Child Psychology

## Developmental psychology Developmental psychology, also known as Human Development, is the scientific study of progressive psychological changes that occur in human beings as they age. Originally concerned with infants and children, and later other periods of great change such as adolescence and aging, it now encompasses the entire life span. This field examines change across a broad range of topics including motor skills and other psychophysiological processes, problem solving abilities, conceptual understanding, acquisition of language, moral understanding, and identity formation. Developmental psychologists investigate key questions, such as whether children are qualitatively different from adults or simply lack the experience that adults draw upon. Other issues that they deal with is the question of whether development occurs through the gradual accumulation of knowledge or through shifts from one stage of thinking to another; or if children are born with innate knowledge or figure things out through experience; and whether development is driven by the social context or by something inside each child. Developmental psychology informs several applied fields, including: educational psychology, child psychopathology and developmental forensics. Developmental psychology complements several other basic research fields in psychology including social psychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive development, and comparative psychology. ## Theory Many theoretical perspectives attempt to explain development, among the most prominent are: Jean Piaget's Stage Theory, Lev Vygotsky's Social Contextualism (and its heir, the Ecological Systems Theory of Urie Bronfenbrenner), and especially the information processing framework employed by cognitive psychology. Historical theories continue to provide a basis for additional research, among them are Erik Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development and John B. Watson's and B. F. Skinner's Behaviorism. Many other theories are prominent for their contributions to particular aspects of development. For example, Attachment theory describes kinds of interpersonal relationships and Lawrence Kohlberg describes stages in moral reasoning. Ecological Systems Theory ## A family of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in 1997 Generally regarded as one of the world's leading scholars in the field of developmental psychology, Bronfenbrenner's primary contribution was his Ecological Systems Theory, in which he delineated four types of nested systems, with bi-directional influences within and between systems. • Microsystem: Immediate environments (family, school, peer group, neighborhood, and childcare environments) • Mesosystem: A system comprised of connections between immediate environments (i.e., a child's home and school) • Exosystem: External environmental settings which only indirectly affect development (such as parent's workplace) • Macrosystem: The larger cultural context (Eastern vs. Western culture, national economy, political culture, subculture) Each system contains factors that can powerfully shape development, as can the interaction of factors across systems. The major statement of this theory, The Ecology of Human Development (1979) had widespread influence on the way psychologists and others approached the study of human beings and their environments. It has been said that before Bronfenbrenner, child psychologists studied the child, sociologists examined the family, anthropologists the society, economists the economic framework of the times and political scientists the structure. As a result of Bronfenbrenner's groundbreaking work in "human ecology," a field that he created, these environments -from the family to economic and political structures -were viewed as part of the life course from childhood to adulthood. ## Role of experience A significant question in developmental psychology is the relation between innateness and environmental influence in regard to any particular aspect of development. This is often referred to as "nature versus nurture" or nativism versus empiricism. A nativist account of development would argue that the processes in question are innate, that is, The objective of this book is to provide sufficient knowledge to its readers about the subject of Child psychology Title from PDF cover (viewed on Sept. 17, 2008).