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In this essay we will discuss about:- 1. Introduction to Child Development 2. Theories of Child Development 3. Biological Approaches.
Essay on Child Development
1. Essay on the Introduction to Child Development:
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The study of child and adolescent development, as with all scientific study, is driven by theories. Developmental theories are basic principles or formulations that help us organize our observations in order to understand and predict human development. For example, a parent might react to an infant’s excessive crying very differently depending on his understanding of what this crying means.
If he subscribes to the theory of behaviourism, he might believe that picking up the crying baby will reward that behaviour and make the baby cry more. However, if he subscribes to the theory of ethology, he might believe the crying is a behaviour that signals that the baby needs comfort. If that need is met, it will help the baby develop a secure attachment that will eventually help the baby cry less.
Although we all have our own personal “theories” about various aspects of human behaviour, the theories that we use to build a scientific understanding about child and adolescent development must be public and testable. If the hypothesis turns out to be correct, it will provide support for ethological theory.
St. James-Roberts studied two types of parenting- “demand parenting,” in which babies were reliably picked up when they cried, and “structured parenting,” in which standard bedtimes and routines were put in place and some crying was acceptable. Demand parenting resulted in babies crying less during the first 3 months of life but continuing to cry at night after that age. Structured parenting resulted in more crying during the first 3 months but reduced crying at night thereafter.
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Most theories can never be proven beyond a shadow of any doubt, but the scientific process allows us to provide evidence that supports or opposes the truth of these ideas. An example of how this process works is Darwin’s theory of evolution. Some say that evolution is not a proven fact, and technically this is true.
However, the enormous body of evidence that supports its ideas outweighs the evidence against it. Consequently, evolutionary theory is widely accepted in scientific circles today. On the other hand, other theories have come and gone as evidence piled up that did not fit with the predictions that emerged from them.
For example, one hypothesis that emerged from psychoanalytic theory was that early mothering is the cause of the development of the severe mental illness known as schizophrenia. As research continued, it became clear that the more likely culprit in the development of schizophrenia is a combination of genetic endowment and environmental influence, which might even include prenatal events, such as a mother’s illness. The concept of mothers as the cause for this disease has thankfully disappeared.
The “how” part of this question has been addressed in two ways- qualitative change and quantitative change. If you change the quantity of something, you just add to or take away from the original amount or number. However, if you change the quality of something, you make that thing substantially different from the way it was before.
For example, you can change a bowl of water quantitatively by adding more water. However, you can change the quality of water by changing the temperature. At room temperature, water is a liquid, but if you put it in the freezer, it becomes ice—a solid—and if you boil it, it becomes steam—a gas. In like manner, there are developmental theories that describe change as happening little by little, smoothly over time.
These are quantitative approaches to understanding development. For instance, we grow physically inch by inch, and we can recognize words more quickly as we learn to read. In other theories, big changes occur at certain ages that alter the nature of the child or adolescent in significant ways.
These qualitative theories are called stage theories, as each stage in life is seen as different from the ones that come before and after. For example, puberty triggers large changes in many areas of development. One way to think about these two kinds of change is to consider the development of memory.
Children can remember more and more as they get older (quantitative change), but they may suddenly increase their memory capacity when they develop a new way of encoding information into memory.
Developmental change may be driven by biological processes inside each person, by environmental events that affect each person, or by an interaction of the two. Developmental theories can fall anywhere along this continuum of explanations. For psychoanalysts, our behaviour is primarily driven by our sex drive. For behaviourists, we develop because of the effects of the environment. Several theories see behaviour resulting from evolutionary processes based on adaptation of the organism to the environment.
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No theory develops in a vacuum. It never happens that a person, no matter how brilliant, reaches a new idea without developing that idea from theories and observations that came before. We then look at how the theory has changed over time and how the theory is currently being applied.
As you read about each theory, keep two questions in mind:
1. How does the theory describe development? Does change occur –
(a) Quantitatively, in small steps, or
(b) Qualitatively, in distinct stages?
2. What drives development? Is development the product of –
(a) Biological processes,
(b) Environmental processes, or
(c) A combination of both biology and environment?
2. Essay on the Theories of Child Development:
i. Psychoanalytic Theory:
We begin our discussion of theories with psychoanalytic theory. Although psychoanalytic theory has been very controversial throughout its existence, many of its concepts have become part of our assumptions about how the mind works.
As we entered the 21st century, the impact of this theory in our culture was acknowledged by Time magazine, which chose Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Sigmund Freud was a physician in Vienna who created the theory of psycho-analysis. Freud believed that we are aware of some of our thoughts, which are in our conscious mind, and we are unaware of other thoughts, which are in our unconscious mind. Often we have thoughts, memories, and feelings that would be unacceptable to us, so we repress them; that is, we hide them from ourselves in our unconscious mind.
Many of these thoughts are linked with events from our childhood. Freud believed that the key to healthy psychological functioning lies in discovering the unconscious thoughts or memories associated with these symptoms. He believed that free association, in which a person allows thoughts to float freely without censorship, and dream analysis are ways of gaining insight into the working of the unconscious mind.
When a person who is suffering from anxieties and maladaptive behaviours comes to understand his underlying thoughts and feelings, his psychological well-being will improve. This is the basis for psychoanalytic psychotherapy. To experience the technique of free association, try Active Learning- Free Association.
Freud theorized that our personality is made up of three parts – the id, the ego, and the superego. According to Freud, we are all born with an id, which consists of our basic drives. Infants have no way to control their drives – They want what they want when they want it! An infant is not going to wait politely for you to get off the phone when she is feeling very hungry.
She is going to cry and demand food, expressing her need to satisfy this basic drive. The id operates on what Freud called the pleasure principle because it seeks immediate gratification for all of its urges.
As children grow older they begin to become aware of the reality of the world around them and begin to develop the ability to think and control their emotions. This ability to negotiate between basic drives and the real world is the province of the ego.
As the ego develops, the child is still motivated by her basic drives, but she now is able to interact in the real world to get her needs met. Even though she is hungry, she might now realize that if she waits until you are off the phone and asks politely, she may be more likely to get her cookie. This way of dealing with our wants and desires is known as the reality principle.
Finally, sometime between the ages of 5 and 7, the child begins to incorporate moral principles that work against the drive-motivated functioning of the id. These moral principles are maintained by the superego.
Freud believed that until this time children do not have any internal sense of guilt that guides their actions. Whereas a younger child might simply take a cookie when hungry, an older child will be able to control herself and resist the temptation because she knows that taking a cookie when she isn’t supposed to be wrong.
ii. Behaviourism and Social Cognitive Theory:
A very different school of thought about how children develop is offered by the learning theories. Whereas psychoanalytic theory focuses on internal processes of the mind, the learning theories focus on observable behaviour.
These theories are based on the interaction of the stimulus of events in the external environment with the response of the child. We will describe the learning theories known as behaviourism and social cognitive theory.
John B. Watson and Classical Conditioning:
John B. Watson is the father of the theory known as behaviourism. Unlike other psychologists in the early 1900s, he was not interested in studying the impact of internal factors such as genetic influences and the workings of the mind on human development. Instead, he concentrated on what he could see-behaviour, or what people do.
The field of psychology was just emerging, and psychologists in America were trying hard to establish the field as an experimental science, with testable hypotheses based on observable phenomena rather than unseen concepts such as Freud’s unconscious mind.
Watson believed that the environment is the most important factor in determining our personality, our abilities, and all our other qualities. He subscribed to a notion put forth by great philosophers including Aristotle and John Locke that we are born a “blank slate” or tabula rasa, ready to be drawn upon by environmental experiences.
He felt so strongly about this, that he made the following statement:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant- chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.
One way in which we learn from our environment, according to Watson, is through a process called classical conditioning. In this process, a particular stimulus, or event in the environment, is paired with another stimulus over and over again. The first stimulus, known as the unconditioned stimulus, provokes a natural response, known as the unconditioned response.
For example, Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist who was studying reflexes and the processes of digestion, presented food to hungry dogs in his lab. In response, the dogs salivated, just as you would if you were hungry and walked by a bakery. The food is called the unconditioned stimulus because it elicits a natural, or unconditioned, response.
Then Pavlov preceded the presentation of the food with a distinctive noise, such as a bell ringing, each time he presented the food. The bell did not at first provoke salivation from the dogs, so initially it was considered a neutral stimulus.
However, over time the dogs began to associate the sound of the bell with the food, so the animals had learned something about the bell and it now became a conditioned stimulus. Finally, Pavlov presented only the bell and found that the dogs continued to salivate just as if the food had been presented. Salivation to an unnatural stimulus, such as a bell, is known as a conditioned response.
In a famous experiment involving Little Albert, a 9- month-old infant, Watson applied the idea of classical conditioning to humans. He carried out an experiment designed to demonstrate that he could use classical conditioning to create fear in a human infant where none had existed before.
When Little Albert was first shown a white rat, he was curious and unafraid. Watson then made a loud clanging sound, which startled Little Albert, who began to cry with fear. Watson then made the loud clanging noise at the same time that he presented the white rat to the infant.
He did this numerous times over a number of days. Eventually he stopped making the loud sound, and yet every time he showed Little Albert the white rat, the infant continued to show fear. This process of association of stimuli (rat and sound) is called classical conditioning. Watson also claimed that this fear generalized to other furry creatures and objects like a Santa Claus mask.
Aside from the obvious ethical questions there are about carrying out research like this with an infant, there are also many questions about the scientific quality and meaning of the research that Watson carried out with Little Albert. Other people who subsequently carried out this type of classical conditioning with other infants were unable to replicate the results that Watson had described.
Even in Watson and Rayner’s own description, there were times when Little Albert did not show much fear of the rat or of the other stimuli to which he supposedly had generalized his fear, such as a rabbit and a dog.
Watson never attempted to decondition Little Albert’s fear before he was removed by his mother, a wet nurse at the hospital in which the experiments were done. According to a biography of Watson, he was so focused on debunking psychoanalytic theory and so disinterested in the welfare of his little subject that he even “speculated with some amusement that if little Albert developed a phobia to fur coats later in life, some psychiatrist would be sure to attempt to find some sexual basis for the fear”.
iii. B. F. Skinner and Operant Conditioning:
B. F. Skinner further developed the theory of behaviourism by introducing the idea of operant conditioning. While studying rat behaviour at Harvard, he noticed that the rats were affected not by what came before their behaviour, as was true of classical conditioning, but by what came after.
He developed the idea that spontaneous behaviours are controlled by the environment’s response to them. When this response is something pleasant or positive, it acts as a reinforcement (or reward), which increases the likelihood that the behaviour will continue or happen again.
Reinforcement can be planned, like the candies we give to toddlers when they use the potty, or unplanned, like nodding and smiling when someone is talking to you. As long as you smile and nod, the person is likely to continue to talk with you because he finds the way you are responding to him pleasant and rewarding. However, if you turn away or look bored, he will be likely to stop.
a. Schedules of Reinforcement:
Skinner found that some ways of giving reinforcement are more effective in controlling behaviour than others. He compared two types of such schedules of reinforcement- interval schedules and ratio schedules. With an interval schedule, reinforcement is given after a particular period of time.
The interval can be fixed, meaning that it is always the same amount of time. Think about how you would study if you knew you were going to have a quiz every 2 weeks. Alternatively the interval can be variable, meaning that it may come after different time periods. Think now about how your study habits would change if you knew you would have quizzes but didn’t know when they would be given.
Which schedule would result in more consistent study habits? When the interval is fixed, the behaviour tends to drop to a low level immediately after the reinforcement and to stay low until around the time of the next reinforcement, when the behaviour picks up sharply. If your reinforcement of getting a good grade depends on “pop quizzes” that are unpredictable, your best strategy is to study at a steady pace so you are always ready.
With a ratio schedule, the reinforcement comes after a certain number of behaviours, and again, this schedule can be fixed, meaning it occurs after the same number of behaviours each time, or variable, meaning it occurs after differing numbers of behaviours. Your favourite frequent- buyer’s card would be a good example of a fixed-ratio schedule.
After you buy 10 cups of coffee (or order five pizzas), you get the next one free. On the other hand, gambling casinos use a variable-ratio schedule in the design of their slot machines. What would happen if you knew that the machine paid off after every 25 games? Chances are, you’d let someone else play the first 24 games! With a variable ratio, you would want to be playing every game, in case that was the one that paid off.
The intense concentration of the players glued to these machines is testimony to the effectiveness of a variable-ratio schedule in maintaining behaviour at a high level.
b. Shaping Behaviours:
Reinforcement of behaviour cannot occur if that behaviour doesn’t occur. For example, you cannot reinforce positive peer interaction with a child who does not interact with his peers. However, Skinner developed the idea, based on his work with pigeons, that behaviour could slowly be “shaped,” through reinforcement of behaviours that progressively get more and more like the behaviours desired. In this way he was able to train pigeons not only to play Ping-Pong but to play with the reward coming only when they won a point!
To use shaping with a child who does not interact with peers, you could use a series of rewards that begin when the child is simply near another child. The next step might be that the child is reinforced only when he looks at the other child, and finally the reinforcement might only be provided when he speaks while looking at the child. Eventually, the reward would be contingent only on true interaction with a peer.
Modern Applications of Operant Conditioning:
Operant conditioning has been used as a classroom management strategy for many years. Students may be given tokens, stickers, or check marks on a classroom chart to reward good behaviour. At some point these tokens can be redeemed for gifts, privileges, or special activities.
In 1997, officials in the town of Tepoztlán in Mexico decided to try to change self-defeating behaviours of the poor, such as absence from school, by directly reinforcing the behaviour they wanted to see. Progress/Oportunidades is a program that pays poor women for keeping their children in school, going for medical appointments, and a variety of other behaviours.
The results have been so encouraging that in 2007, Mayor Michael Bloomberg brought the program to New York City. Part of the program, which is being developed at 15 schools by Roland Fryer of the American Inequality Lab at Harvard University’s Department of Economics, may include paying children for high test scores on standardized tests.
iv. Albert Bandura and Social Cognitive Theory:
Albert Bandura, a psychology professor a behaviourist, at Stanford University who was originally trained as became discontented with the idea that all behaviour develops because of the environment’s direct response to it. It is difficult or impossible to identify either unconditioned stimuli or reinforcements for the entire range of human behaviour that we see.
For Bandura, a third learning principle beyond classical and operant conditioning became central. That principle was learning through imitation. He believed that people learn new behaviours simply from watching others rather than by direct reinforcement of their own behaviours from the environment.
As he studied imitation of a model, he returned to the view, rejected by both Watson and Skinner, that internal mental processes (cognition) play an important role in human behaviour and development. For this reason, he called his theory of learning a social cognitive learning theory because the learning occurs from watching other people (social) but is also processed in one’s mind (cognitive).
For Bandura, imitation has four parts- attention to a model, mental representation or memory of that model’s actions, motoric ability to reproduce the action, and the motivation to imitate the action. Let’s rephrase that to help you better understand the process – You need to notice what someone else is doing (attention) and then be able to remember what you saw (mental representation) and actually be able to do the same thing yourself (motoric response) if or when you want to (motivation). If all these conditions are in place, you will be able to repeat the behaviour (imitate) that you saw modeled by someone else.
Bandura’s earliest work was designed to show how children learn by direct observation. In his classic experiment, one group of children observed an adult on television act aggressively to a “Bobo doll”, hitting it, kicking it, throwing it, and hitting it with a toy hammer.
Bandura’s later development of his theory placed greater emphasis on the cognitive, or thinking, aspects of behaviour development and specifically on thinking about one’s own ability to have control in one’s life. Over time the name of his theory changed to eliminate learning, because this term was connected with the idea of conditioning, over which we have little or no control because the environment is controlling us.
Bandura renamed his theory social cognitive theory to emphasize that thought has social origins but is then processed through our own individual cognitive interpretations. His research has focused on self-efficacy or “the core belief that one has the power to influence one’s own functioning and life circumstances”.
These beliefs play a crucial role in understanding motivation because they are powerful predictors of which goals we will pursue. We tend to pursue tasks at which we believe we can succeed and to avoid ones at which we believe we will fail.
Modern Applications of Social Cognitive Theory:
Social cognitive theory has found wide applications in a variety of situations that involve a personal decision to make changes in one’s life. According to Pajares, ” Empirical evidence supports Bandura’s contention that self-efficacy beliefs touch virtually every aspect of people’s lives— whether they think productively, self-debilitating, pessimistically or optimistically; how much effort they expend on an activity; how well they motivate themselves and persevere in the face of adversities; how they regulate their thinking and behaviour; and their vulnerability to stress and depression”.
Health self-efficacy has been associated with positive lifestyle changes in adolescents with HIV, patients in cardiac rehabilitation, and adults suffering from osteoporosis. Coping self-efficacy has been associated with recovery from posttraumatic stress disorder in victims of natural disasters, military combatants, and victims of sexual or criminal assault.
But perhaps the most important application of the idea of self-efficacy has been in the area of education. Students with a sense of self-efficacy work harder and longer at academic tasks, tackle more difficult tasks, and have a greater sense of optimism that they will succeed.
These findings, in turn, have effected change in aspects of the school environment. Educational practices such as grouping students by ability level or placing emphasis on performance on standardized tests can be damaging to students who do not have a strong sense of self-efficacy in the classroom, but authentic praise that is tied to mastery experiences improves confidence and builds a sense of competence.
3. Essay on the Biological Approaches to Understanding Child Development:
The following theories and approaches concentrate on the physical aspects of children’s growth and how these aspects interact with psychological development.
i. Maturational Theory:
One of the early approaches to the study of children was based on biological maturation. According to this viewpoint, all children go through the same stages of development based on the maturation of their brain and body. This includes everything from the changing ability to grasp objects in infancy to the changing way in which children acquire or collect objects. This approach provides little room for cultural or individual differences.
ii. Dynamic Systems Theory:
The idea that all of psychological development is due to biological maturation is no longer accepted because biological maturation itself may vary for individual children in different circumstances. Esther Thelen’s theory, called dynamic systems theory, provides evidence that biological maturation operates in interaction with environmental influences.
Thelen found that the nature of physical development was flexible, not absolute. For example, newborn babies have a stepping reflex in which they appear to be walking when held upright, even though they cannot support their own weight. This reflex typically disappears at about 2 to 3 months of age, and it was initially thought that this was a product of brain maturation.
However, Thelen found that babies who seem to have lost their initial stepping reflex will begin stepping again if placed up to their chests in water so that their legs are not so heavy, which means that the disappearance of this reflex is not driven solely by brain development.
Infants stop “stepping” reflexively when their legs become too heavy for them to lift. She showed that infants develop these abilities in different ways, depending on such characteristics as weight and activity level. They experiment with how to do things, such as reaching and grabbing, and each action influences what the next action will be.
iii. Neuropsychology and Behavioural Genomics:
New technologies have allowed us to study both neuropsychology and behavioural genomics. These new approaches are on the cutting edge of research in the field of child development today because of new technology that has allowed researchers to investigate both the brain and genes in much more detail.
Researchers can now use technology to see the structure and functioning of our brains and to identify specific genes to try to understand their role in development. The earliest approach to the study of both genes and the brain was very deterministic. The belief was that biology determines behaviour.
However, the more we learn about the functioning of both the brain and genes, the clearer it becomes that the effects go in both directions. These findings have produced an avalanche of new research. Biology has an impact on behaviour, but the environment also affects our biological functioning.
The development of connections between nerve cells, the coating of the nervous system, and the neurochemistry of the brain are all shaped in part by what a person does. The expression of genes is also affected by environmental events.