Perspectives in Child Development - Essay Example

? Psychology assignment Task Child development entails the emotional, physiological, and biological changes that characterize humans from the time of birth up to adolescence. For a society, it is vital for a child’s optimal development to be realized. For the realization of an optimal development, the cognitive, social, emotional, and language development of children needs to be well understood. There is the need to establish an in-depth understanding towards the development of a child cutting across cognitive, emotional, social and language development. This task explores the child developmental stages. Cognitive development This is the continuous and progressive growth of the memory, perception, imagination, reason, conception, and judgement. It can also be referred to as the intellectual counterpart of a child’s environmental adaptation. It involves the activities of the mental, information comprehending and the ability of organizing, remembering, acquiring, and knowledge utility. The acquired knowledge is used in solving problems and novel situations generalization. There are four stages of development under cognitive development (Ginsberg, 2008). The first stage is the sensory, motor stage. This is a period from birth to two years. As this period begins, children may be reflexive and reactive to environmental stimuli. In this stage, Inputs of sensory would result to motor action. The child gets to learn the bottle nourishment by repeated exposure. As this period comes to an end, many reflexes are inhibited by the baby and the actions of a child are purposeful. Preoperational stage is the second stage which occurs from two years to seven years (Ginsberg, 2008). This stage involves cognition and language development. A child establishes vocabularies and skills of language giving room for the complex play development. A child gathers the utility of reflected and social language in storytelling. In the progress of the stage, a child starts understanding the views of others, share opinions, and come with a sense. He can think concerning events that are absent. The third stage is the concrete stage which is normally from seven to eleven years. This stage involves the development of abstract thought and potential of making judgements that are rational. There is also a significant increase in accommodation. Information is mentally manipulated by the child and solving of problems is in a sophisticated manner (Ginsberg, 2008). The last stage of the intellectual development is the formal stage which occurs from eleven years to fifteen years. In this stage, there is a full development of cognition. The child is an adolescent and considers different view in solving problems. Thinking is extremely abstract, and logic is incorporated into thinking. Physical development. In this case, the fine and the gross motor skills are considered in the development. Gross motor skills involve those movements of muscles that are large such as leg muscles. Fine motor, on the other hand, involves small muscles such as those of fingers (Ginsberg, 2008). Increased development of the motor is normally observed in the first eighteen months of a child’s life. In a period from eight months to eighteen months, a child develops the skill of walking. Earlier in development a child is expected to develop gross motor skill like crawling, walking if assisted, and standing alone. Social-emotional development. This stage is normally evaluated by teachers and psychologists in children. For effective communication, a child needs to have an interest in communicating with other children. In infancy, a child’s connectedness is the area of concern. This aspect is normally displayed by use of nonverbal modes like facial expression and eye contact. An infant gives a reaction that evokes a response in the environment (Ginsberg, 2008). A child would give a response towards this reaction thus learning. For instance, a baby would smile in the first month. After some time, the baby understands that a smile gives out a positive reaction. After two months, a baby gives a purposeful smile. This implies that learning has occurred in the child. Whenever infants are born, they do not have the capacity of regulatory. When the infant matures the reflex is combined since he develops self regulation over time. Language development. Within the first two months, a child makes limited purpose sounds. A child cries to ask for assistance or a physical need fulfilment. The infant make pleasure sounds whenever they are calm. At four months, they give out cooling sounds that are an approximation of single syllabi (Ginsberg, 2008). After four months, the baby starts bubbling. When the infant continues to grow, bubbling becomes firm, pitch, volume, and intonation starts to vary. Between nine to ten months, the pattern of vocalization is referred to as jargon. At about 12 months, the child would attar first words. Genie did not develop successfully through the stage of life. This is so because when she was found she could not walk properly, was not toilet trained, and failed to make any sound. This is a clear indication that the social, intellectual, language, and physical development of Genie had been affected. The fact that she did not walk implies that she had a poor physical development (Ginsberg, 2008). Genie could produce any sound, implying that she had a poor language development. The skill of toileting is also an aspect of toileting. At the age of thirteen years, Genie is expected to have the skills of toileting. The poor development of Genie is because of being locked up in room from two years to thirteen years. Task 2. Nature versus nature debate. This debate deals with a child’s inside qualities and a child’s experience. The term nurture versus nature is a coined phrase in the discussion of the effect of environment and heredity on the social development of a child. Nurture is the idea that individual obtain all traits from the influence of environment only. Nature, on the other hand, is the idea that individuals obtain their traits as a result of only the genetic influence. This debate had been considered as a clear division of influences of the environment, but as all the factors are understood to have a role in development, many psychologists consider the controversy to be naive (Ginsberg, 2008). Neglected, trapped, abused, and isolated was the conditions of a young girl referred to a Genie when she was found out in her home, trapped to a potty chair at the age of about thirteen years. When investigations continued, detectives found out that this was the manner in which Genie spent most of her thirteen years of life, utterly neglected, strapped down, and given food on few occasions. This case was heartbreaking and unusual recorded down on the film referred to as The Wild Child. The story is one of its kind that trapped numerous linguistics, psychologists, and theorists of childhood development interest. Genie had obtained scarce chances for interacting with basic knowledge, skills, and language. In this case, Genie represented a situation referred to as the blank learning state, which challenged the parties that were interested to find out whether the nature and nurture actually determined the extent of learning. This made Genie be the centre of experiments, investigation, and studies, when various linguistics and psychologists lead Genie towards new chances of learning. She was excited with the language relations, interaction of human, and tasks that were simple such as putting on shoes. Genie took the learning with curiosity and enthusiasm. She stayed in her foster home under the linguistics and psychologists supervision who wanted full chance to instruct and observe her. Genie came up with a number of vocabularies thus being able to communicate with individuals around her by use of simple phrases. In his theory, Skinner argues out that Genie’s behaviour could be explained by the fact that a baby may start cooing and babbling, and whenever she makes noises sounding like words, the people around them provide for them attention and praise, hence reinforcing her behaviour and motivating Genie to come up with more sounds and words (McLeod, 2007). However, Skinner’s model does not gives out an explanation as to why children who are old may acquire a huge vocabulary and come up with complex skills of grammar. Another researchers referred to as Chomsky, argued out that Genie’s learning ability was encoded inside her brain or was rather innate and that there was no time that was available for her to learn (McLeod, 2007). This theory is supported by the existence of universal features of each language such as verbs and nouns. This theory also argues out that the potential of children to obtain language rapidly, being competent and establishing sentences that are complex is another support of the theory. When the learning of Genie continued a plateau was witnessed in her linguistic learning ability. Despite the expansion in her level of vocabulary, Genie continued to struggle with her syntax, and up to this day, she has never gained the potential to come up with complete correct and grammatical sentences. Making a conclusion from this case, is somewhat tricky due to the ambiguity in the early childhood of Genie. For instance, it is hard to find out whether she was born mentally impaired, or whether the development that was hindered came about due to the neglect. This case, however, argues out that even though an individual may have innate capability in learning language, there is a point where language needs to be learnt in order to realize the full capacity of linguistic. This point is referred to as the critical point. This case, therefore, suggests that both nature and nurture play a significant role in learning and language development of an individual. In this study, it was evidenced that genes perform a significant contribution like psychological traits such as personality and intelligence. However, heredity would be different in situations of environmental deprivation. From this discussion, it is evident that both nurture and nature are crucial in the development of a child. For maximum development, a child requires both the genetic influence and the environmental influence (Ginsberg, 2008). Absence of any one of this would lead to a poor child development. References Ginsberg, P. (2008). Piaget’s theory on child development. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. McLeod, S. (2007). Skinner - Operant Conditioning. New York: Oxford publishers. Read More