CHILD DEVELOPMENT THEORIES

Child Development Theories

Child Development Theories

Introduction

A child goes through many child development changes on the road from infancy to adulthood. There is a never ending struggle to make sense out of this convoluted process. There is no end to theories trying to explain it. This article looks at a few of the more successful or famous, child development theories.

Child Development Theories

Child development that occurs from birth to adulthood was largely ignored throughout much of the history. Children were often viewed simply as small versions of adults and little attention paid to the many advances in cognitive abilities, language usage, and somatic growth. Interest in the field of child development finally began to emerge early in the 20th-century, but it tended to focus on abnormal behavior. Freud tried to explain much human behavior in psychosexual terms. Interestingly, he even tried to fit infants and children into this by describing their behavior based on shifting sexual interests over time. His oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital phases have become part of our popular culture. Current thinking is that sexuality does not have as much importance in childhood as Freud thought. He has also been faulted for only looking at the male perspective (Petersen, 2009, 99).

Everyone affected by the environment they live in. The ecological systems theory breaks this down into multiple environments and examines how they affect the child that is in them. Closest in is the micro system, which would include friends, family, and schools. The society as a whole is the macro system. This includes the general level of income and the culture. Changes that affect the child are in the chrono system. This could include the death of a parent or sibling. It also looks at how the different environments affect each other. It has led to significant insights into how the environment impacts a growing child.

Jean Piaget Child Development Theory

Jean Piaget used developmental stages as the basis for his theory of cognitive development. The essence of this theory is that there are discrete stages that comprise the growth of thinking ability. Normal humans almost always go through the same stages in the same order. The first or sensorimotor stage, based on direct contact with things of interest. The formal operation stage is the last. A person reaching that stage is ready to think like an adult. The general mechanism of formation of knowledge according to Piaget is the balance, the resolution of cognitive imbalances through more balanced organization to higher levels. The balance involves two processes, assimilation and accommodation. As children develop, they integrate different patterns of organized knowledge to help you build a vision of the world and him.

Piaget sees the development as an interaction between physical maturity (organization of anatomical and physiological changes) and experience. It is through these experiences that children acquire knowledge and understand. Hence the concept of constructivism and the constructivist paradigm between pedagogy and curriculum (Salkind, 2004, 71).

According to this approach, the curriculum begins with the interests of learning that ...