Theories in Child Development

• Theory: Interrelated, coherent set of ideas that helps to explain phenomena and facilitate
predictions

• A developmental theory focuses on changes that occur over time, uncovering the links
between past, present, and future (Berger, 2018).

• Developmental theories attempt to answer the crucial questions of the life span.

Psychoanaltyic theories

• Describe development as primarily unconscious and heavily colored by emotion

• Behavior is a surface characteristic, and the symbolic workings of the mind have to be
analyzed to understand behavior

• Early experiences with parents extensively shape development

Freud’s psychosexual theory

• How parents manage their child’s sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years is crucial
for healthy personality development. (Berk, 2018)

• Adult personality results from the way crises are resolved in the five stages of psychosexual
development, which he named oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.
• Each stage has a different source of gratification.
• If too little or too much gratification is experienced during each stage, a person may become
fixated at that particular stage, resulting in various personality traits later in life (Rathus,
2017).

Oral Stage (birth to 12-18 months)

• The mouth is the focus of pleasurable sensations in the baby’s body, and sucking and
feeding are the most stimulating activities (Berger, 2018).

Anal Stage (12-18 months to 3 years)

• The anus is the focus of pleasurable sensations in the baby’s body, and toilet training is the
most important activity (Feldman, 2018).

Phallic Stage (3 to 5-6 years)

• The phallus, or penis, is the most important body part, and pleasure is derived from genital
stimulation.

• Freud’s Oedipus conflict for boys and Electra conflict for girls arise:

• Children feel a sexual desire for the other-sex parent.

 • To avoid punishment, they give up this desire and adopt the same-sex parent’s
characteristics and values.

• As a result, the superego is formed, and children feel guilty when they violate its standards.

Latency (5-6 to 11 years)

• Sexual needs are quiet; psychic energy flows into sports, schoolwork, and friendship

Genital Stage (Begins at adolescence)

• The genitals are the focus of pleasurable sensations, and the young person seeks sexual
stimulation and satisfaction in heterosexual relationships.

Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory

 Focuses on development of self-identity

• Erikson’s theory, like Freud’s, focuses on the development of the emotional life and
psychological traits, but Erikson focuses on social relationships rather than sexual or
aggressive instincts.

• Erikson pointed out that normal development must be understood in relation to each
culture’s life situation.

• Erikson proposed that social relationships and physical maturation give each stage its
character (Rathus, 2017.)

• Erikson described eight developmental stages, each characterised by a particular

developmental crisis.

Trust vs. Mistrust

• Babies either trust that others will satisfy their basic needs, including nourishment, warmth,
cleanliness, and physical contact, or develop mistrust about the care of others (Berger,
2018).

Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt

• Children either become self-sufficient in many activities, including toileting, feeding, walking,
exploring, and talking, or doubt their own abilities.

Initiative vs. Guilt

• Children either try to undertake many adult like activities or internalise the limits and
prohibitions set by parents.

• They feel either adventurous or guilty.

Industry vs. Inferiority

 • Children busily practice and then master new skills or feel inferior, unable to do anything
well.

Identity vs. Role Confusion

• Adolescents ask themselves “Who am I?”

• They establish sexual, political, religious, and vocational identities or are confused about
their roles.

Intimacy vs. Isolation

• Emerging adults seek companionship and love or become isolated from others, fearing
rejection.

Generativity vs. Stagnation

• Generativity is primarily a concern for helping the younger generation to develop and lead
useful lives.

• Stagnation is feeling that one has not done anything to help the next generation is
stagnation.

• Adults contribute to future generations through work, creative activities, and parenthood or
they stagnate.

Integrity vs. Despair

• Older adults try to make sense of their lives, either seeing life as a meaningful whole or
despairing at goals never reached.

Activity 1

• Compare & Contrast Freud’s and Erikson’s Psychoanalytic theories.

Activity 2

• What contributions did psychoanalytic theories make to the field of developmental

psychology?

• What are the limitations of those theories?

Cognitive Theories

• They investigate the ways in which children perceive and mentally represent the world, how
they develop thinking, logic, and problem solving ability.

Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory

• Cognitive development depends largely on the maturation of the brain and children are
active “little scientists” (Rathus, 2017).
 • People build mental structures that help them to adapt to the world.

• Adaptation involves adjusting to new environmental demands (Santrock, 2021).

Cognitive Processes

• Schemes

• Assimilation

• Accommodation

• Organisation

• Equilibration

Schemes

• As the child seeks to construct an understanding of the world, the developing brain creates
schemes (Piaget, 1954 cited by Santrock, 2018).

• These are actions or mental representations that organize knowledge.

Assimilation and Accommodation

• Explain how children use and adapt their schemes.

• Assimilation is incorporating new information into their existing schemes

• Accommodation is adjusting existing schemes to fit the new information and experiences

Activity

Give examples of schemes found in the different periods of development

Organisation

• To make sense out of their world, children cognitively organize their experiences (Santrock,
2021).

• Organisation is the grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order system

Equilibration

• Equilibration is a mechanism by which children shift from one stage of thought to the next.

• It occurs as children seek to resolve cognitive conflict, or disequilibrium.

Stages of Cognitive Development

• Piaget believed that children pass through four stages of development, namely sensorimotor
, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational.
 • Cognition is qualitatively different, i.e the way individuals think at one stage is different
from thinking at other stages

Sensorimotor stage (birth – 2 years)

• Infants progress from possessing simple reflexes to producing complex sensorimotor

patterns and using primitive symbols.

• The sensorimotor stage is divided into six substages in which schemes change in
organisation.

• Object permanence is one of infancy’s landmark cognitive accomplishments.

• Object permanence involves understanding that objects and events continue to exist, even
when they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched.

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

• Stable concepts are formed, mental reasoning emerges, and egocentrism and magical beliefs
dominate the child’s world.

• The term preoperational emphasizes that a child is not able to think in an operational way
(Santrock, 2021).

• Operations are reversible mental actions that allow children to do mentally what they
previously could do only physically.

• Divided into 2 substages.

The symbolic function substage (2-4 years)

• The young child gains the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present.

• Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish between one’s own and someone else’s
perspective.

• Animism is the belief that inanimate objects have “lifelike” qualities and are capable of
action.

The Intuitive Thought Substage (4-7 years)

• Children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of
questions.

• Centration involves focusing attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others.

• Lack of conservation demonstrates centration.

• Conservation is the awareness that altering an object’s or a substance’s appearance does

not change its basic properties.

• Centration and children’s inability to reverse actions contribute to the lack of conservation.
Concrete Operational Thought (7-11 years)

• Children can perform concrete operations, which are reversible mental actions on real,
concrete objects.

• Logical reasoning replaces intuitive reasoning, but only in concrete situations (Santrock,
2018).

• Classification skills are present, but abstract problems go unsolved.

• Conservation tasks demonstrate a child’s ability to perform concrete operations.

• Concrete operations allow children to coordinate several characteristics rather than focus on
a single property of an object.

• Children do not conserve all quantities or conserve on all tasks simultaneously.

Horizontal décalage

• Similar abilities do not appear at the same time within a stage of development (Santrock,
2021).

Classification

• The ability to classify things and to consider their relationships is one important skill that
characterises children in the concrete operational stage .

• These abilities include seriation, the ability to order stimuli along a quantitative dimension
and transitivity, the ability to logically combine relations to reach certain conclusions.

Formal Operational Stage (11-15 years)

• Children think in abstract and more logical ways.

• Adolescents develop images of ideal circumstances.

• They begin to entertain possibilities for the future

• Formal operational thinkers are more systematic and use logical reasoning in solving
problems.

• The abstract quality of formal operational thinking is evident in verbal problem solving.

• Hypothetical-deductive reasoning embodies the concept that adolescents can develop

hypotheses or best hunches about ways to solve problems such as an algebraic equation and
systematically reach a conclusion.

• The initial development of formal operational thought is dominated by assimilation, these

thinkers perceive the world subjectively and idealistically.

Social Cultural Theory

 • Developed by Lev Vygotsky

• Views children as social beings who are influenced by the cultures in which they live.

• Emphasises the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and the use of conversations, external
and internal, to guide children’s learning (Santrock, 2021).

• More advanced learners also scaffold the learning of children by providing as much help as a
child needs to achieve a task independently.

Zone of proximal development

• Refers to a range of tasks that a child can carry out with the help of someone who is more
skilled.

• Captures the child’s cognitive skills that are in the process of maturing

Scaffolding

• Changing the level of support given.

Language and thought

• Language plays an important role in a child’s development.

• Language and thought develop independently of each other and then merge.

• Have external or social origins

Diversity

• The sociocultural perspective asserts that individuals cannot be understood without

awareness of the richness of their diversity (Rathus, 2017)

• It is critical to understand influences of children’s family values and cultural expectations on

development.

• People differ in their ethnicity their gender, and their socioeconomic status.

Activity

Evaluate Vygotsky’s theory

Compare & Contrast Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories

Information processing theory

• Focuses on each aspect of cognition i.e input, processing, and output (Berger, 2018).
 • Emphasizes that individuals manipulate information, monitor it, and strategise about it
(Santrock, 2017).

• Individuals develop an increasing capacity for processing information in a gradual way,

rather than in stages.

• Siegler, emphasises that an important aspect of development is learning good strategies for
processing information.

Behavioural & Social cognitive theories

Behaviourism

• Classical & Operant Conditioning

• According to behaviourism, directly observable events, that is, stimuli and responses, are the
appropriate focus of study (Berk, 2018).

Classical Conditioning

• Pavlov discovered classical conditioning.

• A simple form of learning by association.

• An unconditioned stimulus (UCS) naturally elicits an unconditioned response (UCR).

• When a neutral stimulus is repeatedly associated with an UCS, it become the conditioned
stimulus (US) and evokes a response similar to the UCR, the conditioned response (CR).

• Little Albert’s experiment demonstrated the classical conditioning of emotions in human

beings.

Operant Conditioning

• B.F Skinner

• The consequences of a behavior produce changes in the probability of the behavior’s

occurrence (Santrock, 2021).

• Reinforcement is likely to increase the frequency of a behavior and can be positive or

negative.

• Children are taught skills by reinforcing steps along the way, something known as shaping.
• Punishments are likely to decrease the frequency of a behavior.
• Development is shaped by rewards and punishments that occur in the environment.

Social cognitive theory (Bandura)

• Behavior, environment, and cognition are the key factors in development.

 • Observational learning occurs through watching what others do.

• Bandura proposes a model of learning and development that involves interaction among the
behavior, the person/cognition, and the environment.

Ethological theory

• Influenced by Konrad Lorenz, focuses on instinctive behavior patterns, which preprogram an

organism to behave in a certain way (Rathus, 2017).

• Ethology is concerned with the adaptive, or survival, value of behaviour

• Stresses that behavior is strongly influenced by biology, is tied to evolution, and is

characterized by critical or sensitive periods (Santrock, 2021).

• Lorenz’s study of imprinting in geese showed that innate learning within a critical period is
based on attachment to the first moving object seen, usually the mother.

• A critical period is a limited time span during which the individual is biologically prepared to
acquire certain adaptive behaviors but needs the support of an appropriately stimulating
environment.

• The notion of a sensitive period reflects the recent expansion of the ethological view of
human development (Santrock, 2021).

• A sensitive period is a time that is biologically optimal for certain capacities to emerge
because the individual is especially responsive to environmental influences (Berk, 2018).

Ecological theory

• Influenced by Urie Bronfenbrenner

• Explains development through reciprocal interactions between children and the settings in
which they live (Rathus, 2021).

• The developing child is embedded in a series of systems, ranging from direct interactions
with social agents to cultural influences.

• The 5 systems microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem

interact.

Microsystem

• The innermost level of the environment (Berk, 2018).

• Consists of activities and interaction patterns in the person’s immediate surroundings.

• The person’s family, peers, school, and neighborhood.

• All relationships are bidirectional

Mesosystem

• Involves relations among microsystems or connections among contexts Santrock, 2021).

• Examples include relations of family experiences to school experiences, school experiences

to church experiences, and family experiences to peer experiences would be included in this
system.

Exosystem

• Consists of social settings in which the developing person does not have an active role but
nevertheless affect experiences in immediate settings (Santrcock,2021).

• These can be formal organisations, such as religious institutions, or community health and
welfare services and management in the parent’s workplace.

Macrosystem

• Consists of cultural values, laws, customs and resources.

Chronosystem

• involves the patterning of environmental events and transitions over the life course, as well
as sociohistorical circumstances.

• Ecological transitions are often important turning points in development.

• Development is neither controlled by environmental circumstances nor driven solely by

inner dispositions.

Eclectic Theoretical Orientation

• Does not follow any one theoretical approach.

• It selects and uses, from each theory, whatever is considered the best aspects.