Stages of life

The Parental Periods (conception to birth)

- Involves tremendous growth, from single celled organism to one complete with brain and
behavioral capabilities all in 9 months
Infancy (Birth-18-24 months)
- Extreme dependence upon adults
- Language, symbolic thoughts, sensorimotor coordination, and social learning
Early Childhood (2-5 years)
- The preschool years
- Children become self-sufficient, follow instruction and spend a lot of time with peers
Middle and Late Childhood (6-11 years)
- The elementary years
- Fundamental skills of math and reading are learned
- - child exposed to a larger world of culture
- Achievement becomes major theme
Adolescence (10-12-18-21 years)
- Transition from childhood to early adulthood
- Rapid physical changes, development of sexual characteristics pursuit of independence and
identity is a major theme
Early Adulthood (20s to 30s)
- Establishing personal economic independence, careers, finding a mate, learning to live with
others and possibly children
Middle Adulthood (40-60)
- Expanding personal and social involvement and responsibility, assisting in producing a
competent mature next generation and maintaining a satisfying career
Late Adulthood (60s and 70s- death)
- Longest span
- Battles and smith classified this group into 2 sub-groups
- Young old: potential for physical and mental fitness a lot of cognitive capacity
- Oldest old: show considerable loss in cognitive function and reach their limits of functional
capacity.
Brain development
- Infants grow from a single cell to a brain that contains 100 billion nerve cells (neurons)
- Extensive brain development occurs through infancy
- At birth brain is of bodys total weight
- At age 2 s of bodys total weight
Neuron
- a neuron is a nerve cell that handles information processing
- at birth, we have all the neurons we need
Dendrites
- short fibers that extend from the cell body and receive information from other neurons
- the neurons axon carries the message from the cell body to the next neuron
- ends of axon splits into filaments that end with a terminal button
- Neurotransmitters are then released (serotonin) which cross the synaptic gap, passing the
message onto the next dendrite.
Friendships
1) Companionship: a familiar face, one who enjoys spending time with them
2) Stimulation: friendship provides interesting information excitement and amusement
3) Physical support: friendship provides time, resources and money
4) Ego support: support, encouragement and feedback all help once to maintain an impression of
themselves
5) Social comparison: one can see where they stand socially and if they are doing well within
society
6) Intimacy and attention: friendship provides children with a trusting close relationship with
others
- People may differ in the company that they keep
- 2 important characteristics of friendship are:
Similarity: in terms of attitude, race and sex
Intimacy: self-disburse and the sharing of private thoughts





Growth Patterns
- Infants growth in the first 2 years of life is rapid
- 2 important elements that help this are sleep and health
Physical Growth
- Average North American is born 50.8cm and weighs about 7.7lbs
- In the 1
st
week new born lose 5-7% of body weight before adjusting to new way of feeding
- Once adjusted, infants gain 15 grams per week in first month
- Infants grow about 2.5 cm in the first year
- Growth is a lot slower in the second year
- At the end of year 2 they are about 20% of their future adult weight and bout 50% of their adult
height
- Physical growth follows 2 patterns
Cephalocaudal pattern is the sequence where the greatest growth in size, weight and
feature differentiation gradually works down from top to bottom
Proximodostal patter is the sequence in which growth starts at the center of the body
and moves out towards the extremities
Parenting Styles
Authoritative- characterized by warmth support, acceptance and indirect positive control of children
- Children are better adjusted psychologically and have better self-concept
Authoritarian- characterized by parental control and use of punishment
- More punishment negatively affects the childs psychological adjustment they feel rejected
Permissive- Characterized by few rules and by children controlling family situations
- warm and encouraging permissive parenting children tend to be more irresponsible, impulsive
immature
- Hostile and rejecting permissive parenting children tend to be more flighty, anxious, emotionally
impoverished.
The Brick wall Family (like Authoritarian)
- characterized by parents obsessed with order, control and obedience
- perfection is the goal and anything less is a disappointment
- love is conditional, children from brick wall families lack self esteem
The jellyfish family (like Permissive)
- is characterized by lack of strode consistency and self-border
- Its often chaos in the environment causes lack of structure and rules and bribes and threats are
often used.
The Backbone Family (Like Authoritative)
- the six critical messages parents send to their children in the way they treat them
1) I believe you
2) I trust you
3) I know you can handle life situations
4) You are listened to
5) You are cared for
6) you are very important to me
Kohlberg- Moral Development
- Classified into 3 levels
Pre- Conventional
- Stage 1: obedience and punishment
- Stage 2: individualism, instrumentalism, and exchange
Conventional
- Stage 3: Good boy/girl
- Stage 4: Law and order
Post- Conventional
- Stage 5: social contract
- Stage 6: Principled conscience
First stage
- Found at elementary school level and people behave according to socially acceptable norms
because they are hold to do so by some authority figure
Second Stage
- A view that right behavior means acting in does own best interests
Third stage
- Characterized by an attitude which seeks to do what will gain the approval of others
Fourth Stage
- One oriented to abiding by the law and responding to the obligations of duty
Fifth Stage
- An understanding of social mutuality and a genuine interest in the welfare of others
Sixth stage
- Respect for universal principle and the demands of individual conscience.
Sigmund Freud
- Major contribution include exploration of the conscious, dream analysis, defense mechanisms ,
and 5 psychosexual stage of development
Psychoanalytic theory: picturing the mind and how it works
1) Conscious- the part we are aware of
2) Unconscious- part we are not aware of, it has more influence than the conscious behavior over
our personality and behavior
The Unconscious is divided into 3 parts:
1) Id- encourages us to seek physical satisfaction (food, sex)
2) Super Ego- to do moral not the one that feels best
3) 3) Ego- refers between the 2 and deals with external reality
- Personality and behavior are governed by how the 3 work together
- Early childhood experiences are stored in the unconscious and have powerful influence on how
we function
- Psychoanalysts believe that criminal behavior is caused by early experiences
- Freud: sexual satisfaction/frustration is key element in personality development
- Supporters of Freud have modified this by calming that the sexual component was only one
among many factors in human personality development
- Supporters of Freud have modified this by claiming that the sexual component was only one
among may factors in human personality development







Personal Growth
Biological Processes
- Produce changes in an individuals physical nature
- Genes from parents, brain development, motor skills
Cognitive Processes
- Individuals thought, intelligence, and language
Socio- emotional Processes
- Involved changes in an individual relationships with other people changes in emotion and
changes in personality
- An infants smile, young boys fighting, joy at senior prom, affection of an elderly couple
Time Span of research
Cross Sectional Approach
- A research strategy in which individuals of different ages are compared at one time
- Topics researched can range from IQ levels
Longitude Approach
- The same individuals are studies over a period of time usually several years or more
Sequential Approach
- A combined cross sectional and longitude design
-lifespan development and expensive
Experiments (Behavioral)
Pavlovs classical conditioning
- His curiosity in salivating dogs led him to discover principle of classical conditioning. This can be
applied to humans as well
- The Little Albert Experiment; a loud noise was pared with a white rat, infant then became afraid
of that rat
Skinners Operant Conditioning
- If behavior is followed by a rewarding stimulus it is more likely to reoccur
- Behavioral changes are brought on by rewards and punishment not by thoughts and feelings

Banduras social Cognitive theory
- Social cognitive theorists believe that people acquire a wide range of behaviors, thoughts, and
feelings through observing others behaviors
- Conducted experiments with children: showed films of people hitting or petting a balloon-like
doll painted like a clown. The children were placed in a room with Bobo the clown
- Concluded that learning is largely a modeling experience, humans will likely practice the
observed behavior either acceptable or unacceptable
Six Parental Stages
1) Image Making stage: Pregnancy
- Parents prepare for changes in themselves, for new relationships with each other and many
questions are discussed
2) Nurturing stage: Birth-18-24 months of Autonomy
- Forming bonds of attachment with the body
- Parents attempt to meet the needs of the baby and balance this with other responsibilities
involving spouse, jobs, and friends
3) Authoritative Stage: 2-4 or 5 years
- Parents nurture, guide, and discipline their child
- Parents evaluate their effectiveness in establishing limits, communicating and enforcing rules
and allowing enough freedom for each child to grow and develop
4) Interpretive stage: Preschool years through Adolescence
- Parents teach their child about life and help him or her deal with the actions of others and are
concerned with increasing influence of peers
- When child doesnt meet expectations, parents will question themselves
5) Interdependent Stage: During Adolescence
- Parents involve their teenager in more decisions, parents are still responsible
- Adolescent is searching for identity and independence from parents and parents are struggling
to give up control
6) Departure stage
- Parents begin the process of evaluating their role as a parent
- New relationships emerge between parents and child when the adult child leaves home
- Parents need to redefine their own identity
Pre-term Infants
- Weighs less that 5 pounds at birth
- Very low birth weight newborns weigh under 3 pounds at birth
- Born 3 weeks or more before full term
- Small-for-date-infants are those who birth weight is below normal compared with the length of
pregnancy
- Low birth weight babies generally have more learning disabilities
Kangaroo care and Massage Therapy
- Skin to skin contact for 2-3 hours a day
- Regulates temperature, heart rate, and breathing if child has difficulty
Benefits: Longer period of sleep, gain more weight, cry less, earlier hospital discharge, longer periods of
alertness, better temperament, mother baby bonding
The Brain
- Scientist have divided the cerebral cortex of the brain into lobes
Frontal lobes: voluntary movement, thinking, personality, and purpose
Occipital Lobe: Vision
Temporal Lobe: Hearing, Language, memory
Parietal Lobe: spatial Location, attention, motor control
- The brain is also divided into hemispheres
- Neuroscientists explain that complex functions such as reading or preforming music involves
both hemispheres
- There are no left or right brained individuals
Parenting in eastern vs. western world
- Canadian mothers use physical punishment more than Swedish mothers 71% vs 46%
- Mothers in both countries acknowledge that this punishment would result in negative long term
outcomes
- Some cultures, stress parental power and do not believe in the autonomy of the child
- In some cultures, physical punishment and parental aggression in America European Cultures as
well as African American Cultures
Piaget
- After extensive interviews of children ages 4-12, Piaget concluded that children think about
morality in 2 distinct ways:
Heteronomous morality (4 years old)- justice and rules are conceived of as
unchangeable properties of the world, removed from the control of people
Autonomous Morality (10 years and older)- child becomes aware that rules and laws are
created by people, one should consider intention as well as consequences
- Piaget introduced younger kids (Heteronomous new rules for a game, the children insisted that
the rules cannot be changed.
- Older children (autonomous) realized rules are simply convenient socially agreed upon rules,
and this could be changed
- Heteronomous thinks believe in if a rule is broken punishment must be served e.g. Looking
around if something bad happens
- Autonomous thinking comes from interactions with peers that are the same seniority
Cognitive Development theory
Four stages of cognitive development
- Two processes our cognitive construction of the world
Organization
Adaption
Organization
- To make sense of our world, we organize our experiences
Important vs. Not Important
Adaptation
- We also adapt in two ways, assimilation and accommodation
Assimilations
- Occurs when individuals incorporating new information into their existing knowledge
Using utensils
Accommodation
- Occurs when individuals adjust to new information
Walking
Assimilations and accommodations occur at a very young age
- New borns sucking when lips are touched (assimilation) but after a couple of months
(acumination) takes place
Four stages
1) The sensorimotor stage (birth-2 years)
- Infants construct and understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experience (seeing
and hearing )
- At two years infants have complex sensorimotor patterns and operate with primitive symbols
2) The preoperational stage (2-7 years)
- Children begin to represent the world with words; images and drawing
- These words and images reflect increased symbolic thought and are beyond sense of sensory
information

3) Concrete Operational stage (7-11 years)
- The child can now reason logically about concrete events and classing objects into different sets
4) The formal operation stage (11-adulthood)
- More abstract, logical and ideal thinking such as what an ideal parent
- Comparing parents to their ideal standard
- Begin entertains possibilities for the future. More systematic problem solving
Why did this happen to me?
Elliot Truriel- morality and convention
Morality- structured by concepts of harm, welfare and fairness
Conventions- socially agreed upon rules-important to the function of all social groups
- How people co-ordinate these 2 factors depend on what seems more important to them the
mood or conventional aspect the development level of a person also influences their actions.
Strange situation experiment
-The security of attachment in 1-2 year olds was investigates by ainswoth and bell. In order to determine
the nature of attachment behaviors and styles of attachment between mothers and infants
- Experiment was set up in a small room with one way glass
-conducted by observing the behavior of the infant in a series of seven 3 minute episodes as follows
1) Parent and infant alone
2) Stranger joins parent and infant
3) Parent leaves and stranger alone
4) Parent returns then stranger leaves
5) Parent leaves infant alone
6) Stranger returns
7) Parent returns and stranger leaves
-4 categories of behavior measured and observed:
1) Separation anxiety
2) The infants willingness to explore
3) Stranger anxiety
4) Reunion behavior