Lecture 1 Historical Foundations and Themes 10 01 2013 Believed long term welfare of society depended on children s being raised properly Chapter 1 An introduction to Child Development Why Study Child Development Gain insight into human nature Help raise children Help develop social policy Historical Foundations and Theories Historical Foundation Early philosophers Plato and Aristotle They differed in their opinions and approaches o Origins of knowledge Plato innate knowledge Aristotle learn from experience o Child raising Plato self control discipline Aristotle raising a child should be tailored to the individual Later Philosophers John Locke and Jean Jaques Rousseau Focused on how parents and society could promote child development Differed in beliefs about o Inherent nature of children 1 o Approaches to instruction Rousseau children are innately good and don t need much discipline Children don t need formal instruction until later in life Locke the mind is a blank slate and we learn from experiences Research Based Approach The result of 2 converging forces Social reform movements Charles Darwin s theory of evolution o Wanted people to understand the nature of human development o Ontogeny recapulates phylogeny Embryos are similar through time and developing into adults with the development of their ancestors Formal Field of Inquiry Late 19th Early 20th century child development emerged as a formal field of inquiry Early Assessment G Stanley Hall o Presented questionnaires to large numbers of parents teachers and children in order to detail numerous aspects of development social relationships physical and psychological changes Alfred Binet o First to investigate differences among children of the same age o Invented first practical intelligence test Early evidence based theories o Sigmund Freud psychoanalytic theory and how biological drives are important on development 2 o John Watson idea that everything can be learned through behavioral conditioning like Aristotle and Locke environment We start with nothing and everything is learned and shaped by the 9 Fundamental Questions Theories 1 How do nature and nurture together shape development Nature biological endowment genes we receive from our parents Nurture environments that influence our development both social and physical Most children with parents with schizophrenia don t usually develop the o Ex Autism schizophrenia disease but are more likely to o Phenylketonuria PKU Developmental psychologists now recognize that every characteristic we possess is created through the joint workings of nature and nurture Need to figure out the relative role of each and their interaction 2 How do children shape their own development All children s actions contribute to their own development o These contributions increase with age Ex Infancy adolescence Shape own development by what they choose to pay attention to 3 In what ways is development continuous and in what ways is it discontinuous Continuous process of small changes Discontinuous sudden changes Stage Theories propose that development occurs in a progression of age related sudden qualitative shifts that affect a child s thinking or behavior in broadly unified ways and move the child from one way of experiencing the world to another way Ex Piaget s theory of cognitive development development of thinking and reasoning 3 o Conservative tasks children can learn to focus on more than one task as they get Depending on how it is viewed changes in height can be viewed as either continuous or older discontinuous o Continuous examining height at yearly intervals from birth to 18 years o Discontinuous examining changes in height from one year to the next 4 How does change occur Interactions between genes brain structures processes and experiences environment o how together these affect development Darwininan Influence o Variation differences in thought and behavior within among individuals o Selection survival and reproduction of well adapted variations o Ex strategies for solving single digit addition problems 5 How does the sociocultural context influence development Sociocultural context physical social cultural economic and historical circumstances that make up any child s environment o contexts differ within and between cultures o Ex infants sleeping arrangements in US vs in Mayan culture US is more of an independent culture where infants slept on their own earlier in life o Language development Culture affects how you acquire certain aspects of language 6 How do children become so different from each other Individual differences arise from many sources o Genetic makeup 4 o Their treatment by other people o Their subjective reactions to other people s treatment of them o How children choose their environments Bowlby s model of developmental pathways o For development to be successive an early base of good upbringing pathways is necessary 7 How can research promote children s well being Child development research yields practical benefits in diagnosing children s problems and in helping children to overcome them o Methods to determine early vision problems Preferential learning allows infant s behavior to speak for them seeing if a baby prefers to look at a simple pattern rather than a sold gray field o Carol Dweck Developed theory about people s belief s about intelligence and how this Some believe that intelligence can vary and is not a fixed thing and these people react to failure in more effective ways develop affects their learning persistence Some people believe that intelligence is a fixed thing and these people tend to give up when they fail 8 How do vulnerabilities and resilience contribute to development Your experiences and paths you take in life contribute to development Plasticity the more plastic malleable the more influenced you are to the environment o Differential susceptibility some people are better able to handle influences of the environment 9 The importance of timing Vision Language much harder to learn later in life Attachment early experience influences how we form later relationships 5 Brain damage if you have damage earlier it is easier to recover than if you have damage later in life Ex studies on Romanian orphanages o Did not have social development o Those moved out before 1st year of life were better off than those who lived there longer than 1st year Werner s Study Unique study of 698 children born on the Hawaiian island of Kauai Examined the children s