Developing Self-Awareness in Children during Early Ontogenesis

Basic elements of self-awareness emerge and progress differently in different children. These timing peculiarities remain understudied in preschoolers. A comprehensive review revealed no clear guidelines, procedures, or technologies for psychological and pedagogical support of self-awareness in preschoolers. The authors studied the development of each component of self-awareness and the links between them. The research relied on the approach developed by V. S. Mukhina. The methods included psychodiagnostic testing, expert assessment, psychological experiment, statistical analysis, and qualitative data processing. The key components of self-awareness development included the following stages: identification with one’s own name; awareness of one’s own gender identity; use of the pronoun "I", which is an essential self-awareness link in young children. The psychological and pedagogical support of self-awareness development requires target actions for each link, as well as conscious efforts and resources of the family and the educational institution. The process of support is a process of socialization that starts when the child joins an organized group of peers. It lays foundation for the subsequent structural links between different components of self-awareness, i.e., claim to recognition, further awareness of one’s gender, and temporal self-awareness.