Child and Adolescent Development: Key Theories

Basic Concepts of Child and Adolescent Development

• Theories are essential for understanding children's development by providing the "why" of development.
• A theory is an organized set of ideas designed to explain and make predictions about development.
• Theories summarize current knowledge, connect facts, give facts meaning and aim to predict future behavior.
• Theory stimulates new research and is altered when research differs.
• There are various theories about child development, but no single theory explains everything.
• Most theories tackle only one section of child development, and each theory has sub-theories which allows us to focus on smaller and more specialized parts.
• Many theories have guided research and thinking about children's development since the beginning of child development.
• Findings lead to newer and improved theories and newer theories are best understood in terms of historical roots.
• There are five major theoretical perspectives of child development: biological, psychodynamic, learning, cognitive-developmental, and contextual.

Biological Perspective

• Behavior is primarily determined by biological factors, with less consideration for environmental factors.
• Biological factors include the role of heredity, nervous system, and endocrine system in behavior.
• Maturation theory, proposed by Arnold Gesell, posits that child development reflects a specific and prearranged scheme within the body.
  • Development is a natural unfolding of a biological plan and experience matters little.
  • Speech, play, and reasoning are predetermined through the course of development spontaneously and according to time without environmental influence.
• Ethological theory, developed from evolutionary perspective, contends that many behaviors tend to be adaptive and have survival value.
  • Ethological theorists assume that people inherit many of these behaviors, which is in contrast to maturationists.
  • Animals are biologically programmed so that some kinds of learning will only occur at certain stages called critical periods.
  • Imprinting is a form of learning that takes place during a short, early period in life of an organism when attachment to members of species or maybe even other species occurs.
• Evolutionary theory, applied by Charles Darwin, states that human behavior results from adaptation to environment.
  • Evolution is change in inherited characteristics over successive generations.
  • Change is caused by adaptation to environment and "efficient trait" being passed onto offspring.
  • According to evolutionary psychologists our social nature is a product of evolution.
• Evolutionary developmental psychology highlights adaptive value of children's behavior at different points in development.
• Biological perspective has gained support due to fact that biological factors and certain forms of behaviors are related.
• Sub-disciplines within biological perspective are neuropsychology, behavioral genetics and psycho-endocrinology.
  • Neuropsychology focuses on the nervous system and especially the brain. Studying the influence of certain damages brain areas may be learned from the role of that area.
  • Neuroimaging techniques are used to obtain visual images of functioning brain are obtained to understand the change in brain behaviour.
  • Behavioral genetics studies the role of genetics in behaviors, and they believe that the role of genetics is important and underestimated.
  • Psycho-endocrinology focuses on the relationship between behaviors and endocrine system (hormones) with hormones playing an important role in aspects of behaviors such as sexuality and emotion.

Psychodynamic Perspective

• Explores influences of unconscious psychological motives, drives, or urges on behavior with work done by Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson in 19th and early 20th century.
• Freud was a physician who specialized in diseases of the nervous system.
• Psychoanalysis holds that development is largely determined by how well people resolve the unconscious conflicts they face at different ages.
• The personality includes the primary components of id, ego and superego.
  • The id is a reservoir of primitive instincts and drives, present at birth, and demands immediate gratification of bodily needs and wants. Example: Hungry baby crying
  • The ego is the practical, rational component of personality that emerges during first year of life as infants learn that they cannot have everything they want. Tries to guide ID's impulsive demands into socially acceptable behaviours.
  • The superego is the 'moral agent' in child's personality who emerges during preschool years as the child internalises adult standards or right and wrong.
• Freud proposes a series of psychosexual stages through which a child moves in a fixed sequence determined by maturation.
• In each stage the focus is on a different part of the body called erogenous zones that is dominated by sexual instincts.
• Permitting too much or too little gratification to these urges can lead to fixation.
• Fixation means development is arrested at a certain age and the child cannot move ahead.
• Freud's psychosexual stages are:
  • Oral: Occurs at birth to 1 year with sexual energy centered at mouth for sucking. If oral gratification is deprived, it may develop into thumb sucking, nail biting and then overeating and smoking in the future.
  • Anal: Occurs from 1 - 3 years with sexual energy centered at anal area to focus on elimination functions like toilet training. If conflicts occur, extreme orderliness and cleanliness or messiness may result.
  • Phallic: Occurs from 3 – 6 years with sexual impulses being transferred to genitals and child finding pleasure in genital stimulation. Develops in Freud's Oedipus conflict (boys) and Electra conflict (girls) arise where the children feel sexual desire for other sex parent →causes anxiety.
  • Latency: Occurs at 6 – 11 years where sexual instincts subside and superego develops further.
  • Genitals: Occurs at adolescence where puberty causes sexual impulses to reappear. Adolescents have to learn to express urges in socially acceptable ways.
• Erikson's psychosocial theory includes the basic trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, industry vs. inferiority, identity vs. identity confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generativity vs. stagnation and integrity vs. despair stages.
  • Basic trust vs. mistrust: Develop a sense that the world is safe and a good place.
  • Autonomy vs. shame and doubt: Develop a willingness to try new things and to handle failure.
  • Industry vs. inferiority: Learn basic skills and to work with others.
  • Identity vs identity confusion: Develop a lasting, integrated sense of self.
  • Intimacy vs isolation: Commit to another in a loving relationship.
  • Generativity vs stagnation: Contribute to younger people, through child rearing, voluntary community work or other productive work.
  • Integrity vs despair: View one's life as satisfactory and worth living.

Learning Theory Perspective

• Learning theorists view that infant minds are a blank state on which experience writes (proposed by John Locke).
• Behaviorism refers to the theory that behavior is primarily learned from one's environment.
• Classical conditioning refers to the process of learning through which an initially neutral stimulus comes to elicit a particular response after repeatedly being paired with an unconditional stimulus.
• Social cognitive theory states that children sometimes learn without reinforcement/punishment by learning through observing.
  • Called imitation, modelling or observational learning from Albert Bandura.
  • This decision is influenced by children's own expectations of what the consequences of imitating the model's behaviour will be and child's own personality standards, value system, and how powerful the model is.
  • This includes intentionality, forethought, self-regulation and self-reflection and children take on the agentic perspective.
  • Central to the theory is the idea of self-efficacy, which refers to people's beliefs about own abilities and potential. Mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion and choice of environments all contribute to self-efficacy.

Cognitive-Development Perspective

• The focus of this perspective is on how children think and on how their thinking changes overtime.
• Proponent is John Piaget and information processing theorists.
• Piaget's theory of cognitive development states that children naturally try to make sense of their world.
• In their efforts to comprehend their world, children act like scientists in creating theories about their physical and social worlds.
• Radical revision occurs 3 times in development: once at age 2, second time at about age 7 and again before adolescence.
• This implies that children go through 4 distinct stages of cognitive development.

Piaget's 4 Stages of Cognitive Development

• Sensorimotor: birth - 2 years with infants understanding of world is acquired through senses and movement. Infants also develop object permanence.
• Preoperational: 2-6 years where children start to use language and symbols to represent ideas and objects with animism and egocentric thinking developing.
• Concrete operational: 7-11 years where logical thinking develops but only applies to concrete objects. Abstract thinking is largely absent.
• Formal operational: 12 years and older where adolescents/adults starts thinking abstractly especially on hypothetical situation and reasons deductively about what may be possible.
• Cognitive development is based on interrelated principles and processes: organization and adaptation.
  • Organization: tendency of cognitive processes to become not only more complex but more systematic and coherent. Sense of world = organizing experiences
  • Adaptation: Children gain new experiences and as they do, they have to dela with info that seems to be in conflict with what they already known adaptation involves two processed.
• Assimilation: tendency to interpret new experiences in terms of existing scheme. Existing scheme is not changed. New experience is made to fit into existing scheme.
• Accommodation: development of another cognitive scheme to fit in with current scheme. Balance between assimilation and accommodation is equilibrium.

Information – Processing Theory

• Tries to explain how incoming information is processed in order for person to make sense out of it.
• Draws on functioning of computers to explain thinking and how it develops during childhood and adolescence.
• Information – processing theory proposes that human cognition consist of mental hardware and software.
  • Mental hardware is cognitive structures, including different memories where info is stored.
  • Mental software is a set of cognitive processes that allow children to complete specific tasks such as reading a sentence, etc.
• Information processing works like a computer.
  • Encoding: Information is acquired and processed into neural code
  • Storage: information is stored in the brain
  • Retrieval: information is retrieved when it is needed
• Related concepts are metamemory and metacognition:
  • Metamemory refers to the knowledge of memory skills and the appropriate use of these strategies.
  • Metacognition refers to knowledge about and control of thought processes.

Contextual Perspective

• Environment is an important factor in development, but in contextual perspective environment is just a small part of something big.
• The bigger picture involves family, friends, culture etc.
• Culture provides context in which child develops and thus is the source of many important influences on development throughout childhood and adolescents.
• The social cognitive theory also adopts the agentic perspective in which to be an agent is to intentionally influence one's functioning and life circumstances

Vygotsky's Socio-Cultural Theory

• One of the first psychologists to emphasise cultural context in children's development on how adults convey beliefs, customs and skills of their cultures to their children.
• Asserts that the fundamental aim of all societies is to enable children to acquire essential cultural values and skills.
• Theory suggest that a child's learning of new skills is guided by an adult/ older child.
• The zone of proximal development are tasks that are too difficult for a child to do alone but they can manage with the help of an adult.

Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Theory

• Views child development as a series of complex and interactive systems by dividing environment into 4 levels.
  • Microsystem: Consists of child and persons and institutions in child's immediate surrounding (family) - has strong influence in development.
  • Mesosystem: Represents reciprocal interactions between various microsystems. What happens in one microsystem is most likely to influence other microsystems?
  • Exosystem: Social setting that child may not experience directly but still influence child's development through formal institutions, media, religious institutions where breakdown in exosystem can have negative consequences for child.
  • Macrosystem: Cultures and subcultures, each with its own value system and ideologies where microsystem, mesosystem and exosystem are embedded in here.
• The macrosystems evolve over time where environmental factors do not remain static.
• The chronosystem refers to point of time at which certain changes occur in child's life and influences development.

Nsamenang's African Perspective

• African perspective is fairly recent documentation because of paradigms and African lifestyles were based on oral traditions and were narrative in nature.
• The human behaviour can be understood only in terms of greater whole of which an individual is a part.
• This involves a hierarchical view of universe such as Inanimate objects at the bottom of the hierarchy followed by plants and animals and Humans are placed in the middle followed by living dead which includes all humans are spiritual beings.
• Community plays important role guided by values such as cooperation, interdependence and communal responsibility.
• Ubuntu in nguni describes african worldview in which people can find fulfilment only through positive interaction with other people.
• Nsamenang describes human life span and life cycle as phases of selfhood which includes phases such as : spiritual selfhood, social selfhood and ancestorial selfhood.

Prenatal Environmental Influences

• Prenatal development refers to normal prenatal development, certain factors may disrupt normal development which can result in an effect on child's physical and mental health.
• Congenital abnormalities result in such conditions.
• 20% results from heredity
• 10% prenatal environmental factors
• 70% unknown (environment or genetics)
• Teratogen: External factor/process that has a negative effect on normal development of unborn child. This may include maternal age, emotional state.
• Behavioural teratogen study of effect of teratogen. Time of exposure of teratogens : can cause more damage at certain phases of development. Embryonic phase is more vulnerable than foetal phase.
• Each teratogen has different effect on unborn child.

Age of Parents

• Mothers younger than 20 and older than 35 have greater risk of giving birth to children with psychological and physical effects.
  • Teenage moms are susceptible to premature births, still births and births problems.
• Mothers of age 35 and above have a harder and difficult birth process. There is High frequency of Down Syndrome among babies with older moms with considered factors on the father's sperm.

Nutrition of Mother

• Unborn child is directly dependent on mother for all its nutritional needs and needs to follow a healthy diet.
• Undernutrition refers to too little food intake or an imbalance in nutrient intake which can cause impairment of the child's future cognitive development Overnutrition results from excessive or calorie-rich food intake, generally leads to maternal overweight and obesity that can have adverse consequences for the unborn baby.
• The effect of radiation lead to physical deformities during WWII.
  • Certain sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS; acquired immune deficiency syndrome of the mother, Rubella or German measles and Congenital Syphilis, such effects can also occur.

Smoking and Drinking during pregnancy

• Excessive use of aspirin, antihistamines by mothers can have serious effects in the children.
• Nicotine and tobacco can also have adverse effects of unborn child through premature birth, miscarriage and stillbirths resulting in foetal nicotine syndrome.
• Passive smoking can harm the foetus, and many think e-cigarettes are fine but they are not because of the nicotine.
• Even a small amount of alcohol can lead to Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS and has malformation) and it is said that SA has a high rate of FAS world wide.

Drugs and Emotional State of Mother

• Mothers who cause physical dependence can cause a child to have respiratory problems and may die hours later.
• The emotional state of a pregnant mother does contribute to the baby's development and high stress levels in the mothers may have affects into the brain development of the child. In reaction to stress → endocrine glands release hormones such as adrenaline and noradrenaline into the mother's bloodstream which can reduce the oxygen rate to the child and its development.

Chapter 3: The Neonatal Phase and Infancy

• A lot of time when the baby is awake is spent on feeding, can vary from 8-14 times a day, Intervals can be from 1 12 hours to 5 hours.

Breast-feeding advantages