Boston College Child Development Article Discussion

Article Summary:

Relate to Weekly Class Reading:

Chapter 11: Development (CLASS READING)

“Young Children Will Pass Up Rewards if They Know They can Explore Other Options, a New Study Suggests” https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/young-children-will-pass-up-rewards-if-they-know-they-can-explore-other-options-a-new-study-338572?fbclid=IwAR1vRHLLLuMjm3ddcezePUFRH-KQGBNUZ0I8WNTuC9v7U1O3_2wT08wKdvM (ARTICLE)

Prenatality: A Womb With a View

• Developmental psychology studies continuity and change across the life span.
• The prenatal stage of development begins when a sperm fertilizes an egg, producing a zygote. The zygote, which contains chromosomes from both the egg and the sperm, develops into an embryo at 2 weeks and then into a fetus at 8 weeks.
• Humans are born with underdeveloped brains, which is essential to the birth process and allows for adaptation to the social and physical environment after birth.
• The fetal environment has important physical and psychological effects. In addition to the food a pregnant woman eats, teratogens—agents that impair fetal development—can affect the fetus. The most common teratogens are tobacco and alcohol.
• The fetus can hear and becomes familiar with its mother’s voice.

Infancy and Childhood: Perceiving, Doing, and Thinking

• Infants have a limited range of vision, but they can see and remember objects that appear within it. They learn to control their bodies from the top down and from the center out.
• Infants slowly develop theories about how the world works. Piaget believed that these theories developed through four stages in which children learn basic facts about the world, such as the fact that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight and the fact that objects have enduring properties that are not changed by superficial transformations. Children also learn that their minds represent objects; hence objects may not be as they appear, and others may not see them as the child does.
• Hearing language about thoughts and feelings helps children acquire a theory of mind.
• Cognitive development is also driven by social interactions and infants have several abilities that allow them to learn from others.

Infancy and Childhood: Bonding and Helping

• At a very early age, human beings develop strong emotional ties to their primary caregivers. The quality of these ties—which are indexed by either secure, avoidant, ambivalent, or disorganized attachment styles—is determined both by the caregiver’s behavior and the child’s temperament.
• Piaget concluded that children’s reasoning about right and wrong develops in three ways. It is initially based on inviolable truths about the world, but expands to include concepts of fairness and equity. As they mature, children begin to consider the actor’s intentions as well as the extent to which the action obeys abstract moral principles. Kohlberg outlined a theory of morality that progresses from evaluation of an action’s consequences, to determination of whether it obeys social rules, and finally to how it aligns with core values.
• Infants seem to have some “moral sense,” such as an affinity toward kind people and a concern with fairness.

Adolescence: Minding the Gap

• Adolescence begins with puberty, the onset of sexual maturity of the human body. Puberty now occurs earlier than ever before, and the entrance of young people into adult society occurs later.
• Adolescents are more likely to do things that are risky or illegal, but they rarely inflict serious or enduring harm on themselves or others.
• Although most people are attracted to members of the opposite sex, some are not, and research suggests that biology and genetics play key roles in determining a person’s sexual orientation. Sex education has been shown to reduce risky sexual behavior.
• As adolescents seek to develop their adult identities, they seek increasing autonomy from their parents and become more peer oriented, forming single-sex cliques, followed by mixed-sex cliques. Finally, they pair off as couples.

Adulthood: Change We Can’t Believe In

• Performance on most cognitive tasks peaks when people are in their 20s, and older people develop a variety of strategies to compensate for their cognitive declines.
• Older adults are more oriented toward emotional satisfaction, which influences the way they attend to and remember information, the size and structure of their social networks, and their happiness.
• For most people, adulthood means leaving home, getting married, and having children. The responsibilities that parenthood entails present a significant challenge to people’s happiness.