Child Psychology
When We Were Younger…
Child Psychology
DEVELOPMENTAL
PSYCHOLOGY
• DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
investigates the course of social, moral,
emotional and intellectual development
over the life span. Developmental
psychologists describe, explain and
attempt to predict age-related behaviors.
They often focus on the MATURATION
PROCESS, early experiences and critical
stages in human development.
MATURATION PROCESS
NATURE VERSUS NURTURE
• The NATURE-NURTURE controversy is over the
relative importance of heredity (nature) versus
the role of the environment (nurture). Most
developmental psychologists now believe our
behavior is strongly shaped by
CONSTITUTIONAL FACTORS that are largely
hereditary such as body build and
TEMPERAMENT FACTORS that include
personality characteristics such as adaptability
to new experience and regularity as well as
tendencies to be happy or sad, irritable or easy,
cheerful or glum.
Tendencies to Cheerful or Glum
NATURE VERSUS NURTURE
• Biological and genetic research with twin
studies also indicates genetics or
NATURE plays a part in predispositions to
physical and mental illnesses as well as
being influenced by NURTURE, our
environment, experience, practice and
learning.
Nature Vs. Nurture
BIOLOGICAL APPROACH
• The BIOLOGICAL APPROACH is supported by the
longitudinal research of Thomas and Chess that found
that the TEMPERAMENT of the child at 3 months was a
fair predictor of his or her temperament at 10 years.
Temperament seems to have a strong biological basis as
it tends to be stable over time. Many developmental
psychologists believe that MATURATION, the changes in
development that involve the unfolding of biologically
determined behavior programmed by the genes, occurs
in CRITICAL PERIODS. A CRITICAL PERIOD is a stage
in development during which certain kinds of growth
must occur if development is to proceed normally.
Temperament
PSYCHOSEXUAL
DEVELOPMENT THEORY
• Sigmund Freud's theory of PSYCHOSEXUAL
DEVELOPMENT focuses on the way in which the
sexual, sensual and pleasure needs of the individual are
satisfied during various stages in life. Freud called the
unconscious drives LIFE INSTINCTS AND DEATH
INSTINCTS, residing as a part of the ID, a forceful
"seething cauldron" of unconscious urges for pleasure.
The ID is present at birth and contains all instinctual
drives and motives and operates according to the
PLEASURE PRINCIPLE, seeking IMMEDIATE
GRATIFICATION of a drive... Freud used the term
SEXUAL INSTINCTS to refer to desires for all forms of
pleasure, not just erotic sexuality.
Freud
PSYCHOSEXUAL
DEVELOPMENT THEORY
• PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES according to Freud are
developmental periods during which the sexual and life
energies of the id find different sources of satisfaction.
Freud postulated that in each PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGE,
individual pleasures must be gratified if personality
development is to proceed normally. If the internal and
external conflicts posed by each stage are not resolved,
a person would become FIXATED. If a child's needs
were either overindulged or frustrated in a particular
stage, he/she would become FIXATED, stuck in that
stage. The child although developing chronologically
would retain methods and personality characteristics that
would attempt to meet the unmet needs of the earlier
PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGE.
PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES
• Freud theorized five stages OR CRITICAL
PERIODS of development; Oral, Anal,
Phallic, Latency and Genital. As the mind
was profoundly shaped by early childhood
experiences, personality was largely
DETERMINED by age 5, the end of the
phallic stage. Each period has a sexual
focus that is gratified, frustrated or
overindulged, leaving a lasting imprint on
personality.
PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES
• ORAL STAGE
• During the ORAL STAGE, first 18 months of life, the
infant finds great sources of pleasure from sucking and
later biting and chewing to fulfill instinctual drives or
satisfy hunger. Handling of a child's feeding experience
by the primary caregiver gives the child feelings of
optimism, (my needs will be met) or pessimism if his/her
needs and demands are frustrated or denied. Freud
theorized FIXATION at the oral stage could lead to
obsessive eating, smoking, talking or drinking to try to
obtain oral satisfaction. If overindulged one develops an
ORAL DEPENDENT personality, refusing to grow up,
holding on to having one's needs satisfied from others
who love, cherish and take care of them.
Freud Oral Fixation
PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES
• ANAL STAGE
• As the child matures into the SECOND YEAR
OF LIFE he or she is able to exert more control
to get needs met through walking, talking,
grabbing and hitting if necessary. As he attempts
to gain more control he derives pleasure from
exploring the environment, testing the strength
of his will power over parents and authority
figures. A crucial event to Freud was toilet
training that represents society's systematic
efforts to control the child's biological urges.
PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES
• ANAL STAGE
• If toilet training and other areas of discipline are too
punitive and severe, the child may become ANALRETENTIVE, holding back not only feces but becoming
constricted, stubborn, rigid, meticulous and precise, an
"over-controlled" personality. The rebellious child may
become ANAL-EXPULSIVE, letting go of feelings,
defiantly strong-willed. Although self-confident and
creative, the anal-expulsive becomes fixated on
expulsive (letting go) activities, actively insisting on
pursuing one's own path while fighting external rules,
regulations and requests that might threaten one's
autonomy
Anal Stage
PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES
• PHALLIC STAGE
• Freud proposed that children enter into the PHALLIC STAGE of
psychosexual development at 4 years of age when they become
curious about sexuality. They openly explore and play with their
bodies and enjoying being naked. Children also become interested
in the parent of the opposite sex. Little girls develop a special
attachment to their father that Freud called the ELECTRA
COMPLEX. They actively seek attention and "flirt" with fathers. The
little girl loves to sit in his lap or to play "grown -up" woman in
mother's make-up and shoes. If the girl's attempts to attract his
attention are successful and her father responds fully and positively,
she gains sex-role assuredness and a positive relationship with
men. This sex-role assuredness allows her to re-identify with the
mother, the same-sex parent, resolving the Electra Complex.
PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES
• PHALLIC STAGE
• Boys also have this underlying attachment for the
opposite sex parent, in this case the mother, called the
OEDIPAL COMPLEX. As the fulfiller of all the boy's
needs for security, love and comfort, the boy is strongly
attached to the loving mother and threatened by the
father, the obvious competitor for mom's affections. Boys
may develop a castration complex towards the father
who might punish desires for his mother. Eventually the
conflict is resolved as the boy begins to model after the
father, achieving IDENTIFICATION WITH THE SAMESEX PARENT, signaling the end of Phallic Stage.
Oedipal Stage
You know, there was soooo much I could do,
but I chose the “clean” route.
PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES
• LATENCY, GENITAL STAGES
• From around age 6 to puberty the child's
sexuality is largely repressed, Freud called
this the LATENCY PERIOD. With the
advent of puberty sexual urges reappear
and the sexual energy is normally
channeled toward peers of the opposite
sex. This GENITAL STAGE lasts
throughout life.
PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
• Erik Erikson emphasized the SOCIAL aspects of
personality development. He proposed that
people encounter a series of eight crises in life
surrounding their social relationships with others
that he called PSYCHOSOCIAL CRISES. A
CRITICAL STAGE theorist, Erikson believed
these crises determined the personality
character of the person, each crisis having
favorable or unfavorable consequences on
personality development that remained in the
psyche for the rest of life.
Erik Erikson
PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
• Erikson differed from Freud who felt the "Child is
father of the man...” While Freud felt the most
important years of personality development were
the first five, Erikson emphasized the ongoing
nature of personality development from birth
through death. Each stage of psychosocial
development with the crisis and favorable social
condition and outcome and possible negative
conditions and outcome is reviewed below.
PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
•
Stage 1: Basic trust vs. mistrust (Birth to
12-18 months): infant must form a first
loving, trusting relationship with the
caregiver or develop a sense of mistrust.
Trust vs. Mistrust
PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
•
Stage 2: Autonomy vs. shame/doubt (18
months to 3 years): the child's energies
are directed toward the development of
physical skills, including walking,
grasping, controlling the sphincter. the
child learns to control but may develop
shame and doubt if not handled well.
Autonomy vs. Shame/doubt
PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
•
Stage 3: Initiative vs. guilt (3 to 6 years):
the child continues to become more
assertive and to take more initiative but
may be too forceful, which can lead to
guilt feelings.
Initiative vs. Guilt
PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
•
Stage 4: Industry vs. inferiority (6 to 12
years): the child must deal with demands
to learn new skills or risk a sense of
inferiority, failure, or incompetence.
Industry vs. Inferiority
PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
•
Stage 5: Identity vs. role confusion
(adolescence): the teenager must
achieve identity in occupation, gender
roles, politics, and religion.
Peer Pressure
PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
•
Stage 6: Intimacy vs. isolation (young
adulthood): the young adult must
develop intimate relationships or suffer
feelings or isolation.
Intimacy vs. Isolation
PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
•
Stage 7: Generativity vs. stagnation
(middle adulthood): each adult must find
some way to satisfy and support the next
generation.
Generativity vs. Stagnation
PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
• Stage 8: Ego integrity vs. despair (late
adulthood): the culmination is a sense of
acceptance of oneself as one is and a
sense of fulfillment
Ego Integrity vs. Despair
PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
• COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT investigates
how patterns of thinking, reasoning,
remembering and problem-solving change
during a child’s development. JEAN
PIAGET is an important theorist who
attempted to explain how human
intelligence develops through the child’s
ADAPTATION to the environment.
JEAN PIAGET
PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
• Piaget proposed that the child uses two
processes to adapt, ASSIMILATION, wherein the
child processes experiences, accepting and
fitting them into different SCHEMES and
ACCOMODATION, wherein the child encounters
new information that does not fit into present
schemes and the child changes their scheme to
accommodate the new information. Piaget felt all
children go through clear stages of intellectual
development in the same order and defined the
major characteristics of his STAGES OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT.
ASSIMILATION
PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
• SENSORIMOTOR PERIOD
• During the SENSORIMOTOR PERIOD, from Birth to
Approximately Two Years, the infant perceives the world
through his/her senses. By seeing, touching, hearing,
sucking and feeling the environment, they learn and
begin to act on the environment through their motor
activities. The major development is the gradual
movement from reflexes that are inborn to a use of
mental symbols to represent objects such as mother.
The achievement of this great leap to symbolic thought is
OBJECT PERMANENCE, when the child recognizes
that objects continue to exist even when they are not
visible. Now they can begin to use mental symbols to
think and represent absent objects.
Object Permanence
PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
• PREOPERATIONAL STAGE
• The PREOPERATIONAL STAGE occurs from 2
to 6 years. As they improve their ability to think
in terms of symbolic thought, the foundation of
thinking, remembering and language, they
encounter shortcomings that distinctly define
their thinking. They are EGOCENTRIC and selfcentered in their thinking, unable to understand
life from any perspective other than their own.
Egocentrism leads to ANIMISM, the belief that
all things are living, just like oneself.
PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
• PREOPERATIONAL STAGE
• In the pre-operational stage, the child begins to use
language as symbols but is still unable to think in a truly
logical fashion. They cannot perform "Mental
Operations", internal manipulations, transformations and
reorganizations of mental structures and are therefore
limited to PREOPERATIONAL THOUGHT. The child
experiences CENTRATION, a tendency to focus on one
feature of a group, neglecting all other aspects and
IRREVERSIBILITY, an inability to envision a reverse
action. He has not mastered CONSERVATION, the
awareness that physical qualities such as height, weight,
number and volume remain constant despite changes in
their shape or appearance.
PREOPERATIONAL STAGE
PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
•
CONCRETE OPERATIONS
• The CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE, from 7 to 12
years is characterized by the development of
conservation, mastery of reversibility and decentration, a
gradual loss of egocentric thinking. This allows the child
to begin to reason logically and to organize thoughts
coherently. However they can only think about actual
CONCRETE, physical objects and cannot handle
abstract reasoning. Children in this stage can perform
CONCRETE OPERATIONS, or mental transformations
and reorganizations on concrete objects and events.
They can begin to coordinate several aspects of a
problem and recognize there are several ways to look at
things.
CONCRETE OPERATIONS
PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
• FORMAL OPERATIONS
• The FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE begins
approximately at 11 or 12 and continues through
adulthood, although Piaget emphasized that
some may never attain this ability to think
abstractly. The formal operational stage is
characterized by thought processes that are
abstract, systematic, reflective and logical.
PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
• FORMAL OPERATIONS
• Adolescents develop the ability to formulate hypotheses
and systematically test them to arrive at an answer to a
problem (hypothetical-deductive reasoning). The
adolescent can apply mental operations to abstract
concepts such as love, free will, "good parenting" and
others ideas and ideals and spend hours "thinking" about
and debating topics of interest. With practice the
adolescent begins to develop clear, logical and
systematic thinking although they do suffer often from
the egocentric and idealistic biases of early adolescent
years. As we mature the development of thinking to
Piaget is measured by degree rather than fundamental
changes in the nature of thinking.
Formal Operational Stage
KOHLBERG’S LEVELS OF
MORAL DEVELOPMENT
• LAWRENCE KOHLBERG agreed with Piaget
that a child’s moral development depended on
their level of cognitive development and
investigated the development of moral
reasoning. He posed hypothetical situations or
moral dilemmas wherein people had to make a
difficult decision and justify their choices. He
proposed people have three levels of moral
development incorporating six stages.
LAWRENCE KOHLBERG
KOHLBERG’S LEVELS OF
MORAL DEVELOPMENT
• LEVEL ONE: PRECONVENTIONAL MORALITY
• Young children judge situations solely on their
own needs and perceptions. Their primary goal
in STAGE ONE: Punishment-Obedience
Orientation is to avoid punishment and a good or
bad action is determined by its physical
consequences. Children comply with rules to
avoid punishment.
Obedience
KOHLBERG’S LEVELS OF
MORAL DEVELOPMENT
• LEVEL ONE: PRECONVENTIONAL MORALITY
• STAGE TWO: Personal (Naïve) Reward
Orientation includes a compliance with rules to
gain rewards. Children may "share" if it leads to
positive rewards. Acts are "right" because they
lead to positive consequences. Both reasoning
is in terms of "external authority."
Personal Reward
KOHLBERG’S LEVELS OF
MORAL DEVELOPMENT
• LEVEL TWO: CONVENTIONAL
MORALITY
• Older children take into account the
expectations of society and rules when
they make a decision about a moral
dilemma. In STAGE THREE: Goodboy/Good-girl Orientation they conform to
rules and their behavior is determined by
what will lead to approval or disapproval.
Good-boy/Good-girl Orientation
KOHLBERG’S LEVELS OF
MORAL DEVELOPMENT
• LEVEL TWO: CONVENTIONAL MORALITY
• At STAGE FOUR: Authority Orientation, the child
rigidly conforms to society’s rules and respects
authority. Often called the Law and Order
Orientation, children obey rules and punish
wrongdoing. Their tendency to think concretely
makes them prefer concrete specific rules and
regulations.
Law and Order Orientation
KOHLBERG’S LEVELS OF
MORAL DEVELOPMENT
• LEVEL THREE: POSTCONVENTIONAL
MORALITY
• During adolescence, many begin to think
abstractly and reflectively. They are
flexible in their reasoning and base their
judgments on abstract, personal principles
that may or may not agree with society’s
laws. They challenge conventional rules
and thinking, personalizing morality.
Adolescence, many begin to think
abstractly and reflectively
PTHS
KOHLBERG’S LEVELS OF
MORAL DEVELOPMENT
• LEVEL THREE: POSTCONVENTIONAL
MORALITY
• STAGE FIVE: Social Contract Orientation
recognizes that good is determined by
socially agreed upon standards of
individual rights. Rules are necessary for
social order, but rules can be changed if
the social contract is not mutually
beneficial.
Social Contract Orientation
KOHLBERG’S LEVELS OF
MORAL DEVELOPMENT
• LEVEL THREE: POSTCONVENTIONAL
MORALITY
• STAGE SIX: Morality of Individual Principles and
Conscience includes abstract thinking about
higher internal moral principles such as equality,
justice and human dignity. Laws become
somewhat arbitrary and what is right is what is
right to the individual in the specific instance
according to personal ethics and conscience.
Morality of Individual Principles