Theories of Child Development
Child development is the study of how a child’s behavior and thought processes affect their ability to develop at the proper rate. There are many factors to be considered when referring to the development of a child as children are so easily moldable. A child starts out with a blank slate and from then on their experiences, their social groups, parents, environment and so much more will take part in how they will develop.
Two very influential people in psychology, Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget, had an interesting take on what a child goes through as they develop through each stage. Freud and Piaget both came up with their own theories as to how a child grows cognitively throughout their life. These two psychologists set the standard for modern day practices with Freud’s realization of infants needs, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, and how Piaget shaped child development in modern schooling.
Sigmund Freud was one of the very first psychologists to delve into the topic of child development; he had a very unique outlook. Initially, people agreed with his theory called the Psychosexual Theory, which contains four stages. The first being the oral stage, this happens when a child is an infant. The child will experience and discover new things with their mouths. “…The infant may swallow that which is experienced as pleasant and spit out anything experienced as unpleasant.” (Garcia, 1995, p. 499) The next stage is referred to as the anal
In the “Study of the Child: Theories of Development I” (Learning Seed, 1997), according to Vygotsky, the cognitive development in children is in direct relationship, and dependent on interaction with others. (Feldman 2010, pg. 20). Vygotsky believed to truly understand cognitive development; a child’s social and cultural experiences must be considered.
Piaget's Theory of cognitive development consists of four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. A 3-year-old preschooler falls into the preoperational stage and a 9-year-old student falls into the concrete operational stage. By definition, the preoperational stage is being able to think beyond the here and now, but being unable to perform mental transformations. The concrete operational stage is described as being able to perform mental transformations, but only on concrete objects. A child would move from the preoperational stage to the concrete operational stage once they master conservation tasks and organization skills.
Jean Piaget is a key figure for development, focusing on cognitive constructivism – that being that we must learn from experience and development, building on knowledge that has already been developed. The strengths and weaknesses of Piaget 's cognitive development theory will be discussed.
Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory describes the way that people collect and categorise information to make sense of their surroundings (Woolfolk & Margetts 2013, p. 81). Piaget’s theory is known as constructivist as it is based on the idea that people are active in their own learning (Institute for Inquiry 2017). The theory is based around the idea that a thinking process change and develop from birth to adulthood. According to Piaget, there were four influences involved in the changes that thinking undertakes. These influences included biological maturation, activity, social experiences and equilibration (Kamii 1985, p. 574). He also identified four stages in which people cognitively developed: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete
When the brain is able to learn naturally we call this theory brain based learning we use our brain everyday to acquire and take in things that we learn and children are no exception. According to Jean Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory children use their brain to think, reason, and remember. Based upon his observations, he concluded that children were not less intelligent than adults, they simply think differently (Cherry, n.d.). Piaget described his theory using stages that children go through as they mentally mature. In his description of children he called them "little scientists," actively trying to make sense of the
Children's development depends on many factors. Some people believe that children have an innate talent to learn, but others are convinced that kids are able to learn because of getting good tools. So there appears the question if it is a nature or a realisation? We can spot some theories:
Psychoanalytic theories describe development as primarily unconscious and heavily colored by emotion. Psychoanalytic theorists emphasize that behavior is merely a surface characteristic and that true understanding of development requires analyzing the symbolic meanings of behavior and the deep inner workings of the mind. They also stress that the experiences children have with their parents earlier on in life shape development. The psychoanalytic theory highlighted by Sigmund Freud who was born in 1856 and died in 1939. As he listened to and examine his parents he was influenced they were the result of experiences early in life. He thought that as children grow up, their focus of pleasure and sexual impulses shifts from the mouth to the anus and eventually to the genitals. As a result, we go through five stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. The oral stage is when the infant’s pleasure centers on the mouth, the anal stage is when
While studying psychology, Jean Piaget became extremely interesting of children development and learning throughout their lives. It was over a course of six decades of his career in child psychology when he recognized four stages of mental development
Child development refers to the alterations that occur as a child grows and develops. It is what shapes children's future happiness, growth, development and learning in life. Between the ages of three and five, children continue to grow rapidly and start to develop Fine Motor Skills and Gross Motor Skills. As children grow into the early stages of childhood, their world will begin to open up. They will come to be more self-determining and begin to focus more on people, both adults and children outside of your family.
For ease of review in discussing the developmental theorists and their theories of human development I have subdivided each theorist into their respective schools of psychology. These schools include the psychoanalytic school, behavioral school, humanistic school, cognitive school, and the individual schools of psychology. Each developmental theorist holds their own unique ideas and theories about various components of human development. I will be discussing the contributions of each of these theorists.
Child development theories focus on describing how children change and also grow throughout childhood. Such theories fixate different aspects of development consisting of social, emotional and cognitive development.
Tim is most likely withdrawn because of his traumatic experience as a young child. From the start of Tim’s life, he is already predisposed to an idea of abandonment with the type of relationship he had with his birth mother the first few years of his life. Tim’s mother going into the role of more so a sibling than parental figure most likely set the stage for these ideas of the instability of relationships. Though he was successful with his grandma, the household dynamic was set up in a confusing way for a young child. Without the full understanding of the situation and these dynamics, left Tim to come up with his own idea of his role in the family. According to Piaget’s stages of cognitive operations, at this time in Tim’s life he would
Jean Piaget is best known for his theory that suggested children think differently than adults. His theory proposed that children’s cognitive development developed in
Jean Piaget developed a systematic study of cognitive development. He conducted a theory that all children are born with a basic mental structure. He felt that their mental structure is genetically inherited and their learning evolved from subsequent learning and knowledge. Piaget’s theory is different from other theories and he was the first to study a child’s learning by using a systematic study of cognitive development. His theory was only concerning the learning of children, their development and not how they learn. He proposed stages of development marked more by qualitative differences than by a gradual increase in number and complexities of behavior or concepts. His goal for his theory was to explain the mechanisms a child uses from the infant stage to the growing child who develops into a thinking and reasoning individual when reasoning and using hypotheses. His theory was that cognitive development was how the brain reorganized mental processes over time due to biological maturation and the experiences they have in an environment. The three basic components to Piaget’s cognitive theory is schemas, adaption processes that allow the child to transition from one stage to another, and the four different stages of development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational.
Jean Piaget is one of the pioneers to child development, he was an important factor in the growth, development and one of the most exciting research theorists in child development. A major force in child psychology, he studied both thought processes and how they change with age. He believed that children think in fundamentally different ways from adults.. Piaget’s belief is that all species inherit the basic tendency to organize their lives and adapt to the world that’s around them, no matter the age. Children develop schemas as a general way of thinking or interacting with ideas and objects in the environment. Children create and develop new schemas as they grow and experience new things. Piaget has identified four major stages of cognitive development which are: sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operations, and formal operations. According to the text here are brief descriptions of each of Piaget’s stages: