Lecture 1
December-24-12 12:11 PM
• People who experienced prenatal or birth complications are more likely than others to develop
physical handicaps, mental illness, and learning difficulties
○ Though it depends on one's home environment
• Parents income, educational level, mental health, together with the quality of the relationship
between the parents, exerted particularly important influences on children's development
Why Study Child Development?
• Understanding how children develop can help parents raise their children more effectively, lead
society as a whole to adopt wiser policies regarding children's welfare, and answer intriguing
questions about human nature
• Raising Children
○ One problem that confronts almost all parents is how to promote their children's
management of anger and other negative emotions
▪ One way is expressing sympathy: when parents respond to children's distress with
sympathy, the children are better at coping with the situation causing the distress
▪ Another way is helping angry children find positive alternatives to expressing anger,
perhaps by distracting them from the source of anger and encouraging them to do
something they enjoy to help them cope with the hostile feelings
▪ These strategies are also effective when used by other people who contribute to
raising children
▪ Another approach children are taught to cope with anger is the "turtle technique"
□ When children find themselves become angry, they were to move away from
other children and retreat into their turtle shell, where they could think through
the situation until they were ready to emerge from the shell
• Choosing Social Policies
○ Another reason to learn about child development is to be able to make informed decisions
about a wide variety of social policy questions that affect children in general
○ Child development can inform discussion of all of the policy decisions
○ Child can become increasingly confident about their inaccurate memories with repeated
questioning
▪ An interrogators beliefs about what happened in a event can influence how young
children answer the interrogators questions about the event
▪ However when children are shielded from questions, they are reliable witnesses
□ They may forget details but what they do say is accurate
▪ The younger the child, the more susceptible they are to questions
▪ Realistic props such as a doll actually will increase inaccurate claims
▪ Questions should be stated in a neutral fashion that does not presuppose the answer,
questions should not be repeated, and props should not be used
• Understanding Human Nature
○ Reason to study child development: better understand human nature
○ The timing of experiences influences their effects
Historical Foundations of the Study of Child Development
• Early Philosophers Views of Children's Development
○ Some of the earliest ideas about children's development were those of Plato and Aristotle
▪ Believed the welfare of society depended on the proper raising of their children
▪ Careful upbringing was important because nature would otherwise lead to their
Child Development Page 1
, ▪ Careful upbringing was important because nature would otherwise lead to their
becoming rebellious and unruly
▪ Plato viewed the rearing of boys a challenge
▪ Plato emphasized self-control and discipline as the most important goals of education
▪ Aristotle agreed that discipline was necessary but he was more concerned with fitting
child-rearing to the needs of the child
▪ Plato believed children are born with innate knowledge; Aristotle believed knowledge
came from experience and that the mind of an infant is like a blackboard on which
nothing has yet to be written
▪ John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau focused their attention on how
parents/society can promote child development
▪ Locke believes children are a tabula rasa (blank slate) whose development reflects
nurture
▪ Rousseau advocated discipline before freedom
□ He said children learn from their own interactions with people and objects
rather than through instruction
□ He said children shouldn’t be in school till age 12, should be allowed freedom
• Social Reform Movement
○ Early social reform movements were devoted to improving children's lives by changing the
conditions in which they lived
○ During the industrial revolution children worked all day which could affect their
development
○ The Earl of Shaftesbury's effect at social reform brought success; a law saying girls and boys
couldn’t work under 10years of age
• Darwin's Theory of Evolution
○ Darwin's "baby biography"- a systematic description of Williams day-to-day development-
represented one of the first method to studying children
• The Emergence of Child Development as a Discipline
○ The end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, child
development emerged as a field of inquiry
▪ Also the first theories on child development
▪ One theory: Freud's explorations of hypnosis with his patients and from his analysis of
their recollections of their dreams and childhood experiences
□ He says biological drives have a important influence on development
(psychoanalytic theory)
▪ John Watson proposed the behavioural theory; examined learning in animals and
children and how children's development is determined by environmental factors
especially the rewards and punishments that follow events/behaviours
Enduring Themes in Child Development
• Nature and Nurture: How Do Nature and Nurture Together Shape Development?
○ Nature: our biological endowment, the genes we receive from our parents
▪ Influences our makeup from physical appearances, personality, intellectual ability, and
mental health to specific attitudes
○ Nurture: the environments, both physical and social, that influence our development
▪ Includes in the womb, in our home which we grew up, the schools we attend, the
communities were raised in, and the people we interact with
○ Every characteristic we possess is created through a joint working of nature and nurture
○ Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness characterised by hallucinations, delusions, disorder
thinking and irrational behaviour
▪ Having a parent with this increased the chances of their child having it
▪ Children's genes influence their likelihood of having this disorder
▪ Children who grew up in troubled homes are more likely to have this; environmental
Child Development Page 2
, ▪ Children who grew up in troubled homes are more likely to have this; environmental
influences
• The Active Child: How Do Children Shape Their Own Development?
○ Children first shape their own development through their selection of what to pay attention
to
▪ Newborns prefer to look toward things that move and make sounds helping them
learn about parts of the world
▪ Infants like to look at their mothers face which at first is not accompanied by any
emotion but after 2 months infants smile and coo
○ Once children learn to speak, there contributions to their development become more
evident
▪ Children talk when they are alone in a room; practise helps them improve their speech
○ Young children's play contributes to their development
○ Children's fantasy play contributes to their knowledge of themselves and other people
○ Children's contribution to their own development increases as they grow older
▪ When children are young, their parents determine their environments
▪ Older children choose their own environments, friends, and activities impacting their
future
• Continuity/Discontinuity: In What Ways Is Development Continuous, and in What Ways
Discontinuous?
○ Continuous Development: the idea that changes with age occur gradually, in small
increments like that of a pine tree growing taller and taller
○ Discontinuous Development: the idea that changes with age include occasional large shifts,
like the transition from caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly
▪ Researchers say children of different ages seem qualitatively different
○ A debate over which of the above development is accurate in children's development still
continues
○ Stage Theories: approaches that propose that development involves a series of
discontinuous, age related phases
▪ Development occurs in a progression of distinct age related stages
▪ A child's entry into a new stage involves sudden changes that affect the child's
thinking and behaviour
▪ Among the best stage theorists if Jean Piagets theory of cognitive development: the
development of thinking and reasoning
□ Says between birth and adolescence children go through 4 stages of cognitive
growth
• Mechanisms of Development Change: How Does Change Occur?
○ Effortful Attention: an aspect of temperament involving voluntary control of ones emotions
and thoughts
▪ Includes inhibiting impulses, controlling emotions, focusing attention
▪ Difficulty with exerting effortful attention is associated with behavioural problems,
weak math and reading skills, and mental illness
○ When performing tasks that require control of thoughts and emotions show that
connections between the anterior cingulate (involves setting and attending to goals) and the
limbic area (emotional reactions) are both active
▪ These areas develop considerably during childhood and their development appears to
be one mechanism that underlies improving effortful attention during childhood
○ Specific genes influence the production of key neurotransmitters: chemicals involved in
communication among brain cells- and individual variations in these genes are associated
with the quality of performance on task that require effortful attention
○ Children's experiences can change the wiring of the brain system that produces effortful
attention
• The Sociocultural Context: How Does the Sociocultural Context Influence Development?
Sociocultural Context: the physical, social, cultural, economic, and historical circumstances
Child Development Page 3
, ○ Sociocultural Context: the physical, social, cultural, economic, and historical circumstances
that make up any child's environment
▪ The most important part of a child's sociocultural contexts are the people with whom
they interact and the environment in which they live
□ Also the institutions that influence there lives: schools, religious institutions,
sports leagues, etc.
○ Another important influence is the general characteristics of the child's society
○ Sleeping arrangements can differ across cultures because:
▪ Some lack separate bedrooms
▪ Cultural values; important to develop a good relationship, important so the child does
being distressed at being alone, and for parents to be able to spot any problems that
children are having
○ Socioeconomic Status (SES): a measure of social class that is based on income and
education
▪ Children's lives are influenced by ethnicity, race and SES
○ Poorer families tend to do less well than other children; more likely to have health
problems, behavioural problems, smaller vocabs, lower IQ's, more likely to have a baby
young and drop out of school
▪ More likely to live in dangerous neighborhoods, attend interior daycares and schools,
live with high levels of pollution
▪ Resilient children tend to have three characteristics: positive personal qualities, a
close relationship with at least one parent, and a close relationship with at least one
adult
• Individual Differences: How Do Children Become So Different From One Another?
○ Scarr identified four factors that can lead children from a single family to turn out differently
than others:
1) Genetic differences
□ Siblings share 50% of their genes
2) Differences in treatment by parents and others
□ Differential treatment is often associated with pre-existing differences in the
children's characteristics
3) Differences in reactions to similar experiences
4) Different choices of environments
□ Relates to the theme "active child": as the child grows older, they choose
activities and friends for themselves and influence their own development
• Research and Children's Welfare: How Can Research Promote Childrens Well-Being?
○ Early diagnosis and timely intervention of children’s problems (e.g., cataract in babies- areas
of cloudiness in the lens of the eye that interfere with sharply focused vision)
○ Improving education, parenting, and social policies. e.g., intelligence and learning?
• Methods for Studying Child Development
○ Scientific Method
▪ Scientific Method: an approach to texting beliefs that involves choosing a question,
formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and drawing a conclusion
□ All beliefs may be wrong
□ Until beliefs have been tested, they must be viewed as a hypothesis: educated
guess
▪ Use of the scientific method involves 4 steps:
1) Choosing a question to be answered
2) Formulating a hypothesis regarding the question
3) Developing a method for testing the hypothesis
4) Using the data yielded by the method to draw a conclusion regarding the
hypothesis
○ The Importance of Appropriate Measurement
▪ In order for the scientific method to work, researchers must use measures that are
Child Development Page 4
December-24-12 12:11 PM
• People who experienced prenatal or birth complications are more likely than others to develop
physical handicaps, mental illness, and learning difficulties
○ Though it depends on one's home environment
• Parents income, educational level, mental health, together with the quality of the relationship
between the parents, exerted particularly important influences on children's development
Why Study Child Development?
• Understanding how children develop can help parents raise their children more effectively, lead
society as a whole to adopt wiser policies regarding children's welfare, and answer intriguing
questions about human nature
• Raising Children
○ One problem that confronts almost all parents is how to promote their children's
management of anger and other negative emotions
▪ One way is expressing sympathy: when parents respond to children's distress with
sympathy, the children are better at coping with the situation causing the distress
▪ Another way is helping angry children find positive alternatives to expressing anger,
perhaps by distracting them from the source of anger and encouraging them to do
something they enjoy to help them cope with the hostile feelings
▪ These strategies are also effective when used by other people who contribute to
raising children
▪ Another approach children are taught to cope with anger is the "turtle technique"
□ When children find themselves become angry, they were to move away from
other children and retreat into their turtle shell, where they could think through
the situation until they were ready to emerge from the shell
• Choosing Social Policies
○ Another reason to learn about child development is to be able to make informed decisions
about a wide variety of social policy questions that affect children in general
○ Child development can inform discussion of all of the policy decisions
○ Child can become increasingly confident about their inaccurate memories with repeated
questioning
▪ An interrogators beliefs about what happened in a event can influence how young
children answer the interrogators questions about the event
▪ However when children are shielded from questions, they are reliable witnesses
□ They may forget details but what they do say is accurate
▪ The younger the child, the more susceptible they are to questions
▪ Realistic props such as a doll actually will increase inaccurate claims
▪ Questions should be stated in a neutral fashion that does not presuppose the answer,
questions should not be repeated, and props should not be used
• Understanding Human Nature
○ Reason to study child development: better understand human nature
○ The timing of experiences influences their effects
Historical Foundations of the Study of Child Development
• Early Philosophers Views of Children's Development
○ Some of the earliest ideas about children's development were those of Plato and Aristotle
▪ Believed the welfare of society depended on the proper raising of their children
▪ Careful upbringing was important because nature would otherwise lead to their
Child Development Page 1
, ▪ Careful upbringing was important because nature would otherwise lead to their
becoming rebellious and unruly
▪ Plato viewed the rearing of boys a challenge
▪ Plato emphasized self-control and discipline as the most important goals of education
▪ Aristotle agreed that discipline was necessary but he was more concerned with fitting
child-rearing to the needs of the child
▪ Plato believed children are born with innate knowledge; Aristotle believed knowledge
came from experience and that the mind of an infant is like a blackboard on which
nothing has yet to be written
▪ John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau focused their attention on how
parents/society can promote child development
▪ Locke believes children are a tabula rasa (blank slate) whose development reflects
nurture
▪ Rousseau advocated discipline before freedom
□ He said children learn from their own interactions with people and objects
rather than through instruction
□ He said children shouldn’t be in school till age 12, should be allowed freedom
• Social Reform Movement
○ Early social reform movements were devoted to improving children's lives by changing the
conditions in which they lived
○ During the industrial revolution children worked all day which could affect their
development
○ The Earl of Shaftesbury's effect at social reform brought success; a law saying girls and boys
couldn’t work under 10years of age
• Darwin's Theory of Evolution
○ Darwin's "baby biography"- a systematic description of Williams day-to-day development-
represented one of the first method to studying children
• The Emergence of Child Development as a Discipline
○ The end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, child
development emerged as a field of inquiry
▪ Also the first theories on child development
▪ One theory: Freud's explorations of hypnosis with his patients and from his analysis of
their recollections of their dreams and childhood experiences
□ He says biological drives have a important influence on development
(psychoanalytic theory)
▪ John Watson proposed the behavioural theory; examined learning in animals and
children and how children's development is determined by environmental factors
especially the rewards and punishments that follow events/behaviours
Enduring Themes in Child Development
• Nature and Nurture: How Do Nature and Nurture Together Shape Development?
○ Nature: our biological endowment, the genes we receive from our parents
▪ Influences our makeup from physical appearances, personality, intellectual ability, and
mental health to specific attitudes
○ Nurture: the environments, both physical and social, that influence our development
▪ Includes in the womb, in our home which we grew up, the schools we attend, the
communities were raised in, and the people we interact with
○ Every characteristic we possess is created through a joint working of nature and nurture
○ Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness characterised by hallucinations, delusions, disorder
thinking and irrational behaviour
▪ Having a parent with this increased the chances of their child having it
▪ Children's genes influence their likelihood of having this disorder
▪ Children who grew up in troubled homes are more likely to have this; environmental
Child Development Page 2
, ▪ Children who grew up in troubled homes are more likely to have this; environmental
influences
• The Active Child: How Do Children Shape Their Own Development?
○ Children first shape their own development through their selection of what to pay attention
to
▪ Newborns prefer to look toward things that move and make sounds helping them
learn about parts of the world
▪ Infants like to look at their mothers face which at first is not accompanied by any
emotion but after 2 months infants smile and coo
○ Once children learn to speak, there contributions to their development become more
evident
▪ Children talk when they are alone in a room; practise helps them improve their speech
○ Young children's play contributes to their development
○ Children's fantasy play contributes to their knowledge of themselves and other people
○ Children's contribution to their own development increases as they grow older
▪ When children are young, their parents determine their environments
▪ Older children choose their own environments, friends, and activities impacting their
future
• Continuity/Discontinuity: In What Ways Is Development Continuous, and in What Ways
Discontinuous?
○ Continuous Development: the idea that changes with age occur gradually, in small
increments like that of a pine tree growing taller and taller
○ Discontinuous Development: the idea that changes with age include occasional large shifts,
like the transition from caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly
▪ Researchers say children of different ages seem qualitatively different
○ A debate over which of the above development is accurate in children's development still
continues
○ Stage Theories: approaches that propose that development involves a series of
discontinuous, age related phases
▪ Development occurs in a progression of distinct age related stages
▪ A child's entry into a new stage involves sudden changes that affect the child's
thinking and behaviour
▪ Among the best stage theorists if Jean Piagets theory of cognitive development: the
development of thinking and reasoning
□ Says between birth and adolescence children go through 4 stages of cognitive
growth
• Mechanisms of Development Change: How Does Change Occur?
○ Effortful Attention: an aspect of temperament involving voluntary control of ones emotions
and thoughts
▪ Includes inhibiting impulses, controlling emotions, focusing attention
▪ Difficulty with exerting effortful attention is associated with behavioural problems,
weak math and reading skills, and mental illness
○ When performing tasks that require control of thoughts and emotions show that
connections between the anterior cingulate (involves setting and attending to goals) and the
limbic area (emotional reactions) are both active
▪ These areas develop considerably during childhood and their development appears to
be one mechanism that underlies improving effortful attention during childhood
○ Specific genes influence the production of key neurotransmitters: chemicals involved in
communication among brain cells- and individual variations in these genes are associated
with the quality of performance on task that require effortful attention
○ Children's experiences can change the wiring of the brain system that produces effortful
attention
• The Sociocultural Context: How Does the Sociocultural Context Influence Development?
Sociocultural Context: the physical, social, cultural, economic, and historical circumstances
Child Development Page 3
, ○ Sociocultural Context: the physical, social, cultural, economic, and historical circumstances
that make up any child's environment
▪ The most important part of a child's sociocultural contexts are the people with whom
they interact and the environment in which they live
□ Also the institutions that influence there lives: schools, religious institutions,
sports leagues, etc.
○ Another important influence is the general characteristics of the child's society
○ Sleeping arrangements can differ across cultures because:
▪ Some lack separate bedrooms
▪ Cultural values; important to develop a good relationship, important so the child does
being distressed at being alone, and for parents to be able to spot any problems that
children are having
○ Socioeconomic Status (SES): a measure of social class that is based on income and
education
▪ Children's lives are influenced by ethnicity, race and SES
○ Poorer families tend to do less well than other children; more likely to have health
problems, behavioural problems, smaller vocabs, lower IQ's, more likely to have a baby
young and drop out of school
▪ More likely to live in dangerous neighborhoods, attend interior daycares and schools,
live with high levels of pollution
▪ Resilient children tend to have three characteristics: positive personal qualities, a
close relationship with at least one parent, and a close relationship with at least one
adult
• Individual Differences: How Do Children Become So Different From One Another?
○ Scarr identified four factors that can lead children from a single family to turn out differently
than others:
1) Genetic differences
□ Siblings share 50% of their genes
2) Differences in treatment by parents and others
□ Differential treatment is often associated with pre-existing differences in the
children's characteristics
3) Differences in reactions to similar experiences
4) Different choices of environments
□ Relates to the theme "active child": as the child grows older, they choose
activities and friends for themselves and influence their own development
• Research and Children's Welfare: How Can Research Promote Childrens Well-Being?
○ Early diagnosis and timely intervention of children’s problems (e.g., cataract in babies- areas
of cloudiness in the lens of the eye that interfere with sharply focused vision)
○ Improving education, parenting, and social policies. e.g., intelligence and learning?
• Methods for Studying Child Development
○ Scientific Method
▪ Scientific Method: an approach to texting beliefs that involves choosing a question,
formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and drawing a conclusion
□ All beliefs may be wrong
□ Until beliefs have been tested, they must be viewed as a hypothesis: educated
guess
▪ Use of the scientific method involves 4 steps:
1) Choosing a question to be answered
2) Formulating a hypothesis regarding the question
3) Developing a method for testing the hypothesis
4) Using the data yielded by the method to draw a conclusion regarding the
hypothesis
○ The Importance of Appropriate Measurement
▪ In order for the scientific method to work, researchers must use measures that are
Child Development Page 4
