Life Span development
Lifespan development
• Meaning- from conception – continues
through out life- till the moment of death.
• Includes physical as well as mental
development
• Continuous process
• Not only to be fully grown individuals but to
adopt to their environment.
Importance
• 1. Life moves along a specific course or route
of development.
2. Unique pace
3. Entire route is divided into many stages.
4. Each stage associated with various changes in
physical, cognitive and socio-emotional aspects
of individual.
Life---Route----- stages----changes
Study of lifespan development helps us to
understand this route, and transition from one
stage to the other.
Proper knowhow of the different milestones of
various development stages.
Development changes is normal or not?
Parents can benefit- Understand and concerns of
their adolescents children.
Deviation--- can make an intervention
Thus, understand the factors influencing the
changes, giving us the development calendar of the
people.
Development
1. Significant changes
2. Refers to physical and mental growth
3. Extensive studies on developmental changes during early
life outnumber the studies on developmental changes
that occur during the later life.
4. Because a child displays a wide range of development in
early years like physical , emotional development etc.
5. Various experiences gained after the birth by the child +
genetic endowments = overall development.
6. Proper parenting , proper knowledge of reality and an
environment that allows a child for proper interactions
and emotional development are necessary.
7. maldjusment
Development
• Definition
• Context-
1. Continuous- not always observable, always in progress, not smooth and
gradual. Sometimes the development is rapid or sometimes it may slow
down.
2. Cumulative process-
3. Product of interaction
4. Consistent process
5. Development proceeds from general to specific responses
6. Individualised process
7. Different development aspects are interrelated
8. Development and growth are predictable
9. Spiral patterns of movement rather than a liner way
10. Specific stages with specific traits and characterstics
• Difference between development and growth
• Meaning of marturity
Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological systems
Theory
Infancy (birth- 1year)
• Rapid growth
• Good nutrition- triple in weight and body
length
• At birth, babies have a little ability to regulate
their own body temperature until about 8or 9
weeks old.
Reflexes
• Meaning- Inherited responses to stimulation in
certain areas of the body,
• Reflex activities- All the random activities of the
infants which are spontaneous, unlearned and
limited to a specific areas for eg sucking, sneezing
etc.
• If these reflexes are present, the baby’s nervous
system is assumed to be normal.
• Other important development abilities are
physical, motor, cognitive and socio-emotional
development.
Motor development
• After the neonatal stage (birth- 1 month), motor
development progresses at an extraordinary
speed depending upon the physical development.
• Essential- adjust and accommodate with the
environment,
• Means gradual gaining the control over the bodily
movements,
• Nature provides the new born with a number of
reflexes. They help in their survival until the
motor development is well established..
Reflexes
• Rooting
• Moro
• Grasping
• babinski
BABYNSKI
Motor Milestone
What is motor development in infancy?
• “Motor development refers to changes in
children's ability to control their body's
movements, from infants' first spontaneous
waving and kicking movements to the
adaptive control of reaching, locomotion
( ability to move from one place to another),
and complex sport skills”
What is a milestone of motor
development?
• Motor Milestones
• Sits without support.
• Sits and reaches for toys without falling.
• Moves from tummy or back into sitting.
• Starts to move with alternate leg and arm
movement e.g. creeping, crawling.
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT-
Sensorimotor stage
• Swiss cognitive theorist, Jean Piaget
• Stage Theory
• According to him, children are not born with cognitive abilities, they
developed by exploring the environment through their perceptual
and motor activities.
• That build and refine psychological structures (organized way of
make sense of their unique experiences)
• Children choose and interpret experiences according to their
present structures,
• Modify or change
• They discover or construct all knowledge about the world they live
in , through their own activity.
• Constructivist approach
Characteristics
• 4 Developmental stage
• 1. sensorimotor ( birth- 2 years)
• 2. preoperational (2-7)
• 3. concrete operational (7-11)
• 4. formal operational (11 and above)
Sensorimotor stage
• Piaget belief that infants and toddlers think
with their wyes, ears, hands, and other
sensorimotor equipment.
• They cannot yet carry out many activities
mentally.
Concepts
• Children construct their knowledge of the world by
interacting with it.
• Schemas – a framework of holding knowledge and
organize it
• OR
• “organized ways of making sense of experience.”
• 1. Adaptation- involves building schemes through
direct interaction with the environment
• 2 basic process
• 1. Assimilation – adding
• 2. Accommodation- modification
• During assimilation, we use our current schemes to interpret the external
world.
• In accommodation, we create new schemes or adjust old ones after
noticing that our current way of thinking does not capture the
environment completely.
• According to Piaget, the balance between assimilation and
accommodation varies over time.
• When children are not changing much , they assimilate more than
accommodate – a steady and comfortable state called COGNITIVE
EQUILIBRIUM.
• During the time of rapid cognitive change, children are in a state of
COGNITIVE DISEQUILIBRIUM OR Cognitive discomfort, realising that new
information does not match their current schemes, they shift to
assimilation to accommodation.
• Piaget’s term for this back-forth movement between equilibrium and
disequilibrium is called EQUILIBRATION.
Sensorimotor stage (birth- 2y)
• Earliest stage of cognitive development
• Reflexes
• Chance behaviour like simple motor habits
• Infants gradually learn that there is relationship
between their actions and external world,
manipulate objects, cause and effect
• Not able to use mental images
• Object permanence
Socio-emotional cognitive
development
• Cognitive development is an crucial aspect of
human growth, but it does not occur in a
social vacuum.
• As infants and children are acquiring
capacities to think and reason, they are also
gaining the basic experiences, skills and
emotions that permit them to form close
relationships and to interact effectively with
others in many settings.
At what age infants begin to
experience and demonstrate discrete
•
emotions?
Emotional and cognitive development occur simultaneously , and there are
many connections between them.
• Cant describe subjective feelings
• Focused on discrete facial expressions – outward signs of distinct
emotions
• Research- 2month demonstrate smile on human faces,
• 3-4 month they laughter, anger, sadness and surprise and are readily to
recognize to adults.
• Some expressions appears before others for eg-
• As they grow older, read the emotional expressions, for eg 3 month-
• 8-10 months-they actively seek information about the people’s feelings
and begin to demonstrate growing understanding of their own mental
states and those of others,
• 1 year old – social referencing –involves relying on another person’s
emotional reaction to appraise an uncertain situation. ( one years old
• Often look at their care-givers and depending on their reactions –will cry
or laugh -
Attachment
• Definition- A strong affectional bond between
infant and care givers.
• Do infants love their parents?
• 6-7 months-appear to have strong emotional
bond who care for them.
• And called attchment
• Q. what is the origin of initial love?
• Q. how it can be measured?
Mary Ainsworth’s & Lamb’s Strange
Situation Test
• Strange situation Test- A procedure for studying
attachment in which a caregivers leaves a child alone with a
stranger for a several minutes and then returns.
• - infants reactions
• This test was conducted by Bowlby (1969)
• Suggesting that attachment involves a balance
between the infant’s tendencies to seek to be near to their
care givers and their willingness to explore new
environment.
The quality of attachment, Bowlby contended, is revealed by
the degree to which infant behaves as if the care giver, when
present, serve as a secure base of operations.
4 distant pattern of attachment
• Secure Attachment
• Insecure/ Avoidant Attachment
• Insecure/ Ambivalent Attachment
• Disorganized or disoriented Attachment
Childhood
• Period between birth and adolescence
• Birth----------------------------- Adolescence
• I
• Childhood
• Early(2-6) Later(6-13)
Motor development
• Includes both
• Gross motor skills- are the abilities usually
acquired during childhood , they are foundation
skills that involve bigger movements using large
muscle groups- arm, legs, feet and trunks –to
move the body,
• Includes walking , riding, jumping, hopping and
running.
• 2 yrs- walk backwards and sideways
• 2-4- runs easily, walks upstairs
• Fine motor skills- are the activities in which
you use the small muscles in your hands and
wrists to make precise movements.
• Like grasping, picking up objects, holding a
crayon or a pencil
• For eg putting small objects in container.
• 2-4- hold crayons.
• 3-4- thread beads
Cognitive development – Pre-
operational stage
• Also called- Growth of Symbolic Play- play in which
children pretend that one object is another object.
• Extraordinary increase in mental representation.
• Mental images of objects and events-Sometimes
toddlers acquire between the ages of 18- 24 month .
• Verbal symbols- words---- language also develops.
• Pre-operational reflects that at this stage, children
don’t yet show much ability to use logic and mental
operations.
Symbolic Play
• This stage lasts until about age 7,
• Symbolic Play- in which they pretend that one object is
another – 3 shifts
1. Decentration ( play becomes less self-centred)
2. Decontextualization - Objects are made to substitute
for each other.
3. Integration- combing play action into increasingly
complex sequences, Socio-dramatic play( By the age
of 4-5 children build on other play ideas, create and
coordinate several roles and have a sophisticated
understanding of story lines.
• Their thought process are more advanced than
preceding stages , Piaget emphasized that these
children are still immature in several respects.
• They can use mental symbols, but their thinking
remains somewhat inflexible , illogical , fragmented,
and tied to specific contexts.
• Egocentrism
• Lack of Conservation- It's the understanding that a
quantity stays the same even if you change the size,
shape, or container it's in.
• Lack seriation- lack of understanding relational terms
such as lighter, larger, softer
Concrete operations
• Age 7-11 years
• Mastery of conservation
• Many important skills emerge- understanding of relational terms and seriation –
ability to order items along a quantitative dimension such as length or weight.
• Reversibility- jugdement about cause and effect also improve
• Logical thoughts
• Classification- ability to create relationship between things i:e general and specific
categories
• Spatial Reasoning – children’s understanding of space is more accurate than of
pre-schoolers , they can understand the concept of space in terms of distance and
direction.
• By the age of 8 they are able to do the mental rotations i:e they can align their
own frame of reference to match that of another person or object in different
orientation, which enables them to identify left and right for positions they do not
occupy.
• Cognitive map- The children of this age mentally represent large scale spaces,
such as their school or neighbourhood. This develops by middle childhood when
the students are able to draw and read maps .
Moral development
• Changes in the capacity to reasons about the
rightness or wrongness of various actions that
occur with age.
Kohlberg’s perspective experiment on
moral development
• Building on earlier views proposed by Piaget, kohlberg studied boys
and men and suggested that human beings move through three
distinct level of moral reasoning, each divided into 2 separate
phases.
• In order to determine the stage of moral development participants
had reached, kolhberg asked them to consider imaginary situations
that raised moral dilemmas for the persons involved. Participants
then indicated the course of action they would choose and explain
why?
• Kohlberg used moral development interview while proposing his
theory on moral development. This interview procedure helps to
access the more understanding of the people. The people are given
moral dilemmas, i:e they are presented the situation that evokes
conflicts between two moral values. Then they are asked what are
the main character in the situation should do and why? For example
“Heinz dilemma”
• According to Kohlberg, It is the way an individual
reasons about the dilemma not a content of the
response (whether or not to Steal) that
determines moral judgement maturity.
• Kohlberg’s theory in emphasises that the moral
development of a child proceeds in sequential
stages up to the adulthood. He suggested that
the human being move through three distinct
levels of moral development. Each level is again
divided into 2 separate stages.
Formal Operational Stage:11y and
older
• In this stage they develop the capacity for abstract, systematic, scientific
thinking.
1. Hypothetico- Deductive Reasoning- when faced with a problem, they
start with a hypothesis, or prediction about variables that might effect
an outcome, from which they deduce logical, testable inferences.
Inductive ( general principles from specific events)and Deductive reasoning
(general to specific)
2. Reflective thinking- able to criticise and evaluate his own ideas, solution,
or thought process.
3. Interpropostional Thinking- adolescents are able to evaluate the logic of
verbal statements, without any reference to the real world circumstances,
adolescents can determine whether statement is logical based solely on the
wording of the statement rather than having to observe or re-create the
actual scenario to determine if it is logical.
• 4. Abstract thoughts- the ability to understand concepts
that are real such as freedom but which are not directly
tied to concrete physical objects and experiences.
• Abstract thinking is the ability to absorb information from
our senses and make connections to the wider world.
• 5. Cognitive distortions-consequence of abstract thoughts (
ability to reflect on their own thoughts, combine with
physical and psychological changes that are undergoing,
means they more think about themselves.---
• egocentrism
• Imaginary audience
• Personal fable
