Tags / 34 quotes from 2 sources
#child-development
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Babies are not blank slates
Babies are highly attuned to these perceptions of safety, though they may not look it. At first blush, babies seem mostly preoccupied with more mundane biological processes, like eating and pooping and spitting up on your shirt. This fooled a lot of researchers into believing…
Romanian orphans and the window for bonding
There’s a window of several years during which babies strive to create these bonds and establish perceptions of safety. If it doesn’t happen, they can suffer long-term emotional damage. In extreme cases, they can be scarred for life. We know this because of a powerful and…
The play that builds impulse control
the type of play that gives all the cognitive benefits is a type that focuses on impulse control and self-regulation—those executive-function behaviors discussed in the previous chapter as ingredients of intelligence, revealed by the cookie experiment. The data are so clear…
Children don't follow Piaget's stages
The brain appears to go through some commonly experienced developmental stages. But few in the brain science community completely agree on what they are. Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (who worked for a time with Alfred Binet, the IQ guy) came up with four phases of…
Kohlberg's three stages of moral reasoning
Kohlberg, the Harvard psychologist, believed that moral reasoning depended upon general cognitive maturity—another way of saying that these things take time. If, indeed, decisions have strong emotional roots, as we will explore, I would also argue that moral reasoning depends…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Teachers need both joy and theory
We need teachers who have both a true enjoyment of children and a true understanding of how they grow and learn. It seems that we have not been successful at presenting child development as a usable tool for working with young children more effectively. Perhaps we need to take…
Dewey's criteria for an educational experience
Dewey thought that rather than saying, “The children will enjoy this,” teachers need to ask the following questions when they plan activities for children: How does this expand on what these children already know? How will this activity help this child grow? What skills are…
A project that leaves children curious
This story is an example of what Dewey would call an educational experience. The teacher observed and asked questions to find out what the children already knew. She set up experiences for them to discover things they didn’t already know. She used her knowledge of child…
Erikson's eight ages of man
Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, which is called the Eight Ages of Man, covers the entire life span of a human being. It is Erikson’s idea that there is a task that must be accomplished at each stage of development. Successful resolution of each stage affects the…
Developmental tasks can always be renegotiated
He believed it was always possible to go back and renegotiate issues from a previous stage of development. He was convinced that the tasks of each stage continue to present themselves at times of crisis in love and work throughout our lives. Though it is true that basic trust…
Trust versus mistrust
Erikson’s first stage of psychosocial development, which takes place during the first year of life, is trust versus mistrust. Babies’ task during this time is to develop a sense of trust in themselves, in other people, and in the world around them. Erikson wrote about trust as…
Autonomy versus shame and doubt
Erikson’s second stage of psychosocial development, which takes place during the second and third year of life, is autonomy versus shame and doubt. The developmental task of this stage is to acquire a sense of autonomy (independence) without suffering extremes of shame and…
Toddlers between holding on and letting go
Erikson believed that toddlers struggle to achieve balance between appropriate holding on and letting go. Areas for these struggles include sharing with friends, relationships with parents and primary caregivers, independent toileting, and making choices. Erikson thought that…
Initiative versus guilt
The third and last stage of Erikson’s theory that addresses the early childhood years is initiative versus guilt. Most four-and five-year-olds are at this stage, which is therefore a key one for preschool and kindergarten teachers to know about. The developmental task of this…
Supporting initiative in preschoolers
To support children’s development of initiative in the third stage, Erikson says that teachers can encourage children to be as independent as possible; focus on gains as children practice new skills, not on the mistakes they make along the way; set expectations that are in line…
Piaget asked how children come to know
Although Piaget is frequently referred to as a psychologist, he was really an epistemologist (someone who studies the nature and beginning of knowledge). It is this piece of his work that has made Piaget a major contributor to the knowledge base of educational psychology. While…
Criticisms of Piaget
Piaget’s work has been a primary influence in preschool programs in the United States since the 1970s. The volumes of Piaget’s work provide an in-depth view of how children create knowledge. Unfortunately, much of his work is difficult to read and can be intimidating to busy…
Piaget's cognitive stages and Erikson's emotional ones
Nonetheless, Piaget’s stages of cognitive development have created our overall view of how children think in their early years, just as Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development have helped us understand how children develop emotionally.
Same stages, different ages
Piaget believed that children all pass through the same stages when developing their thinking skills. The age at which children accomplish these stages of development can vary. Because of this variation, charts outlining Piaget’s stages may also differ slightly.
Children build their own understanding
Piaget believed that children’s intellectual growth is based partly on physical development. He also believed that it is affected by children’s interactions with the environment. He did not believe that teachers can “teach” young children to understand a concept. He was certain…
Object permanence and the dropped spoon
Piaget believed that in the beginning, babies’ reactions to the world are purely reflexive (without thought). He said that intelligence began when the reactions became purposeful. For example, when we watch an infant lying below a crib gym, we notice that initially he shows a…
The egocentric preoperational child
According to Piaget, after the sensorimotor stage, children’s cognitive development enters the preoperational stage, which extends from the second year of life through age seven or eight. The preoperational stage is when children’s thinking differs most from adult thought…
Disequilibrium and accommodation
Piaget believed that in the preoperational stage, children form ideas from their direct experiences in life. This is why telling children something is less effective than finding a way to help them think their own way through a problem. For example, if a child sees birds fly…
Conservation of number and the spread-out coins
Because preoperational children tend to believe what they see, they do not yet have a firm grasp of qualities belonging to the objects in their world. For example, they confuse “heavy” with “large.” Due to inexperience, most young children would initially be surprised that a…
Ironing the baby: single-focus thinking
Preoperational children also tend to focus on one attribute of an object or person at a time. It is hard for them to think of their mother as their grandma’s daughter, for instance. This single-focus thinking is revealed in children’s conversations, if adults know how to listen…
Preschoolers can't hold several qualities at once
Clearly, the children do not make the connection that an iron might be a good tool to use on clothes or curly hair but not on babies. These children are not cruel or limited, but they are incapable of holding several qualities of an object or situation in their minds…
Wrinkles and irons, one aspect at a time
They are focusing on one aspect of the baby—the baby has wrinkles, and one aspect of the iron—the iron is used to get wrinkles out. The children do not naturally consider at the same time that the iron is hot, hot enough to hurt, and that a baby has skin like theirs that could…
Concrete operations and reversibility
When children enter Piaget’s stage of concrete operations at about age seven, many changes in their thought patterns are visible. At this age (usually from about seven through eleven or twelve) children possess the characteristic of reversibility, which allows them to reverse…
Formal operations and hypothetical thinking
The final stage Piaget outlined is formal operations. This stage begins around age eleven or twelve and is marked by the ability to think logically and in hypothetical terms. According to Piaget, once this stage is reached, young people can wrestle with such questions as “Is it…
The zone of proximal development
One of the most important concepts of Vygotsky’s theory is that of the zone of proximal development, or ZPD. Vygotsky defined this as the distance between the most difficult task a child can do alone and the most difficult task a child can do with help. He believed that a child…
Scaffolding a child's learning
Vygotsky referred to the assistance a teacher or peer offers a child as scaffolding. A house painter working on a house uses a scaffold to reach parts of the house that would otherwise be out of reach. In the same way, adults and peers can help a child “reach” a new concept or…
Vygotsky versus Piaget on stretching children
Curriculum planning is perhaps the area most affected by Vygotsky’s theory. Unlike Piaget, who thought children’s cognitive learning was more internal than interactive, Vygotsky believed that interaction had a huge impact on cognitive development. Until Vygotsky’s work became…
Scaffolding self-regulation in young children
In addition, research shows that children develop the foundational skills for self-regulation in the first five years of life. These findings have many implications for early childhood education and highlight the important role teachers play in helping young children develop…
Mind in Society (reference)
Vygotsky, Lev. 1978. Mind in Society. Edited by Michael Cole et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.