Child development
Child development involves the biological, psychological and emotional changes that occur in human beings between birth and the conclusion of adolescence. It is—particularly from birth to five years— a foundation for a prosperous and sustainable society.
Childhood is divided into three stages of life which include early childhood, middle childhood, and late childhood. Early childhood typically ranges from infancy to the age of 5 years old. During this period, development is significant, as many of life's milestones happen during this time period such as first words, learning to crawl, and learning to walk. Middle childhood/preadolescence or ages 5–10 universally mark a distinctive period between major developmental transition points. Adolescence often begins around the onset of puberty, marked as menarche or spermarche, occurring between 10 and 12 years of age, and ends upon acquiring the age of maturity.. Adolescence is characterized by maturation of the body, increase in capacity for learning, and emergence of personal identity. Developmental change may occur as a result of genetically controlled processes, known as maturation, or environmental factors and learning, but most commonly involves an interaction between the two. Development may also occur as a result of human nature and of human ability to learn from the environment.
There are various definitions of the periods in a child's development, since each period is a continuum with individual differences regarding starting and ending. Some age-related development periods with defined intervals include: newborn ; infant ; toddler ; preschooler ; prime childhood ; preteens ; and teens.
Parents play a large role in a child's activities, socialization, and development; having multiple parents can add stability to a child's life and therefore encourage healthy development. A parent-child relationship with a stable foundation creates room for a child to feel both supported and safe. This environment established to express emotions is a building block that leads to children effectively regulating emotions and furthering their development. Another influential factor in children's development is the quality of their care. Child-care programs may be beneficial for childhood development such as learning capabilities and social skills.
The optimal development of children is considered vital to society and it is important to understand the social, cognitive, emotional, and educational development of children. Increased research and interest in this field has resulted in new theories and strategies, especially with regard to practices that promote development within the school systems. Some theories seek to describe a sequence of states that compose child development.
Theories
Ecological systems
Also called "development in context" or "human ecology" theory, ecological systems theory was originally formulated by Urie Bronfenbrenner. It specifies four types of nested environmental systems, with bi-directional influences within and between the systems; they are the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. Each system contains roles, norms, and rules that can powerfully shape development. Since its publication in 1979, Bronfenbrenner's major statement of this theory, The Ecology of Human Development, has had widespread influence on the way psychologists and others approach the study of human beings and their environments. As a result of this influential conceptualization of development, these environments – from the family to economic and political structures – have come to be viewed as part of the life course from childhood through adulthood.Piaget
Jean Piaget was a Swiss scholar who began his studies in intellectual development in the 1920s. Interested in the ways animals adapt to their environments, his first scientific article was published when he was 10 years old, and he pursued a Ph.D. in zoology, where he became interested in epistemology. Epistemology branches off from philosophy and deals with the origin of knowledge, which Piaget believed came from Psychology. After travelling to Paris, he began working on the first "standardized intelligence test" at Alfred Binet laboratories, which influenced his career greatly. During this intelligence testing he began developing a profound interest in the way children's intellectualism works. As a result, he developed his own laboratory, where he spent years recording children's intellectual growth and attempting to find out how children develop through various stages of thinking. This led Piaget to develop four important stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete-operational stage, and formal-operational stage. Piaget concluded that adaption to an environment is managed through schemas and adaption occurs through assimilation and accommodation.Stages
Sensory Motor:In the first stage in Piaget's theory, infants have the following basic senses: vision, hearing, and motor skills. In this stage, knowledge of the world is limited but is constantly developing due to the child's experiences and interactions. According to Piaget, when an infant reaches about 7–9 months of age they begin to develop what he called object permanence, meaning the child now has the ability to understand that objects keep existing even when they cannot be seen. An example of this would be hiding the child's favorite toy under a blanket, and although the child cannot physically see it they still know to look under the blanket.
Preoperational:
During this stage, young children begin analyzing their environment using mental symbols, including words and images; the child will begin to apply these in their everyday lives as they come across different objects, events, and situations. However, Piaget's main focus on this stage, and the reason why he named it "preoperational", is that children at this point are not able to apply specific cognitive operations, such as mental math. In addition to symbolism, children start to engage in pretend play, pretending to be people they are not, for example teachers or superheroes; they sometimes use different props to make this pretend play more real. Some weaknesses in this stage are that children who are about 3–4 years old often display what is called egocentrism, meaning the child is not able to see someone else's point of view, and they feel as if every other person is experiencing the same events and feelings that they are. However, at about 7, thought processes of children are no longer egocentric and are more intuitive, meaning they now think about the way something looks, though they do not yet use rational thinking.
Concrete:
In this stage, children between the age of 7 and 11 use appropriate logic to develop cognitive operations and begin applying this new way of thinking to different events they encounter. Children in this stage incorporate inductive reasoning, which involves drawing conclusions from other observations in order to make a generalization. Unlike in the preoperational stage, children can now change and rearrange mental images and symbols to form a logical thought, an example of this is "reversibility", where the child now knows to reverse an action by doing the opposite.
Formal operations:
The final stage of Piaget's cognitive development defines a child as now having the ability to "think more rationally and systematically about abstract concepts and hypothetical events". Some strengths during this time are that the child or adolescent begins forming their identity and begins understanding why people behave the way they behave. While some weaknesses include the child or adolescent developing some egocentric thoughts, including the imaginary audience and the personal fable. An imaginary audience is when an adolescent feels that the world is just as concerned and judgemental of anything the adolescent does as they themselves are; an adolescent may feel as if they are "on stage" and everyone is a critic and they are the ones being critiqued. A personal fable is when the adolescent feels that he or she is a unique person and everything they do is unique. They feel as if they are the only ones that have ever experienced what they are experiencing and that they are invincible and nothing bad will happen to them, bad things only happen to other people.
Vygotsky
Vygotsky, a Russian theorist, proposed the sociocultural theory of child development. During the 1920s–1930s, while Piaget was developing his own theory, Vygotsky was an active scholar and at that time his theory was said to be "recent" because it was translated out of Russian and began influencing Western thinking. He posited that children learn through hands-on experience, as Piaget suggested. However, unlike Piaget, he claimed that timely and sensitive intervention by adults when a child is on the edge of learning a new task could help children learn new tasks. This technique, called "scaffolding", builds new knowledge onto the knowledge children already have to help the child learn. An example of this might be when a parent "helps" an infant clap or roll their hands to the pat-a-cake rhyme, until they can clap and roll their hands themself.Vygotsky was strongly focused on the role of culture in determining the child's pattern of development. He argued that "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people and then inside the child. This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals."
Vygotsky felt that development was a process, and saw that during periods of crisis there was a qualitative transformation in the child's mental functioning.