Child Development

It is much easier to measure the development of a child's physical growth compared to its psychological growth. Children usually find their boundaries of what is acceptable behavior at an early age. How they react to this boundary is usually determined by what living situation they are in, how they are being raised, and also genetics. There are different viewpoints on what has a bigger impact on how a child will develop, and this is called Nature vs. Nurture.

The nature argument actually came a decade or two before the nurture argument, at least in the major ideas and creators of them. In late 19th century, Charles Darwin focused majorly on the nature side of development. Darwin even closely studied his children. Just a few years later in the early 1900's G. Stanley Hall began the studies of early childhood experiences in relation to development. This was called the theory of "psychoanalysis". This theory was new at this time having just been developed by Sigmund Freud.

There are three stages of childhood. The first obviously being infancy, this is from when you're born to about 2 years old. The second stage of childhood is early childhood. Early childhood is from 2 or 3 years old until around 6 or 7. The last stage of childhood is middle childhood. Middle childhood is from 6 or 7 to approximately 12. These stages are more like benchmarks in the way that there is no significant change from 6 years old and 364 days and 7 years old, but there is a significant change in a child when you compare the 2-6 time to the 7-12 time.

There are also three ways that behavior is learned and determined. The first kind of learning is when behavior is answered with a reward or punishment. The reward encourages whatever that action was, increasing the chances that it will be repeated or "positive reinforcement". The punishment on the other hand decreases the chance that action will be repeated. The second kind of behavior learning is called "classical conditioning". This happens when a child makes a connection between two events. This is seen when an infant is placed in whatever the normal feeding position is for that baby, it will often start sucking even before given a bottle. The third type of learning in childhood development is imitation. This is seen when someone inherits their parents' accents or mannerisms.

Early in psychology, people thought that the nature and nurture aspects of child development worked separately and had little to do with each other, often favoring one theory over the other as to what had