Child Psychology

INTRODUCTION

Child Development, physical, intellectual, social, and emotional changes that occur from birth to adolescence. Although people change throughout their lives, developmental changes are especially dramatic in childhood. During this period, a dependent, vulnerable newborn grows into a capable young person who has mastered language, is self-aware, can think and reason with sophistication, has a distinctive personality, and socializes effortlessly with others. Many abilities and characteristics developed in childhood last a lifetime.
Some developments in behavior and thought are very similar for all children. Around the world, most infants begin to focus their eyes, sit up, and learn to walk at comparable ages, and children begin to acquire language and develop logical reasoning skills at approximately the same time. These aspects of individual growth are highly predictable. Other aspects of development show a much wider range of individual differences. Whether a child becomes outgoing or shy, intellectually advanced or average, or energetic or subdued depends on many unique influences whose effects are difficult to predict at the child’s birth.
A variety of factors influence child development. Heredity guides every aspect of physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and personality development. Family members, peer groups, the school environment, and the community influence how children think, socialize, and become self-aware. Biological factors such as nutrition, medical care, and environmental hazards in the air and water affect the growth of the body and mind. Economic and political institutions, the media, and cultural values all guide how children live their lives. Critical life events, such as a family crisis or a national emergency, can alter the growth of personality and identity. Most important of all, children contribute significantly to their own development. This occurs as they strive to understand their experiences, respond in individual ways to the people around them, and choose activities, friends, and interests. Thus, the factors that guide development arise from both outside and within the person.
Why is the study of child development important? One reason is that it provides practical guidance for parents, teachers, child-care providers, and others who care for children. A second reason is that it enables society to support healthy growth. Understanding early brain development, for example, means that parents can provide better opportunities for intellectual stimulation, and society can reduce or eliminate obstacles to healthy brain growth. Third, the study of child development helps therapists and educators better assist children with special needs, such as those with emotional or learning difficulties. Finally, understanding child development contributes to self-understanding. We know ourselves better by recognizing the influences that have made us into the people we are today.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

People have thought very differently about children in different historical eras. In ancient Rome and throughout the Middle Ages, for example, childhood was brief: A boy or girl was considered an “infant” until the age of six, but soon afterward worked alongside adults in the fields, workshop, or home. Children were thought to be born in a state of sin and were viewed as the property of their fathers. Such beliefs contributed to strict discipline of children and neglect of their special needs.
These harsh attitudes softened during the Renaissance and Enlightenment as the humanistic spirit of the times caused a rediscovery of the special qualities of childhood. In paintings, for example, young children were depicted more realistically as they played, nursed, and did other childish things, rather than being shown as miniature adults. The importance of childhood as a unique period of development was understood more fully in the 17th and 18th centuries, as reflected in the writings of two important European thinkers. The English philosopher John Locke argued that the newborn infant comes into the world with no inherited predispositions, but rather with a mind as a tabula rasa (Latin for “blank slate”) that is gradually filled with ideas, concepts, and knowledge from experiences in the world. He concluded that the quality of early experiences, particularly how children are raised and educated, shapes the direction of a child’s life. Later, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed that children at birth are innately good, not evil, and that their natural tendencies should be protected against the corrupting influences of society. The sympathetic, romantic attitude toward children inspired by Rousseau had an important influence on society. For example, the novelists Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo decried the exploitation of child labor and highlighted the need for educational and social reform.

SCIENTIFIC STUDY

In the late 19th century, interest in the characteristics and needs of children produced more systematic efforts to study their development. The modern theory of evolution, conceived by British naturalist Charles Darwin, contributed to this interest by arguing that human behavior is best understood through knowledge of its origins—in both the evolution of the species and the early development of individuals. Darwin himself studied children’s growth by writing one of the first “baby biographies,” consisting of careful observations of his children. In the early 1900s, the theory of psychoanalysis focused on the importance of early childhood experiences. American psychologist G. Stanley Hall at Clark University began large-scale investigations of child development through surveys and interviews with the adults who cared for them. For the first time, children warranted scientific attention because of society’s interest in their development and well-being.
In the 1920s developmental scientists at other American universities began large-scale observational studies of children and their families, including the Berkeley Growth Studies at the University of California, the Fels Growth Study at Antioch College, and the Harvard Growth Studies at Harvard University. Each investigation studied a large number of children repeatedly over many years to identify changes and consistencies in their behavior and thinking. At Stanford University, psychologist Lewis Terman created the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, which remains one of the most widely used assessments of children’s intellectual capabilities (see Intelligence). Terman also started his own long-term study of highly intelligent children. At Yale University, psychologist Arnold Gesell established a research institute devoted to identifying age norms for a wide variety of behaviors and characteristics. While Gesell believed in the importance of maturation on children’s development, other psychologists emphasized the role of learning from environmental influences. One of these, John B. Watson of Johns Hopkins University, advised parents to treat their offspring in an objective, consistent manner to encourage the development of desired characteristics. Watson believed that all human behaviors could be explained as learned responses to stimuli in the environment, an approach known as behaviorism. This approach to the study of child development remained dominant for the first half of the 20th century.
Although behaviorists contributed much to the study of children, their concepts eventually were viewed as being overly narrow. In the early 1960s scholars began to focus more attention on the work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who had been studying children’s cognitive development since the 1920s. Piaget claimed that children construct new knowledge by applying their current knowledge structures to new experiences and modifying them accordingly. His perspective, called constructivism, emphasized the active role children play in their own mental growth as inquisitive thinkers.
Piaget’s theories led to other approaches to the study of child development. In the 1960s and 1970s British psychologist John Bowlby and American psychologist Mary Ainsworth introduced the concept of attachment. They proposed that infants and young children form emotional bonds to their caregivers because, throughout human evolutionary history, close attachments to adults promoted the survival of defenseless children. In the 1970s and 1980s American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner sought to describe child development in terms of ecological and cultural forces. In his model, environmental influences on the child extend well beyond the family and peer group, and include schools and other community agencies, social institutions such as the media, political and economic conditions, and national customs. Other developmental scientists have studied how cultural values guide the skills and attitudes that children acquire as they mature, and how brain maturation influences the development of thinking and feeling.

NATURE AND NURTURE

Scholars have long debated the relative importance of nature (hereditary influences) and nurture (environmental influences) in child development. It was once assumed that these forces operated independently of each other. Today developmental scientists recognize that both influences are essential and are mutually influential. For example, how a child responds to parenting—an environmental influence—is partly determined by the child’s temperament and other inherited characteristics.
Likewise, the environment influences how hereditary characteristics develop and are expressed. During the past century, for example, there have been significant increases in average height because of improved nutrition and medical care, even though individual differences in height are strongly influenced by heredity. The conclusion that strongly inherited characteristics are changeable has important practical implications. For instance, even though many features of personality are based on inherited temperament, the family environment is an important influence on a child’s personality development. Thus, even a child with a difficult temperament can develop positively in a warm and caring family environment.


SUMMARY

In the end I’d like to sum it all up by saying that child behavior can be best understood by studying the following three factors, which are:

1. Need – It is the psychological feature that arouses an organism to act towards a desired goal; the reason for the action; that which gives purpose and direction to behavior.
Needs in this context can be broadly classified into
i. Physical Needs – Instinctive needs such as hunger, sleep and the like.
ii. Social Needs – Needs of love, belonging and friends
2. Environment – It is the totality of circumstances surrounding a child, especially:
i. The combination of external physical conditions that affect and influence the growth, development, and survival of the child
ii. The complex of social and cultural conditions affecting the nature of the child
3. Attitude – a complex mental state involving beliefs and feelings and values and dispositions to act in certain way. Attitude is expressed through skills and it is required to recognize a child’s attitude and channelize it to develop the child’s personality.