Child Development and Behavior - Essay Example

?Running Head: ABBREVIATED OF YOUR CHOICE (all caps) and Section # of Child Psychology There is seldom any awareness and attention attached to the development of a child from birth to adulthood. Throughout history, children were seen as smaller versions of adults and there was rarely any interest in the cognitive, emotional and social development of children with rrspect to mental abilities, language usage and physical growth. With the passage time, there is growing interest in the field of child development. There are numerous theories, studies and researches that are focused on the development of children and their psychology. This paper would study the behavior of Amy, a 5 year old girl, and would correlate her behavior to various concepts and theories. The behavior would be linked to the cognitive, language and emotional perspectives of child psychology. Discussion Human development is the science of studying how a human develops physically, psychologically as well as socially with the passage of time. It is a branch of psychology that studies the behavioral changes that come within people as they grow older (Meggitt, 2006). The subject that I observed is my niece, Amy. She is currently five years old and would turning six after one month. Amy is the eldest child and has one younger brother who is three. Both her parents are working; her mother is a lecturer in a college while her father works for a company. Amy lives in a joint family where her paternal grandparents live with them. Being the eldest child, and being on her on most of the time, Amy is more mature than other children of her age. According to the periods of development, Amy is presently in her early childhood stage, but soon she will enter middle childhood when she turns six years old. Erik Erikson was a development psychologist and psychoanalyst who had worked extensively to develop his theories on social development. The most significant development among the works of Eric Erikson was the innovation to have eight stages of human life span instead of five. Erikson had eight life stage virtues that are helpful in understanding the lifespan model these virtues include hope, will, purpose, competence, fidelity, love, caring and wisdom (Berk, 2000). According to the stages of Erickson's development model, Amy would be right in the middle of the play age (3 to 5 years) and School age (6 to 12 years). As she created play situations based on her imagination and is developing a social stage where is she making new friends. The bioecological model of development of Bronfenbrenner is focused upon child development with respect to the relationships that form his or her environment. Bronfenbrenner defines layers of environment that influence the development process such as family, school, religion, society and culture. The layers of environment form the Microsystems which are the direct interactions, Mesosystems which are the linkages between Microsystems, Exosystems which encompasses the experiences which are gained and also Macrosystem and Chronosystem (McCormick, 2011). According to the environment, I have come to notice that Amy is very independent, she does not rely on attention and is more focused in what ever she does. This is because of the family environement. As both the parents are working and Amy's mother is also doing her post-graduate degree, Amy has seen a studious environment in her house and this has inculcated in her, an interest in reading books, writing and drawing. Cognitive Development Cognitive development is referred to the development with respect to a childs ability to process information, grasp concepts, develop perceptual skills and other aspects of brain development. Piaget is the most prominent psychologist in the field of cognitive development with principles that stand true through the development phases (Berk, 2008). When interacting with Amy, I observed that she had some ideas related to things as she perceives them. This could relate to Schemata, whereby a Schema is developed which contain all information, experience and ideas that an individual has related to something. For example, Amy has a schema of squirrel as she relates them to small fury animals with a bushy tail that eat acorns and sleep in winters. However, when I showed her some pictures of grey and red colored squirrels, this extended her Schema through a process called Assimilation. Moreover, going to a pet shop I showed her an animal that she assumed was a squirrel, over closer inspection she noticed that it did not have a bushy tail, and it lived in a cage rather than a tree. This threw her in a state of disequilibrium as it did make sense to her, as I told her that the animal was a rabbit, in order to make sense of the world of small animals, she created a new schema for rabbit. And according to theory of Piaget, this process is called Accommodation as new information could not be incorporated into an existing schema and hence a new schema was created. Based on the stages of development proposed by Piaget, Amy lies in the Preoperational stage which is from two to seven years. This stage is seen in numerous behaviors displayed by Amy. She is fond of drawing and writing, she mostly draws realistic drawings of her family including her parents, grandparents and also her friends from school. The concept of the inability to conserve was observed when she was offered juice, she always picked the narrow glass that made them juice seem more in quantity. Amy displayed animistic thinking when she interacted with her favorite stuffed toy that she named 'ginger'. She treated Ginger like a human, who needed sleep, food and bathing. According to the studies of Vygotsky, the cognitive development of a child is based upon social interactions and language. Make-believe-play is extremely pertinent in children that are in the same age group as Amy. She loved to portray herself as a teacher and play with her little brother. She would act as the teacher while Ryan (brother) would be the student. This kind of a behavior is developed in a child through social learning as going to school she observes the behavior of her teachers. Moreover, her mother is a teacher herself which has an impact over how Amy inspires to be. The information processing model was developed to examine the cognitive development of children by their mental processes based on processing, encoding, storing and decoding data (Seilgleman & Rider, 2006). Pertaining to the theory, children in the age 5-7 years have the ability to focus and use their cognitive abilities for specific purposes, for example Amy was able to memorize the names of animals, she was able to connect the information of the alphabets and their sounds to read words and make connection among the words to form sentences. Language Development One of the longest ongoing debates concerning language acquisition is whether the ability to learn language is innately wired into out biology or whether we need to learn it. According to Skinner, we learn language in the same way as we learn everything else, which is through operant conditioning: selective reinforcement, shaping and imitation (Dwyer & Scampion, 1995). The nativist view, proposed by Chomsky, suggests that humans possess a brain mechanism for learning language which is called Language Acquisiyion Device (LAD). This device enables children to understand the rules of grammer and apply them in their speech without being taught them. The interactionist approach, although considered Chomsky's approach valuable, take into account the influence of interaction. Children need to speak to others on a one to one basis if they are to learn language; it is not sufficient to simply hear a language being spoken. As Amy is almost six years old, she has developed most of the language skills and is not in her semantic development phase where she understands most words and her vocabulary is increasing. As Amy spends most of her time with her grandparents, her language is developed according to their style of speaking, for example, she calls the TV, 'television' which is seldom used by children these days and her sentence construction is more complete such as "may I watch the television, please?". This is the influence of social interaction and adult feedback. Amy's pragmatic development is enhanced by her interaction with her Grandparents, and by reading storybooks which is one of her favorite hobbies. Based on the child development study of Jean Piaget, during the pre-operational period, ages 2-7, the language of children makes considerable development. With the help of schemas they are quickly able to accommodate new words into their vocabulary (Castella, 2010). For example, Amy while with me read a book about dinosaurs. She had never seen them before and hence had no prior schema about dinosaurs. She read the book and saw the different kinds of dinosaurs that existed. This expanded her vocabulary as she learnt a few new names of dinosaurs. Emotional Development The parental behavior and the family environment of children is crucial to the emotional development of children and has considerable influence over their behavior. It is imperative to develop high levels of emotional intelligence in children in order to enable them to correctly interpret their own and others emotions. Emotional understanding is linked with cognitive development and the judgment of causes of emotion also develops. For example, when Amy drew drawing some the sad faces showed connections. One drawing she showed me had a boy who was sad because 'he lost his toy' she said. The connection was made as Ryan often lost his toys and cried. There is also the development of sympathetic and empathetic feeling. When Ryan is sad, Amy tries to make him feel better by sharing her toys, candies etc as she feels that he is unhappy. Based on the attachment theory of Bowlby, during the early stages of development attachment and bond is created based on the time spent with the child. (Miggett, 2006) As Amy's mother was working ever since she was born, Amy has developed a deep attachment with her grandmother, as she spent most time with her in her infancy. This shows that the attachment during infancy stages is lasted through later stages. Conclusion Understanding the human development requires research as proper research enables us in comprehending the development of a human with respect to physical, mental and social development. There is a plethora of studies that have come about in relation to understand hypothesis and theories. Researches turn theory in practicality, revealing the motives behind behavior enables in enhancing positive behavior and reducing negative behavior. The way that the development of children takes its course, reflects the overall personality of the children and hence, the development of every child is different and its imperative to understand the factors that determine this development. References Dwyer, D & Scampion, J (1995). Psychology: Experience Behavior. Mcmillion press ltd. Meggitt, C (2006). Child Development: An illustrated guide. Heinemann. Berk, L.E. (2008) Child Development. Pearson. Sigelman, C. K. & Rider, E.A. (2006). Life-span human development (5thEd.) Berk, L.E. (2000). Child Development (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. McCormick, J. The Developmental theories of Erik Erikson and Urie Bronfenbrenner. Retrieved April 12, 2011 from http://jessiemccormick.com/edpg%202%20paper.pdf Castella, C (2010, June 04). Jean Piaget's Theory on Child Development. Retrieved April 17, 2011 from Read More