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Chapter 1 - Introduction to Child Development
Reasons to Learn About Child Development
It improves child rearing, promotes adoption of wiser social policies about children’s welfare, answers basic questions about human nature
Raising Children
Anger
80% of parents of kindergarten children reported spanking their child on occasion when they fought, name-called and talked back to express their anger.
This made matters worse no matter the race or culture.
The effects of spanking on the child’s behaviour held above other relevant factors like parent’s income and education.
Spanking Alternatives
Express Sympathy
This leads to children being better able to cope with the distressing situation.
Positive Alternatives to Expressing Feelings
Ex. Encourage them to do something they enjoy to cope with hostile and frustrated feelings.
Use the Turtle Technique
This technique is used to help angry 3- and 4-year-olds.
It also helps children recognize their own and other children’s emotions (children would “go into their shell” when they were mad and came back to their peers when they were calm).
Children who did this were better at recognizing and regulating anger, even after 4-5 years.
Choosing Social Policies
Studies let us make informed decisions about social-policy questions that affect children.
ex. do violent video games make children and adolescents more aggressive?
meta-analysis (a statistical technique that combines results from independent studies) was used to reach conclusions).
It showed that the effect of playing violent video games on children’s and adolescent’s aggression was minimal & this is not a major cause of children’s and adolescent’s aggression.
These analyses let us weigh whether the benefits of removing something that may be harmful outweighs taking away someone’s freedom of choice.
Understanding Human Nature
nativists → group of contemporary philosophers and psychologists
argue evolution has created many capabilities in early infancy especially particularly the understanding of basic properties of physical objects, plants, animals, and other people.
empiricists → infants possess general learning mechanisms but they do not have the specialized capabilities nativists believe them to.
Romanian Adoption Study
Research examines children whose early lives were spent in horrible conditions in Romanian orphanages.
The goal of this study was to evaluable the long-term effects of the children’s deprivation at such a young age (physical, intellectual and social).
When the children left the orphanage, they were below 6 months old. Most were severely malnourished, showed varying degrees of intellectual disability, and were socially immature.
At 6 years old, the early experience in the orphanages had prolonged damaging effects on children’s social development and followed them into early adulthood. Differences in intellectual development diminished over time.
The findings showed that the timing of experiences influence their effects, and the later the age of adoption, the greater the long-term harmful effects of early deprivation.
Historical Foundations of the Study of Child Development
Early Philosopher’s Views of Children’s Development
Plato & Aristotle (4th century BC) believed long-term welfare of society depended on proper raising of children.
Plato thought boys were the most difficult to handle so he emphasized self-control and discipline.
Aristotle agreed with Plato but he cared more about accommodating to the different needs of each individual child.
Plato believed children have innate knowledge and Aristotle believe all knowledge comes from experience.
English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) & French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) focused on how parents and society can best promote children’s development.
Locke believed children were born as a blank slate (concept of tabula rasa) & their development was largely influenced by the nurture provided by parents and society.
He believed parents need to set good examples of honestly, stability, and gentleness and instill discipline and reason so they mature.
Rousseau on the other hand believed parents and society should give children maximum freedom.
He claimed children learn primarily from their own spontaneous interactions & shouldn’t receive formal education until they are 12 (old enough to judge validity of teachings in his eyes).
Social Reform Movements
Child psychology was important in social reform movements that were focused on improving children’s lives by changing the conditions in which they lived.
Children as young as 5-6 years old worked up to 12 hours a day in factories or mines in dangerous circumstances.
Child psychology investigated the adverse effects harsh environments can have on children.
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
This theory focuses on variation, natural selection, and inheritance.
It influenced the thinking of modern scientists in the field of child development (developmentalists) on wide range of topics.
ex. Infant attachment to maternal care, innate fear of natural dangers, sex differences, aggression and altruism, and learning mechanisms.
Enduring Themes in Child Development
Nature and Nurture: How Do Nature and Nurture Together Shape Development
Nature → genetics
Influence everything; physical appearance, personality, intellect, mental health & specific preferences.
Nurture → environments
Physical & social factors that influence our development.
ex. womb, homes, schools, communities, people we interact with
Developmentalists ask how nature and nurture work together to shape development.
Example: Schizophrenia
Children who have a schizophrenic parent are much more likely of developing it later in life.
However, children who grow up in troubled homes are more likely to become schizophrenic than children raised in a normal household.
A study of adopted children showed those with substantial likelihood of developing schizophrenia had a parent with the illness and were adopted into a troubled family.
Nurture influencing nature & vice versa
Studies show that the genome - each person’s complete set of hereditary info - influences behaviour and experiences and vice versa.
Genomes contain proteins that regulate gene expression by turning activity on and off.
The proteins change in response to experience, and can create long-lasting changes in cognition, emotion, and behaviour.
This led to new field called epigenetics, which is the study of stable changes in gene expression influenced by environment.
Methylation is a biochemical process that influences behaviour by suppressing gene activity.
It is also involved in regulating reactions to stress.
Studies show the amount of stress mothers reported during child infancy is related to the amount of methylation in children’s genomes 15 years later.
The Active Child: How Do Children Shape Their Own Development
Children shape their own development through direction of attention, language use, and play.
Direction of attention
Children pay more attention to things that move which helps them learn about important parts of world, like people, animals, and vehicles.
They are particularly drawn to faces, especially their mothers’.
This preference leads to social interactions that strengthen the mother-infant bond.
Language
Usually between 9-15 months of age, toddlers start to speak.
Toddlers 1-2 years old talk when they are alone.
This is an internal motivation to learn language.
It is called “crib speech”.
Play
Play teaches babies about reactions.
ex. sounds of objects clashing, speed of objects falling & even limits of parent’s patients (pushing and learning about boundaries).
At around 2 years, children play pretend.
Activities vary across cultures, but it does happen, even in cultures that actively discourage it.
Play teaches children how to cope with fears, resolve disputes, and interact with others.
Older children play is more organized
It promotes self-control through turn-taking.
It includes following rules.
It also includes controlling emotions.
Continuity/Discontinuity: In What Ways Is Development Continuous, and in What Ways Is It 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 who view development as discontinuous start with the fact that children of different ages are different in terms of how they think and what they know.
4 year old - 6 year old Piaget’s Conservation of Liquid Task
In this experiment, a 4-year-old watched her mother pour all the water from a typical drinking glass into a taller narrower one and then back to the normal one.
The 4-year-old thought there was more water in the second glass because the water was higher.
However, when she was 6, she said there was the same amount of water in both glasses.
letters to Mr. Rogers
In this experiment, a 4-year-old asks how Mr. Rogers “got inside the TV” and a 5-year-old asked if he could “step out of the TV and into his house” so he could play with him.
These findings beg the question “what is it about 4- and 5-year-olds that lead them to form such improbable beliefs, and what changes occur that make such notions laughable to 6- and 7-year-olds?”
Stage theories - approaches proposing development involves a series of large, discontinuous, age-related phases
These theories propose that entry into new stage affects the child’s way of thinking and behaviour.
Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development - development of thinking and reasoning.
This theory says that between birth & adolescence, children go through 4 stages of cognitive growth.
2- to 5-year-olds can only focus on one aspect of an event at a time.
By age 7, children can simultaneously focus on & coordinate 2 or more aspects of an event.
With this view, the conservation of liquid scenario shows that 4- to 5- year-olds focus on the single dimension of height, but 7- to 8-year-olds can look at height and volume at the same time (second glass taller, but also narrower so they cancel each other out).
Many researchers have concluded that most developmental changes are gradual rather than sudden & and development occurs skill by skill.
Evidence: a child will often act in accordance with one stage in some tasks, but in accordance with others in a different task, so the child isn’t in either-or stage, it’s just a gradual process.
However, there are some discrepancies, like when height spikes at certain ages. So, we must ask, “is development fundamentally continuous, or fundamentally discontinuous?”
The answer is, it depends on how you look at it. It is gradual in some cases, and sudden in others.
Mechanisms of Change: How Does Change Occur?
Developmental mechanisms can be behavioural, neural or genetic.
The roles of brain activity, genes, and learning experiences in development of effortful attention:
Control of one’s emotions and thoughts: Inhibiting impulses, controlling emotions, and focusing attention.
Difficulty in exerting effortful attention is associated with behavioural problems, weak math and reading skills, and mental illness.
To specify the physiological mechanisms under this, researches examined brain activity of people who performed tasks that require these types of control.
The findings showed when people are controlling thoughts and emotions, brain activity is intense between the limbic area (the part of brain that plays a role in emotional reactions), and the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex (brain structures involved in setting and attending goals).
Connections among these areas develop during childhood primarily through nature and nurture.
Ex. if one grew up in poverty, there is a negative effect on the brain activity that suppresses negative emotions.
Brain activity and parenting:
Variations of genes that influence the production of key neurotransmitters (chemicals involved in communication among brain cells) are associated with variations in quality of performance on tasks that require effortful attention.
Ex. Infants with a specific variance of a gene are impacted by the quality of parenting they receive. (Lower-quality parenting → lower ability to regulate attention. Higher-quality parenting, higher ability to regulate attention).
However, for children who do not have the variance of the gene, the quality of parenting has less of an effect on effortful attention.
Learning and Effortful attention:
Learning can impact effortful attention.
In a study, 6-year-olds were presented with a 5-day training program that used exercises to improve capacity for effortful attention.
The result was that those who completed the exercises showed improved effortful attention.
These children also showed improved performance on intelligence tests.
The role of sleep in promoting learning and generalization:
Infants spend a lot of time sleeping, which is important in promoting learning.
The type of learning sleep encourages changes with the maturation of the hippocampus (brain structure that is important for learning & remembering).
In the first 18 months of birth, sleep promotes learning of frequently encountered patterns.
After 24 months, children often remember the specifics after a nap better than those who did not take a nap, but memory of general patterns is no better than those who did not nap.
How?
Active Systems Consolidation Theory
This theory suggests the hippocampus and cortex encode new information during learning at the same time.
The hippocampus learns details after one or two experiences, and the cortex produces abstraction of general patterns over many experiences.
This theory also suggests that in older children and adults, hippocampal memories (specifics) are replayed during sleep, which allows the cortex to take the general, frequently encountered patterns and, vice versa, to improve retention of the content.
These findings showed that before 18-24 months of age, the hippocampus is not mature enough to handle the rapid details of specific experiences, so sleep doesn’t help with retention of information, but after 24 months, it does.
The Sociocultural Context: How Does the Sociocultural Context Influence Development?
Sociocultural context - physical, social, cultural, economic, and historical circumstances that make up any child’s environment.
Uri Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model:
This model includes:
People with whom children interact with (parents, grandparents, siblings, day-care providers, teachers, friends, peers)
The physical environment (house, day-care center, school, neighbourhood...)
Institutions (education systems, religious institutions, sports leagues, social organizations)
Society (economic & technological advancement, values, attitudes, beliefs, traditions, laws, political structure...)
ex. Most toddlers in america go to childcare outside their homes, and this reflects the historical era, economic structure, cultural beliefs and cultural values held.
What happens in day care determines who the children meet and the activities in which they engage in as well.
A method used to understand influence of sociocultural context is to compare the lives of children who grew up in different cultures (cross-cultural comparisons).
This reveals practices that are rare in one culture and very common in another and vice versa.
Ex. sleeping arrangements
In America, infants sleep in a crib or in the parent’s bed, but when they are 2-6 months old, they move to another bedroom and sleep alone there.
However, in other nations such as Italy, Japan, and South Korea, young children always sleep in the same bed as their mother and somewhat older children also sleep in the same room or bed.
How do these arrangements affect children?
Morelli and colleagues interviewed mothers in middle-classed families in Utah and in rural Mayan families in Guatemala
This study revealed that by 6 months, children in America sleep in their own bedroom and as they grow older, they have a bedtime ritual to comfort the child (children also took comfort objects with them to bed, like teddy bears).
However, Mayan mothers said their children sleep in the same bed until they are 3, and sleep in the same room after with no rituals.
Why is it the way it is?
Mayan culture values interdependence, and they believe this method is important for developing a good parent-child relationship.
In America, independence and self-reliance are valued, and this method allows for that, and also allows for intimacy between couples.
(Basically, these normal practices reveal the deeper values we hold.)
In multicultural societies, contextual differences are related to ethnicity, race & socioeconomic status (SES) - the measure of social class based on income and education.
Virtually all aspects of children’s lives (food, parental discipline, toys...) vary with these factors.
SES plays a large part in children’s lives
In America, most children grow up in reasonably comfortable circumstances, but millions of other children do not.
Poverty rates are high in Black and Hispanic families & single-mother families.
Poverty rates also high in the 25% of immigrant children or children with immigrant parents (twice as high as among children of native-born parents).
Children from impoverished families tend to do less well than other children because of difficulties they face (dangerous neighbourhoods, inferior day-care centers and schools, exposure to high levels of air and water pollution, less parental involvement in schooling), which boils down to cumulative risk (which is the accumulation of disadvantages over years of development).
By infancy, they are more likely to have serious health problems.
Their brains, on average, have less surface area in areas that support spoken language, reading, and spatial skills.
They tend to have more emotional problems, small vocabulary, lower IQs, and lower math and reading scores on standardized tests.
In adolescence, they are more likely to have a baby or drop out of school too.
However, many children do overcome the obstacles of poverty through:
Positive personal qualities
A close relationship with at least one parent
A close relationship with at least one adult other than parents
These factors show that children’s resilience are not just about their personal qualities, but their interactions too.
Individual Differences: How Do Children Become So Different from One Another?
Children differ in physical appearance, activity level, temperament to intelligence, persistence, and emotionality.
Four factors that lead children to turn out very different from one another are:
Genetic differences
Differences in treatment by parents and others
Differences in reactions to similar experiences
Different choices of environments
Genetic differences
Every child is genetically unique, even identical & fraternal twins.
Differences in treatment by parents and others
Parents are more caring towards easygoing infants than difficult ones (by second year, parents of difficult children are generally angry at them even if they didn’t do something wrong in the moment).
Teachers provide more positive attention and encouragement towards well-behaved students and are openly critical with disruptive students. They even deny requests for special help from disruptive students.
There are subjective interpretations of treatment that are also influential.
ex. A sibling feels that parents favour the other child over them.
Differences in reactions to similar experiences.
Ex. A parent is fired? One sibling might be very concerned, but the other might believe everything will be okay.
Different choices of environment
As children grow older, they choose their activities and friends for themselves and thus influence their subsequent development.
They might choose niches (the smart one, the popular one, the naughty one, the nice one...)
If labeled by family members, they might try to live up to their label, whether it is good or bad (the nice one vs the troublemaker).
Research and Children’s Welfare: How Can Research Promote Children’s Well-Being?
Research helps children deal with anger, helps understand whether eyewitness testimonies from young children are valid or not, and so on.
Educational innovations
Some believe intelligence is fixed, but some believe it increases with learning.
People who believe intelligence is fixed tend to give up when they fail, but people who believe it increases with learning often persist and work hard until they accomplish their goals.
Building on this, an effective educational program for middle school students was developed.
In this program, some students were given findings about how learning alters the brain in ways that improves subsequent learning.
Others were given info about how memory works.
Investigators predicted students who were taught about how learning affects the brain would change their beliefs about intelligence, and expected their math skills to improve primarily as most students expect initial failure in math (they were right).
Children who initially believed intelligence was fixed but came to believe that it can be improved showed especially large improvements.
Therefore, providing children with information about how learning changes the brain increases their motivation to learn, but struggle stories of famous people are also motivating.
Methods for Studying Child Development
The Scientific Method
The approach to testing beliefs that involves choosing a question, formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and drawing a conclusion is called the scientific method.
hypotheses are testable predictions of the presence of absence of phenomena or relations.
There are four basic steps to the scientific method:
Choosing a question to be answered.
Formulating a hypothesis.
Developing a method for testing the hypothesis.
Using the resulting data to draw a conclusion regarding the hypothesis.
Importance of Appropriate Measurement
Researchers must use measures that are directly relevant to the hypotheses.
To determine whether a measure is good or not, it must possess reliability and validity.
Reliability
The degree of which independent measurements of given behaviour are consistent.
Interrater reliability is the amount of agreement in the observations of different raters who witness the same behaviour.
The rater’s evaluations must be in close agreement to have confidence in research findings.
Used in qualitative & quantitative observations.
Test-retest reliability is the degree of similarity of a participant’s performance on two or more occasions.
This is attained when child’s performance of the same test administered under the same conditions are similar on two or more conditions.
In this situation, to accurately reflect each child’s status, the test needs to be reliable, and we know it is if the outcomes are similar when done multiple times.
Validity
The degree to which a test measures what it is intended to measure.
Internal validity is the degree to which effects observed within experiments can be attributed to the factor that the researcher is testing.
external validity - The degree to which results can be generalized beyond the particulars of the research.
Additional studies with participants from different backgrounds are needed to establish external validity of general findings.
KEY PROPERTIES OF BEHAVIOURAL MEASURES
relevance of hypotheses | interrater reliability | test-retest reliability | internal validity | external validity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Do the hypotheses predict in a straightforward way what should happen on these measures? | Do different raters who observe the same behaviour classify or score it the same way? | Do children who score higher on a measure at one time also score higher on the measure at other times? | Can effects within the experiment be attributed to the variables that the researcher intentionally manipulated? | How widely can the findings be generalized to different children in different places at different times? |
Contexts for Gathering Data About Children
Interviews and Questionnaires
Structured interview - a research procedure in which all participants are asked to answer the same questions.
Questionnaires - a method that allows researchers to gather information from a large number of participants simultaneously by presenting them a uniform set of printed questions.
Questionnaries are often used for young children orally, but are printed for children of reading age.
clinical interview - a procedure in which questions are adjusted in accord with the answers in the interviewee provides.
ex. 10-year-old child Bobby who was assessed for symptoms of depression
Bobby was asked what he would wish for if 3 wishes could be granted.
His answers were instrumental in understanding his experience and his depression.
This would have been impossible if the interviewer did not tailor the questions to him specifically.
Interviews can get a lot of data quickly, but they can also be biased.
Naturalistic observation - examination of ongoing behaviour in an environment not controlled by the researcher.
ex. troubled and typical families
To observe the frequency at which members engaged in negative behaviours, assistants observed dinnertime interactions of troubled and typical families silently.
troubled households | typical households |
|---|---|
Parents are more self-absorbed and less responsive to children than parents in typical households. | Parents are less self-absorbed and more responsive to children than parents in troubled households. |
Parents are more self-absorbed and less responsive to children than parents in typical households. | Children responded to punishment by becoming less aggressive. |
Interactions were in a cycle where the child acted hostile, the parent reacted angrily, the child became more hostile, the parent became more angry, and so on. | Typical households did not fall into this cycle. |
It is hard to know what influenced the behaviour specifically with naturalistic observation.
Many behaviours only occur occasionally which makes limits the researcher’s opportunities to observe them.
structured observation - a method that involves presenting an identical situation to each participant and recording participant’s behaviour
data-gathering situation | features | advantages | disadvantages |
|---|---|---|---|
interview/questionnaire | Children can answer questions asked either in person or on a questionnaire. | 1. can reveal children’s subjective experience 2. structured interviews are cheap ways to collect thorough data about people 3. clinical interviews allow for following up on comments | 1. reports are often biased to reflect favorably on the interviewed subject 2. memories of interviewees are often inaccurate and incomplete 3. prediction of future behaviours often is inaccurate |
naturalistic observation | children’s activities in one or more everyday settings are observed | 1. useful for describing behaviour in everyday settings 2. helps illuminate social interaction processes | 1. difficult to know which aspects of situation are most influential 2. limited value for studying infrequent behaviours |
structured observation | children are brought to labs and presented prearranged tasks | 1. ensures that all children’s behaviours are observed in same context 2. allows controlled comparison of children’s behaviour in different situations | 1. reveals less about subjective experience than interviews |
Variables - attributes that vary across individuals and situations, such as age, sex, and popularity.
Correlational designs - studies intended to indicate how two variables are related to each other.
Correlation - the association between two variables.
Direction-of-causation problem - the concept that a correlation between 2 variables does not indicate which, if either, variable is the cause of the other.
Third-variable problem - the concept that a correlation between two variables may stem from both being influenced by some third variable.
Experimental designs - a group of approaches that allow inferences about causes and effects to be drawn.
Random assignment - a procedure in which each participant has an equal chance of being assigned to each group within an experiment.
Experimental control - the ability of researchers to determine the specific experiences of participants during the course of an experiment.
Experimental group - the group of participants in an experimental design who are presented the experience of interest.
Control group - the group of participants in an experimental design who are not presented the experience of interest but in other ways are treated similarly.
Independent variable - the experience that participants in the experimental group receive and that those in the control group do not receive.
Dependent variable - a behaviour that is measured to determine whether it is affected by exposure to the independent variable.
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF CORRELATIONAL AND EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS
types of design | features | advantages | disadvantages |
|---|---|---|---|
correlational | comparison of existing groups of children/examination of relations in each child’s scores on different variables | 1. only way to compare many groups of interest (boys-girls, rich-poor) 2. only way to establish relations among many variables (IQ & achievement, popular, happiness | 1. direct-of-causation problem (correlation does not equal causation) 2. third-variable problem |
experimental | random assignment of children to groups & experimental control of procedures presented to each group | 1. allows casual inferences because design rules out direction-of-causation and third-variable problems 2. allows experimental control over the exact experiences that children encounter | 1. need for experimental control often leads to artificial experimental situations 2. cannot be used to study many differences & variables of interest such as age, sex, and temperament |
Cross-sectional design - a research method in which participants of different ages are compared on a given behaviour or characteristic over a short period.
Longitudinal design - a method of study in which the same participants are studied twice or more over a substantial length of time.
Microgenetic design - a method of study in which the same participants are studied repeatedly over a short period.
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF DESIGNS FOR STUDYING DEVELOPMENT
name | features | advantages | disadvantages |
|---|---|---|---|
cross-sectional | children of different ages are studied at a single time | Yields useful data about differences among age groupsQuick and easy to administer | Uninformative about stability of individual differences over timeUninformative about similarities and differences in individual children’s patterns of change |
longitudinal | children are examined repeatedly over a prolonged period | Indiciates the degree of stability of individual differences over long periodsReveals individual children’s patterns of change over long periods | Difficult to keep all participants in studyRepeatedly testing children can threaten external validity of study |
microgenetic | children are observed intensively over a relatively short period while a change is occuring | Intensive observation of changes while they are occuring can clarify process of changeReveals individual change patterns over short periods in considerable detail | Does not provide information about typical patterns of change over long periodsDoes not yield data regarding change patterns over long periods |
Ethical Issues in Child-Development Research
All research with human beings raises ethical issues, and this is especially the case when the research involves children.
The Society for Research on Child Development has formulated a code of ethical conduct for investigators to follow. Some of the most important ethical principles in the code are:
Be sure that the research does not harm children physically or psychologically.
Obtain informed consetn for participating in the research.
The experimenter should inform children and relevant adults of all aspects of the research that might influence their willingness to participate and should explain that refusing to participate will not result in any adverse consequences to them.
Preserve individual participants’ anonymity, and do not use information for purposes other than that for which permission was given.
Discuss with parents or guardians any information yielded by the investigation that is important for the child’s welfare.
Try to counteract any unforseen negative consequences that arise during the research.
Correct any inaccurate impressions that the child may develop in the course of the study.
Debrief the participants after the research has been completed.
Recognizing the importance of such ethical issues, universities, and governmental agencies have established institutional review boards made up of independent scientists. However, the individual investigator is in the best position to anticipate potential problems and bears the ultimate responsibility for seeing that their study meets high ethical standards.