Transcript Infancy and Childhood • Developmental Psychology: study of changes that occur in people from birth through old age. – How and why do.

Infancy
and Childhood
• Developmental Psychology: study of changes that occur
in people from birth through old age.
– How and why do these changes occur and we get older??
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Thinking
Language
Intelligence
Emotions
Social Behavior
Prenatal Development
• Stage of development from conception to birth.
• Two weeks after conception, the cells begin to specialize:
some form the baby’s internal organs, others will form
muscles and bones, and still others form skin and the
nervous system.
• Embryo: a developing human between 2 weeks and 3
months after conception.
• Fetus: a developing human between 3 months after
conception and birth.
– about one inch in length
– Resembles a human being, with arms and legs, a large head, and a
heart has begun to beat.
• Placenta: organ by which an embryo or fetus is attached to
its mother’s uterus and that nourishes it during prenatal
development.
• Teratogens: toxic substances such as alcohol or nicotine
that cross the placenta and may result in birth defects.
– Drugs
– Smoking (Cigarettes)
• Causes low birth weight and severe life long asthma
– Alcohol
• Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)
– Causes facial defects, heart defects, stunted growth, and cognitive
impairments.
The Newborn Baby
• When babies are first born they can sleep up to 20 hrs. a
day!
• Reflexes
– Rooting reflex: causes a newborn to turn its head toward something
that touches its cheek and to grope around with its mouth.
– Sucking reflex: newborn’s tendency to suck on objects placed in its
mouth
– Swallowing reflex: enables newborn to swallow liquids without
choking.
– Grasping reflex: causes newborns to close their fists around
anything that is out in their hands.
– Stepping reflex: causes newborns to make little stepping motions if
they are held upright with their feet just touching a surface.
• Temperament: characteristic patterns of emotional
reactions and emotional self-regulation.
– “Easy” babies are good-natured and adaptable, east to care for and
please.
– “Difficult” babies are moody and intense, reacting to new people
and new situations both negatively and strongly.
– “Slow-to-warm-up” babies are relatively inactive and slow to
respond to new things, and when they do react. Their reactions are
mild.
Nature v. Nurture
Influence of heredity or genes v.
influence of environment or
experience on thought and
behavior.
Ideas to think about?
How much of development is
the result of inheritance
(heredity)?
How much is the result of
what we have learned?
Perceptual Abilities
• Newborns can see, hear, and understand far more than
previous generations had thought.
– Vision:
• See most clearly when faces or objects are only 8-10 inches away from
them.
• By 8-10 months babies can see almost as well as your average college
student.
• Takes 3-4 years for a babies visual system to fully develop.
• Babies would rather see new objects or patterns, rather than ones
constantly being repeated.
– Depth perception
• There is no research on a babies depth perception before 4 months of
age.
• Viewing the world in three dimensions begins as a baby begins to crawl,
around 6-12 months of age.
– Other Senses
• Babies ears work before they are even born.
• Babies remember sounds that they hear while in their mother’s womb.
• Babies can also tell directions from which sound comes from and will
turn their heads toward sounds.
• Newborn babies have clear likes and dislikes for smells and food.
• Likes for sweet flavors can last through childhood.
• Two factors are important to the development of all of these factors
– Physical maturation of the sense organs and nervous system
– Experience in the world
Infancy and Childhood
• Physical Development
– First year of life the average baby grows 10 inches and gains 15 lbs.
– First two years of life a baby’s head is larger than his/her body; the
brain undergoes rapid growth.
– A child’s brain reaches three-quarters of its adult size by about 2
years of age.
– Head growth is virtually done by the age of 10.
• Motor Development: acquisition of skills involving
movement, such as grasping, crawling, and walking.
• Developmental norms: ages by which the average
achieves various developmental milestones.
• Maturation: automatic biological unfolding of development
as a person grows older and contribute to orderly
sequences of developmental changes.
– Crawling to toddling to walking
• Cognitive Development
– Most influential theorist in cognitive
development was Swiss psychologist
Jean Piaget (1896-1980).
– Observed and studied children
(including his own three) playing
games, solve problems, and perform
everyday tasks, and then he asked
them questions and devised tests to
learn how they thought.
– Piaget believed that children
progress through four stages of
cognitive development.
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive
Development
• Sensory Motor Stage (Birth – 2 years)
– Stage in which an individual develops object permanence and
acquires the ability to form mental representations.
– Start by using skills they are born with- grasping, rooting, sucking.
– Object permanence: concept that things continue to exist even
when they are out of sight.
• By 18 -24 months, infants can imagine the movement of an object they
do not actually see move.
– Mental representations: mental images of symbols (such as words)
used to think about or remember an objects, a person, or an event.
• By the end of this stage, an infant can recognize itself in the mirror.
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Pre operational Stage (2-7 years)
– Individual becomes able to use
mental representations and
language to describe,
remember, and reason about
the world though only in an
egocentric fashion.
– Lays groundwork for engaging
in fantasy play and for using
symbolic gestures (slashing a
dragon with an imaginary
sword).
– Egocentric: describes the
inability to see things from
another’s point-of-view.
• Concrete Operations (7-11 years)
– Individual can attend to more than one thing at a time and
understand someone else’s point-of-view, though thinking is limited
to concrete matters.
– Principles of conservation: concept that the quantity of a
substance is not altered by reversible changes in its appearance.
(Ex. Volume of liquid stays the same no matter what size or shape the
container is)
– Ability to grasp complex classification schemes such as those
involving super-ordinate or subordinate classes.
• Formal Operations (11-15 years)
– Individuals becomes capable of abstract thought.
– Can formulate a hypothesis, test it mentally, and accept or reject it
according to the outcome.
– Can understand cause and effect.
– Develop general rules, principles, and theories.
Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory
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Many question his assumption that there are distinct stages in cognitive
development that always progress in an orderly, sequential way, and that a child
must pass through one stage before entering the next.
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Another criticism being the assumption that young infants understand very little
about the world, such as permanence of objects in it.
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They also so sophisticated knowledge of the world that Piaget thought they
lacked, such as grasp of numbers.
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Critics also believe that Piaget underplayed the importance of social interaction
on cognitive development.
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Piaget’s theory gives a schematic road map of cognitive development, the
interests and experiences of a particular child may influence development of
cognitive abilities in ways not accounted for in the theory.
Moral Development
• Lawrence Kohlberg
– Preconvential level
• children tend to interpret behavior on terms of its concrete
consequences.
• Judgments of “right” and “wrong” behavior on whether it is rewarded or
punished.
– Conventional level
• Adolescents first define right behavior as that which pleases or helps
others and is approved by them.
• Considering various abstract social virtues, such as being a “good
citizen” and respecting authority.
• Postconventional level
– Emphasis on abstract principles such as, justice, liberty, and
equality.
– Personal and strongly felt moral standards become a guideposts for
deciding what is right and wrong.
Criticisms of Kohlberg’s Theory
• Research indicates that many people in our society, adults
as well as adolescents, never progress beyond the
conventional level of moral reasoning.
• Does not take into account cultural differences in moral
values.
• Kohlberg’s theory is sexist. Kohlberg found that boys
usually scored higher than girls on his test of moral
development. However, Carol Gilligan found that boys base
their moral judgments on the concept of justice. While girls
focus on caring and maintaining personal relationships.
• Current moral development research focuses on the factors
that influence moral choices in everyday life, and the extent
to which those choices are actually put into action.
Language Development
• Language development follows a particular pattern.
• At about 2 months of age, an infant begins to coo.
• In another month or two, the infant begins the babbling
stage and starts to repeat sounds such as “da” or even
meaningless sounds that developmental psychologists refer
to as “grunts”; these sounds are building blocks for later
language development.
• Babbling: a baby’s vocalizations, consisting of repetition of
consonant-vowel combinations.
• A few months later the infant may string together the same
sound, as in dadadada.
• Finally, the baby will form combinations of different sounds,
as in dabamaga.
• Even deaf babies with deaf parents who communicate with
sign language engage in a form of babbling.
– Like hearing babies, they begin to babble before 10 months of age.
– Instead of babbling with their mouths, the babble with their hands.
• By 4-6 months of age a babies language takes on features
of adult language.
– Babies vocalizations begin to show signs of intonations (ising and
lowering of the voice)
• By 1 years old babies use intonations to indicate commands
and questions.
– Motherese: “mother talk” is spoken slowly. And uses simple
sentences, a higher pitch voice, repetition, and exaggerated
intonations.
• All of this preparation leads to a baby’s first words, such as
“mama” or “dada.”
• The next 6-8 months, involve a child building up their
vocabulary with holophrases (one-word sentences).
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Cookie
Hi
Bye
Ouch
Me
• Year two for language development includes naming objects
as they appear.
• Year three, children begin to for two and three word
sentences.
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My ball
Baby cry
Me fall down
Doggy for woof-woof
Parenting Styles
• Children seek independence in a variety of different ways in
which they try to resolve conflicts.
• Authoritarian Families
– Parents are the bosses and rule the roost.
– Parents do not believe that they have to explain their actions or
demands.
– Parents also believe their children has no right to question parental
decisions.
• Authoritative (Democratic) Families
– Parents listen to their children’s reasons for wanting to go places or
go our with people and make a solid effort to explain their rules and
expectations.
– Children participate in decisions affecting their lives.
– Children are given the opportunity to make their own decisions, but
parents still reserve the right to say no.
• Permissive Families (Laissez-faire families)
– Children have final say.
– Parents try to play the parenting role, but children still insist in getting
their own way.
– Parents give up on parenting responsibilities (set no rules,
boundaries, or expectations).
• Uninvolved Parents
– Egocentric in parenting
– Uncommitted in being a parent
– Distant from children
Effects of Parenting Styles
• Research shows that children that are raised in an
authoritative environment are more confident of themselves
and their goals.
• This comes from the following two features
– Establishment of limits on the child and responding to the child with
love and support.
• Authoritative reared children are better at making decisions
with or without advice due to
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Assume responsibility gradually
Able to identify with parents
Present a model of responsible, cooperative independence
Children themselves may contribute to the style parents embrace,
with consequences for their own personal development.
Child Abuse
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Child abuse includes the physical or mental injury, sexual abuse, negligent
treatment, or mistreatment of children under the age of 18 by adults entrusted
with their care.
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Many abusive parents were themselves mistreated as children, suggesting that
these parents may gave learned an inappropriate way of caring for children.
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Overburdened and stressed parents are more likely to abuse their children.
• Low-birth weight infants and those children who are
hyperactive or mentally or physically disadvantaged
experience a higher than normal incidence of abuse.
• Social-cultural stresses such as unemployment and lack of
contact with family, friends, and groups in the community
are other factors associated with child abuse.
• The most effective way of stopping child abuse is to prevent
future incidents.
• Parent education for abusive parents allows them to learn
new ways of dealing with their children.
• Abuse has many developmental effects for its victims. It
may rob children of their childhood and create a loss of trust
and feelings of guilt, which in turn may lead to antisocial
behavior, depression, identity confusion, loss of self-esteem,
and other emotional problems.
Social Development
• Learning the rules of behavior of the culture in which you
are born and grow up is called socialization. Learning what
the rules are and when to apply or bend them--- is, however,
only one dimension of socialization.
• Every society has ideas about what is meaningful, valuable,
worth striving for, and beautiful. Every society classifies
people according to their family, sex, age, skills, personality
characteristics, and other criteria.
• Finally, socialization involves learning to live with other
people and with yourself.
Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual
Development
• Sigmund Freud believed that all children are born with
powerful sexual and aggressive urges.
• He also believed that by learning to control these urges
children learn the sense between right and wrong.
• Boys and girls go through different processes.
Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual
Development
• Oral Stage (First 18 months of life)- weaning the child for nursing,
causing the child’s first experience of not getting what he/she wants.
• Anal Stage (1 ½ years to 3 years of age)- when the anus becomes the
source of erotic pleasure.
• Phallic Stage ( 3 years to 6 years of age)- when they become aware
of the differences between themselves and members of the opposite
sex.
• Identification- when the boy takes on all of his father’s values and
moral principles. Thus, at the same time that he learns to behave like a
man, he internalizes his father’s morality.
• Latency Stage (6 years to puberty)- sexual thoughts are
repressed; child focuses on developing social and
intellectual skills.
• Sublimation- the process of redirecting sexual impulses
into learning tasks.
• Genital Stage (puberty through adulthood)- sexual
desires are renewed; individuals seek relationships with
others.
Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial
Development
• Erik Erikson takes a broader view of human development.
Although he recognizes the child’s sexual and aggressive
urges, he believes that the need for social approval is just
as important.
• Erikson studied what he called psychosocial development
-life periods in which an individual’s goals is to satisfy
desires associated with social needs.
• Although Erikson believes that childhood experiences have
a lasting impact on the individual, he sees development as a
lifelong interactive process between people.
• See handout for stages ***