Most scientists eventually decided that child development is not a mini replay of evolution and but most continue to believe that studying children and how they develop can tell us a lot about human beings in general. This belief helped to spark a scientific field now known as developmental psychology. Developmental psychologists study the changes that occur during all or part of the life span in the processes of perception, learning, thinking, social activity and other aspects of human behavior.
Three major issues in developmental
psychology have stimulated recurring conflicts.
NATURE VERSUS NURTURE
The nurture side of the nature –nurture
debate had its strong advocates too – people who believed that environmental
forces have a more powerful influence on our development than does heredity.
The nature-nurture debate really concerns the relative impact of heredity and
environment. Virtually no one believes that nature alone, or nurture alone,
completely determines the course of our development. Psychologists agree that
development is shaped by the interaction of heredity and environment.
PASSIVITY VERSUS ACTIVITY
Some psychologists picture as fairly
passive, doing what we do largely because of the environmental forces around
us. Jean Piaget attacked the view that the developing person merely “submits
passively to the environment”. Instead Piaget argued that people actively
manipulate the objects and events around
them. They don’t merely copy or learn about reality as they develop. Instead,
they construct their own ways of understanding the world; psychologically
speaking they all invent their own reality.
CONTINUOUS VERSUS DISCONTINOUS
Some psychologists see development as a
sort of continuous progression – that is a steady accumulation of skills,
knowledge and maturity. According to this view, development is best viewed as a
smooth curve, it can be measured in quantitative ways – that is ways that tell
us how much of a particular ability the child has. Other psychologists see
development as a discontinuous progression – that is as a sequence of leaps from
one stage to another. Here it measures developmental changes in qualitative
ways – that is in terms of the characteristics of people’s behavior.
Methods of Studying Development
Development psychologists focus on time
and transformation. They study the changes that occur as the developing
individual unfolds – changes in processes as basic as perception and as complex
as forming a self concept. The psychologists rely on research methods geared
specifically to the study of development. Two of the most important are the
longitudinal method and the cross sectional method.
THE LONGITUDINAL MEHTOD
A psychologist using the longitudinal
method observes the same individuals at different points in time. The
individuals may be the children of oil barons and migrant workers studied at
yearly intervals from birth. This research can be much more difficult. People
who enlist in a study may move away, lose interest, or for other reasons be
unavailable for later observation or testing. This is a logistical problem for
the investigator, and it is a source of bias, it might mean that the findings
of the completed study would apply only to people who rarely move and who are
interested in research. Another risk of this research is that a study will seem
less important or sophisticated at its end than it did at its beginning; this
is because the central issued and the preferred research methods of psychology
are continually shifting.
Carefully conducted longitudinal
research, despite its problems, is highly regarded by most developmental
psychologists, who recognize the value of repeatedly observing ithe same
individuals as they mature.
THE CROSS-SECTIONAL METHOD
Most developmental research involves the
cross-sectional method. In studying dependency, for example, many investigators
simply compare representative samples of youngsters at two or more age levels
on the same measures. They found large group differences, with dependency most pronounced
in the youngest children and least pronounced in the oldest. This of course,
suggests that dependency as measured by these researchers probably declines
from the early to the mid elementary years. Such cross sectional research is an
efficient way of spotting age group differences as such. It has its
disadvantages, though because it does not involve repeated measurements of the
same individuals, it cannot tell us how stable people’s characteristics are as
they mature.
Infancy: Early steps in the March to
Maturity
For centuries, the deeply private world
of the infant was cloaked in mystery. Because babies could not talk, the adults
in their world were reduced to guesswork and speculation about them. In recent
decades, however, ingenious investigators have figured out ways of peering into
the infant’s world. The neonatal (newborn) period is the first 4 weeks after
birth. This is the time of transition from the total dependency of prenatal
life to a more independent, creative existence. It is a time when rhythms of
breathing, feeding, sleeping, and elimination are established and when babies
and parents make some critical adaptations to one another.
THE NEONATE:
Most of the psychologists agree that
neonates are born with abilities to perceive and respond to some parts of their
world in an organized and effective way. For example, reflexes that are in
place at birth permit the neonate to grope, or ‘root’ for the breast, to suck
when a object is placed in its mouth and to swallow milk and other liquids.
Neonates show perceptual abilities that
would surprise most people. They show positive reactions to certain sweet
tastes and negative reactions to certain sour, bitter or salty taste. They turn
in the direction of certain sounds, including human speech. Some of the most
exciting findings about neonates involve their visual abilities. They not only
orient toward light but they can under the right conditions, actually follow a
light.
Some surprising findings of a study
conducted by Meltzoff and Moore suggested that neonates are even capable of
imitation. The research appeared to show that babies as young as 2 to 3 weeks
can mimic certain adult behaviors such as facial expressions.
Some researchers now suspect that the
apparent imitation may be most pronounced among very young infants and that it
may be reflexive – something like the early rooting.
MOTOR DEVELOPMENT
The development of motor activity in the
period of infancy has been studied extenisively. Investigators have built up a
rich fund of normative data on the ages at which certain motor milestones are
attained. The below mentioned chart
shows the norms for several such milestones. It shows that there is a fairly
broad age range within which individual infants may reach each milestone, the
order in which the milestones are reached rearely differs.
Age (in months) Mile stones
At 1 level arms and legs thrust in
play
At 2 level hands erect and steady
At 3 level hand predominantly open
At 4 level turns back to side
At 5 level one
handed reaching
At 6 level sits alone steadily
At 7 level crawls or creeps
At 8 level pulls up by furniture
At 9 level Neat pincer ( thumb)
At 10 level Pat –a – cake
At 11 level stand alone
At 12 level walks alone
At 13 level throws ball forward
The order of events is quite consistent,
but the age at which each milestone will be reached is hard to predict for a
given child. For example, 5% of the infants walk alone by the age of 9 months
but that another 5% percent do not walk alone until after their sixteenth
month. Walking is another good example of the interaction of nature and nurture;
although it seems to be a wired in developmental sequence, it can be speeded up
or slowed down by variations in the infant’s experience.
Prehension - the use of the hands as
tools, shows another predictable developmental sequence. It begins with infants
thrusting their hands in the direction of a target object, essentially “taking
a swipe” at the object. This is followed by crude grasping involving only the
palm of the hand. Then there is a sequence of increasingly well-coordinated
finger and thumb movements. Later in the first year of life, most infants can
combine thumb and finger action into a pincer motion that allows them to pick up
a single chocolate chip from a tabletop.
What they will then do with the
chocolate chip depends upon the state of yet another motor system, mouthing.
The most common form of mouthing in infancy is sucking.
DEVELOPMENT OF PERCEPTION
The past two decades have seen an
explosion of research on infant perception, particularly visual perception.
There are lot of ways in which infants organize and interpret what they see.
For example – a kind of research is a study of depth perception conducted by
Gibson and Walk. To judge whether infants can read the perceptual cues that
adults use to judge depth, these researchers used the visual cliff. It involved
an apparent drop-off made safe by a clear glass cover. Despite the cover,
Gibson and Walk found that none of the 6-14 month old infants they tested would
cross the “deep” area to get to their mothers.
Yet all 36 of them eagerly crawled to their mothers when the moms were
stationed on the “shallow” side. This strongly suggests that even 6 month old infants have depth
perception.
Investigators have traced significant
development changes in face watching. One month olds show only a moderate
interest in real human faces; when they do focus on a face they focus mostly on
edges and points of light dark contrast. Two month olds, by contrast, spend
more time looking at the interior of the face, especially the eyes, than at the
outer edges. Most researchers agree that by the fourth or fifth month, infants
can ‘assemble’ parts of a face into a meaningful whole. By five months, for
instance, babies can distinguish between two dissimilar faces.
COGINITIVE DEVELOPMENT – PIAGET’S THEORY
For the infant, the cognitive
development is expressed through perceptual and motor activity. When a baby
looks intently at the points and contrasts of a triangle or inspects her
father’s face, she is manifesting one of her few means of “thinking about” or
“knowing” the triangle or the face. When another infants sucks on the handle of
his rattle, this motor activity is his way of knowing, or understanding that
rattle.
This point has been emphasized by Jean
Piaget, a Swiss biologist, philosopher, and psychologist who has developed the
most detailed and comprehensive theory of cognitive development. Piaget called
his approach genetic epistemology. In Piaget’s view, the development of
knowledge is a form of adaptation and as such involves the interplay of two
processes, assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation means modifying ones
environment so that it fits into one’s already developed ways of thinking and
acting.
Accommodation means modifying oneself so
as to fit in with existing characterisitics of the environment.
According to Piaget, the processes of
assimilation, accommodation and equilibrium operate in different ways at
different age levels.
Piaget called the period of infancy the
sensorimotor stage. This label reflects something as the infant’s ways of
knowing the world are sensory, perceptual and motoric. Piaget called each
specific ‘way of knowing’ a scheme. A scheme is an action sequence guided by
thought. For example, when infants suck, they are exercising a suckling scheme.
Their first sucking is primitive and not very flexible in style being
sucked. In making the necessary
adjustments, they accommodate their sucking scheme to the shape of the nipple.
This allows them to assimilate the nipple into their sucking scheme. This
combination of assimilation and accommodation results in adaptive behavior that
helps the infant survive.
Piaget described many specific cognitive
changes that take place during the sensorimotor stage. When young infants sees the object and the
object is hidden, they seem unaware that the object continues to exist. For example, hold an object within view of the
baby until he or she is clearly interested and is reaching for it, and then
quickly cover the object with a cloth. Chances are that the baby will stop in
mid reach and will not search for the object at all. If we repeat the same with
an younger age level (14-16mth) we will
see that the baby search for the hidden object. The search suggests that the
baby has attained what Piaget called Object permanence – the idea that objects
continue to exist even when we can no longer see them.
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
The first ‘social’ relationship most
infants form is with a parent and in most cultures that parent is the mother.
Various theorists have offered various ideas about the psychological
significance of that relationship.
Piaget emphasized the cognitive aspects
of infancy. In the infant’s ways of “relating” to parents and others, Piaget saw
signs of sensorimotor intelligence. Freud’s view was quite different. He saw
infancy, the oral stage, as a time when issues of dependency were being dealt
with and when physical satisfaction was derived from stimulation in the oral
region of the body. Erik-Erikson argued
that mother-infant interaction is a context for the baby’s basic conflict
between trust and distrust of the world.
Despite their differences, all three
theorists agreed that infants typically form intimate attachments to their
mothers.
Attachments :
Attachment is an early, stable, affectional
relationship between a child and another person, usually a parent. Early
efforts to study this relationship were clinical and somewhat informal. Various
researchers studied attachment in a structured way. Their work yielded a
surprisingly consistent picture
1.
Initially, the infant develops an attraction to social
objects in general and to humans in particular; the baby shows proximity –
maintaining behaviors (crying, clinging, and other behaviors that serve to keep
humans nearby)
2.
Next, the baby distinguishes familiar from unfamiliar
people and the primary caretaker (usually the mother) from other familiar
people; then proximity – maintaining behaviors begin to be aimed more directly
at familiar persons, particularly at the primary caretaker.
3.
By the second half of their first year, most infants
develop a true attachment to the primary caretaker; they recognize that person
and direct proximity maintaining behaviors toward that person and not toward
others.
4.
By the first birthday, the attachment is so strong
that children react negatively to separation from the primary caretaker, they
grow fearful and tearful, for example, when their parent leave them with a
sitter.
EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
When babies smile, does it mean they are
happy? This seemingly simple question is actually very complicated because what
looks like an emotion may not always be one. Evidently smiling happens for
different reasons at different ages. Some smiling is seen even in new borns,
but much of this seems automatic and hardly emotional. For example, some
smiling seems to be triggered merely by the infant’s bodily state, as when
babies break in to grin during REM sleep in the first few days after their birth.
In the second month, smiles can be brought on by events in the environment –
particularly the sound of human voice or the sight of a human face. A powerful
smile evokes is a combination of a voice and a moving face, particularly if the
voice is high-pitched. By the third or fourth month, babies smile more for
their mothers than for an equally encouraging female stranger. By the beginning
of the fifth month most babies have begun to combine smiling with
laughing. By their first birthdays,
tactile fun evokes fewer laughs; but interesting visual displays like a human
mask, get more laughs.
ADJUSTMENT PROBLEMS IN INFANCY
In an ideal world, infancy would be a
time when baby and parent would quickly adjust to one another and develop a
smooth harmony of styles that is called a “Waltz”. Quite common in the first
year of life are infant feeding problems – especially a digestive discomfort
known as colic and vomiting. Constipation and diarrhea, irregular sleep
patterns, and mystifying bursts of crying also occur very often in the first
year. Near the end of the first year and well into the second, the problems
most often involve a conflict between the baby’s growing physical and mental
processes and the parents efforts to regulate behavior that seems to them to be
aggressive or dangerous.
A number of clinical disorders make
their first appearance during infancy. Among these are several that are known
to be caused by genetic or other biological factors. Down syndrome for example,
involves mental retardation and a characteristic physical appearance noticeable
even in the newborn.
Early signs of the disorder known as
infantile autism make their appearance during the first year and a half of
life. Autistic youngsters fail to show several of the landmark features of
infancy. They fail to focus on other people’s eyes, they do not smile regularly
in response to people’s voice or faces, they do not show key signs of
attachment as protest when a parent leaves them. Infants suffering from a
failure to thrive show apathy, lack of normal social interest, and stunted
growth despite seemingly adequate nutrition.
ADJUSTMENT PROBLEMS IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
In the
preschool year, children acquire a risky combination: mobility,
language, and immature judgement. Their limited powers of reasoning make it
hard for them to foresee the consequences of their physical activity. They are
physically able to cross the street but unable to envision all the dangers that
crossing the street poses. Preschoolers also use their newfound language skills
with a distinct lack of restraint. Their cognitive egocentrism prevents them
from taking the perspective of their listener; the result can be painfully
honest comments such as “Hello, fat lady” or “you have ugly teeth.
Preschoolers pay a price for their
powers of representational thought. That price is a lively imagination that can
careen out of control at times. Shadows on the wall at bedtime can become
burglars, kidnappers or ghosts. There is a perpetual tension between the
rational and irrational uses of imagination.
A common fear among preschoolers is that something under the bed will
grab a hand if it hangs free. Surveys of parents show that fears are amoung the
most common behaviors problems of early childhood, but what children fear
changes markedly during this period.
Problems such as temper tantrums decline
over the preschool years.
Early Childhood : Play, Preschool, and
Preoperations
From the age of about 18 mths through
the age of 6, the comfortable confines of the child’s family give way to the
world of peers. The play that goes on in that world may seem frivolous to many
adults, but we are now coming to recognize it as , to use Piaget’s expression,
“the work of the child”. In the context of play, children make the transition
from sensorimotor thinking to thinking that involves internal manipulatiohn of
symbols. The elegant symbol system is known as language takes shape at a pace
that leaves even experienced parents dazzled. The frequency and intensity of
peer interaction force the child to deal with interpersonal issues, such as
coping with aggressive impulses and learning how to help.
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
The period between about the ages of 2
and 7 was labeled the preoperational stage by Piaget. By this label, he meant
that these years are preliminary to the development of truly logical
operations.
Operations are flexible mental actions
that can be combined with one another to solve the problems.
The primitive identity concept is an
important milestone. One reasons is that it enters into the way children think
about their gender identity. Another reason is that identity concepts seem to
be necessary steps on the way to concentration, a defining feature of the next
major Piagetian stage, concrete operations. Finally these early object-identity
concepts may be linked to a more personal sense of identity – that is the self
concept.
Another important development in the
preoperational period is representational thought – the ability to form mental
symbols to represent objects or events that are not present. As early evidence
of representational thought, Piaget cites delayed imitation.
Early in the preoperational stage,
reasoning is not truly deductive nor is it truly inductive. Instead very young
children show transductive reasoning; that is they reason from the particular
to the particular, often in ways that are influenced by their desires.
Some other characteristics of
preoperational thought can be surveyed briefly. Egocentrism, means an inability
to take the point of view of another person. Preoperational children tend to
assume that others see the world just as they themselves see it. Egocentrism as
thus defined, does not mean selfishness; instead , it refers to an intellectual
limitation. Preoperational children also display animism, the belief that
inanimate objects which have certain characteristics of living things are in
fact alive. Finally, preoperational children do not understand cause effect
relationships very well. They tend to see unrelated events and objects as
causally related to one another. Infact, they tend to believe that each event
has a clearly identifiable cause, and thus they often fail to recognize the
operation of chance and luck.
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Achieving mature thought requires
achieving a mature use of language. One
can view the course of language development as either continous or
discontinuous . vocabulary development appears to be a fairly smooth,
continuous process. The infant’s first legitimate English word usually appears
around the time of the first birthday. By the age of 2 , the vocabulary has
usually expanded to about 50 words, and by age 3, it consists of about 1000
words.
Language development looks more
discontinous or stagelike, when we focus on syntax, the formation of
grammatical rules for assembling words into sentences. There are large
differences among children in their rate of development and because children do
not always use their most advanced forms of language. In many children,
syntactic development actually begins before stage 1 (12-18 mths)
The recurring conflict between active
and passive views of the developing person canbe seen in the study of language
development. Some theorists, have argued that children learn language by
trying various combinations of sounds
and being rewarded by their parents and other for those sounds that represent
true language. Others, such as Piaget have argued that children create their
language by constructing their own rules and revising them as needed. There can
be little doubt that some of children’s language acquisition comes from being rewarded or encouraged by
others; all of us have seen this process in action. Yet it also is hard to deny
that children are active builders of their own language. One line of evidence
often used to support this view is the erroneous language that children use –
language that reveals rules the children have constructed but that is not
likely to have been rewarded.
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Along with the increasing mobility and
accelerating language skills of the preschool child comes an expanding social
world. The process by which the child’s behavior and attitudes are brought into
harmony with that world is called socialization.
Freud’s theory focused mainly on the
child’s socialization with respect to parents during this period. Freud
believed that during the anal stage, roughly the second year of life, key
interactions center around toilet training. The child takes physical
satisfaction from stimulation in the anal region of the body and social issued
including self control and orderliness are confronted. Freud believed that
children forge a lasting identity with their same sex parent.
Freud and erikson did theirs, with a
focus on the parent-child relationship.
The parent –child relationship: The
first part of early childhood has been dubbed “the terrible 2s. one reason for
this label is that the child’s increasing physical prowess, intellectual power,
and language skill transform the nature of the parent child relationship, the
child becomes less compliant and manageable than before.
In teaching specific skills to their
children, parents may profit from the work of behavioral psychologists. In
addition to teaching specific skills, the parent during this period is called
upon to be disciplination.
First a combination of general parental
warmth and specific explanations for specific prohibitions seems to promote
effective discipline. Parental warmth seems to make the child eager to maintain
the parent’s approval and to understand the parent’s reason for the prohibition. Parental style may influence the way these
patterns are expressed, but parental style is also partly a response to the
child’s style.
Sex roles : children’s identification
with their parents influence their ideas about sex roles. Children of both sexes
may initially adopt may traditionally feminine and maternal behavior patterns
but by the age of 4 or 5, boys have already begun to show traditional male
types of behavior. One reason for the divergence of boys and girls is that
children pick up sex-typed behavior through observational learning – that is
boys observe and imitate males, particularly their mothers. There is a large
differential imitation of males and females not shown up strongly until
children are 4 or 5 years old. The reason seems to be that children’s awareness
of sex differences is influenced by their cognitive development.
- Cognitive development and
environmental factors, there seem also to be biological causes for sex role
development.
Peers and Play : As children mature,
their relationships with their parents are increasingly rivaled by their
relationships with their peers. The nature of child to child interaction in the
context of play change sin predictable ways over the early childhood years.
Initially children engage in solitary
play, they may show a preference for being near other children and show some
interest in what those others are doing. Solitary play us eventually replaced by parallel play
in which children use similar materials and engage in similar activity;
typically near one another, but they hardly interact at all. By age 3, most
children show at least some co-operative play a form that involves direct
child-to-child interaction and requires some complementary role taking.
Additional signs of youngster’s growing awareness of peers can be seen at about
age 3 or 4. at this age, at least some children beign showing a special
faithfulness to one other child. At the age of 4 or 5 they step on the way to
the stable sense of gender identity.
Aggression: In early childhood, boys and
girls face an important new task: learning to express unpleasant feelings in
socially acceptable ways. Often the feelings are vented in the form of
aggressive behavior. Studies show that aggressive behavior, across many
cultures, is more common in boys and girls ; also more common in early
childhood.
Aggressive behavior may be fostered not
only by observational learning but also by direct reinforcement, or reward. In
many settings where children play, the aggressive children play, the aggressive
children often triumph over others, have easier access to preferred toys, and
even get extra attention from adults who are encouraging them to be less
combative. Social influences such as television may, through modeling,
encourage aggression. Parent often
respond to such behavior by paying special attention to the child and even by
giving in to the child’s demands “just to get a little peace and quiet”.
Prosocial behavior: Preschoolers can be
aggressive, but they can also be touchingly helpful, generous, and comforting.
Such behavior is called presocial. Some have argued that these children are
motivated to be involved with other children; and whether the involvement is
aggressive or prosocial will depend upon the situation. Others argue that
aggressive children, who themselves are easily upset, finds it easier to
empathize with others who are upset.
According to Hoffman, children pass
through four predictable stages in the development of the empathy that makes
prodocial behavior possible. In the first stage, infants have trouble
differentiating self from others. Their behavior is triggered by and often
looks like, the strong emotional displays of others. After the first year,
children gradually develops a sense of self as different from others, and at that
point they enter a second stage. Although they have come to recognize that
another person is, in fact another person, their egocentric thinking leads them
to “help” the other person in ways that they themselves would want to be
helped. In the third stage children recognize that a distressed person may have
feelings and needs that are different from their own. In the fourth stage the
children are likely to empathize with
and seek to help, say an unpopular child
who seems generally morose or withdrawn.
ADJUSTMENT PROBLEMS IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
In the
preschool year, children acquire a risky combination: mobility,
language, and immature judgement. Their limited powers of reasoning make it
hard for them to foresee the consequences of their physical activity. They are
physically able to cross the street but unable to envision all the dangers that
crossing the street poses. Preschoolers also use their newfound language skills
with a distinct lack of restraint. Their cognitive egocentrism prevents them
from taking the perspective of their listener; the result can be painfully
honest comments such as “Hello, fat lady” or “you have ugly teeth.
Preschoolers pay a price for their
powers of representational thought. That price is a lively imagination that can
careen out of control at times. Shadows on the wall at bedtime can become
burglars, kidnappers or ghosts. There is a perpetual tension between the
rational and irrational uses of imagination.
A common fear among preschoolers is that something under the bed will grab
a hand if it hangs free. Surveys of parents show that fears are amoung the most
common behaviors problems of early childhood, but what children fear changes
markedly during this period.
- Problems such as temper tantrums
decline over the preschool years.
- Later Childhood : Cognitive Tools, Social
Rules , Schools
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
The intellectual tools that children
develop in this period were labeled concrete operations by Piaget, and that is
also the name he has given to this stage of development. This stage involves a
major advance in the power of the child’s reasoning.
With the advent of these operations,
children’s awareness of the ways the world is organized begins to mushroom.
They understand not only conversation of length but conservation of other
physical entities – like mass, number and area.
In many ways the concrete-operational
child’s thinking shows a power and versatility that would have been literally
unthinkable in the preoperational period. But even this more advanced level of
thought has its limitations. The operations are concrete in the sense that they
are tied to the real world of objects and events. It is also hard for the
concrete-operational child to grasp the broad meaning of abstract concepts such
as freedom, integrity or truth.
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
As their social world expands to include
classmates and teachers, children’s ways of thinking about people show a
corresponding change. Studies of “person perception” show that a child even as
old as 6 or 7 will describe others in egocentric ways, referring to what the
other people do to or for the child. Descriptions at this age also focus on
concrete, observable characteristics of others, such as their physical
appearance or their outward behavior.
During the next few years, children
begin to use more and more descriptive statements involving psychological
characteristics – statements that require some inference about the other
person.
Friendship: The development of “person perception” goes
hand in hand with changes in the nature of friendship. Their first friendships
tend to be self-serving; a friend is someone who “does what I want”. Later
during the elementary school years, friendships become not only outgoing but
reciprocal as well; friends are seen as people who “do things for each other”.
Quality of exclusion or possessiveness goes along with many friendships in the
middle and late elementary years, and also in adolescence.
Groups:
At the same time that children are learning to form one to one
relationships with friends, they are learning to organize themselves into
groups. Groups have certain defining characterisitics: goals shared by its
members, rules conduct and a hierarchical structure.
Peers versus Adult influence : During
the elementary school years, as we have just seen, friends and groups of peers
take on central importance in a child’s social life, parents also influence .
by the late elementary school period, there are many situations in which
American youngster prefer relying on peers to relying on parents. Perhaps more
importantly, there are many situations in which children, if forced to choose,
will opt for behavior approved by their peers rather than behavior approved by
their parents and other adults.
- Later Childhood : Cognitive Tools,
Social Rules , Schools
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
The intellectual tools that children
develop in this period were labeled concrete operations by Piaget, and that is
also the name he has given to this stage of development. This stage involves a
major advance in the power of the child’s reasoning.
With the advent of these operations,
children’s awareness of the ways the world is organized begins to mushroom.
They understand not only conversation of length but conservation of other
physical entities – like mass, number and area.
In many ways the concrete-operational
child’s thinking shows a power and versatility that would have been literally
unthinkable in the preoperational period. But even this more advanced level of
thought has its limitations. The operations are concrete in the sense that they
are tied to the real world of objects and events. It is also hard for the
concrete-operational child to grasp the broad meaning of abstract concepts such
as freedom, integrity or truth.
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
As their social world expands to include
classmates and teachers, children’s ways of thinking about people show a
corresponding change. Studies of “person perception” show that a child even as
old as 6 or 7 will describe others in egocentric ways, referring to what the
other people do to or for the child. Descriptions at this age also focus on
concrete, observable characteristics of others, such as their physical
appearance or their outward behavior.
During the next few years, children
begin to use more and more descriptive statements involving psychological
characteristics – statements that require some inference about the other
person.
Friendship: The development of “person perception” goes
hand in hand with changes in the nature of friendship. Their first friendships
tend to be self-serving; a friend is someone who “does what I want”. Later
during the elementary school years, friendships become not only outgoing but
reciprocal as well; friends are seen as people who “do things for each other”.
Quality of exclusion or possessiveness goes along with many friendships in the
middle and late elementary years, and also in adolescence.
Groups:
At the same time that children are learning to form one to one
relationships with friends, they are learning to organize themselves into
groups. Groups have certain defining characterisitics: goals shared by its
members, rules conduct and a hierarchical structure.
Peers versus Adult influence : During
the elementary school years, as we have just seen, friends and groups of peers
take on central importance in a child’s social life, parents also influence .
by the late elementary school period, there are many situations in which
American youngster prefer relying on peers to relying on parents. Perhaps more
importantly, there are many situations in which children, if forced to choose,
will opt for behavior approved by their peers rather than behavior approved by
their parents and other adults.
