Karabanova, O.A.

Background. The study of L.S. Vygotsky’s scientific heritage enables the clarification of the theoretical basis for the role of the social environment in children’s mental development and the key regularities of children’s mental development at varying ages and stages of development in the context of transitivity and the social uncertainty of modern society.

Objectives. The currently article analyses the significance of the social situation of development as an alternative to the understanding of the environment as a factor of development in L.S. Vygotsky’s doctrine of the structure and dynamics of psychological age.

Results. Experience is the indivisible “unit” of the social situation of development as a dynamic unity of personality and environment in the form of age-specific attitude. The experience acts as an integration of affective and intellectual components and acquires features of awareness and meaningfulness as the child’s thinking develops. The social environment contains ideal forms as a standard of historically developed human properties and abilities, determining the greatest originality of the child’s developmental path — the future is already represented in the present and sets the vector for development. The ideal form embodies the age-specific normative content of the developmental potential of higher mental functions at each age stage, being appropriated in the course of cooperation. Experience determines the individual trajectory and the result of development. A comparative analysis of the crises of three and seven years convincingly proves the change in the type of experience: from the child’s singling out of relations and himself as the subject of these relations to the singling out of experiences, their differentiation and realisation of the attitude to Self. The social situation of development determines the boundaries for the zone of the child’s proximal development (ZPD).

Conclusions. Experience realises the child’s active position in relation to the world through the prism of age characteristics. Transformation of the social situation of development, according to L.S. Vygotsky, occurs in the form of changes in the types and methods of experiencing in connection with the development of the motivation and need during the period of age-related developmental crises.

The relevance of the article is explained by crisis nature of modern childhood and the risks of informational socialization, reflected in loss of value in becoming mature, the loss of the leading role of education, and the growth of deviant behavior in children and adolescents. Social anomie and cultural deprivation create a diverse information environment that poses the risks of promoting the cult of violence, cruelty, extremism, suicidal behavior, involving children and adolescents in the consumption of psychoactive substances, the formation of Internet addiction and computer gaming addiction.

The purposeof the article is to analyze risk management capabilities of information socialization as a manifestation of a childhood crisis. 

Methods – theoretical and comparative analysis, generalization. 

The results.The risks of information socialization associated with a low level of information security are highlighted. Significant age-related psychological characteristics of the child are identified and analyzed. These characteristics determine the effect of the psychological impact of information products on the development of the child. They are specified for preschool, primary school age, younger and older adolescents. A comparative analysis of the features of cognitive activity and mental development is presented: the degree of vulnerability of the child to the effects of harmful content; preservation of psychological well-being; readiness to imitate the social patterns of behavior presented on the Internet. The tasks to ensure informational security of children and adolescents have been specified.

Conclusions. Accounting for age-related psychological characteristics will allow to create an effective risk management system for informational socialization of children. Such a system includes the tasks of the age classification of information products and building the developing content of the information environment. The creation of interdisciplinary science of social ecology of childhood will make it possible to make significant progress in overcoming the crisis of modern childhood. 

Background. The socialization of personality in the modern world occurs on the Internet and social networks, transforming traditional methods of communication on the basis of ethical standards for constructing interpersonal Internet communication. The basic rules are: personal responsibility for actions performed on the network, including illegal actions; respect and equality of partners; confidentiality; copyright protection; and privacy. The relevance of the problem of ethical standards in Internet communication in adolescence is due to its importance for youth and their formation of moral consciousness as a developmental task.

Objective. This study is aimed at identifying attitudes toward ethical standards of Internet communication among youth users with different levels of moral consciousness. Our research goals were: 1) elaboration and testing of the author's technique “Ethical Dilemmas in Internet Communication” (EDI); 2) discovering attitudes towards ethical standards in Internet communication and strategies for resolving ethical dilemmas; and 3) study of the relationship between the level of the moral consciousness of respondents and their orientation toward following the basic ethical standards in Internet communication.

Design. The methods used were the author’s EDI technique, including ethical dilemmas, and the questionnaire "Justice-Care" (S.V. Molchanov). The sample consisted of 61 subjects.

Results. We found an ambiguous attitude by users of the Internet network toward the ethical standards of communication and a differentiated attitude toward following ethical standards. A high level of willingness to follow the norm was identified for copyright protection, but a low one for respecting the inviolability of personal life and taking personal responsibility for actions performed on the network. The strategies for solving ethical dilemmas in Internet communication were clear. The hypothesis about the connection of the level of moral competence and the attitude toward following basic ethical standards in Internet communication was verified.

The article presents the results of a study of the relationship of parent-child relationships teenagers and young men with the status of identity in professional identity. Revealed that the predominant identity statuses in the professional sphere in youth are achieved identity, moratorium and predestination; in adolescence — a moratorium, predestination and diffuse identity. Significant differences in the nature of the parent-child relationship in groups with statuses predestination, achieved identity, moratorium and diffused identity. For teenagers and young men with low status (diffuse identity, predestination) is characterized by the experience of the integrity of the relationship with the family in direct command of a parent and low autonomy of children. Adolescents with the status of the moratorium relationships with parents are characterized by a high level of autonomy and differentiation from the parental home often combined with high conflict and confrontation. Integration with family at a sufficiently high autonomy, respect the opinions of parents of typical teenagers and young men with the status of achieved identity. The gender specificity, reflecting the different roles of the mother and father in the formation of identity among girls and boys is revealed. The results show the decisive role of the father in the formation of identity statuses for both gender groups.

The model of the dynamic structure of social situation of development is proposed. The orientation activity as the main concept of P.Ya. Galperin’s theory, amounted the basis to discuss the role and the functions of the orienting the image in the social situation of development structure. Orienting the image realizes the child’s activity-effective attitude to the world. The types of the orienting the images are allocated; the age-related specificity of the images is shown. The mechanism of the developing effect of zone of the proximal development is concretized and analyzed.  

In the age-approach framework (L.S. Vygotsky, D.B. Elkonin) student’s perception of the moral atmosphere in the secondary school is discussed as the essential feature of the social situation of development. The results of the research cleared the role of the student’s perception of the moral atmosphere in the secondary school as the essential factor of the value and moral development in adolescence in the modern Russia society. The peculiarities of the perception of the moral atmosphere in the secondary school were revealed. The clusters of the different patterns of the perception of the moral atmosphere in school were described. 

The role and functions of the child-parent relations and communication with peers in adolescence are considered as characteristics of the social situation of development. The developmental processes of the value, emotional, cognitive and behavioral components of autonomy in their heterochrony are discussed. The results of the research demonstrated complicated non-linear relationship between the level of personality autonomy and child-parent relation’s parameters (the level of parent’s control, the adolescent’s independence and self-management competence, communication and cooperation with parents). 

The paper is aimed to present several results of the number of big scale international projects; their purposes were: 1) diagnosis of the contemporary adolescents’ psychological well-being actual level; 2) search of the ways to improve this level. Adolescent psychological well-being actual level has been monitored on different experimental fields in Russia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. After that multifactor intervention (with adolescents, their parents, teachers, and school administration) took place. The study results achieved demonstrate the intervention strategy efficacy and productivity, and allow defining a direction of further movement.

Introduction.