Childhood Definition

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Childhood is something experienced by everyone globally, but not everyone has the same experiences. It is an area that cannot be looked at as a biological, universal stage of life so instead we need to look at meta analysis to gain an understanding in Childhood. In the UK the legal definition of a 'child ' is from 0-18 years so the term child is in danger of becoming meaningless as there is a big difference in children 's needs from birth compared to a child aged 17, when people think of a child they think of the noticable differences such as size and how children are biologically and psychologically more immature than adults, politically powerless and seen by many as more precious.
Childhood Studies is relatively new but it looks at different
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British children would have been disciplined should they act 'naughty ' using forceful measures whereas today these measures are discouraged and instead we are encouraged to use a reward system to teach them certain behaviors are 'good ' so this is an example of how ideas have changed over time. In the 1970 's a famous experiment called the 'Baby X experiment ' (Seavey et al., 1975) shows that more often participants would present what they believed to be a male infant with a ball and a female infant with a doll to play with, also when playing with the male they would be more physically encouraging whilst with the female they would be more soothing which let us see that people 's beliefs about childhood (which can be influenced through their own upbringing, media, advertising etc) affected the way they interacted with the …show more content…
Whereas Child Psychologists focus more on behaviorisms and developemental stages in a childs life such as theories regarding 'continuous development ' and 'discontinuous development ' to try and describe, explain and predict

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