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1
Introduction to Child
Development
Why you should read this chapter This book focuses on the study of child development from birth to 8 years. From our own observations of children, we are all aware of the tremendous changes that take place during this period: in the space of a few years, not only do children grow in the physical sense, they also acquire skills in language and communication, the capacity to think and reason about the world, and skills in social interaction. The study of child development is not just fascinating in its own right; knowledge gained from studying development can also impact on many practical issues regarding the care, education and wellbeing of children. This book presents an overview of research and theory in various aspects of child development, but before we look at these, this chapter and Chapters 2 and 3 will aim to provide some basic context for the study of development as a whole. In this chapter we will look at some basic issues in child development and some of the broad theoretical approaches to understanding development. (Continued)
2 Child Development: A Practical Introduction By the end of this chapter you should
- be aware of the various domains of development that are of interest to researchers in this field
- understand some basic issues in the study of development including the role of nature versus nurture, and whether development proceeds in a continuous or discontinuous manner
- be aware of the different theoretical approaches to development including psychoanalytic, learning theory, cognitive-developmental, ethological and evo- lutionary psychology, and bioecological approaches
- have a basic understanding of some specific theories from the various approaches.
The nature of development
Development can be seen as the way in which individuals grow and change over the course of their lifespan and this can take place in different domains: biological, which includes features such as physical growth and developments in motor skills; cognitive, which refers to changes in thought processes such as memory, reasoning and problem solving, imagination, and creativity and language; emotional, where the focus is on changes in emotional experience and understanding; and social, which refers to changes in our understanding of ourselves and other people and how we relate to others. While the division of development into different domains may be useful from the point of organising our own thinking about the nature of development, it is impor- tant also to recognise that development itself is a holistic process and each domain influences and is influenced by the others. For example, development in a child’s motor skills, such as crawling and reaching and grasping (physical development), will allow them to explore both their environment and the objects in this environment, leading to a greater understanding of their surroundings (cognitive development). A central issue in development is the nature versus nurture debate, in other words, the relative roles played by biological and genetic factors as opposed to envi- ronmental factors in shaping development. Nature refers to the role of biology and genetics and nurture to the role of experience and other environmental factors. Advocates of the nature position see development as a process of maturation, with physical and psychological change unfolding according to a genetically predetermined ‘plan’ inherited from our parents. The nurture viewpoint sees development occurring as a result of learning. Hall (1883) was a strong proponent of the role of nature in development, and very much influenced by evolutionary theory. This can be seen in (Continued)
4 Child Development: A Practical Introduction
Theories of development
A theory is essentially a set of organised observations that are used to explain an inter- esting phenomenon. There are a number of broad theories of child development and some of these will be reviewed in this section. These will include psychodynamic, learning, cognitive-developmental, ethology and evolutionary psychology, and bioeco- logical theories.
Psychodynamic theories
Psychodynamic theories have their roots in the work of Sigmund Freud whose views stemmed from his experiences of treating individuals suffering from a variety of neuroses. Freud concluded that human development is essentially driven by conflict. We have basic aggressive and sexual instincts that need to be satisfied, but we live in a society where such instincts have to be controlled and restrained. Development was therefore about seeking a balance between satisfying basic drives and adapting to the reality of our situ- ation. Freud (1917) proposed that the human personality is made up of three compo- nents: the id, the ego and the superego. The id is present from birth and its sole purpose is the satisfaction of our basic urges. It operates according to the pleasure principle and seeks immediate gratification of our needs and Freud believed that the infant was dominated by it. However, as we develop, our instincts come into conflict with reality and we need to restrain the impulses of the id, and this leads to the emergence of the ego. The ego operates according to the reality principle in that it seeks to satisfy our basic drives but in a desirable and socially acceptable manner. The final component we develop is the superego and this occurs during the preschool years when children take on their parent’s moral values as their own. The superego acts as the child’s con- science and allows them to know when they have done wrong without the need to be told by an adult, thus they are enabled to feel guilt and shame over their unacceptable conduct. Freud viewed healthy development as achieving a balance between the three conflicting components of personality. The id communicates basic needs, the superego demands that we behave in a morally acceptable manner and the ego attempts to satisfy the demands of the id but in ways that are acceptable to the superego. Based on his observation that many of his patients neurotic symptoms revolved around childhood sexual conflicts that they had repressed, Freud viewed sex as the most important instinct. This led him to propose his psychosexual theory, its basic premise being that development proceeded in a series of stages in which the sexual instinct shifted to different erogenous zones in the body. The first stage in Freud’s theory was the oral stage, in which pleasure is centred on the mouth and behaviours such as sucking, chewing and biting were sources of pleasure. The next stage is the anal phase and this occurs around the second year of life and involves pleasure becoming focused on the processes of urination and defecation. A potential source of
Introduction to Child Development 5 conflict here is the desire to satisfy these bodily functions immediately, clashing with the parent’s desire to toilet-train the infant. The child then moves on to the phallic stage when they are between 3 and 6 years old: it is around these ages that sexual pleasure becomes centred on the genitals. During this stage an important conflict occurs in which the child sexually desires the opposite-sex parent. This is accompa- nied by feelings of jealousy towards the same-sex parent and also a fear of punish- ment from them. In boys this conflict is called the Oedipus complex and in girls the Electra complex. The conflict is eventually resolved by the child identifying with the sex-role characteristics and moral standards of the same-sex parent. The next stage is the latent stage in which sexual impulses are suppressed and channelled into intel- lectual and social activity and this leads to further development of the superego. Finally during puberty, the child reaches the genital stage in which sexual desires reawaken and the adolescent must learn to express these in socially appropriate ways. If development is successful, sexual desires will be satisfied by seeking to form rela- tionships with peers, leading to marriage and the raising of children. Freud’s theory has few followers today, and from a scientific point of view it is dif- ficult to test empirically: how can one test the notion that healthy development is characterised by the ego successfully balancing the demands of the id and the super- ego? However, in terms of stressing the importance of early experiences for later development, the basic ideas of Freud are influential.
Erikson’s psychosocial theory
Erikson (1963) was influenced by Freud but came to place less emphasis on sexual urges and more on the role of social and cultural factors. He saw development as involving the interaction between the individual’s biological (somatic) processes, mental (ego) processes and wider societal influences arising from our membership of ‘...groupings of geographical and historical coherence: family, class, community, nation’ (Erikson, 1963: 30). Erikson, like Freud, proposed that development occurred in a series of stages, but unlike Freud, whose theory saw development as being complete by adolescence, he saw it as a lifelong process whereby its stages extend into adulthood and old age. He viewed these stages as occurring in a fixed, orderly sequence. At each stage of devel- opment, he argued that the individual is confronted with an age-related task or psy- chosocial crisis related to biological maturation and the social demands being faced by the individual at a particular point in their life. The successful resolution of each crisis led to healthy developmental outcomes. The first stage in Erikson’s theory lasts from birth to when the child is around 1 year old and is termed basic trust versus mistrust. In this stage, infants must learn to trust others to care for them. If they do not (possibly due to poor caregiving), then they may come to view people as being unreliable and untrustworthy and this may have implica- tions for future relationships. The next stage occurs between the ages of approximately
Introduction to Child Development 7
Learning theories
Learning theories began with the work of John Watson who, as we saw earlier, was a strong proponent of the view that it is nurture rather than nature that is the strong- est influence on development. Watson saw development as a process of learning and is regarded as the founder of an approach to psychology called behaviourism.
Watson’s classical conditioning
Watson was concerned with creating an objective science of psychology that focused on directly observable events (behaviour) rather than unobservable, hypothetical con- structs such as the id and the ego. He was strongly influenced by the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. While conducting research on the digestive systems of dogs, Pavlov noted that the mere appearance of a food bowl was sufficient for the dogs to start salivating, and decided to investigate if other stimuli could be used to elicit this response. He found that if he paired the presentation of food with an envi- ronmental stimulus such as a light, eventually the light on its own would be sufficient to elicit salivation. The light had changed from being a neutral stimulus to being a conditioned stimulus and salivation had become a conditioned response to the light. This is the basis of a form of learning called classical conditioning in which a particular stimulus becomes associated with a particular response. Watson applied these notions to human behaviour and rejected the notion of behaviour developing in stages, and instead saw it as a continuous process of change shaped by people’s envi- ronmental circumstances. Watson’s most famous demonstration of this view is the case of ‘little Albert’ (Watson and Raynor, 1920), wherein a gentle white rat was presented to Albert, a 9-month-old boy who crawled towards the rat and played with it. At a later stage, Watson presented the rat to the boy and accompanied this with a loud, unpleasant noise and eventually the presence of the rat on its own was enough to elicit a fear response from the child, who had come to associate the rat with the unpleasant noise. On the basis of findings such as these, Watson concluded that the environment was the main factor in develop- ment, with children learning through making a wide variety of stimulus-response associations.
Skinner and operant conditioning
An important point about Watson’s view of learning is that the child is essentially pas- sive and when presented with a stimulus associates this with a particular response. However, Skinner, while accepting that it was the environment that was most impor- tant, saw learning as a more active process in which we act on or operate on our environments. Based on research with animals, Skinner (1953) argued that humans and animals repeat behaviours that lead to favourable outcomes and suppress those that lead to unfavourable ones. So a rat in a cage that receives food in response to
8 Child Development: A Practical Introduction pressing a bar is likely to repeat this act. The food acts as a reinforcer and increases the likelihood that a particular behaviour will occur again. Sometimes behaviour will lead to a negative consequence; this acts as a punisher and will reduce the probabil- ity of a reoccurrence of the behaviour. Applied to child development, learning can be seen as the child making the connection between certain ways of behaving and cer- tain desirable or undesirable outcomes and this is seen to apply to all areas of devel- opment. An infant who vocalises will be reinforced by praise and attention from parents, leading to a reoccurrence of this behaviour, and as vocalisations come closer to speech, the selective patterns of reinforcement received by the infant for this behav- iour lead to the development of language. A child who behaves in a friendly and considerate manner will receive praise and encouragement and this will strengthen the child’s tendency to repeat this behaviour. Reinforcers and punishers can be positive and negative in nature. Positive in this context means that a stimulus is presented and negative means that it is withdrawn. Examples of a positive reinforcer would be praise, social approval or rewards such as being given a toy or engaging in a fun activity. A negative reinforcer is the removal of an unpleasant stimulus in response to a desirable behaviour, such as the relief of pain following the taking of a painkiller. An example of a positive punisher would be a child receiving parental disapproval for misbehaving, or receiving a burn as a result of touching a hot object. A negative punisher involves the removal of something pleasant, such as the removal of a toy or being ‘grounded’ for misbehaviour. Skinner argued that the totality of human development could be explained in terms of the association of behaviours and their consequences, but many will see this as an oversimplification. It does not take into account personal factors such as motivation. As we will see in Chapter 9, attempts to explain language development in these terms cannot account for the speed with which children acquire language and the complex- ity of this achievement. However, Skinner’s views are useful in practical settings such as promoting positive behaviours and form the basis for interventions for problem behaviours in children through the process of behaviour modification (Martin and Pear, 2007).
Bandura’s social learning theory
Bandura, another learning theorist, accepted Skinner’s views on the importance of operant conditioning in development, but also noted that children and adults acquire many new skills in the absence of rewards and punishments simply by watching and imitating the behaviour of others (Bandura, 1977). His theory therefore stresses the role of observational learning or modelling in development. Bandura’s work also allows for the role of thought processes or cognition. This means that in order to imitate a behaviour, we must attend to the behaviour of the model, comprehend that behaviour and remember it. One of Bandura’s best known experiments demonstrated that pre-school children who were exposed to an adult
10 Child Development: A Practical Introduction enhanced our chances of survival (Piaget, 1950). Piaget noted that children’s thinking was often at odds with the nature of the world and that they could not think beyond their own perspective. Their view of the world was often egocentric (Piaget and Inhelder, 1956), in other words, they were unable to see situations from any other viewpoint but their own, and animistic (Piaget, 1929), meaning that they often saw inanimate objects as having thoughts and feelings just like they did. For Piaget devel- opment was a process of change in which children, as a result of exploring their worlds, revise their knowledge so that it corresponds more closely with reality, and in so doing they achieve a state of equilibrium between their knowledge and the nature of the physical and social world. Piaget saw development as passing through a series of distinct stages which he termed the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal opera- tional stages. The sensorimotor stage spans the period from birth to around the age of 2, during which time infants gain a basic understanding of the world through use of their sensory and motor capabilities. The next stage of development, the preopera- tional stage, lasts until the child is about 7 years old, by which time they can now use basic mental representations such as images and language to represent the world, but their ability to think is very much limited to their own point of view. At around the age of 7, children move to the concrete operational stage of development wherein their thinking becomes increasingly logical. This stage lasts until they are between 11 and 12 years old. At this age, the child reaches the formal operational stage in which they gain the ability to think in more abstract and hypothetical ways and thinking is no longer tied to concrete reality. Piaget’s theory has strongly influenced the way we think about child development, and has also been applied in educational contexts. However, there have also been criticisms and in particular a tendency to underestimate the capabilities of the child. These issues will be considered in Chapter 4.
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory
Vygotsky shared Piaget’s view of the child as an active explorer of their environment, but while Piaget saw children as lone explorers making discoveries on their own, Vygotsky (1978) saw development as a socially transmitted process in which children acquired knowledge and skills through their dialogues with more skilled and experi- enced members of their society. Vygotsky also noted that while children are unable to do many tasks on their own, they are able to do them with help and support from an adult. Vygotsky referred to this difference between the child’s existing capabilities and what they can achieve with help from others as their zone of proximal develop- ment. Vygotsky also saw development as following a continous pattern in which the child moved from being able to do things with help from others to being able to do things on their own, in other words, development moved from the social plane to the psychological plane.
Introduction to Child Development 11
Information-processing accounts
A more recent approach to cognitive development is based on making an analogy between the human mind and the digital computer. Like computers, the human mind is seen as processing information based on a limited set of rules. Thought is seen as the flow of information through a system. We receive input from our senses, perform a series of operations on this input and transform it into some useful output, such as the answer to a question, the ability to recall a memory or the transformation of sound waves into meaningful speech. There are a variety of different information-processing models describing different aspects of cognition, for example memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin,
- and recognising printed words (Stuart, 2003). In general information-processing models see development as a continuous process in which basic abilities gradually improve as we mature. An example is the capacity of children’s short-term memory (see Chapter 4) which gradually improves over the course of childhood so that by the age of around 10 it is the same as an adult’s (Gathercole and Baddeley, 1993).
Ethology and evolutionary psychology
Ethology is concerned with ways in which behaviour can promote the survival of a species. It has its roots in the work of Charles Darwin, but modern ethology arose from the work of the zoologists Conrad Lorenz and Nico Tinbergen, whose observa- tions of animal behaviour provided some important insights into the adaptive nature of some behaviours. The basic assumptions of ethology are that members of all animal species are born with a set of biologically programmed behaviours that are products of evolution and contribute to survival (Lorenz, 1981; Tinbergen, 1973). One of the best-known patterns of such behaviour that promotes survival is imprinting, an instinctual following response in birds that keeps the young close to the mother in order to be protected and fed. In birds this imprinting occurs during a restricted period of development called a critical period. This refers to a particular time when an animal is biologically prepared to acquire a certain pattern of behaviour. In studying geese, Lorenz noted that if the mother was not present during this period but an object resembling her features was, the baby geese would imprint on this object instead. Ethological perspectives have been applied to various aspects of human behaviour. An example is attachment, or the formation of an affectionate, caring bond between the infant and primary caregiver. Bowlby (1969) argued that human infants are born with a set of behaviours that will lead them to seek close physical proximity to the mother who will in turn nurture and protect the infant from danger, and this tendency is a product of our evolutionary history. This issue will be considered further in Chapter 8. An important issue when applying ethological perspectives to human development is the applicability of the notion of a critical period. Bornstein (1987) suggests that in the case of humans, the term sensitive period is more accurate. A sensitive period
Introduction to Child Development 13 and school. An example would be the way in which the quality of a child’s home life may affect performance at school or peer relationships. The third layer is referred to as the exosystem and this relates to contexts or set- tings in which the child does not directly participate but which nevertheless can have an influence on them. An example of such an influence could be the work environ- ment of the parent(s). Long working hours may restrict the parent’s availability to the child, or a stressful working environment may have implications for the way in which the parent behaves towards them in the home environment. At the outer layer of the model is the macrosystem. This refers to the broader social, cultural and political climate in which the child develops. Such influences can include broader attitudes to child-rearing, government policies, and so on. Bronfenbrenner also included a temporal system called the chronosystem because he recognised that changes in the individual or the environment over time can also influence development. These can include historical events such as the effects of growing up during a time of conflict or economic difficulty, but can also apply to events having an effect related to the time of the child’s life in which they occur. For example, the way in which a child reacts to parental divorce may depend on the age of the child at the time of the separation of the parents. The bioecological model certainly provides a much broader definition of the envi- ronment that will make sense to many people and it allows us to consider how changes in one system can influence the others – for example, legislation requiring employers to pay a minimum wage (macrosystem influence) will cause changes in the parent’s working life (more pay). In other words, it will affect the exosystem and improved financial circumstances may have an effect on the child’s home life (the microsystem). Can you think of any examples from your own life that might reflect the interactions of the various systems as set out in Bronfenbrenner’s model?
Chapter summary
- Development can be seen as the ways in which an individual changes over the lifespan.
- Different domains of development can be defined including biological, cogni- tive, social and emotional. It is important, however, to recognise that develop- ment is a holistic process in which the different domains influence and are influenced by each other. (Continued)
14 Child Development: A Practical Introduction
- Researchers in child development differ over the role of nature and nurture in development.
- Some researchers argue that development proceeds in a continuous manner marked by quantitative changes in functioning. Other researchers argue that development proceeds as a series of abrupt changes in a stage-like manner, with each new stage showing qualitative differences in functioning.
- There are different theoretical approaches to development including psycho- analytic, learning theory, cognitive-developmental, ethological and evolution- ary psychology, and bioecological approaches.
Further reading
Crain, W. (2010) Theories of Development: Concepts and Applications (6th edn). New York: Pearson. A detailed account of theories of child development. Workman, L. and Reader, W. (2007) Evolutionary Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A comprehensive but very readable introduction to this field and includes evolutionary perspectives on various aspects of development.
References
Atkinson, R.C. and Shiffrin, R.M. (1968) ‘Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes’, in K.W. Spence and J.T. Spence (eds), Advances in the Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol.2. New York: Academic Press. pp. 90–195. Bandura, A. (1977) Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Bandura, A. (1989) ‘Social cognitive theory’, in R. Vasta (ed.), Annals of Child Development: Vol. 6 Six Theories of Child Development. Greenwich, CT: Jai Press. pp. 45–103. Bandura, A., Ross, D. and Ross, S.A. (1963) ‘Imitation of film-mediated aggressive models’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66(1): 3–11. Bjorkland, D.F. (1997) ‘The role of immaturity in human development’, Psychological Bulletin, 122(2): 153–169. Bornstein, M.H. (1987) Sensitive Periods in Development: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Bowlby, J. (1969) Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1 Attachment. New York: Basic Books. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979) The Ecology of Human Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Erikson, E.H. (1963) Childhood and Society (2nd edn). New York: Norton. Freud, S. (1917) Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy, Vol. SE xvii. London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis. Gathercole, S.E. and Baddeley, A.D. (1993) Working Memory and Language. Hove: Erlbaum. (Continued)
