Child Development Laura Berk Chapter 1

6. Emerging Adulthood:

(Emerging, unofficial stage) 18 - 25. Prolonged transition into adulthood; intense exploration of love, career, personal values before permanent commitment.

4. Middle Childhood

6 to 11 years. Learn about wider world, master new adult-like responsibilities & logical thought processes; advanced understanding of world, self, morality, and friendship.

Warm Parental Relationship

A close relationship with at least one parent who provides warmth, appropriately high expectations, monitoring of the child's activities, and an organized home environment fosters resilience

Discontinuous

A process in which new ways of understanding and responding to the world emerge at specific times

Continuous

A process of gradually adding more of the same types of skills that were there to begin with.

Psychosocial Theory

Erikson emphasized that in addition to mediating between id impulses and superego demands, the ego makes a postive contribution to development, acquiring attitudes and skills that make the individual an active, contributing member of society

Psychosexual Theory

Which emphasizes that how parents manage their child's sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years is crucial for healthy personality development.

Maturation

Which refers to a genetically determined, naturally unfolding course of growth

Normative Approach

In which measures of behavior are taken on large numbers of individuals and age-related averages are computed to represent typical development

Theory of Evolution

Natural Selection and Survival of the fittest

Stages

Qualitative changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving that characterize specific periods of development

Ethology

concerned with the adaptive, or survival, value of behavior and its evolutionary history

Periods of Development

1. Prenatal Period: conception to birth. 2. Infancy & Toddlerhood: birth to 2 years. Infancy = first year, toddlerhood = second year. Dramatic changes in body & brain that support beginning of motor, perceptual, & intellectual capacities; beginnings of , 3. Early Childhood: 2 to 6 years. Body longer & leaner, refined motor skills, more self-controlled & self-sufficient. Make-believe play; though & language expand quickly; morality emerges; make friends. 4. Middle Childhood: 6 to 11 years. Learn about wider world, master new adult-like responsibilities & logical thought processes; advanced understanding of world, self, morality, and friendship. 5. Adolescence: 11 to 18 years. Transition into adulthood. Puberty; most abstract & idealistic though; prepare for higher education and world of work; personal values and goals. 6. (Unofficial Period) Emerging Adulthood: 18 - 25. Prolonged transition into adulthood; intense exploration of love, career, personal values before permanent commitment.

5. Adolescence

11 to 18 years. Transition into adulthood. Puberty; most abstract & idealistic though; prepare for higher education and world of work; personal values and goals.

3. Early Childhood

2 to 6 years. Body longer & leaner, refined motor skills, more self-controlled & self-sufficient. Make-believe play; though & language expand quickly; morality emerges; make friends.

Sensitive Period

A time that is optimal for certain capacities to emerge because the individual is especially responsive to environmental influences. However, its boundaries are less well-defined than those of a critical period. Development can occur later, but it is harder to induce.

Developmental Science

All changes we experience throughout the lifespan.

Child Development

An area of study devoted to understanding constancy & change from conception through adolescence.

Theory

An orderly, integrated set of statements that describes, explains, and predicts behavior.

Social Policy

Any planned set of actions by a group, institution, or governing body directed at attaining a social goal

Nature vs Nurture Controversy

Are genetic or environmental factors more important in influencing development?

Plasticity

As open to change in response to influential experiences

2. Infancy & Toddlerhood

Birth to 2 years. Infancy = first year, toddlerhood = second year. Dramatic changes in body & brain that support beginning of motor, perceptual, & intellectual capacities; beginnings of language, first intimate ties to others.

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Brings together researchers from psychology, biology, neuroscience, and medicine to study the relationship between changes in the brain and the developing child's cognitive processing and behavior patterns

Chronosystem

Bronfenbrenner called the temporal dimension of his model. Life changes can be imposed on the child, as in the examples just given. Alternatively, the can arise from within the child, since as children get older they select, modify, and create many of their own settings and experiences.

Piaget's Cognitive- Developmental Theory

Children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world

Psychoanalytic Perspective

Children move through a series of stages in which they confront conflicts between biological drivers and social expectations. How these conflicts are resolved determines the person's ability to learn, to get along with other, and to cope with anxiety.

1. Prenatal Period

Conception to birth. Most rapid time of change. One-celled organism to human baby with amazing capacities to adjust to life.

Behavior Modification

Consists of procedures that combine conditioning and modeling to eleiminate undesirable behaviors and incerease desirable responses

Exosystem

Consists of social settings that do not contain children but that nevertheless affect children's experiences in immediate settings

Behaviorism

Directly observable events- stimuli and responses- are the appropriate focus of study

Sociocultural Theory

Focuses on how culture- the values, beliefs, customs, and skills of a social group- is transmitted to cooperative dialogues between children and more kowledgeable members of society- is necessary for children to acquire the ways of thinking and behaving that make up a community's cultrue

Public policy

Laws and government programs designed to improve current conditions

B.F. Skinner's

Operant Conditioning

Macrosystem

Outermost level of Bronfenbrenner's model consists of cultural values, laws, customs, and resources.

Collectivist Societies

People define themselves as part of a group and stress group goals over individual goals

Individualistic Societies

People think of themselves as separate entities and are largely concerned with their own personal needs.

Domains of Development

Physical, cognitive, emotional & social. All interwoven in nature.

Evolutionary Developmental Psychology

Seeks to understand the adaptive value of species-wide cognitive, emotional, and social competencies as those competencies change with age

Resilience

The ability to adapt effectively in the face of threats to development

Information Processing

The human mind might also be viewed as a symbol-manipulating system through which information flows- a perspective called information processing

Social Learning Theory

The most influential, devised by Albert Bandura, emphasized modeling, otherwise known as imitation or observational learning as a powerful source of development

Meso-system

The second level of Brofenbrenner's model, the encompasses connections between microsystems

Contexts

Unique combinations of personal and environmental circumstances that can result in different paths of change

Ecological System Theory

Views the child as developing within a complex system of relationships affected by multiple levels of the surrounding environment

Dynamic Systems Perspective

the child's mind, body, and physical and social worlds form an integrated system that guides mastery of new skills. The system is dynamic, or constantly in motion. A change in any part of it- from brain growth to psychical and social surroundings- disrupts the current organism-environment relationship. When this happens, the child actively reorganizes her behavior so the components of the system work together again but in a more complex, effective way

Micro-system

the innermost level of the environment, consists of activities, and interaction patterns in the child's immediate surroundings