L' enfant de deux ans,unité sociale perçue comme un système multimodal : perspective synthétique, intégratrice et différentielle

This research establish children's social profiles, we estimated the emotional and environmental characteristics, and cognitive and social skills of 61 2-year-old children, stemming from three day-cares. In an ecological perspective, the social skills in free play were coded thanks to an ethogram reporting the percentage of time in "self-centred", in "solitary play", in "parallel play", in "social observation", in "social emission", in "vertical interaction" and in "horizontal interaction". The emotional sphere estimated by the mother includes the temperament, estimated by a questionnaire, and the attachment at the mother, estimated by Q-Sort ("security" and "dependence" on a continuum). The cognitive sphere measured by the experimenter includes the language ("understanding", "expression", "memory"), the understanding of the emotion ("recognition of the emotion", "attribution of external causes in emotion") and the global motricity (scale which we built: "address", "quality of locomotion", "speed of locomotion"). We defined three types of microsystems: "biological" (age and sex), "family" (parental situation and sibship) and "day-care" (size of the group and the management of activities). The results reveal that the synthetic perspective, integrative and differential brings to light profiles of two-year-old children who are social unities are seen as multimodal systems (environmental, biological, emotional, cognitive and social). All these results brings, at once, knowledge in child and developmental psychology, which will have effects at the level of the representations of the 2-years-old social child and on the educational practices which are associated with them.