Chapter 16 - Conclusions

pg. 1716 to 1783

Theme 1: Nature and Nurture: All Interactions, All the Time

Nature and Nurture Begin Interacting Before Birth

• the interaction of nature and nurture before birth is apparent when things go wrong, especially in the case of teratogens - toxins in the general environment like mercury, radiation, lead, insects, air pollution, and ones that depend on parental behaviour like cigarettes, alcohol and illegal drugs
  • prenatal exposure to these can cause a variety of physical and cognitive impairments
  • whether and how much a given baby will actually be affected depends on innumerable interactions among the genetics of the mother, the genetics of the fetus, and a host of environmental factors such as the particular teratoge, the timing, and the amount of exposure
• the interaction of nature vs nurture during the prenatal period is evident in fetal learning
  • ex. the experience of haering the mother’s voice in the womb leads a newborn to prefer her voice to that of other women
  • ex. prenatal exposure to garlic-flavoured food influences liking such flavours among 8-9-year-olds
  • preferences that are thought of being determined purely by nature reflect nurture as well

Infants’ Nature Elicits Nature

• nature equips babies with a host of qualities that elicit appropriate nurture from parents and other caregivers
• one big factor in babies’ favour is that they are cute, and most enjoy watching and interacting with tehm
  • by smiling at others, babies motivate others to love and care for them
• their emotional expressions guide caregivers’ efforts to figure out what to do to make them happy and comfortable
• their attentiveness to sights and sounds they find interesting encourages others to provide the stimulation necessary for learning
  • ex. parents sing to their infats; infants find singing soothing, bounce in response to rhythm, and respond positively to melodies

Timing Matters

• timing of exposure to teratogens greatly influences their effects on prenatal development
  • ex. if a pregnant woman comes down with rubella early in preganncy when developing visual and auditory systems are at a sensitive point, her baby may be born deaf or blind. If she develops rubella late in pregnancy, the risk that damage will occur is considerably lower
• timing also influences many aspects of development in the months and years following birth
  • ex. until 8 months of age, infants can discriminate between phonemes regardless of whether they occur in the language the infatns hear daily
  • by 12 months, they lose the ability to hear the difference between similar sounds that they do not ordinarily encounter or are not meaningfully different in their native language
  • similar sensitive periods occur in grammatical development
  • children from East Asia who move to America and begin to learn English as a second language before age 7 acquire grammatical competence in English that eventually matches that of native-born American children
  • those who arrive between 7-11 learn almost as well
  • however, those who arrive later rarely master English grammar even after many years of hearing and speaking the language of their adopted land
  • early exposure results in more complete grammatical mastery in terms of deaf children’s learning of ASL as well
  • the importance of normal early experience is also evident in social, emotional, and intellectual development
  • infants who do not have an emotional connection with any caregiver often continue to interact abnormally with other people long after being placed in loving homes
• in many aspects of the development of perception, language, intelligence, emotions, and social behaviour, the timing of experience is crucial

Nature Does Not Reveal Itself All At Once

• many genetically influenced properties do not become evident until middle childhood, adolescence, or adulthood
  • ex. physical changes that occur at puberty
  • ex. nearsightedness
  • many are born with genes that predispose them to become nearsighted, but most do not until late childhood or early adolescence
  • ex. steep rise during adolescence in depression
  • increased rate of depression in adolescence is attributable to the many challenges of dealing with the world of adolescnece including cruel comments on social media
• ex. development of schizophrenia
  • most do not become schizophrenic until late adolescence or early adulthood
  • this is due to nature and nature
  • children with a schizophrenic biological parent but raised by those not affected are more likely to become schizophrenic than biological children of nonschizophrenic parents (genetics)
  • children raised in troubled homes are also more likely to become schizophrenic
  • the interaction between the child’s nature and the nurture they receive is crucial
  • experience can enhance or silence gene expression
  • early stressful environments seem to especially influence later gene expression
  • some of these effects of the early environment on the genome are passed down to the next generation

Everything Influences Everything

• genes influence a wide range of other characteristics that themselves influence self-esteem (as an example)
  • ex. genes strongly affect attractiveness, athletic talent, and academic success, all which contribute to self-esteem
• factors other than genes also have a role in terms of support from famiily and peers, and values of the broader society
• complex interactions are characteristic of development in all areas
  • ex. in the development of intelligence, the influence of genetics seems to be greater than that of shared environment for children from middle- and upper-income backgrounds but the opposite seems to be true for children from impoverished backgrounds
• children’s nature interact with the nurture they receive from parents, teachers, peers, the broader society, and the physical environment to shape their self-esteem, intellect, and other qualities

Theme 2: Children Play Active Roles in Their Own Development

• children are physically active even before they leave the womb, and fetuses are also mentally active

• infants’ and older children’s actions produce reactions in other people, which further shape the children’s development

• children contribute to their own development through

  1. physically interacting with the environment
  2. interpreting their experinece
  3. regulating their behaviour
  4. eliciting reactions from other people

Self-Initiated Activity

• in the womb, fetuses make breathing movements that strengthen their lungs, and swallow amniotic fluid that prepares their digestive system for after birth
• when they are born, infants display looking preferences that guide their attention to the most informative aspects of the environment their processing abiliteis can handle
• infants’ ability to interact with the environment expands greatly during the first year
  • 3 months → can following moving objects with eyes fairly smoothly
  • improves their ability to learn about the actions occuring around them
  • 6-7 months → can crawl on their bellies and on their hands and knees
  • don’t need to wait for the world to come to them
  • 8-9 months → can hold up heads
  • allows them to react for objects without support
  • 13-14 months → can walk independently
  • opens new frontiers for exploration
• children’s self-initated activity extends to additonal domains such as language
  • they become skilled at initiating conversations that bring them information, allow them to express their feelings and desires, and regulate emotions
• the effects of self-initiated activities are seen at older ages too in another areas like self-socialization and antisocial behaviour
  • play patterns reflect children’s own choices
  • gender segregation is rarely imposed by adults. it arises from differences in the kinds of play boys and girls prefer
  • children tend to increasingly act like their friends and others in their social group in both positive and negative ways

Active Interpretation of Experience

• children contribute to their development by trying to understand the world around them as well
• toddlers’ and preschoolers’ ask “why” questions, school-age childrens look for explanations for magic tricks…
• the desire to understand motivates young children to construct informal theories concening inanimate objects, living things, and people
• children and adolescents’ interpretations of their experiences extend to inferences about themselves as well as about the external world
• subjective interpretations of experience, as wel as objective reality, shape development

Self-Regulation

• by age 6 months, children learn to cope with upsetting situations by rubbing their bodies to soothe themselves
• children use physical strategies during toddler and preschool periods and increasingly use cognitive strategies during elementary school
• children who successfully regulate their emotions tend to be more popular and more socially competent than those less skilled at emotional regulation
• early self-regulation skills are related to long-term developmental outcomes
  • ex. boys who exhibit strong self-regulation abilities early on are less likely to use cocaine and other drugs as adults
• children’s early self-control has been found to be a strong predictor of their later grades in school and of occupational and economic success in adulthood
• over the course of childhood and adolescnece, children increasingly regulate their development through their choice of activities

Eliciting Reactions from Other People

• because children of all ages differ from one another in behaviour and appearance, they evoke different reactions from other people
• the effects that children’s initial inclinations have on their parents’ behaviour toward them multiply over time
  • once negative cycles are established, they are difficult to stop
• children’s characteristics and behaviour influence parents’ and teachers’ reactions, as well as those of their peers
• peer reactions to children’s behaviour often have long-term consequences
  • ex. children who were rejected by peers when younger are more likely than children who were popular to have difficulty later in school and engage in criminal activity
• children influence their own development not only by initiating actions, interpreting experiences, regulating emotions, and eliciting reactions from others

Theme 3: Development Is Both Continuous and Discontinuous

Continuity/Discontinuity of Individual Differences

• many individual differences in psychological properties are moderately stable over the course of development, but the stability is always far from 100%
• in terms of the development of intelligence, some stability is present from infancy onward, and the amount of stability increases with age
  • IQ scores vary from occassion to occasion though, with random fluctuations on the day-to-day basis
  • there is variability, in that even if two children start out with equal intelligence, one may show greater intellectual growth over time
• individual differences in social and personality characteristics may show some continuity over time
• the degree of continuity in individual differences in social, emotional, and personality development is generally lower than in intellectual development
• regardless of whether the focus is on intellectual, social, or emotional development, the stability of individual differences is influenced by the stability of the environment
  • IQ scores are more stable if the home environment remains stable
• continuities in individual differences reflect continuities in children’s environments as well as in their genes

Continuity/Discontinuity of Overall Development: The Question of Stages

• many of the most prominent theories of development divide childhood and adolescence into a small number of discrete stages

  • Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, Freud’s theory of psychosexula development, Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, and Kohlberg’s theory of moral development all describe development in this way

• all stage theories share 4 key assumptions

  1. development progressing through a series of qualitatively distinct stages
  2. when children are in a given stage, a fairly broad range of their thinking and behaviour exhibits the features characteristic of that stage
  3. the stages occur in the same order for all children
  4. transitions between stages occur quickly

• development is considerably less tidy than stage approaches apply

  • ex. children who use preoperational reasoning on some tasks often exhibit concrete operational reasoning on others…

• developmental processes often show a great deal of continuity with gradual increases in the ability to regulate emotions, make friends, take other people’s perspectives, remember events, solve problems, and engage in many other activities

• there are sudden jumps when considering specific tasks and processes in specific aspects of development

• whether development appears to be continuous or discontinuous often depends on whether the focus is on behaviour or on underlying processes

  • it also depends on the timescale being considered

• at one level of self, the development of the self is continuous, and at another, milestones characterize each period of development

• any statement about when a given competency emerges is somewhat arbitrary but identifying milestones helps us understand roughly where we are on the map

Theme 4: Mechanisms of Developmental Change

Biological Change Mechanisms

• biological change mechanisms come into play the moment a sperm units with an egg, with each containing half of the DNA that will constitude the child’s genotype throughout life
• the way the brain forms after conception illustrates the complexity of change at the biological level
  • the first key process is neurogenesis
  • by the 3rd or 4th week after conception, the brain is producing roughly 10k brain cells per minute
  • about 100 days, the brain contains almost all the neurons it will have
  • once neurons form, a process of cell migration causes many to travel from where they were produced to their long-term location
  • once they reach their destination, they undergo a process of differentiation where dendrites and axons grow out from the original cell body
  • later in the prenatal period, the process of myelination adds an insulating sheath over certain axons, speeding up the rate of transmission of electrical signals among them
  • synaptogensis involves formation of synpases between the ends of axons and the beginning of dendrites that allow neurotransmitters to transmit signals from neuron to neuron
  • the process of purning reduces the number of synapses
• the brain includes a number of areas that are specialized for specific functions which makes possible rapid and universal development of these functions which enhances learning of the relevant type of information
• some functions are closely linked to senory and motor systems
• other brain areas are specialized for functions that are not specific to any one sensory or motor system (ex. limbic system, related to producting emotions)
• biological mechanisms underlie both specific and broad changes

Behavioural Change Mechanisms

Habituation, Conditioning, Statistical Learning, and Rational Learning

• the capacity to habituate to familiar stimulie begins at about 30 weeks after conception and continues after birth
• from their first days in the outside world, infants can learn through classical conditioning
• like older children, infants can also learn through instrumental, or operant, conditioning
• infants learn through statistical learning as well, which helps infants anticipate other people’s actions and generate similar sequences of behaviour themselves
• rational learning integrates the learner’s prior beliefs and biases with what actually occurs in the environment and it is closely related to statistical learning
• habituation, classical conditioning, generalization, and instrumental and statistical learning allow infants to acquire knoweldge of the world from the first days following birth

Social Learning

• children and adults learn a great deal from observing and interacting with other people
• humans are far more skillful than any other animal in learning what others are trying to teach us and are more inclined to teach others what we know
• among the crucial contributors to this social learning are imitation, social referencing, language, and guided participation
• imitation
  • imitation is limited to behaviours that infants sometimes spontaneously and inconsistently produce on their own, and by the second half of the first year, infants imitate new behaviours they never make spontaneously
  • when children see amodel unsuccessfully try to do something by 15 months, they imitate what the model was trying to do rather than what they actually did, and use alternative means to reach what they see as an intended goal
  • social learning influences socioemotional development as well as knowledge acquisition
  • social learning also shapes children’s standards and values
  • from the 2nd year of life, toddlers internalize their parents’ values and standards and use them to guide and evaluate their own conduct
• scaffolding
  • scaffolding is when a more knowledgeable person may provide the learning with an overview of a given task, demonstrate how to do the most difficult parts, provide help with the most difficult parts, and offer suggestions to the learner on how to proceed
  • scaffolding helps the learner master the basics of the task and person with the most expertise transfers more and more responsibility to the learner until the learner is doing the entire task

Cognitive Change Mechanisms

General Information-Processing Mechanisms

• 4 types of information-processing mechanisms are especially general and pervasive: basic processes, strategies, metacognition, and content knowledge
• basic processes
  • simplest, most broadly applicable, and earliest-developing general information-processing mechanisms
  • they overlap considerably with behavioural learning processes
  • they include associating events with each other, recognizing objects as familiar, recalling facts and procedures, encoding key features of events, and generalizing from one instance to another
  • changes with age occur in the speed and efficiency of these basic processes, but they are all present from early infancy onward
• strategies
  • ex. toddlers form strategies for achieving goals
  • preschoolers form strategies for counting and solving arithemetic
  • school-age children form strategies for playing games and getting along with others
  • often, children acquire multiple strategies for solving a single kind of problem
  • knowing multiple strategies allows children to adapt to the demands of different problems and situations
• metacognition
  • cognitive process
  • ex. increasing use of memory strategies is largely due to children’s increasing realizatoin that they are unlikely to remember large amounts of material verbatim without strategies
  • among the most important applications of this is adaptive choice among alternative strategies (ex. whether to reread to understand text)
  • the cognitive control involved in executive functioning is another crucial type of metacognition
• Content knowledge
  • the more children know about any topic, the better able they are to learn and remember new information about it
  • knowledge also facilitates learning of unfamiliar content by allowing children to draw analogies between the new content and previously acquired information

Domain-Specific Learning Mechanisms

• infants acquire some complex competencies surprisingly rapidly
  • these include basic perception, understanding of the physical world, language comprehension and production, interpretation of emotions, and attachment to caregivers
  • what seems to unite these is their importance for further learning and survival
• many have proposed that nearly universal, rapid learning in these domains is produced by domain-specific learning mechanisms that operate on everyday experience to produce accurate conclusions about the world
• childre'n’s informal theories about the main types of entities in hte world also faciliate their learning about then
  • crucial in children’s informal theories are causal relations that explain a large number of observations in terms of a few basic unobservable processes
• possessing basic understanding of key concepts - like inertia, goal-direct movement, and growth for living things - helps children act appropriately in new situations
• both general and domain-specific cognitive learning mechanisms help children understand the world around them

Change Mechanisms Work Together

• although it is often easiest to discuss different change mechanisms, it is crucial to remember that biological, cognitive, and behavioural mechanisms that all reflect interactions between the person and the environment and that alll types of mechanisms work together to produce change
  • ex. effortful attention. The development of this reflects on a combination of biological and environmental factors
  • biological ex: genes influence the production of neurotransmitters that affect children’s ability to focus and ignore distractions
  • environmental ex: the quality of parenting a child receives influences the development of effortful attention
  • depending on the child, the impact of genes and environemnt varies
  • specific experiences can also be influential, for example, playing specially designed computer games increases the activity of the anterior cingulate and may aid the ability to sustain attention on both experimental tasks and intelligence tests
  • varied types of mechanisms work together to produce development of even a single capability

Theme 5: The Sociocultural Context Shapes Development

Growing Up in Societies with Different Practices and Values

• values and practices that people within a society take for granted as natural often vary substantially among societies
• emotional reactions provide an example of how cultural practicies and values influence behaviour
  • ex. American parents emphasize independence to a greater degree than Japanese and Korean mothers, and leave babies alone in a room or with other people more
  • Japanese and Korean babies who are placed in strange situations more often become very upset and show an insecure/resistant attachment pattern, and this is because Japanese and Korena mothers traditionally encourage dependence and rarely leave their babies alone
• cultural influences continue beyond infancy
  • ex. Japanese culture places a higher value on hiding negative emotions, especially anger, than American culture
  • due to these cultural influences, Japanese preschoolers less often express anger and other negative emotions than American children
• culture influences not only parents’ actions but also children’s interpretations of those actions
  • ex. Chinese American mothers use a great deal of scolding and guilt to control their children, and in the broader american population, use of this disciplinary approach is associated with negative outcomes but this association is not present among Chinese American children
  • the differing effectiveness of the disciplinary approaches may reflect children’s interpretation of their parents’ behaviour
  • if children believe scolding and inducing shame and guilt are in thier best interest, these behaviours can effective, but if they see it as reflecting negative parental feelings towards them, the discipline tends to be ineffective or harmful
• sociocultural differences exert a smiliar influence on cognitive development
  • they help determine which skills and knowledge children acquire
  • they also influence how well children learn skills that everyone acquires to some degree
• cultural values influence the educational system which in turn influences what and how deeply children learn
  • ex children in community-of-learners classrooms learn about fewer scientific topics than children in traditional classrooms, but they learn about them in greater depth

Growing Up in Different Times and Places

Economic Influences

• in every society, the economic circumstances of a child’s family considerably influence the child’s life
• the degree of economic inequality within each society influences how large a difference the economic circumstances make
  • in societies with large income inequalities, poor children’s academic achivement is far lower than that of children from wealthier families but in societies with smaller inequalities, children also do better than children from poorer families, but the differences are smaller
• all aspects of development are influenced by economic circumstances
  • ex. infants from impoverished families are more often insecurely attached to their mothers
  • ex. children and adolescents from impoverished families often are rejected as friends and report being lonely more often
  • illegual substance use, crime and depression are also more common
• children from impoverished families face many disadvantages so these negative outcomes are unsurprising
  • poor children often live in dangerous neighbourhoods, grow up in homes with one or no biological parents, attend inferior schools, are less often read to and spoken to by parents, and have fewer intellectually stimulating material in their homes

Influences of Family and Peers

• in some families, regardless of income, parents are sensitive to babies’ needs and form close attachments with them; in others, this does not occur
• the influence of friends, other peers, teachers, nad other adults, varies in as many ways as that of families
  • ex. friends can provide companionship and feedback, contribute to self-esteem and serve as a buffer against stress. During adolescence, they can be particularly important sources of sympathy and support.
  • friends can also have negative influences, drawing children and adolescents into reckless and aggressive behavior like crime, drinking and drug use.
• personal relationships, like economic circumstances, culture, and technology, influence development, but the effect of these influences vary with the particulars

Theme 6: Individual Differences

• a breadth of related characteristics are crucial in determining the importance of any dimension of individual differences
• one reason intelligence is considered a central individual difference is that the higher a child’s IQ, the higher the child’s grades, achievement test scores, and general knowledge
• a second characteristic is stability over time
• a third characteristic is that a child’s status on a dimension predicts outcomes on other importnat characteristics in the future
• this analysis makes it clear why demographic variables like gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status are studied so often
  • ex. gender: cis boys tend to be larger, stronger, more physically active and aggressive, to be better at some forms of spatial thinking thinking, and more often to have ADHD and math/reading disabilities
  • cis girls tend to be more verbal, better at writing, more likely to express sympathy and empathy for people in distress
  • gender identity as male or female is also generally stable over time and being male or female predicts future individual differences
• the correlation between a person’s gender and future individual differences reflects complex interactions among social and biological influences
  • ex. not all boys are physically active and not all girls are good at perceiving emotions
• there is also much overlap between females and males
  • ex. many girls and boys have good spatial skills or verbal skills, and many girls and boys score poorly in these domains

Breadth of Individual Differences at a Given Time

• children who are high on one dimension also tend to be high on other, conceptually related dimensions
• similarly, children who do well on one measure of social or emotional functioning also tend to do wel on others
• sometimes the conects are very strong (ex. intelligence and school achivement)
• more often, the relationships are moderate (ex. children who get along with parents often get along with peers but there are many exceptions)
• beyond intelligence and gender, 2 other crucial dimensions of individual differences are attachment and self-esteem
  • ex. toddler who is securely attached to their mother tends to be enthusiastic and positive about solving problems with her, to comply more often with her directives, and to obey her requests even she isn’t present. These children also tend to get along better with peers and to be more sociable and more socially competent
• children and adolescents who are high in self-esteem tend to be strong on many other diemsnions of social and emotional functioning as well
  • they tend to be generally hopeful and popular, to have many friends, and to have good academic and self-regulation skills
  • those with low self-esteem tend to feel hopeless and to be prone to problems like depression, aggression, and social withdrawal

Stability Over Time

• many individual differences show moderate stability over time
  • ex. children who have easy temperaments during infancy tend to continue to have easy temperaments in middle and later childhood
  • ex. elementary school children with ADHD, reading disabilities, or mathematics disabilities usually have lifelong difficulties in those areas
• the reasons for such stability of psychological characteristics are to be found in the stability of both genes and environment
  • a child’s genotype remains identical over the course of development (though some genes switch on and off at different times)
  • most children’s environments remain stable as well
• major changes do occur, and they affect children’s happiness, self-esteem, and other characteristics
• nonetheless, the stability of children’s environments, like the stability of their genes, contributes to the stability of their psychological functioning over time

Predicting Future Individual Differences on Other Dimensions

• individual differences on some dimensions are related to future status on that dimension but also to future status on other dimensions
  • ex. children who are securely attached as infants tend to have more social ties to their peers as toddlers and preschoolers than those who were insecurely attached as infants
  • securely attached children tend to understand other children’s emotions relatively well and to be relatively skilled in resolving conflicts and tend to form close attachments with romantic partners in adolescence and adulthood
• the relative stability of most children’s environments contributes to these long-term continuities of psychological functioning
• if children’s environments change in important ways, the typical continuities may be disrupted
  • ex. divorce reduces the likelihood that securely attached children will conitnue to show positive relations with peers usually associated with secure attachment

Determinants of Individual Differences

Genetics

• for a number of important characteristics, about 50% of the differences among individuals in a given population are attributable to differences in genetic inheritance
• the degree of genetic influence on individual differences tends to increase over the course of development
  • in terms of IQ, one reason for tis is that genes related to intellectual functioning do not exercise their effects until late childhood or adolescence
  • another is that over the course of development, children become increasingly free to choose environments that are in accord with their genetic predispoisitons

Experience

• individual differences reflect children’s experiences as well as their genes
  • ex. with the environmental influence of parents: the more parents speak to toddlres, the faster they recognize familiar words and learn new ones. The more parents aim scaffolding at children’s capabilities, the greater the improvement in thier children’s problem solving. The more stimulating and responsive the home intellectual environment, the higher children’s IQ tends to be
• parents exert at least as large an influence on their children’s social and emotional development as on their intellctual development
  • ex. the likelihood that children will adopt their parents’ standard and values appears to be influenced by the type of discipline their parents use with them
• the effects of different types of parenting depends on the child
  • ex. development of conscience. With fearful children, the key factor determining whether the child internalizes the parents’ moral values is gentle discipline. With fearless children, the key factor is a positive relationship with one’s parents. They tend to internalize their parents’ values only if they feel close to them

Theme 7: Child-Development Research Can Improve Children’s Lives

Implications for Parenting

Pick a Good Partner

• given the importance of the environment, if you think you might want to have children, pick a partner whose intellectual and emotional characteristics seem likely to lead to their becoming a good mother or father

Ensure a Healthy Partner

• an expectant mother should maintain a healthy diet, have regular checkups, and keep stress levels as low as possible to increase the likelihood of a successful pregnancy
• should also avoid teratogens like tobacco, alcohol, and harmful drugs

Know Which Decisions Are Likely to Have a Long-Term Impact

• babies are quite resilient but some decisions that may seem minor can have important effects
  • ex. the baby’s sleeping position
  • sleeping on their back instead of their stomach reduces the possibility of SIDS
• the lesson of child-development research is that early problems are often transitory so there is no reason to worry about them
  • ex. Colic, which affects about 10% of babies
  • the best approach is to soothe the baby, seek social support, obtain help to allow some time off from caregiving, and remember colic usually ends by the time babies are 3 months old

Form a Secure Attachment

• most parents have no difficulty forming a secure attachment with their baby, but some do not form such bonds
• one reason is genetics
  • variant forms of certain genes can influence the likelihood of a child’s forming a secure parental attachment in at least some circumstances
• baby’s temperament and the parents’ attitude and responsiveness influence the quality of attachment
  • even when babies are initially irritable and difficult, programs that teach parents how t be responsive and positive with them can lead to more secure attachments

Provide a Stimulating Environment

• the home environment has a great deal to do with children’s learning
• one example involves reading acquisition
  • reading to young children positively influences their later reading achievement
  • one reason for this is such activities promote phonological awareness, and nursery rhymes appear to be particularly effective in this regard
  • phonological awarenss helps children learn to sound out words which helps them learn to retrieve the words’ identities quickly and effortlessly
• successful early reading leads children to read more, which helps them improve their reading as they age
• the more stimulating the intellectual environment, the more eager children are to learn

Implications of Education

• Piaget’s theory emphasizes the importance of the child’s active involvement, both mental and physical, in the learning process
  • active involvement is especially important in helping children master counterintuitive ideas
• Information-processing theories suggest that analyzing the types of information available to children in everyday activities can improve learning
  • ex. the board game Chutes and Ladders provides visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and temporal information that can help children learn the sizes of numbers, as well as improve counting, recognition of numbers, and arithmetic learning
• sociocultural theories emphasize the need to turn classrooms into communities of learners where children cooperate with one another in their pursuit of knowledge
  • instead of following the traditional model of learning where teachers lecture and children take notes, community-of-learners classrooms follow an approach where teachers provide only what children need to learn and gradually decrease their directive role as children become more competent
  • these programs also encourage children to make use of resources of the broader community
  • the approach can be effective not only in building intellectual skills but also in promoting desirable values, like personal responsibility and mutual respect

Implications of Helping Children at Risk

The Importance of Timing

• providing interventions at the optimal time is crucial in a variety of developmental contexts
  • ex. helping children at risk for learning difficulties
  • must be addressed early before children lose confidence in their ability to learn and become resentful toward schools and teachres
  • early educational programs that are optimally staffed, high funded, and carefully designed, like the Abecedarian Project, produce large gains in both academic achievement and social skills that continue through childhood and adolescence
  • it is possible for intensive programs that start early to have substantial, lasting benefits on the academic achievement of poor children
  • ex. early detection of child maltreatment and rapid intervention is crucial
  • knowing the characteristics of abused and neglected children can help those who come into contact with children recognize potential problems early and alert social service agencies so they can investigate. Early recognition of signs of abuse can literally save children’s lives.
    • children who are maltreated tend to have difficult temperaments, have few friends, be in poor physical and mental health, do poorly in school, and show abnormal aggression or passivity
    • adolescents who are maltreated may be depressed or hyperactive, use drugs or alocohol, and have sexual problems

Biology and Environment Work Together

• biology and environment work together to produce all behaviour.
  • ex. this has been important to note in designing treatments for ADHD
  • when medications are used alone, their benefits usually end as soon as children stop taking them. Longer-lasting benefits require behavioural therapy as well as medication

Every Problem Has Many Causes

• problems almost always have multiple causes
• ex. the greater number of risks, the more likely a child is to have low IQ, poor socioecmotional skills, and psychiatric disorders
• providing effective treatment often requires addressing many particular difficulties
• ex. helping children gain better social skills requires increasing their understanding of other people, learning new strategies, and learning from their own experience

Improving Social Policy

• knowledge of child-development research can inform your perspectives on many issues relevant to children
• your actions as a citizen through votes in elections, opinions expressed in informal discussions, and participation in advocacy organizations can make all the difference
• research cannot answer questions that depend on values as well as data, but knowing the scientific evidence can help us, as citizens, make better-informed decisions

Parental Leave

• should society require employers to grant paid parental leave in the months after a baby is born? if so, for how long? should all employers be required to provide paid leave? for how long should paid leave be required? should the length of paid leave be identical for both parents?…
  • scientific evidence can never answer such questions, which inevitably reflect values and priorities

Day Care

• one argument against plicies that society should subsidize day-care payments is that children development more successfully if they stay at home with one of their parents than attending day care
• this argument has turned out to be incorrect

Eyewitness Testimony

• understanding child development is vital for deciding whether children should be allowed to testify in court cases and for obtaining the most accurate testimony possible from them
  • when children are shielded from misleading and repeated questioning, even 4- and 5-year-olds usually provide accurate testimony about the types of issues that are central in court cases
• given the high stakes in such cases, using the lessons of research to elicit the most accurate possible testimony from children is essential for just verdicts
• child-development research holds lessons for numerous other social problems as well
  • ex. research on the causes of aggression have led to programs like Fast Track, which are designed to teach aggressive children to manage their anger
• there is no end of social problems, and understanding child development can help address the ones that affect children’s futures

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