Describe the development of self-concept from early childhood to adolescence

What will be an ideal response?

As children develop an appreciation of their inner mental world, they think more intently about themselves. During early childhood, knowledge and evaluation of the self's characteristics expand. Children begin to construct a self-concept, the set of attributes, abilities, attitudes, and values that an individual believes defines who he or she is.
Preschoolers' self-concepts largely consist of observable characteristics, such as their name, physical appearance, possessions, and everyday behaviors. By age 3½, children also describe themselves in terms of typical emotions and attitudes, suggesting a beginning understanding of their unique psychological characteristics. As further support for this emerging grasp of personality, when given a trait label, 4-year-olds infer appropriate motives and feelings. Direct references to personality traits must wait for greater cognitive maturity.
Over time, children organize their observations of typical behaviors and internal states into general dispositions, with a major change occurring between ages 8 and 11. Older school-age children are far less likely than younger children to describe themselves in extreme, all-or-none ways. A major reason for these evaluative self-descriptions is that school-age children often make social comparisons—judgments of their own appearance, abilities, and behavior in relation to those of others. Whereas 4- to 6-year-olds can compare their own performance to that of a single peer, older children can compare multiple individuals, including themselves.
In early adolescence, the self differentiates further. Teenagers mention a wider array of traits, which vary with social context. Generalizations about the self are not interconnected and are often contradictory. These disparities result from expansion of the adolescent's social world, which creates pressure to display different selves in different relationships. As their awareness of these inconsistencies grows, adolescents frequently agonize over "which is the real me."
From middle to late adolescence, cognitive changes enable teenagers to combine their traits into an organized system. Their use of qualifiers reveals their increased acceptance of situational variables in psychological qualities. Older adolescents add integrating principles, which make sense of formerly troublesome contradictions. Compared with school-age children, teenagers place more emphasis on social virtues, such as being friendly, considerate, kind, and cooperative—traits that reflect adolescents' increasing concern with being viewed positively by others. Among older adolescents, personal and moral values also emerge as key themes.