Child development ch.1

What are the five broad periods

Prenatal, Infancy, Early Childhood, Middle Childhood and Adolescence

Domains

Major areas of development

What are some domains

social, emotional, cognitive, and physical

What factors cause development

Nature or heredity: blueprint in genes

Nurture or environment: life experiences

What are the four fundamental issues with process of development

1. Sources of development

2. Plasticity

3. Continuity/discontinuity

4. Individual differences

plasicity

development is open to change and intervention

Sensitive plasticity

times in an organisms life development where a particular experience has more effect on the organism than the same experience on a different time

Continuity

development has gradual accumulation of small changes

Discontinuity

development has a series of abrupt, radical transformations

Quantitative change

Change in number or amount, such as in height, weight, or size of vocabulary

Qualitative change

Change in behavior from specific points of development like babbling to talking or crawling to walking

When does qualitative patterns happen

during developmental stages

Ontogeny

Within a person's time (human development)

Phylogeny

from lower species to humans (evolution)

What are the four theoretical perspectives

1. Psychodynamic

2. Behaviorist

3. Constructive

4. Sociocultural perspectives

Psychodynamic theory

How universal developmental processes and stages can be understood by exploring specific life experiences of certain individuals

Sigmund Freud

created a theory of personality to help him cure patients with came with symptoms like fears, anxiety and uncertainty

- believed that the fears came from unresolved traumatic experiences in early childhood

- believed all biological drive comes from sex drive

What goal does people have

survival and propagation of species

What stages did freud create

psychosexual stages

- believes that if the stage is not complete, then it affects the later well-being of the person and their personality or behavior.

What are the three mental structures of freud

Primitive id- present from birth and has biological drives for demanding immediate gratification.

Ego- begins to emerge in early childhood and rational component of personality

Super ego-

Erik Erikson

Instead of biological drives he thought of cultural and social factors

- viewed developmental factors going throughout life and not ending in adolescence.

Erik Erikson main challenge for life

quest for identity

- referred to tasks as "crisis" because they have sources of conflict within person

- person must resolve conflict to move onto next task

- Resolution can be positive or negative

Behaviorism

- idea that personality and behavior are gradually shaped by an individuals learning experience

Law of effect

Behaviors that produce a satisfying effect in a situation are likely to be repeated in same or a similar situation

Piagets Constructivist theory

Theory of children's cognitive or intellectual development.

- believes that cognitive development is driven by the interaction of children's biologically driven motivation to learn and explore

- Shaping their own cognitive development

Constructivist theory

Children construct successfully higher levels of knowledge by mastering their environements

asssimilation

process of adopting the behaviors and values of dominant culture among culturally distinct groups.

accommidation

adapting our current understandings to incorporate new information

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory

Believed biological and social factors play a role in development and believed children construct their development by active engagement with the world.

- human biology and environments shape development by interacting through culture.

Evolutionary theories

attempt to both explain human behavior in terms of survival of species and address ways in which our evolutionary past continues to influence one's development.

Ethology

field of study that explores animal behavior in natural environments

Social learning theories

emphasize the behavior consequence associations that children learn by observing and interacting with others in social situations

- children observe and imitate others

Information- Processing Theories

how information flows through a child's developing mental system

- how a child comes to perceive, remember, organize, and manipulate information

System theories

envisions development in complex wholes made up of parts (systems) and how the wholes are organized and how they interact and change over time.

- ex how babies walk over time

Ecological System theory

- focuses on the organization of multiple environmental contexts within which children develop.

Longitudinal Design

- collects information about a group of people as they grow older

- few drawbacks as it was expensive and needed long-term commitments (relocation, too long study)

Cross-sectional design

Collects various information about people for various ages at one time

- Researchers have carried out many tasks with quantitative and qualitative developmental changes