UNIT 1: THE FIELD OF

CHILD PSYCHOLOGY
Chap 1: Child Development – Foundations
of Child and Adolescent Psychology
Childhood Trauma

Chap 2: The Field Of Child Psychology –

Foundations Of Child And Adolescent
Psychology
Table of Content: Chap 1
Child Development – Foundations of Child and
01.
Adolescent Psychology
02. Theories of Development
Behavioral and Social Learning Theories and
03.
Cognitive Theories
04. Stages of Development

05. References
 INTRO
Each person in this course has
had a different background and
upbringing?

Whether that be the type of parenting you received,

the type of school you attended, the health issues
you might have faced, your mother’s health during
her pregnancy with you, your genetics, or, simply,
your basic inborn personality characteristics.
Historical Views of Child and Adolescent Development

Aristotle (384–322 BC) believed that children are born as blank

slates. This is known as the tabula rasa view of human nature.
An English philosopher, named John Locke (1632–1704) shared
the tabula rasa view.

This view of human nature sees children and their

development shaped by their environment and experiences.

Locke advocated for parents to be good role models for their

children to facilitate character development. Children learn
self-control, kindness, and honesty by observing their parents
exhibit these traits.
Historical Views of Child and Adolescent Development
Innate goodness view. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), a
French philosopher, was an advocate of this view.

He believed that infants are born inherently good, and that it

is society that can corrupt them. In his writings, he refers to the
native savage.

This is the idea that if a child is raised away from civilization and with
minimal restrictions on his freedom, then that child would manifest the
innate goodness with which he was born.

In this view, parents simply need to give the child freedom to develop
along his or her pathway, and to protect them from the corruptible
influences of society.
How we view human nature influences every interaction that we have with others.

At what age are children capable of adult

behaviours?
In modern America, we do not expect children to be left alone or capable of caring for
themselves before late childhood or early adolescence.

However, it was not always this way. During the Industrial Revolution, children as
young as five worked in factories for up to 12 hours a day.

Even today, there are cultures around the globe that allow young children to cook over
open fires, carry machetes, and care for younger siblings.

Therefore, there is no simple answer to this

question.
It depends on where and when you live.
Let’s watch this silent, black and white film. It shows how
children were used and treated in hard labor prior to World
War I. It shows how the concept and experience of
childhood has changed across history.

The Cry of the Children (1912) on Vimeo

 Domains of
Development
Development is often viewed as occurring
in three distinct, yet interrelated,
domains:
1. Physical

2. Cognitive

3. Socioemotional
Developmental Issues
Nature VS Nurture
Such a viewpoint is far too simplistic. Instead, any developmental
outcome is due to the collaboration among nature, nurture, and personal
agency.
Another developmental issue is the question of sensitive periods of
development.

Is there a certain age range where if a child does not acquire a skill or process,
it becomes too late?

There are two areas where there is, indeed, a sensitive period:

(1) Language acquisition

(2) Attachment.
Some development is continuous, while others occur in stages.

Stages of Development
Prenatal Development Early Adulthood (20-30)
Middle Adulthood (late 30’s –
Infancy and Toddlerhood (0-2)
mid 60’s)
Early Childhood (3-6) Late Adulthood

Middle Childhood (7-11) Death and Dying

Adolescence (12-19)
Theories of Development
Psychodynamic Theory – Sigmund Freud
 Psychosexual Stages
1. Oral Stage – the infant is meeting primarily needs through oral gratification

2. Anal Stage – the child is taught that some urges must be contained and some actions
postponed

3. Phallic Stage – the child becomes sexually attracted to his or her opposite-sexed parent.

4. Latent Stage – the child directs attention to a larger world of friends

5. Genital Stage – the adolescent relies on the ego to help think logically through these urges
without taking actions that might be damaging.
 Strength and Weakness of Freud
Theory
• Difficult to test scientifically (other variables)
• Sexist (women who do not accept an inferior position in society are somehow
psychologically flawed)
• Focuses on the darker side of human nature (what determines our actions is
unknown to us)

 Freud’s assumptions about early childhood experiences have found their way into child
development, education, and parenting practices.
 Freud’s theory has heuristic value in providing a framework to elaborate and modify subsequent
theories of development.
 Many later theories, particularly behaviorism and humanism, were challenges to Freud’s views.
Psychosocial Theory
The father of developmental psychology, Erik Erikson.
 Behavioral and Social
Learning Theories and
Cognitive Theories
Behavioral Learning Theories: How Do We Act?

Learning theories focus on how we respond to events or stimuli

rather than emphasising what motivates our actions.

These theories explain how experience can change what we are

capable of doing or feeling.
 Classical Conditioning and Emotional
Responses
How our responses to one situation become attached to new situations

01. Example: a smell might remind us of a time when we were a kid

How we develop many of our emotional responses to people, events, or “gut level”
02.
reactions to situations.

03. New situations may bring about an old response – Why? Connected. Attachments
form this way.
Addictions - affected by classical conditioning
04. Eg; When you try to quit, everything that was associated with smoking makes you
crave a cigarette.
 Pavlov: Classical Conditioning

A learned response is called a “conditioned”

response.

The response, salivation, is the same whether

it is conditioned or unconditioned (unlearned
or natural).

What changed is the stimulus to which the

dog salivates. One is natural (unconditioned)
and one is learned (conditioned).
 ● Watson believed that most of our fears and other emotional responses
are classically conditioned.

● He gave advice on parenting. He believed that parents could be taught

to help shape their children’s behavior.

● Watson sat Albert down and introduced a variety of seemingly scary

objects to him: a burning piece of newspaper, a white rat, etc. But Albert
remained curious and reached for each of these things. Watson knew
that one of our inborn fears is the fear of loud noises so he proceeded to
make a loud noise each time he introduced one of Albert’s favorites, a
white rat. After hearing the loud noise several times paired with the rat,
Albert soon became fearful of the rat and began to cry when it was
introduced.

● Watson could help parents achieve any outcome they desired, if they
would only follow his advice.
Watson and Behaviorism - famous experiment on 18 month-old boy named little
Albert.
 Watson:
Little Albert
(Behaviorism)
Behavioral Learning
Theory
Operant Conditioning and Repeating Actions: Operant
Conditioning - learning theory - emphasizes a more conscious
type of learning than that of classical conditioning.

A person / animal does something (operates something) to see

what effect it might bring.

Operant conditioning how we repeat behaviors because they pay

off for us.

It is based on a principle authored by a psychologist named

Thorndike called the law of effect.

The law of effect suggests that we will repeat an action if it is

followed by a good effect.
 Skinner and Reinforcement
B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) expanded Thorndike’s principle - operant conditioning.

Skinner believed that we learn best when our actions are reinforced.

Example, a child who cleans his room and is reinforced (rewarded) with a big
hug and words of praise is more likely to clean it again than a child whose deed
goes unnoticed.

Skinner believed that almost anything could be reinforced.

A reinforcer is anything following a behavior that makes it more likely

to occur again. It can be something intrinsically rewarding (called intrinsic or
primary reinforcers), such as food or praise, or it can be something that is
rewarding because it can be exchanged for what one really wants (such as
money to buy a cookie). Such reinforcers are referred to as secondary
reinforcers or extrinsic reinforcers.
Positive and Negative Reinforcement
Adding something to the situation is reinforcing eg cookies, praise, and money.

Positive reinforcement involves adding something to the situation to encourage a

behavior. Other times, taking something away from a situation can be reinforcing.

For example, the loud, annoying buzzer on your alarm clock encourages you to
get up so that you can turn it off and get rid of the noise.
Children whine to get their parents to do something and often, parents give in
just to stop the whining.
In these instances, negative reinforcement has been used.

Operant conditioning tends to work best if you focus on trying to encourage a

behavior or move a person into the direction you want them to go rather than
telling them what not to do.
Reinforcers are used to encourage a behavior; punishers are used to stop
behavior.

A punisher is anything that follows an act and decreases the chance it will
reoccur.

But often a punished behavior doesn’t really go away. It is just suppressed and
may reoccur whenever the threat of punishment is removed.

For example, a motorist may only slow down when the highway patrol is on the
side of the freeway.

Another problem with punishment is that when a person focuses on punishment,

they may find it hard to see what the other does right or well.

And punishment is stigmatizing; when punished, some start to see themselves

as bad and give up trying to change.
Reinforcement can occur in a predictable way, such as after every desired
action is performed, or intermittently, after the behavior is performed a
number of times or the first time it is performed after a certain amount of
time.

The schedule of reinforcement has an impact on how long a behavior

continues after reinforcement is discontinued.

A parent who has rewarded a child’s actions each time may find that the
child gives up very quickly if a reward is not immediately forthcoming.

But sometimes we learn very complex behaviors quickly and without direct
reinforcement. Bandura explains how.
● Many of our actions are not learned through conditioning; rather, they are learned
by watching others.

● Young children frequently learn behaviors through imitation. Sometimes,

particularly when we do not know what else to do, we learn by modeling or copying
the behavior of others.

● E.g. An employee on his or her first day of a new job might eagerly look at how
others are acting and try to act the same way to fit in more quickly.

● E.g. Adolescents struggling with their identity rely heavily on their peers to act as
role models.

● E.g. Newly married couples often rely on roles they may have learned from their
parents and begin to act in ways they did not while dating and then wonder why
their relationship has changed.

● Sometimes we do things because we’ve seen it pay off for someone else. They were
operantly conditioned, but we engage in the behavior because we hope it will pay
off for us as well. This is referred to as vicarious reinforcement.
Social Learning Theory – Albert Bandura
 Do Parents Socialize Children or Do Children Socialize
Parents?
Bandura (1986) suggests that there is interplay between the environment and the
individual.

We are not just the product of our surroundings; rather, we influence our surroundings.

There is interplay between our personality and the way we interpret events and how they
influence us.

This concept is called reciprocal determinism.

Example the interplay between parents and children.

Parents influence their child’s environment, perhaps intentionally by reinforcement,
and children influence parents as well.
Parents may respond differently with their first child than with their fourth. Perhaps they
try to be the perfect parents with their firstborn, but by the time their last child comes
along they have very different expectations both of themselves and their child.
Our environment creates us and we create our environment.
 Other social influences: TV or not
TV?conducted an experiment – he showed children a film of a woman hitting
Bandura
an inflatable clown or “bobo” doll.

Then the children were allowed in the room where they found the doll and
immediately began to hit it. This was without any reinforcement whatsoever.

Later children viewed a woman hitting a real clown and sure enough, when
allowed in the room, they too began to hit the clown! Not only that, but they
found new ways to behave aggressively. It’s as if they learned an aggressive role.

Behavioral theories are NOT developmental theories.

Both Freud and Erikson were interested in developmental stages and how we change
across time.

Behavioral theories believe that reinforcers and punishers function the same regardless
of age or stage of development, which is why they are psychological theories, but not
developmental theories.
Cognitive
Theories
Cognitive theories focus on how our mental processes or cognitions change
over time.
Two cognitive theorists: (1) Jean Piaget and (2) Lev Vygotsky
Piaget: Changes in Thought with Maturation
● Jean Piaget – cognitive theorists inspired to explore children’s ability to
think and reason by watching his own children’s development.

● He was one of the first to recognize and map out the ways in which
children’s intelligence differs from that of adults.

● He became interested in this area when he was asked to test the IQ of

children and began to notice that there was a pattern in their wrong
answers.

● He believed that children’s intellectual skills change over time and that
maturation rather than training brings about that change.

● Children of differing ages interpret the world differently.

 Making Sense of the World
● Piaget believed that we are continuously trying to maintain cognitive equilibrium or
a balance or cohesiveness in what we see and what we know.

● Children have much more of a challenge in maintaining this balance because they
are constantly being confronted with new situations, new words, new objects, etc.

● When faced with something new, a child may either fit it into an existing framework
(schema) and match it with something known (assimilation) such as calling all
animals with four legs “doggies” because he or she knows the word doggie, or
expand the framework of knowledge to accommodate the new situation
(accommodation) by learning a new word to more accurately name the animal.
 Stages of Cognitive Development
● Piaget outlined four major stages of cognitive development.

● For about the first two years of life, the child experiences the world primarily
through their senses and motor skills. This type of intelligence is sensorimotor
intelligence

● During the preschool years, the child begins to master the use of symbols or words
and is able to think of the world symbolically but not yet logically. This stage is the
preoperational stage of development.

● The concrete operational stage in middle childhood is marked by an ability to

use logic in understanding the physical world.

● In the final stage, the formal operational stage the adolescent learns to think
abstractly and to use logic in both concrete and abstract ways.
 Criticism of Piaget
 Piaget has been criticized for overemphasizing the role that physical
maturation plays in cognitive development and in underestimating the
role that culture and interaction (or experience) plays in cognitive
development.

 Looking across cultures reveals considerable variation in what children

are able to do at various ages.

 Piaget may have underestimated what children are capable of given

the right circumstances.
Vygotsky: Changes in Thought with Guidance
• Vygotsky differed with Piaget in that he believed that a person not only has a set of
abilities, but also a set of potential abilities that can be realized if given the proper
guidance from others.

• His sociocultural theory emphasizes the importance of culture and interaction in the
development of cognitive abilities.

• He believed that through guided participation (scaffolding), with a teacher or capable

peer, a child can learn cognitive skills within a certain range known as the zone of
proximal development.

• Have you ever taught a child to perform a task? Maybe it was brushing her teeth or
preparing food. Chances are you spoke to her and described what you were doing
while you demonstrated the skill and let her work along with you all through the
process. You gave her assistance when she seemed to need it, but once she knew
what to do-you stood back and let her go. This is scaffolding and can be seen
demonstrated throughout the world.
Stages of Development
CHAP 1
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