building and testing more elaborate models of social competence that take into account the interplay between development, the complexity of different underlying skills, and the variety of social contexts that together shape social competence.
A second reason why it is crucial to develop a clearer picture of how social competence unfolds is that social competence can be malleable, and open to interventions. Yet optimization of interventions in childhood requires not only identifying which underlying skills of social competence are well-suited targets, but also selecting optimal periods to administer such interventions, and should be tailored to a child’s stage of social competence. Knowledge on when to start an intervention is essential since developmental models such as the developmental cascades models assume that adaptive and maladaptive behaviors can result in spreading effects over time across various levels (Cicchetti, 2002). Optimal interventions should ideally result in the interruption of negative cascades and the promotion of positive cascades (Masten and Cicchetti, 2010). Thus, it is essential to develop a model of social competence that makes explicit not only how different underlying skills connect with different stages of social competence (the ‘hows’), but also how social competence changes over development (the ‘whens’).
The third and final reason why it is important to develop get a better picture on how social competence unfolds is that children’s social contexts (the ‘wheres’) have changed dramatically in the past two decades. One key change is that most Western infants and toddlers now have extensive experiences with peers and other adults prior to school entry. In fact, unlike earlier generations, most of today’s infants are in some form of day care away from their primary caregiver(s). How does this change affect the formation of peer relations and social competence (Hay et al., 2018)?
Another key change involves the rapid changes in children’s and adolescents’ media environments. In the 1970s the average age that a child started watching television was at 4 years of age. But due to the rise of prosocial and educational baby TV and apps (and parents’ tendencies to embrace such media), the onset of media exposure is now dropped to three and five months of age (Valkenburg and Piotrowski, 2017). Developmentally appropriate educational media may support cognitive learning (e.g., numeracy, literacy), but could also improve underlying skills of social competence (e.g., prosocial behaviour), particularly when adults are involved with the content their children consume (Courage and Howe, 2010). Furthermore, increasingly more interactions in childhood and adolescence take place online. What are the consequences of this? Do skills in social competence generalize easily to those required in online social interaction or does effectively communicating in digital interactions require an additional set of skills? Or does the larger amount of online interaction hamper development of complex underlying skills of social competence, such as emotion recognition and perspective taking? This is something research only starts exploring (Blumberg et al., 2019).
Before we can explain how CID aims to build theory on the development of social competence, it is essential to provide an overview of how social competence develops across childhood. In Table 1 we therefore define each period in childhood and list the main characteristics in marking the development of social competence. Please note that this overview is neither inclusive nor complete—it only serves to outline the highlights of each period in relation to social competence.
Each age period comes with its own characteristics of social competence.