Why and how do we study the development of a child? - BulletPoints 1

• Plato argued that self-control for children and discipline for parents are the purpose of good parenting and education. He also believed that knowledge is innate. Aristotle stressed the importance of the individual character of children. Hereby, the quality of parenting is important. Aristotle believed that knowledge is acquired through experiences. Locke argued that parents should raise their children with discipline.
• Nature is our biological heritage, the genes we receive from our parents, the innate aspects of a human being. Nurture is the environment, both physical and social, influencing our development, the acquired aspects of a human being. Nature and nurture interact. The genome (the complete set of hereditary information) influences behavior and experiences, but behavior and experiences also influence the genome. This discovery has given rise to the epigenetics, the study of stable changes in gene expression that are mediated by the environment. Evidence for the enduring epigenetic impact of early experiences and behaviors comes from research on methylation, a biochemical process that reduces expression of a variety of genes. To conclude, both genes and environment are important in development.
• A continuous development is the idea that changes with age occur gradually, in small steps, quantity is important. A discontinuous development is the idea that changes with age include sudden large steps, quality is important. According to the stage theories, development consists of four large steps which are discontinuous, and age related. One of the best-known stage theories is Piaget's theory of cognitive development, the development of thinking and reasoning. This theory holds that children go through four stages of cognitive growth, each characterized by distinct intellectual abilities and ways of understanding the world. However, many researchers have concluded that developmental changes are mostly gradual.
• In the development of effortful attention, brain activity, genes and learning experiences play a role. Effortful attention involves voluntary control of one's emotions and thoughts. Difficulty in exerting effortful attention is associated with different behavioral problems.
• The scientific method is an approach to test beliefs that involves choosing a question, formulating a hypothesis (testable predictions of the presence or absence of phenomena or relations), testing the hypothesis, and drawing a conclusion. Different measures exist to test hypotheses. These measures need to possess reliability, validity and relevance to the hypothesis. Reliability is the degree to which independent measurements of a given behavior are consistent. Interrater reliability is the amount of agreement in the observations of different raters who witness the same behavior. Test-retest reliability is the degree of similarity of a participant's performance on two or more occasions. Validity is 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 is the degree to which results can be generalized beyond the particulars of the research.

How does prenatal development work? – BulletPoints 2

• Gametes are reproductive cells (egg and sperm) that contain only half the genetic material of all the other cells in the body. Gametes are produced through meiosis, a special type of cell division in which the eggs and sperm receive only one member from each of the 23 chromosome pairs contained in all other cells of the body. The union of egg and sperm contains the normal amount of genetic material.
• The development process of the fertilized egg consists of four processes: Mitosis: cell division, which takes places from 12 hours after fertilization; Cell migration: the movement of newly formed cells away from their point of origin; Cell differentiation: specialization in terms of structure and function; Apoptosis: genetically programmed cell death.
• In the last three months after the central nervous system is adequately developed, the fetus learns from experiences. Habituation is a simple form of learning that involves a decrease in response to repeated or continued stimulation. Dishabituation is the introduction of a new stimulus of interest, following habituation to a repeated stimulus. These two forms of learning already exist in the womb and the fetus remembers it after birth.
• Also, characteristics of the mother can affect prenatal development, these include age, nutritional status, health and stress level.
• State refers to the level of arousal and engagement in the environment, ranging from deep sleep to intense activity. The two newborn states that are of particular concern to parents are sleeping and crying. Sleep consists of REM sleep and non-REM sleep. REM sleep is an active sleep state characterized by quick, jerky eye movements under closed lids and associated with dreaming in adults. Non-REM sleep is a quiet or deep sleep state characterized by the absence of motor activity or eye movements and more regular, slow brain waves, breathing and heart rate. The older the child, the less sleep it needs.

What is the relationship between biology and behavior? – BulletPoints 3

• Three key elements of the development of a child are: genotype, phenotype and the environment. Genotype is the genetic material an individual inherits. Phenotype is the observable expression of the genotype, including both body characteristics and behavior. The environment is every aspect of an individual and his or her surroundings other than genes.
• Chromosomes are molecules of DNA that transmit genetic information. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) carries all the biochemical instructions involved in the formation and functioning of an organism. Humans normally have a total of 46 chromosomes, divided into 23 pairs, in the nucleus of each cell. The only exception are the sex cells, which contain only 23 chromosomes.
• Endophenotypes are intermediate phenotypes, including the brain and nervous system, that do not involve overt behavior. Regulator genes are genes that control the activity of other genes. A gene never functions in isolation. Extensive networks exist in which the expression of one gene is a precondition for the expression of another. By analogy, the alphabet consists of 26 letters, not every letter is used in every word. But there are a billion of different words, so also billions kinds of expressions of genes.
• Heritability is a statistical estimate of the proportion of the measured variance on a trait among individuals in a given population that is attributable to genetic differences among those individuals.
• A neuron consists of three key elements: the cell body, dendrites, and an axon. The cell body contains the basic biological material that keeps the neuron functioning. The dendrites receive input from other cells and conduct it toward the cell body. The axons conduct electrical signals away from the cell body to connections with other neurons. Synapses are junctions between the axon terminal of one neuron and the dendritic branches or cell body of another.
• The cerebral cortex is thought to be particularly humanlike, the 'gray matter'. The cerebral cortex constitutes 80% of the human brain. The major areas of the cortex are called the lobes, which are associated with general categories of behavior. The occipital lobe is primarily involved in processing visual information. The temporal lobe is associated with memory, visual recognition, and the processing of emotion and auditory information. The parietal lobe governs spatial processing as well as integrating sensory input with information stored in memory. The frontal lobe is associated with organizing behavior; the one that is thought responsible for the human ability to plan ahead. Association areas are the parts of the brain that lie between the major sensory and motor areas and that process and integrate input from those areas. Cortical areas are not functionally specific, there is an extraordinary degree of interactivity both within and across brain regions.

Which cognitive development theories are there? – BulletPoints 4

• Piaget's theory remains the best-knows cognitive developmental theory. Piaget describes the ability of children's thinking at different ages. He sees the child as a scientist: the child acquires knowledge through experiences. Children are motivated to learn without instructions or rewards from others. Therefore, Piaget is often labeled as a constructivist.
• Piaget believed that nature and nurture interact to produce cognitive development. Piaget depicted development as involving both continuities and discontinuities. The main sources of continuity are: assimilation, accommodation and equilibration. Accommodation is the process by which people adapt current knowledge structures in response to new experiences. Assimilation is the process by which people translate incoming information into a form that fits concepts they already understand. Equilibration is the process by which children balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding. When children recognize shortcomings in their understanding, it puts them in a state of disequilibrium.
• Piaget hypothesized four stages of cognitive development: a sensorimotor stage, a preoperational stage, a concrete operational stage and a formal operational stage.
• Information-processing theories focus on the structure of the cognitive system and the mental activities used to deploy attention and memory to solve problems. Task analysis is a research technique of identifying goals, relevant information in the environment, and potential processing strategies for a problem. Task analysis helps to understand behavior. In some cases, a computer simulation can be formulated, a mathematical model that expresses ideas about mental processes in precise ways.
• Core-knowledge theories are approaches that view children as having some innate knowledge in domains of special evolutionary importance and domain-specific learning mechanisms for rapidly and effortlessly acquiring additional information in those domains. Studies show two characteristic features of these theories. First, research on these theories focuses on areas of knowledge that have been important throughout human evolutionary history, such as understanding and manipulating another people's thinking. Second, the assumption exists that in certain areas of importance in human evolution, infants and young children think in ways that are considerably more advanced than Piaget suggested.
• Socio-cultural theories are approaches that emphasize that other people and the surrounding culture contribute greatly to children's development. Often, parents help to acquire knowledge. This is called guided participation, a process in which more knowledgeable individuals organize activities in ways that allow less knowledgeable people to learn. Also, the cultural context influences the child's thinking, also called cultural tools, like certain values and skills.
• Dynamic-system theories focus on how change occurs over time in complex physical and biological systems. According to these theories, change is the only constant.

What is the connection between seeing, thinking and doing? – BulletPoints 5

• There is a difference between perception and sensation. Sensation is the processing of basic information from the external world by the sensory receptors in the sense organs and brain. Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information.
• The visual capacity of infants was underestimated earlier. Research shows that infants have surprisingly sophisticated visual abilities. This is proven by means of the preferential-looking technique and habituation. The preferential-looking technique is a method for studying visual attention in infants that involves showing infants two patterns or objects at a time to see if the infants have a preference for one over the other. Habituation is a method to examine sensory and perceptual development. An infant is repeatedly presented with a particular stimulus until the infant's response to it declines. Then a novel stimulus is presented. If the infants dishabituates in response to the novel stimulus, the baby can discriminate between the old and new stimuli.
• When they hear a sound, newborns tend to turn toward it. The perception of the location in space of a sound source is called auditory localization. Infants show an impressive degree of sensitivity toward music. They prefer consonant music over dissonant music. Infants also react to rhythm, but they have a different attunement to rhythm than adults. After two weeks of listening to Balkan rhythms, infants could detect changes in complex rhythms, but the adults failed to do so. This suggest that, with experience, there is a process of perceptual narrowing: developmental changes in which experience fine-tunes the perceptual system.
• After birth, the newborn is uncoordinated because of the full effects of gravity. A newborn starts off with some reflexes. Reflexes are innate, fixed patterns of action that occur in response to particular stimulation. Examples are: grasping, sucking and swallowing. When a reflex is not present, this may signal brain damage.
• Classic conditioning is a form of learning that consists of associating an initially neutral stimulus with a stimulus that always evokes a particular reflexive response. An unconditioned stimulus (UCS) in classical conditioning, is a stimulus that evokes a reflexive response. An unconditioned response (UCR) in classical conditioning, is a reflexive response that is elicited by the UCS. A conditioned stimulus (CS) in classical conditioning, is the neutral stimulus that is repeatedly paired with the UCS. The conditioned response (CR) in classical conditioning, is the originally reflexive response that comes to be elicited by the conditioned stimulus. So: firstly, the UCS leads to a UCR, secondly the CS leads from an UCS to an UCR and ultimately, a CS leads to a CR.

How does the development of language work? – BulletPoints 6

• Generativity is a concept that shows that communication is important. Generativity refers to the idea that through the use of the finite set of words and morphemes in humans' vocabulary, we can put together an infinite number of sentences and express an infinite number of ideas. Language exists of different pieces. Phonemes are the elementary units of meaningful sound used to produce languages. The phonological development is the acquisition of knowledge about the sound system of a language. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language, composed of one or more phonemes. The semantic development is the learning of the system for expressing meaning in a language, including word learning. Syntax are the rules in a language that specify how words from different categories can be combined. The syntactic development is the learning of the syntax of a language. Ultimately, there is the pragmatic development, the acquisition of knowledge about how language is used.
• The left hemisphere predominantly processes speech. The critical period for language is sometime between age 5 and puberty. The critical period for language is the time during which language develops easily and after which language acquisition is much more difficult and ultimately less successful.
• The first step in language learning is speech perception. The basis for this is prosody, the characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonational patterns, and so on with which a language is spoken. Both adults and infants receive certain speech sounds that belong to a discrete category. This is called categorical perception. The voice onset time (VOT) is the length of time between the moment air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating. Studies that examined VOT show that infants can better discriminate between speech sounds than adults, which helps them to start learning any of the world's languages they hear around them. When children are in their first year, their speech perception has become adultlike and at that point they have lost the ability to discriminate between speech sounds like before.
• The last step in language learning is the development of conversational skills. This starts with collective monologues: conversations between children that involve a series of non sequiturs, the content of each child's turn having little or nothing to do with what the other child has just said. Later they start talking by means of narratives: descriptions of past events that have the basic structure of a story. The development of conversational perspective-taking ability is related to children's level of executive function. As children become more able to control their tendency to assume their own perspective, it becomes easier for them to take the perspective of a conversational partner. By the age of 5 or 6 years, the foundational elements of language are typically in place.
• To use symbols in non-verbal language, dual representation is required. This is the idea that a symbolic artifact must be represented mentally in two ways at the same time, both as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself. When children grow older, they understand the use of symbols better. A school-age child will understand that the red line on a road map does not mean that the real road would be red, unlike younger children. Drawing is also a symbolic way of non-verbal language. Initially, drawing has no specific goal. At about 3 or 4 years of age, most children begin trying to draw pictures of something, like a human.

How does conceptual development work? – BulletPoints 7

• Children divide objects into categories by means of categorial hierarchies. These are categories organized by set-subset relations, such as animal-dog-poodle. Infants frequently use perceptual categorization: the grouping together of objects that have similar appearances. This is seen in children of 3 to 4 months. When children grow older, they improve in understanding of not only individual categories, but also hierarchical and causal relations among categories. The category hierarchies that young children form often include three levels: the superordinate level (the general level, such as animal), the subordinate level (the most specific level, such as poodle) and the basic level (the middle level, such as dog). Children often learn the basic level first, after that, parents and others use the child's basic-level categories as a foundation for explaining the more specific and more general categories. Older children understand causal relations between objects through explanations of cause and consequences between objects. This helps the child getting a better understanding of categories and they continue forming more categories.
• When children grow older, they develop theory of mind (TOM). This is an organized understanding of how mental processes such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions and emotions influence behavior. TOM improves mostly between ages 3 and 5. An important component of TOM is the understanding of relations between desires and actions. Children develop this understanding toward the end of the first year and it is fully established by the age of 2 years. With 3 years, children show some understanding of the relation between beliefs and actions. At the same time, the understanding is limited. These limitations are evident when children are presented with false-belief problems. These are tasks that test a child's understanding that other people will act in accord with their own beliefs even when the child knows that those beliefs are incorrect. Studying such situations reveals whether children understand that other people's actions are determined by the contents of their own minds rather than by the objective truth. Most 5-year-olds understand this.
• Concluding, both nature and nurture seem to play important roles in the acquisition of biological understanding. Young children are innately fascinated by animals, but the particular knowledge children learn obviously is influenced by the information, beliefs and values conveyed to them by their environment. As always, nurture responds to nature.
• From early infancy on, children code the locations of objects in relations to their own bodies. According to Piaget, children only form representations during the sensorimotor period, namely egocentric spatial representations. This is the coding of spatial locations relative to one's own body, without regard to the surroundings.
• There are five principles underlying counting which preschoolers acquire: (1) One-one correspondence: each object must be labeled by a single number. (2) Stable order: the numbers should always be recited in the same order. (3) Cardinality: the number of objects in the set corresponds to the last number stated. (4) Order irrelevance: objects can be counted left to right, right to left, of in any other order. (5) Abstraction: any set of discrete objects or events can be counted.

What are the aspects of intelligence and how does it develop? – BulletPoints 8

• Most intelligence tests provide an overall quantitative measure of a child's intelligence relative to the intelligence of other children of the same age. This measure method is referred to as the child's intelligence quotient (IQ). Most characteristics, also intelligence, fall into a normal distribution. A normal distribution is a pattern of data in which scores fall symmetrically around a mean value, with most scores falling close to the mean and fewer and fewer scores further away from it. IQ has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. A standard deviation (SD) is a measure of the variability of scores in a distribution; in a normal distribution, 68% of scores fall within 1 SD of the mean, and 95% of scores fall within 2 SDs of the mean. The older the child, the higher the scores on intelligence tests.
• Different things can be predicted by the IQ. IQ scores are strong predictors of academic, economic and occupational success. They correlate positively with school grades and achievement performance.
• There is a lot of debate around the factors that influence intelligence. A useful starting point for thinking about genetic and environmental influences on intelligence is Bronfenbrenner's bioecological model of development. This model envisions children's lives as embedded within a series of increasingly encompassing environments. The child is at the center, surrounding the child is the immediate environment, the immediate environment is surrounded by more distant forces that influence development.
• Intelligence is also influenced by broader characteristics of the societies. Average IQ scores have consistently risen over the past 80 years. This is called the Flynn effect. Poverty in certain countries can have a great influence on intelligence. Children from poorer homes score higher on IQ tests than do children from wealthier homes. Brain development can be disrupted because of inadequate diets and missing meals. This can impair intellectual functioning on daily life.
• Reading develops in five stages: Stage 0: from birth until the beginning of 1st grade. During this time, children learn the alphabet and gain phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify sound components within words. Stage 1: 1st and 2nd grade. Children acquire phonological recoding skills, the ability to translate letters into sounds and to blend sounds into words; informally called 'sounding out'. Stage 2: 2nd and 3rd grade: Children gain fluency in reading simple material. Stage 3: 4th to 8th grade. Children become able to acquire complex, new information from written text. As Chall states: 'In the primary grades, children learn to read; in the higher grades, they read to learn. Stage 4: 8th to 12th grade. Skills are acquired to understand information by coordinating multiple perspectives.
• Knowledge of mathematics varies among countries. These differences start even before children enter formal schooling and they seem to be related to cultural emphasis on math, quality of math teachers and textbooks, and time spent on math in classrooms and homes. Another important factor is language. In Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages, whole-number names are expressed in a more straightforward way than in English, this makes mathematical learning easier in these languages.

Which theories of social development exist? – BulletPoints 9

• Psychoanalytic theories had a great impact on Western culture and on thinking about personality and social development. This is mainly due to Sigmund Freud. Later on, Erik Erikson built on the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Both theories are driven by biological maturation. For Freud, behavior is motivated by the need to satisfy basic drives. These drives and the motives that arise from them, are mostly unconscious. For Erikson, development is driven by a series of developmental crises related to age and biological maturation. To achieve healthy development, the individual must successfully resolve these crises. The theories of Freud and Erikson are stage theories.
• Freud emphasizes the role of internal forces and subjective experiences. Learning theorists emphasize the role of external factors in shaping social behavior and personality. Contemporary learning theorists emphasize the theme of the active child, the role that children play in their own development.
• Watson's work on classical conditioning laid the foundation for treatment procedures based on the opposite process, namely, deconditioning, or elimination of fear. To decondition fear, the experimenter treated Peter who was afraid of white rabbits by first giving him a favorite snack. Ten a white rabbit was very slowly brought closer and closer to him. After repeatedly being exposed to the feared object in a context that was free of distress and paired with the positive experience of a snack, Peter got over his fear. This approach now known as systematic desensitization, is still widely used to help people get rid of fears and phobias of everything from dogs to dentists.
• Social cognitive theories provide a sharp contrast to the emphasis that psychoanalytic and learning theories place on external forces as the primary source of development. Social cognitive theories emphasize the process of self-socialization. Self-socialization is the idea that children play a very active role in their own socialization through their activity preferences, friendship choices, and so on.
• Dodge's information-processing approach focusses on social problem solving. Dodge and colleagues have found that some children have a hostile attributional bias. A hostile attributional bias is the tendency to assume that other people's ambiguous actions are intented as hostile. This leads the children to search for evidence of hostile intention of the peer, which leads to self-fulfilling prophecies: a child's aggressive answer to the presumed hostile act of a peer elicits counterattacks and rejection by his or her peers, further fueling the child's belief in the hostility of others. Harsh parenting and physical maltreatment predict social information-processing biases. Directly targeting children's thinking about social behavior may possibly decrease the likelihood of later antisocial behavior.
• The bioecological model is based on the idea that the environment consists of a series of structures, each structure representing a different level of influence on development. The first level in which the child is embedded is the microsystem: the immediate environment that an individual child personally experiences and participates in. The second level is the mesosystem: the interconnections among immediate, or microsystem, settings, such as family, peers and schools. The third level is the exosystem: environmental settings that a child does not directly experience but that can affect the child indirectly, such as the parents' workplace. The fourth level is the macrosystem: the larger cultural and social context within which the other systems are embedded. The fifth level is the chronosystem: historical changes that influence the other systems, like beliefs, values, social circumstances and so on, with consequences for the child's development.

How does emotional development work? – BulletPoints 10

• The discrete emotions theory argues that emotions are innate and distinguishable from one another from very early in life, and each emotion is believed to be packaged with a specific and distinctive set of bodily and facial reactions. This theory was first put forward by Darwin. According to this theory, emotional responses are largely automatic and not based on cognition. Infants express a set of recognizable, discrete emotions, before they can be actively taught about them, besides, similar emotional facial expressions have been observed around the world. The functionalist perspective argues that emotions are partly a response to how an individual appraises the environment and that emotions are goal-driven. Emotions are not discrete from one another and vary somewhat based on the social environment. These two approaches agree that cognition and experience shape emotional development.
• Researchers agree that there are several basic emotions that are universal in all human cultures. These basic emotions serve important survival and communication functions. These basic emotions appear very early in life, supporting the discrete emotions theory.
• The first step in understanding emotions, is the recognition of different emotions in others. By 3 months of age, infants can distinguish facial expressions. Social referencing is the use of a parent's or other adult's facial expression or vocal cues to decide how to deal with novel, ambiguous, or possibly threatening situations. The ability to discriminate and label different emotions helps children respond appropriately to their own and others' emotions.
• Regulating emotions is crucial to successfully reach one's goals. Emotion regulation is a set of both conscious and unconscious processes used to both monitor and modulate emotional experiences and expressions.
• Social competence is the ability to achieve personal goals in social interactions while simultaneously maintaining positive relationships with others. Studies indicate that children who have the ability to inhibit inappropriate behaviors, postpone satisfaction, and use cognitive methods of controlling their emotion and behavior tend to be well-adjusted and liked by their peers and by adults.
• There are very large differences in children's emotional functioning. There are similarities, but also a lot of differences in the development of emotions and self-regulation capacities. Some infants and children are relatively mellow, other children are quite emotional. Such differences led researchers to develop the concept of temperament. Temperament refers to individual differences in emotion, activity level, and attention that are exhibited across contexts and that are present from infancy and thus thought to be genetically. Temperament is also influenced by the environment.
• The emotional development of children is also influenced by parents' emotional socialization of their children, this is the process through which children acquire the values, standards, skills, knowledge, and behaviors that are regarded as appropriate for their present and future role in their particular culture. This also affects their social competence.
• When a child is repeatedly exposed to stress or traumatic stress, this can lead to the development of mental disorders. Mental disorders are chronic conditions that may persist throughout childhood and into adulthood, it is a state of having problems with emotional reactions to the environment and with social relationships in ways that affect daily life. There is no single pathway to a disorder. Equifinality is the concept that various causes can lead to the same mental disorder. Multifinality is the concept that certain risk factors do not always lead to a mental disorder.

In what way does attachment and the self develop? – BulletPoints 11

• The attachment theory was proposed by Bowlby. This theory states that children are biologically predisposed to develop attachments to caregivers as a mean of increasing the chances of their own survival. Ainsworth extended and tested Bowlby's ideas. According to Freud, infants' earliest relationships with their mothers shape their later development. Bowlby agreed with this, but replaced the notion of a 'needy, dependent infant' with the idea of a 'competence motivated infant', who uses his or her primary caregiver as a secure base. The secure base refers to the idea that the presence of a trusted caregiver provides an infant or toddler with a sense of security that makes it possible for the child to explore the environment.
• Ainsworth made a distinction between three patterns of the quality or security of their attachment bonds: Secure attachment: in which children have a positive and trusting relationship with their attachment figure. The child may be upset when the caregiver leaves but may be happy to see the caregiver return. Children can use caregivers as a secure base for exploration. Insecure ambivalent attachment: in which children are clingy and stay close to their caregiver rather than exploring the environment. Children tend to become very upset when the caregiver leaves them alone. When the caregiver returns, they are not easily comforted, and both seek comfort and resist efforts by the caregiver to comfort them. Insecure avoidant attachment: in which children seem somewhat indifferent toward their caregiver and may even avoid the caregiver. They seem also indifferent when the caregiver leaves and indifferent or avoidant when the caregiver returns. If they get upset when left alone, they are as easily comforted by a stranger as by a parent. Because a small percentage did not fit well into any of these three categories, disorganized attachment was added: in which children have no consistent way of coping with the stress of the Strange Situation. Their behavior is often confused or even contradictory, and they often appear dazed or disoriented.
• Self-esteem is an individual's overall subjective evaluation of his or her worth and the feelings he or she has about that evaluation. It does not emerge until children reach age 8 or so. Individuals with high self-esteem tend to feel good about themselves and hopeful in general. Individuals with low self-esteem tend to feel worthless and hopeless. Low self-esteem is often associated with problems such as aggression, depression, substance abuse, social withdrawal, suicidal ideation and several problems in adulthood.
• The identity is a description of the self that is often externally imposed, such as through membership in a group. Each of us has multiple identities that are more salient than others at certain times or in certain situations. Erikson argued that all adolescents experience an identity crisis in the psychosocial stage of development that he called identity versus role confusion: during this stage, the adolescent or young adult either develops an identity or experiences an incomplete and sometimes incoherent sense of self. Successful resolution of this crisis results in identity achievement, which is an integration of various aspects of the self into a coherent whole that is stable over time and across event. Later on, researchers rejected the idea that all individuals must go through an identity crisis. More recently, researcher have delineated additional distinctions in identity status. During a status of moratorium, individuals explore possible occupational and ideological choices and has not yet made a clear commitment to them. They explore them in two different ways: in breadth (trying out a variety of candidate identities before choosing one) and in depth (through continuous monitoring of current commitments in order to make them more conscious).

What is the influence of family on development? – BulletPoints 12

• The adult family members that will have the biggest effects on children's development are those they live with, both because they will have regular contact with the children and because they financially support and raise the children. Family structure refers to the number of and relationships among the people living in a household.
• Divorce leads to a number of changes in a child's life. Parents may experience stress, financial problems can occur, and children may move to a new neighborhood: then they must go through a transition to a new home, neighborhood, school and peer group, when they are adjusting to a new family structure at the same time. This can affect children's mental health directly, but it can also affect children indirectly by undermining positive parenting and enjoyable family interactions. Divorce may also result in positive outcomes, particularly if the parents were engaged in high levels of conflict. On the other hand, divorce itself can also lead to conflict between parents.
• Socialization is the process through which children acquire the values, standards, skills, knowledge, and behaviors that are regarded as appropriate for their present and future roles in their particular culture. Two aspects of parenting are particularly important for children's development: parent's use of discipline and their overall parenting style.
• Baumrind identified four parenting styles: (1) Authoritative parenting: parents are high in demandingness and supportiveness, they set clear standards and limits. At the same time, they allow their children considerable autonomy within those limits and are attentive and responsive. (2) Authoritarian parenting: parents are cold, unresponsive and high in demandingness. They are oriented toward control and expect their children to comply without question or explanation. (3) Permissive parenting: parents are high in responsiveness but low in demandingness. Children do not need to regulate themselves or act in appropriate or mature ways. (4) Uninvolved parenting: parents are low in both demandingness and responsiveness, they are focused on their own needs rather than their children's, they set no limits. Parents are not supportive and do not monitor the behavior of their children.
• Children contribute to the parenting they receive with their behavior and personality. How children behave with their parents can be due to a number of factors, the most prominent of these are genetic factors related to temperament. Some children may be more reactive to the quality of parenting they receive than others. The bidirectionality of parent-child interactions is the idea that parents and their children are mutually affected by one another's characteristics and behaviors.

What influences do peers have on each other? – BulletPoints 13

• Peer relationships provide special opportunities for children's development. Piaget suggested that children tend to be more open and spontaneous when expressing their ideas and beliefs with peers than with adults. Vygotsky observed that children learn new skills and develop their cognitive capacities in peer interactions. A friend is a person with whom an individual has an intimate, reciprocated, positive relationship.
• The rich-get-richer hypothesis proposes that those youths who already have good social skills benefit from the internet when it comes to developing friendships. The social-compensations hypothesis, however, argues that social media may be especially beneficial for lonely, depressed and socially anxious adolescents, because they can take their time thinking about what they say. Unfortunately, there are hazards, like cyberbullying.
• The sociometric status seems to be affected by physical attractiveness, social behavior, personality, cognitions about others and goals when interacting with peers. The most commonly used sociometric system classifies children into one of five groups:
  • Popular children. Children are designated as popular if they are rated by their peers as being highly liked and accepted and highly impactful. These children have high status and tend to be above average in aggression, because of which they are not necessarily the most likeable. Relational aggression involves excluding others from the social group and attempting to do harm to other people's relationships; it includes spreading rumors about peers, withholding friendship to inflict harm and ignoring peers.
  • Rejected children. Children who are liked by few peers and disliked by many peers. Rejected children tend to fall in one of two categories: aggressive-rejected or withdrawn rejected. Aggressive-rejected children are prone to physical aggression, disruptive behavior, delinquency, and negative behavior such as hostility and threatening others. Withdrawn-rejected children are socially withdrawn, wary and often timid.
  • Neglected children. Children who are infrequently mentioned as either liked or disliked; they simply are not noticed much by peers.
  • Average children. Children are designated as average if they receive moderate ratings.
  • Controversial children. Children who are liked by quite a few peers and are disliked by quite a few others.
• Attachment to the parent affects the child's future social competence and the quality of the child's relationships with others, including peers. A secure attachment promotes competence with peers. An insecure attachment is likely to impair a child's competence with peers.

How does moral development work? - BulletPoints 14

• Piaget's theory on moral judgment describes that interactions with peers, more than adult influence, account for advances in children's moral reasoning. According to Piaget, there are two stages of development in children's moral reasoning, with a transitional period between them.
  • Heteronomous morality: in children younger than seven years old. Children learn good and bad as consequences of an action, not the motives or intentions behind it. Children belief that rules are unchangeable in this period. Parental control is coercive and unilateral, leading to children's unquestioning respect for rules set by adults. Second, children's cognitive immaturity causes them to believe that rules are 'real' things that exist outside people and are not the product of the human mind.
  • Transitional period: in children between seven and ten years old. The child takes a more active role in reasoning about good and bad. Interactions with peers assist in this process.
  • Autonomous morality: starts when children are eleven or twelve years old. Children no longer accept blind obedience to authority. They consider motives and intentions when evaluating behavior.
• Kohlberg's theory on moral judgment proposes that the development of moral reasoning proceeds through a specific series of stages that are discontinuous and hierarchical. Few people ever attain the highest stage of the postconventional level. People differ in how far they progress. The complete model is as follows:
  • Niveau 1 > Preconventional moral reasoning: this stage is self-centered, it focuses on getting rewards and avoiding punishment.
    • Stage 1: Punishment and obedience orientation. Obedience to authorities and avoidance of punishment. The child does not consider the interests of others.
    • Stage 2: Instrumental and exchange orientation. Do what is in one's own best interest or involves equal exchange between people (tit-for-tat exchanges of benefits).
  • Niveau 2 > Conventional moral reasoning: this stage is centered on social relationships, it focuses on compliance with social duties and laws.
    • Stage 3: Mutual interpersonal expectations, relationships and interpersonal conformity orientation. Being good is important and entails having good motives and showing concern about others.
    • Stage 4: Social system and conscience orientation. Fulfilling one's duties, upholding laws and contributing to society.
  • Niveau 3 > Postconventional moral reasoning: this stage is centered on ideals, it focuses on moral principles.
    • Stage 5: Social contract or individual rights orientation. Upholding rules that are in the best interest of the group, but also value liberty.
    • Stage 6: Universal ethical principles. Commitment to self-chosen ethical principles. When laws violate these principles, the individual should act in accordance with these universal principles rather than with the law.
• In everyday life, children make many decisions. These decisions can involve the following kinds of judgement:
  • Moral judgment: decisions that pertain to issues of right and wrong, fairness, and justice.
  • Social-conventional judgment: decisions that pertain to customs or regulations intended to secure social coordination and social organization.
  • Personal judgment: decisions that refer to actions in which individual preferences are the main consideration.

How does gender develop? – BulletPoints 15

• Sex is the distinction between genetic females (XX) and genetic males (XY). Gender is the social assignment or self-categorization as female or male (or possibly neither or a different category). Gender-typed refers to behaviors stereotyped or expected for a given person's gender. Cross-gender-typed refers to behaviors stereotyped or expected for the gender other than that of a given person. Gender typing is the process of gender socialization.
• Self-socialization is the active process during development whereby children's cognitions lead them to perceive the world and to act in accord with their expectations and beliefs. Self-socialization occurs in gender development when children seek to behave in accord with their gender identity.
• Gender-role norms seen in the social interactions of many girls and boys tend to reflect differences in the balance of assertion and affiliation. Assertion is the tendency to take action on behalf of the self through competitive, independent, or aggressive behaviors. Affiliation is the tendency to affirm connection with others through being emotionally open, empathetic, or supportive. Boys differentiate themselves by assertion and girls by affiliation. This is however not mutually exclusive: assertion and affiliation are often blended together in a style known as collaboration. Collaboration is the coordination of assertion and affiliation in behavior, such as making initiatives for joint activity. This is more common among girls.
• An important factor in sexual development is the absence or presence of androgens. The Y-chromosome of males regulates its secretion. In puberty, dramatic bodily transformations occur, this period is marked by the ability to reproduce. In this period, the onset of menstruation (menarche) takes place in women and the capacity for ejaculation (spermache) in males. These changes are accompanied by psychological and behavioral changes. Which can lead to changes in body image, an individual's perception of, and feelings about, his or her own body. More girls than boys have a negative body image. Another change that accompanies physical maturation, is the onset of adrenarche, a period prior to the emergence of visible signs of puberty during which the adrenal glands mature, providing a major source of sex steroid hormones, correlates with the onset of sexual attraction.
• Differences in aggressive behavior between boys and girls is not as great as many people expect. There is a distinction between direct and indirect aggression. Direct aggression involves overt physical or verbal acts openly intended to cause harm. Indirect aggression involves attempts to damage a person's social standing or group acceptance through covert means such as negative gossip and social exclusion. Men display more direct aggression than women, but women display more indirect aggression than males.

What conclusions can be drawn from the previous chapters? – BulletPoints 16

• Genes, personal characteristics and behavioral tendencies interact with the nurture they receive in different ways. This shapes the self-esteem, intellect and other qualities of the child.
• Even in the first year, infants develop a sense of what is possible in the physical world. This suggests a desire to understand the world, this motivates young children to construct informal theories concerning inanimate objects, living things, and people. How children interpret experiences and react to them depends on their characteristics. Thus, subjective interpretations of experiences, as well as objective reality, shape development.
• Many of the most prominent theories of development divide childhood and adolescence into a number of discrete stages (Piaget, Freud, etcetera). These theories share four key assumptions: (1) Development progresses through a series of qualitatively distinct stages. (2) When children are in a given stage, a fairly broad range of their thinking and behavior exhibits the features characteristics of that stage. (3) The stages occur in the same order for all children. (4) Transitions between stages occur quickly. However, development turns out to be less tidy than stage approaches imply.
• Four information-processing mechanisms are especially general and pervasive: basic processes, strategies, metacognition and content knowledge. Basic processes include associating events with each other, recognizing objects as familiar and recalling facts and procedures. With age, speed and efficiency of these processes improve. Strategies are used to obtain goals in cognitive and social situations and in specific actions. Metacognition contributes to development in large ways. Increasing use of memory strategies stems from the children's increasing realization that they are unlikely to remember large amounts of material without a strategy. Content knowledge is the fact that the more children know about any topic, the better able they are to learn and remember new information about it, this allows children to draw analogies between the new content and content that is familiar to them.
• Among children growing up at the same time in the same society, differences in economic circumstances, family relationships and peer groups lead to large differences in children's lives. Children from poor families have a lower academic achievement, are more often insecurely attached, are more often lonely and illegal substance use, crime and depression are more common. The cumulative burden of these disadvantages poses the greatest obstacle to successful development. Also, friends and family have a substantial influence on development: friends can provide support, but friends can also draw children into reckless and aggressive behavior.
• Children differ on a huge number of dimensions, but how can we tell which differences are the crucial ones for understanding children and predicting their futures? Three characteristics are of importance: breadth of related characteristics, stability over time, and predictive value. Applied to intelligence: a higher IQ often means a higher score in other areas (breadth of related characteristics), that the child will have a higher IQ when they grow into adults (stability over time) and that this higher score predicts outcomes in the future (predictive value).
• When children are at risk for developmental problems, it is of great importance to start with interventions in time. Timing is important, because difficulties should be addressed before children lose confidence and becomes resentful toward schools and teachers. Early detection of child maltreatment is also crucial. It is important that teachers recognize signs of abuse. It is futile trying to identify the cause of a particular problem, because problems almost always have multiple causes. Providing effective treatment often requires addressing many particular difficulties.