Different issues in child development
BEd Course: Human Development and Learning
BEd Course Code: 8610
Solved Assignment
BEd Course Code: 8610
Solved Assignment
Answer:
Children’s
development of social skills is affected by the nature of their family and
early educational experiences (NRC, 2001). Whether
in a nuclear, blended, or extended family; a communal arrangement; or a single-parent
family, the child learns social patterns and skills within this context. Children find love and
security and form attachments with people who protect and care for them. In the family,
children become socialized through interactions with parents, siblings, relatives, and neighbors;
once in a school setting, they need new ways of acting, relating, and socializing. Children
who have had a strong attachment to a nurturing figure and see themselves as separate from
this nurturing figure are ready for a group situation. Children who have not fully developed strong
attachments to another person may have a more difficult time adjusting to the complexity of the social system of
the school. The
child development theories vary widely in scope and content.
Psychoanalytic
theory focuses on the emotional and motivational
aspects of development. Learning
theory is concerned generally with the effects of the environment on
behavior and, more specifically, with how
those who deal with children can control their behavior. Piaget's theory focuses on the development of intellectual functioning:
adaptive problem-solving, reasoning,
and concept formation.
Information processing theory is concerned
primarily with children's attention, memory, and problem-solving
abilities. Ethological theory explores
the effects of evolution on children's
adaptive behavior.
But
the theories do not just differ in content; They take very different positions
on certain fundamental issues about the nature of development. Is the child an active force in its own development?
Is development continuous or discontinuous? Are there critical periods in
development? Is development the product
of nature or nurture?
Are children an active force in their own development?
Some theories portray
children as essentially passive concerning developmental change. In this view, children do not initiate behavior or
spontaneously act upon the environment; they merely react to stimuli from the environment. Thus, some developmentalism see development
as the accumulation of learned associations between environmental stimuli and responses (Skinner, 1953; Bijou & Baer, 1961;
Bijou, 1989)
Other theories portray children as active agents in their own development. In this perspective, children selectively and
spontaneously involve themselves with specific aspects of the environment and alter the environment in ways that affect the nature of their experiences.
For example, a child who develops an interest and aptitude for motor
skills may begin to select activities--such as joining a team and
practicing--that further develop these motor skills. Thus from the moment of conception, each
individual must be understood as an active force in development,
affecting the environment as much as he or she is influenced by that environment (Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981). This view promotes a sense of humility among those who seek to steer children's development by external interventions. To promote development, we must understand what
children bring to a situation, what they want and need, and whether they will
spontaneously cooperate with our efforts.
There is no simple
resolution to the differences between the passive and active views. Both seem
valid. Children do appear to actively
affect some developmental changes, such as acquiring language and social skills.
Other changes, such as physical growth and changes in certain infant reflexes, seem to occur with less,
or perhaps no active participation of the child. Thus the complexity of
development can be best explained by theories that encompass both passive and active involvement of the child in developmental
change.
Is development continuous or discontinuous?
Many
developmentalists believe that the accumulation of developmental change is not
a matter of adding one new skill after another.
Instead, they believe that developmental change causes "the rules of the system to change" (Green, 1989, p.17), or to
reorganize. For example, when a thirteen-month-old suddenly discovers that he can let go of furniture and toddle across
the living room, the rules for the system of movement in space change irreversibly. At a more
advanced level of development, when a five-year-old child discovers that a few cookies
can be called one, two, and three, her mental system for conceptualizing
quantity is completely reorganized. She
can now count cookies and tell whether her brother has more or fewer than she has.
The
controversy of continuity versus discontinuity is this: Some theorists say that children go through
various developmental
stages defined by reorganizing changes, while other
theorists reject the notion of stages.
A developmental stage refers to the time elapsing between any two
sequential developmental changes that reorganize the system. Sigmund Freud (1939) proposed that personality emerges in a sequence of five developmental
stages organized around qualitatively
different aspects of sexual functioning.
Jean Piaget (1983) proposed that cognitive development emerges in a series of four sequential stages organized around qualitatively distinct forms of thinking and problem-solving. Theorists who accept the concept of stages view
development as discontinuous.
Other
theorists such as social learning theorists (Bandura, 1989) and
information-processing theorists (Bjorkland,
1987; Klahr, 1989) explain development without reference to the stage concept. They view development as a gradual
accumulation of minute changes and see no basis for arbitrarily dividing development into stages. Developmentalists who reject the concept of stages view development as continuous.
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