Issues on Human Development

What is human development?

-The capability for long healthy life, it’s not about how much money you get but how much you
invested on people.
-Freedom to decide, human development is about giving people more freedom to live lives they
value or to live the life they want to be or be what they want to be
-More choices for people, human development is about more choices so its about providing
people with a lot of opportunities but not insisting that they make use of them they’re just going
to choose which one is more suitable and more beneficial for them and could relate to them as
well
-Lead a life in dignity, it means being valued and respected for what you are what you believe in
and how you live your life and also treating others with dignity means treating them the way
we’d like to be treated ourselves too.

Major core issues of Human development

nature vs nurture
-behavior is caused by innate characteristics from the word innate which means inborn or
natural it means that all possible behaviors were already present at the time of conception
when babies are still in their mother’s womb.
-reference to all of the genes and hereditary factors so genes and hereditary factors influence
who we are from our physical appearance to our personality characteristics.
-so there are a few examples of biologically determined characteristics including certain genetic
diseases, genetic diseases runs or diseases that runs in the family so it’s passed down from one
to both parents to a child who may then pass it to his or her children. Example of genetic
disease is down syndrome and other characteristics include eye color, hair color, hair type, and
skin color.
-aspects of development are distinctly biological such as puberty. Puberty it’s a natural process
of human beings so all children undergo or all children go through the biological development of
puberty
-plato and discard support on inborn ideas so they believe that ideas, behaviors and
personalities are inborn or natural
-language acquisitions emphasize the biological influence so the ability to learn language is
something that is already wired into our brains at birth or during the time of conception when
our mom were talking to us and that’s the time as well that we were processing those words
though the languages that our moms have been using too.

nurture
-one’s behavior is determined by the environment, nurture refers to all environmental variables
that impact who we are including our early childhood experiences however race our social
relationship and our surrounding culture
-john locke’s concept tabula rasa, john locke argued for the concept of tabula rasa the tabula
rasa means a belief that the minds is blank state at birth with only experience determining our
knowledge so its like we were born an empty vessel, we didn’t know anything
-depends on environmental influences and not genes so more on environmental factors and not
biological factors
-puberty can be affected by the environment, the onset of puberty can be affected by
environmental factors such as diet and nutrition.
-language acquisition emphasize influences of learning the child must hear language that is
properly pronounced and grammatically correct in order to develop linguistic fluency so that’s
why parents, teachers, and other people usually correct the mistakes of a child if in terms of
words, languages and grammar so that they could develop fluency.

Interaction between Nature and Nurture

-behavior is often a result of the interaction between nature and nurture most psychologist
believe that these two forces causes development. So heredity and environment operate
together without genes there is no person and without environment there is no person. Our
genes influence how we interact with our environment so our unique experiences
-in our environment influence whether and how particular traits are expressed
-reciprocal interaction between nature and environment, there is a reciprocal interaction
between the two of them as they both shape who we become but the debate still continues as
the relative contributions of each.

Continuity vs Discontinuity
-these two developmental theories in developmental psychology attempts to explain how
people change through the course of their lives.
Continuity
- change is gradual many continuity theories believe human development is continuous with no
abrupt change.
- quantitative augmenting the same type of skills that were already there so children become
more skillful in thinking, talking or acting much the same way as they get taller so they’re just
going to develop more of the treats that they already have until they grow up.
Discontinuity
-is an abrupt shift, one’s goals in life might change as we move through the life span and
discontinuity theory instead contends that people change abruptly.
-qualitative, new ways of understanding emerge at specific times so the discontinuity views his
development as more abrupt a succession of changes that produce different behaviors in
different age specific life period call stages so there are a lot of theories supporting this idea