Chapter 1 - An Intro To Child Development

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I. Why Study Child Development?

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- Raising Children
- Choosing Social Policies
- Understanding Human Nature

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*Raising Children

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- Knowledge of child development can help parents and teachers meet the challenges of rearing and educating children

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*Choosing Social Policies

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- Knowledge of child development permits informed decisions about social-policy questions that affect children

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*Understanding Human Nature

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- Child-development research provides important insights into some of the most intriguing questions regarding human nature

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II. Historical Foundations of the study of Child Development

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- Early philosophers' views of children's Development

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Plato

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- Emphasized self-control and discipline
- Believed that children are born with innate knowledge

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Aristotle

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- Was concerned with fitting child rearing to the needs of the individual child believed that knowledge comes from experience

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John Locke

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- Like Aristotle, saw the child as a "Tabula Rasa" and advocated first instilling discipline, then gradually increasing the child's freedom

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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- Argued that parents and society should give the child maximum freedom from the beginning

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Social Reform Movements

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- In 19th century, research was conducted for the benefit of children and provided some of the earliest descriptions of the adverse effects that harsh environments can have on child development

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The Emergence of Child Development as a Discipline

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- Child development emerged as a formal field of inquiry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
- Freud & Watson formulated influential theories of development during this period

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Sigmund Freud

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- Concluded that biological drives exerted a crucial influence on development

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John Watson

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- Argued that children's behaviour arises largely from the rewards and punishments that follow particular behaviours

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III. Enduring Themes in Child Development

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1. Nature vs Nurture
2. The Active Child
3. Continuity/Discontinuity
4. Mechanisms of Developmental Change
5. The Sociocultural Context
6. Individual Differences
7. Research and Children's welfare

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Nature vs Nurture

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- How nature and nurture interact to shape the development process
- Developmentalists now recognize that every characteristic we possess is created through the join workings of both nature and nurture

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The Active Child

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- Children contribute to their own development from early in life, and their contributions increase as they grow older

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*Three of the Most Important Contribution During Children's First Years

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- Attentional patterns
- Use of language
- Play

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Continuity/Discontinuity

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- Stage theories propose that development occurs in a progression of age-related, qualitative shifts

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Mechanisms of Developmental Change

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- In general, the interaction of genes and environment determines both what changes occur and when those changes occur
- Example: one mechanism involves the role of brain activity, genes, and learning experiences in the development of effortful attention

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The Sociocultural Context

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- Refers to the physical, social, cultural, economic, and historical circumstances that make up any child's environment
- Contexts of development differ within and between cultures
- Exerts a particularly large influence on children's lives

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Individual Differences

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- Individual differences among children arise very quickly in development
- Children's genes, their treatment by other people, their subjective reactions to other people's treatment of them, and their choice of environments all contribute to differences among children, even those within the same family

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Research and Children's Welfare

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- Child-development research yields practical benefits in diagnosing children's problem and in helping children overcome them
- Preferential looking (a research method) - has enabled the diagnosis of the effects of cataracts in infants as young as 2 months in age