The Developing Child - Essay Example

Particularly, child is attributed to have phisycal, psychological and cognitive development. Those will be descussed in current paper. Both child developmentalists and life-span researchers recognize that development is more than increases in frequency, size, complexity, or functional efficacy. For example, in some areas of psychometric intelligence, such as crystallized intelligence, development proceeds in an incremental fashion over the life span into late adulthood; in others, such as fluid intelligence, it declines beginning in early adulthood.

Similar phenomena exist in social development. Relationships with opposite-sex peers may show a discontinuous pattern with declines in the elementary school years and increases in adolescence and young adulthood. Ontogeny therefore is a reflection of aspects of both growth and decline. Development thus may be viewed as a gain-loss relationship. Both child development and life-span development have models involving such ideas. In research on adulthood and old age, Bronfenbrenner (2003) has suggested that a basic process underlying this dynamic interplay between gains and losses over the course of development is selective optimization with compensation.

As constraints in development or limitations in plasticity occur with age, individuals become more specialized and selective in adapting to situations and in solving problems. They develop substitutive skills to compensate for declining abilities. In confronting new tasks; the elderly draw selectively upon past experiences, existing knowledge and skills, and personal and social resources. The particular form of selective optimization or compensatory skills or strategies adopted will depend on the individual's past life conditions.

Gains and losses may also exist in childhood development. For example, even in Piaget's theory there is evidence for loss (in perceptual accuracy) as children more toward a higher cognitive stage ( Bronfenbrenner, 2003). A more concerted effort by both child and life-span researchers to focus on gains and losses and multidirectionality in development could lead to enhanced and increasingly fruitful developmental models. Both contemporary child psychologists and life-span developmentalists see child development as resulting from the interaction between an active, organized individual and an active, organized environment.

Individuals act on their environments, evoke behavior from others, select settings, and discriminate among stimuli to which they respond. Moreover, the individual exists in multiple levels of embeddedness in his or her environment, for example at the individual psychological level, the dyadic level, the family level, the community level, the historical level, and so on. There is a dynamic interaction among these contextual levels and between the individual and the contextual levels. Development is a process of constant change based on the interaction between the changing individual and these changing contextual levels.

Although the ecological movement, led in child development by Bronfenbrenner ( 1979), has had a profound impact on theory in child development, much developmental research still presents a picture of the child developing within rather static ecosystems. Certainly more attention is focused on individual