Theories and research Child Development Theories

                     Methods and challenges in child development: theories and research

                                            Child Development Theories

When child development experts talk about the study of development, they have in mind some fundamental theories of development that were codified by brilliant clinicians and scientists well before we had the technology to correlate them to brain development. Roughly speaking, these theories can be categorized as emotional, cognitive and moral. Erik Erikson developed the most common theories of emotional development. Jean Piaget developed the most common theories of cognitive development. And, Lawrence Kohlberg developed the dominant theories of moral development.

Let’s look at Erikson first.

Erikson saw the world as a series of age-matched developmental crises, and he conceptualized these crises as binary and competing values. He didn’t think of the crises as bad things; rather, each crisis represented an opportunity to move forward.

Infancy, for example, is characterized by Trust (a positive value) versus Mistrust (a negative value). Adolescence is a battle between Identity Formation (good) versus Role Diffusion (bad). According to Erickson, if these binary crises are not successfully negotiated—if an infant, for instance, can’t trust the adults of the world to keep him warm and fed and held—then that infant will grow up with a fundamental lack of trust, and at some point, will have to actively address this issue. These ideas actually stem directly from the psychoanalytic notions that Sigmund Freud put on the map, namely that past experience influences future feelings and behaviors.

Jean Piaget

Piaget was more interested in how kids change the way they think about the world; that’s why he is considered the father of cognitive development.

Piaget watched how kids figure things out. He noticed that when kids are teeny, they do lots of touching and tasting. From this, he decided that very young kids learn about their new world by doing simple experiments. What does that cat feel like? How does the side of the table taste? After that, he felt that children moved onto a more binary view of the world. He noticed that school-aged kids rarely abstract; in today’s world, for example, four fouls is an out every single time in first grade. He decided, therefore, that young school-aged kids are focused primarily on a black-and -white view of the world.

But then he noticed that as that first grader moves through elementary school, her views of the world change; at first, four fouls are an out every single time. By second grade, four fouls is an out because those are the rules that are used to keep the game fun. By third grade, four fouls is an out, but that rule doesn’t have to be; in fact, by third grade, lots of energy is used in discussing the possible variations in the rules.

Piaget categorized the way kids make sense of the world like this:

Preoperational (ages 2-7) – Lots of gray matter, much less white matter

Concrete Operational (ages 7-11) – White matter starts to connect in linear patterns

Formal Operations (ages 11+) – Gray matter decreases as white matter flowers

Kohlberg, Lawrence Philosophy of  Moral Development:

Generally speaking, Kohlberg felt that moral development was characterized first by a more or less amoral stage: you want what you want regardless of right or wrong. In fact, little kids don’t even understand the concept of right versus wrong. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to get angry at a 2-year-old for cheating—they don’t, and can’t, understand the concept of cheating. However, after around age 3, kids start to appreciate right and wrong, but they do so as a function of external punishments.

 As kids age, Kohlberg noted, they move through different views of the concepts of right and wrong. They might start with a fear of punishment, but then they move to a desire for approval. Slowly, they make their way from external drivers of what to do to internal notions of what constitutes the right thing to do.

Kohlberg called the final stages of moral development “post conventional.” By that he meant that people at these stages were deciding what to do as a function of their own internal compasses, and not as a function of how they ought to behave because of the conventions of their society (Steven schlozman, n.d.).