Understanding Children's Development

Peter K. Smith, Helen Cowie, Mark Blades

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119025030
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia dello sviluppo

Understanding Children's Development is the UK's best-selling developmental psychology textbook and has been widely acclaimed for its international coverage and rigorous research-based approach.

This dynamic text emphasizes the practical and applied implications of developmental research. It begins by introducing the ways in which psychologists study developmental processes before going on to consider all major aspects of development from conception through to adolescence.

New to the 6th Edition:

• Increased coverage in many areas, including ethics; children's rights; participatory research methods; three models of human plasticity; breastfeeding and cognitive development; fostering; non-resident or absent fathers; parenting styles in China; effects of domestic violence on children; physical punishment, and child maltreatment; the development and fostering of emotional intelligence; homophobic bullying and cyberbullying; and developing intercultural competence through education.

• There are entirely new sections on immigration, acculturation, and friendships in multicultural settings; disruptive behaviour and oppositional defiant disorder; sexting; and adolescent bedtimes.

• The Adolescence chapter has been extensively revised, covering work on the social brain, insights from neuroscience, evolutionary perspectives on risk-taking and peer relationships, romantic development, and use of mobile phones and the internet.

PART I
THEORIES AND METHODS

• Chapter 1 Studying Development
• Chapter 2 Biological and Cultural Theories of Development

CHAPTER 1
Studying Development

CHAPTER OUTLINE

• Development Observed
• What is 'Development'?
• Obtaining Information about Behaviour and Development
• Working with the Data: Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
• What Implications does Psychological Knowledge have for Society?
• The Scientific Status of Psychology

---

The study of how behaviour develops forms part of the science of psychology. But what do we mean by terms such as ‘science’, ‘psychology’ and ‘development’? This chapter aims to supply the answer, but although it comes first in the book, it may not necessarily be best to read it thoroughly at the outset. Especially if you have not studied psychology before, it might be useful to read it through quickly at this stage and return to it later, even after finishing the rest of the book, for a more thorough understanding. The issues raised in this chapter are important, but understanding them fully will be easier if you already know something of psychological theories and methods of investigation.

---

In an important sense, we are all psychologists. We are all interested in understanding behaviour, both our own and that of our parents, children, family and friends. We try to understand why we feel the way we do about other people, why we find certain tasks easy or difficult, or how certain situations affect us; we try to understand and predict how other people behave, or how their present behaviour and situation may affect their future development. Will a child settle well with a childminder, or do well at school? Will watching violent films on television be harmful? Will a child be bullied at school? Can we teach children to cooperate? What level of moral reasoning can we expect a child to understand?

Nicholas Humphrey (1984) described us as ‘nature’s psychologists’, or homo psychologicus. By this he means that, as intelligent social beings, we use our knowledge of our own thoughts and feelings—‘introspection’—as a guide for understanding how others are likely to think, feel and therefore behave. Indeed, Humphrey went further and argued that we are conscious, that is, we have self-awareness, precisely because this is so useful to us in this process of understanding others and thus having a successful social existence. He argued that consciousness is a biological adaptation to enable us to perform this introspective psychology. Whether this is right or not (and you might like to think about this again after you have read Chapter 2), we do know that the process of understanding others’ thoughts, feelings and behaviour is something that develops through childhood and probably throughout our lives (see Chapter 15). According to one of the greatest child psychologists, Jean Piaget, a crucial phase of this process occurs in middle childhood, though more recent research has revealed how much has developed before this.

If we are already nature’s psychologists, then why do we need an organized study of the science of psychology? A professional psychologist would probably answer that it is to try and arrive at greater insight, and greater agreement on contentious issues. Sometimes, common-sense beliefs are divided. For example, attitudes to physical punishment of young children as a form of discipline are sharply divided and polarized in many countries (see Chapter 4). Sometimes, common beliefs are wrong. In the course of researching the lives of children of mixed parentage, Tizard and Phoenix (1993, p. 1) reported to a group of journalists that many of the young people in their sample saw advantages in their family situation through the meeting of two distinctive cultures. The journalists responded with incredulity, since the findings ran contrary to the popular belief that these children inevitably suffered from identity problems, low self-esteem and problem behaviour!

By systematically gathering knowledge and by carrying out controlled experiments, we can develop a greater understanding and awareness of ourselves than would otherwise be possible. There is still much progress to be made in psychology and in the psychological study of development. We are still struggling to fully understand areas such as the role of play in development, the causes of delinquency and the nature of stages in cognitive development. Most psychologists would argue, however, that the discipline of child development has made much progress, and even in the most difficult areas knowledge has now become more systematic, with theories being put forward. We now know more, for example, about the importance of social attachments in infancy (Chapter 4), the process by which a child learns its native language (Chapter 12) and how our understanding of others’ minds develops (Chapter 15) than previous generations ever did or could have done without organized study.

So, how can we go about this?

DEVELOPMENT OBSERVED

The biologist Charles Darwin, famous for his theory of evolution, made one of the earliest contributions to child psychology in his article ‘A biographical sketch of an infant’ (1877), which was based on observations of his own son’s development. By the early 20th century, however, most of our understanding of psychological development could still not have been described as ‘scientific’ knowledge; much was still at the level of anecdote and opinion. Nevertheless, knowledge was soon being organized through both observation and experiment, and during the 1920s and 1930s the study of child development got seriously under way in the USA with the founding of Institutes of Child Study or Child Welfare in university centres such as Iowa and Minnesota. Careful observations were made of development in young children and of normal and abnormal behaviour and adjustment. In the 1920s, Jean Piaget started out on his long career as a child psychologist, blending observation and experiment in his studies of children’s thinking (see Chapter 13).

Observation of behaviour in natural settings fell out of favour with psychologists in the 1940s and 1950s (though it continued in the study of animal behaviour by zoologists; see Chapter 2). Perhaps as a reaction against the absence of experimental rigour in philosophy and early psychology, and the reliance on introspection (that is, trying to understand behaviour by thinking about one’s own mental processes), many psychologists moved to doing experiments under laboratory conditions. As we will discuss later, such experiments do have advantages but they also have drawbacks. Much of the laboratory work carried out in child development in the 1950s and 1960s was described by Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979) as ‘the science of the behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults'.

We hope that in the course of reading this text you will begin the process of integrating perspectives—for example, by reflecting on the links made by psychologists between the concept of the child’s ‘internal working model of relationships’ (Chapter 4) and discoveries about ‘theory of mind’ (Chapter 15). We hope too that you find the opportunity to recognize the complementary virtues of various different methods of investigation and gain a sense that the child’s developmental processes and the social context in which they exist are closely intertwined, each having an influence on the other.

WHAT IS ‘DEVELOPMENT’?

The term ‘development’ refers to the process by which an organism (human or animal) grows and changes through its life-span. In humans, the most dramatic developmental changes occur in prenatal development, infancy and childhood, as the newborn develops into a young adult capable of becoming a parent himself or herself. From its origins, much of developmental psychology has thus been concerned with child psychology, and with the changes from conception and infancy through to adolescence. These are the primary areas covered in this book.

Generally, developmental processes have been related to age. A typical 3-year-old has, for example, a particular mastery of spoken language (see Chapter 12), and a 4-year-old has typically progressed further. A developmental psychologist may then wish to find out, and theorize about, the processes involved in this progression. What experiences, rewards, interactions and feedback have helped the child develop in this way? Two important but different research strategies have commonly been used in this endeavour: ‘cross-sectional’ and ‘longitudinal’ designs. Each method has advantages and disadvantages.

Cross-sectional...