Childhood Development

6 Key excerpts on "Childhood Development"

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  eBook - ePub

  Forensic Psychiatry

  Fundamentals and Clinical Practice

  • Basant Puri, Ian H. Treasaden(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  8

  Developmental psychology

  NATHALIA L. GJERSOE AND CATRIONA HAVARD Introduction Cognitive development Personality Social development Sexual development The child as witness Conclusion References

  INTRODUCTION

  Developmental psychology is a discipline that encapsulates the full spectrum of psychological processes throughout the life span. Theories developed as part of this research have important implications not just for our understanding of children’s behavior and growth but also for how we conceptualize the human mind as a whole. Often there are processes so inextricably interwoven and sophisticated in adults that understanding them requires examination from their inception in the developing brain. This chapter focuses on the age range between infancy and late childhood and summarizes theories of children’s cognitive, personality, social, and sexual development, concluding with an outline of current opinion regarding children’s capacities as eyewitnesses.

  COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

  Even newborns come into the world with a toolkit of basic sensory capacities and biases to attend to specific types of information. This stream of information forms the basis for mental representations—patterns of neuronal activity that refer to aspects of the external world. Developmental cognitive psychology examines mechanisms of change in mental representations throughout the life span. Examining cognitive development in infants and young children requires its own set of methodologies distinct from those used to examine adults. Children have limited communication and -comprehension abilities, disorganized or slow motor responses, and are easily distracted. Traditionally, research into cognitive development utilized naturalistic observation of children’s behavior at different ages and manipulated situations to determine if children’s responses changed in a reliable manner from age to age. This work has revealed a host of cognitive capabilities that all typically developing children seem to attain within a very similar time period—referred to as cognitive milestones

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  An Introduction to Child Development

  • Thomas Keenan, Subhadra Evans, Kevin Crowley(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  child development. Understanding children is important in its own right and also has the potential to significantly inform us about the nature of human development. By studying the earlier forms of behaviour and the changes which behaviour undergoes, we can gain a better understanding of the ‘end product’, that is, adult behaviour. While this text focuses specifically on children’s development, the wider principles of life-span developmental psychology (which we discuss shortly) apply as equally to this area as they do to the study of development across the life span.

  What is ‘Development’?

  When we speak of development, what in fact are we referring to? One frequently used definition refers to this as patterns of change over time which begin at conception and continue throughout the life span. Development occurs in different domains, such as the biological (changes in our physical being), social (changes in our social relationships), emotional (changes in our emotional understanding and experiences), and cognitive (changes in our thought processes). Some developmental psychologists prefer to restrict the notion of development only to changes which lead to qualitative reorganizations in the structure of a behaviour, skill or ability (Crain, 2000). For example, Heinz Werner (1957) argued that development refers only to changes which increase the organization of functioning within a domain. Werner believed that development consisted of two processes: integration and differentiation. Integration refers to the idea that development consists of the integration of more basic, previously acquired behaviours into new, higher-level structures. For example, according to Piaget (1952), a baby who learns to successfully reach for objects has also learned to coordinate a variety of skills, such as maintaining an upright posture, moving their arm, visually coordinating the position of their hand and the object, and grasping the object under an integrated structure called a scheme

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  Teacher and Pupil

  Some Socio-Psychological Aspects

  • Philip Gammage(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8

  Towards maturity: the developmental context and implications for education

  Students of educational or developmental psychology soon become aware of two recurring phenomena in their studies: first and foremost that one must recognize the debt owed by psychologists and philosophers to the work of Jean Piaget over the last fifty years. The study of children’s thinking would be infinitely poorer if we had not received much painstakingly gleaned information from Piaget on how children’s knowledge is built up and how this can shed light on the origins of knowledge. The second, somewhat more mundane, is that care must be taken to avoid the over-enthusiastic use of chronological age as an infallible index of characteristics in children. Its merit lies in its ease of operation when dealing with approximations of normative development. Its use is inevitable, but it defeats its purpose if the wide range of individual differences is not constantly borne in mind. Very often, in order to categorize or describe, syntheses and generalizations have to be attempted. The wise student remembers, however, that usually the child reflects the home more than the school pattern (except possibly during adolescence) and that popular stereotypes can be extremely dangerous particularly if taken and applied as indications of ‘correct’ development.

  The younger schoolchild and his acquisition of skills

  Observations of teachers and research workers would lead us to believe that the child of five or thereabouts appears to reason best upon problems closest to his own experience, from personal involvement in concrete situations and as a result of optimum exposure to language skills. Usually, a child of this age is vulnerable to immediate distraction, afraid of antagonizing grown-ups, very aware of physical needs and not capable of discussions in large groups. From this it follows that wise adults dealing with groups of children of this age do not attempt to superimpose a form of social cohesiveness where it does not exist, but cater for individual attention along with the gradual promotion of awareness of others.

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  Psychiatry

  • Allan Tasman, Jerald Kay, Jeffrey A. Lieberman, Michael B. First, Mario Maj(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Sigmund Freud (1953) emphasized the role of young children’s thoughts and feelings in influencing their subsequent development, focusing on the child’s oedipal fantasies. He left the field with a rich legacy of interest in children’s individuality and the importance of understanding the meaning of events to children. His daughter, Anna Freud (1965), developed the important concept of developmental lines through her observations of children. She examined the unfolding of different domains of development, much as Piaget (1952) did in his fascinating explication of the cognitive growth of preschoolers. Erik Erikson (1959) further directed our study to the prominent developmental themes of each age period, emphasizing the development of autonomy for toddlers and initiative for preschoolers. He also broadened psychoanalytic interest from the intrapsychic to the world of actual social relationships, anticipating an important focus of current empirical research.

  Whereas psychodynamic clinicians have derived their hypotheses about child development predominantly from clinical experience with children and adults, modern developmental psychology requires that observations be subjected to the rigor of empirical research. Developmental studies, as in much of psychiatry, continue to struggle with integrating clinical and empirical insights. Researchers, such as Sroufe (1983), have extended studies of parent-infant attachment to the preschool period, demonstrating both continuities and discontinuities in attachment status through time, as well as delineating some of the negative correlates of insecure attachment. Cicchetti (1989) has examined how normative and at-risk populations of children negotiate stage-salient developmental tasks either adaptively or maladaptively, shedding light on both normal development and the origins of some forms of psychopathology. Broader social influences on children’s linguistic (Bruner 1983) and social developments (Dunn 1988) are increasingly being studied within cultural context.

  Conceptual Framework

  As children progress from infancy through the preschool years, they attempt to master specific developmental issues and to acquire certain skills. For example, with the advent of walking at the end of the first year of life, children begin to grapple with autonomy issues. However, these issues are not resolved completely within any single developmental period, but they continue to be important throughout the life span (Stern 1985). More or less successful resolution of stage-specific issues leads to healthier or less successful adaptation for the child. Children who do not master stage-specific issues will not inevitably develop psychopathology, but they are at increased risk of subsequent developmental failures and the development of certain psychiatric disorders. This is particularly noticeable when the individual subsequently encounters the same issue in a different developmental form, such as when young physicians once again confront autonomy issues when they complete their long years of training and move into practice. It is often overlooked that this process is frequently positive, offering new opportunities for growth. Each new developmental stage enables the individual to rework past traumas, resolve problematical issues, and master new skills. This positive perspective emphasizes children’s potential resilience to trauma and loss, an important area for future research.

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  Handbook of Psychology, Developmental Psychology

  • Irving B. Weiner, Richard M. Lerner, M. Ann Easterbrooks, Jayanthi Mistry(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  In turn, Cummings, Braungart-Rieker, and Du Rocher Schudlich note that a change in views about the roles of emotions in socioemotional development has taken place. Emotions were once viewed as experiential, intrapsychic events that occurred more or less secondarily, as by-products of more significant causal processes and phenomena. However, they note that, in recent years, research and theory on the study of emotions have placed much greater emphasis on the significance and role of emotions in social functioning and personality development. Accordingly, the authors review the state-of-the-art in seminal themes for understanding the role of emotions in children's development: what is known, what is being done, and future directions, including (a) individual differences in the development of emotion and personality in children, (b) relational influences, and (c) a developmental psychopathology perspective. Future directions are discussed for each of these themes of research and theory on emotions and personality development.

  In the next chapter in this section, Grusec, Chaparro, Johnston, and Sherman point out that in middle childhood, peers become important as children spend more time away from home. Major improvements occur in children's ability to understand the perspective of others and in their inferences about the psychological attributes of others as well as of themselves. Social development continues to result from a complex interaction between genes and the environment in which children find themselves, and behavior geneticists have studied the role of genetic mediation in social development, and sought specific genes that are involved in various social behaviors. Different children respond to the same socialization intervention in different ways, depending on a host of factors including variables such as age, sex, temperament, and the cultural context in which the intervention takes place. As a result, effective socialization is a function of the way children perceive and respond to a given intervention, rather than a function of a specific action on the part of the socializing agent. Socialization goes on in a variety of domains, with each domain characterized by a different kind of relationship between agent of socialization and child, and the actions of the latter need to be appropriate to the relationship or domain that is currently activated. Although parents, peers, and siblings differ considerably in their characteristics relative to the child being socialized, they all, nevertheless, operate in the same set of domains or relationships.

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  Psychology for Nurses

  • Devinder Rana, Dominic Upton(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 ) but that children’s minds developed over time – not smoothly but in qualitatively different stages. At certain points children’s thinking ‘takes off’ and moves into completely new areas and capabilities. These transitional stages take place at about 18 months, 7 years and 11–12 years. Each of these corresponds to certain stages of child development. Before these ages, children are incapable – irrespective of how intelligent they are – of understanding things in certain ways.

  Hence, the suggestion is that an important role of development is children’s increasing capacity to understand their world. Furthermore, they cannot undertake certain tasks until they are cognitively mature enough to do so. There are several theorists who propose that this development occurs in stages, and the nature of these has an impact on health care. During this chapter, these theories will be presented and how the child’s stage of maturation influences their health, illness, behaviour and the care they should receive from health care professionals will be discussed.

  Piaget’s stages of cognitive development

  Piaget suggested that there were four stages of cognitive development and that movement through the stages is invariant .

  The sensorimotor phase

  The first of Piaget’s stages is the sensorimotor period which lasts for the first two years of an infant’s life. During this time, the child is exploring and discovering the relationship between their own body and the outside environment. The infant relies on seeing, touching, sucking and feeling – using their physical sensory abilities to explore the environment and in this way learn things about themselves and the environment. Hence the term used by Piaget to describe this stage – sensorimotor – because intelligence is manifested by sensory perceptions

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