Psychological Developmental Stages



Infancy

Infants are born with instinctive memory and they have pre equipped remarkable abilities including memory, social interaction, communication skills and movement factor. It is a very famous phenomenon that children are very competitive and have amazing abilities. During the early infancy, children feel, dream, have little taste abilities and can track slow moving objects.

The most important people in an infant's life are their parents in usual conditions. This is demonstrated when an infant turn towards her mother after hearing her voice. This relationship is very important in an infant's life. The early foundation of emotional stability and a sound personality is based on this early stage. The whole process of social development is dependent on this stage. In addition strong bond between an infant and the care taker is dependent on touch, massage and cuddling. In this stage parents talk, sing and make the infant understand about life and its basic elements. Despite all these abilities and infant sleeps most of the time. Through sleep infants are able to consolidate of this new information. The best time to interact with them is when they are not sleeping. According to research this is the ideal time to interact with infants (Santrock, 2008). As they grow they spend more time awake and form a routine. It is a response to their instinctive nature.

Infants show signs of their emotions, all kinds of emotions which is an early foundation of characteristics of personality. It is important to respect their emotional expressions as it built confidence in their personality. Due to these actions infants learn to trust other people. Infants require care because they believe that the world revolves around them. According to many psychologist, the basic personality building starts from infancy and all the aspects of basis personality start at this time. At this time if the care taker's are listening and responding to infants and their actions or reactions it will create confidence and boost their self esteem to a next level. The growth of height and weight is remarkable at this stage if proper nutrients are provided to the infant.

An experience to HCC illustrated every aspect of an infant. Infants love to look at faces, particularly those who are the primary caretaker. In the majority of the cases parents are the main care takers. Most of the infants look at everything of the surrounding; it shows that they understand the world by looking at faces and vocal expressions. They imitate facial expressions, a simple learning process for infants. The most interesting thing observed was infants don't look at unexpressive faces. They look at every face with in their reach but don't continuously look at unexpressive faces. They only look at faces from which they can learn from. For obvious reasons infants don't have this behavior deliberately but it in completely instinctive. A general observation about infants is that they were paying attention to every little sound and movement in the environment, because everything was new to them (Santrock, ...