Pediatrics Ages And Stages

[Vangele Ioannidis]

Developmentalchange may occur as a result of genetically controlled processes, known as maturation,[4] or environmental factors and learning, but most commonly involves an interaction between the two. Development may also occur as a result of human nature and of human ability to learn from the environment.

Parents play a large role in a child's activities, socialization, and development; having multiple parents can add stability to a child's life and therefore encourage healthy development.[6] Another influential factor in children's development is the quality of their care. Child-care programs may be beneficial for childhood development such as learning capabilities and social skills.[7]

The optimal development of children is considered vital to society and it is important to understand the social, cognitive, emotional, and educational development of children. Increased research and interest in this field has resulted in new theories and strategies, especially with regard to practices that promote development within the school systems. Some theories seek to describe a sequence of states that compose child development.

Jean Piaget was a Swiss scholar who began his studies in intellectual development in the 1920s. Interested in the ways animals adapt to their environments, his first scientific article was published when he was 10 years old, and he pursued a Ph.D. in zoology, where he became interested in epistemology.[10] Epistemology branches off from philosophy and deals with the origin of knowledge, which Piaget believed came from Psychology. After travelling to Paris, he began working on the first "standardized intelligence test" at Alfred Binet laboratories, which influenced his career greatly. During this intelligence testing he began developing a profound interest in the way children's intellectualism works. As a result, he developed his own laboratory, where he spent years recording children's intellectual growth and attempting to find out how children develop through various stages of thinking. This led Piaget to develop four important stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2), preoperational stage (age 2 to 7), concrete-operational stage (ages 7 to 12), and formal-operational stage (ages 11 to 12, and thereafter).[10] Piaget concluded that adaption to an environment (behaviour) is managed through schemas and adaption occurs through assimilation and accommodation.[11]

In this stage, children between the age of 7 and 11 use appropriate logic to develop cognitive operations and begin applying this new way of thinking to different events they encounter.[10] Children in this stage incorporate inductive reasoning, which involves drawing conclusions from other observations in order to make a generalization.[14] Unlike in the preoperational stage, children can now change and rearrange mental images and symbols to form a logical thought, an example of this is "reversibility," where the child now knows to reverse an action by doing the opposite.[10]

The final stage of Piaget's cognitive development defines a child as now having the ability to "think more rationally and systematically about abstract concepts and hypothetical events".[10] Some strengths during this time are that the child or adolescent begins forming their identity and begins understanding why people behave the way they behave. While some weaknesses include the child or adolescent developing some egocentric thoughts, including the imaginary audience and the personal fable.[10] An imaginary audience is when an adolescent feels that the world is just as concerned and judgemental of anything the adolescent does as they themselves are; an adolescent may feel as if they are "on stage" and everyone is a critic and they are the ones being critiqued.[10] A personal fable is when the adolescent feels that he or she is a unique person and everything they do is unique. They feel as if they are the only ones that have ever experienced what they are experiencing and that they are invincible and nothing bad will happen to them, bad things only happen to other people.[10]

Vygotsky was strongly focused on the role of culture in determining the child's pattern of development.[15] He argued that "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals."[15]

Attachment theory, originating in the work of John Bowlby and developed by Mary Ainsworth, is a psychological, evolutionary and ethological theory that provides a descriptive and explanatory framework for understanding interpersonal relationships. Bowlby's observations led him to believe that close emotional bonds or "attachments" between an infant and their primary caregiver were an important requirement for forming "normal social and emotional development".[10]

Erikson, a follower of Freud, synthesized his theories with Freud's to create what is known as the "psychosocial" stages of human development. Spanning from birth to death, they focus on "tasks" at each stage that must be accomplished to successfully navigate life's challenges.[19]

John B. Watson's behaviorism theory forms the foundation of the behavioral model of development.[21] Watson explained human psychology through the process of classical conditioning, and he believed that all individual differences in behavior were due to different learning experiences.[22] He wrote extensively on child development and conducted research, such as the Little Albert experiment, which showed that a phobia could be created by classical conditioning. Watson was instrumental in the modification of William James' stream of consciousness approach to construct behavior theory.[23] He also helped bring a natural science perspective to child psychology by introducing objective research methods based on observable and measurable behavior.[23] Following Watson's lead, B.F. Skinner further extended this model to cover operant conditioning and verbal behavior.[24] Skinner used the operant chamber, or Skinner box, to observe the behavior of animals in a controlled situation and proved that behaviors are influenced by the environment. Furthermore, he used reinforcement and punishment to shape the desired behavior. Children's behavior can strongly depend on their psychological development.

Sigmund Freud divided development, from infancy onward, into five stages.[25] In accordance with his view that the sexual drive is a basic human motivation,[26] each stage centered around the gratification of the libido within a particular area, or erogenous zone, of the body.[27] He argued that as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects throughout their stages of development.[28][29] Each stage contains conflict which requires resolution to enable the child to develop.[30]

The use of dynamical systems theory as a framework for the consideration of development began in the early 1990s and has continued into the present.[31] This theory stresses nonlinear connections (e.g., between earlier and later social assertiveness) and the capacity of a system to reorganize as a phase shift that is stage-like in nature. Another useful concept for developmentalists is the attractor state, a condition (such as teething or stranger anxiety) that helps to determine apparently unrelated behaviors as well as related ones.[32] Dynamic systems theory has been applied extensively to the study of motor development; the theory also has strong associations with some of Bowlby's views about attachment systems. Dynamic systems theory also relates to the concept of the transactional process,[33] a mutually interactive process in which children and parents simultaneously influence each other, producing developmental change in both over time.[34]

The "core knowledge perspective" is an evolutionary theory in child development that proposes "infants begin life with innate, special-purpose knowledge systems referred to as core domains of thought".[35] These five domains are each crucial for survival, and prepare us to develop key aspects of early cognition, they are: physical, numerical, linguistic, psychological, and biological.[35]

The most influential theories emphasize social interaction's essential contribution to child development from birth (e.g., the theories of Bronfenbrenner,[9] Piaget,[10] Vygotsky[15]). It means that organisms with simple reflexes begin to cognize the environment in collaboration with caregivers. However, different viewpoints on this issue - the binding problem[36] and the primary data entry problem[37][38] - challenge the ability of children in this stage of development to meaningfully interact with the environment.[39][40]

Recent advances in neuroscience and wisdom from physiology and physics studies reconsider the knowledge gap on how social interaction provides cognition in newborns and infants. Developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello contributed to knowledge about the origins of social cognition in children by developing the notion of Shared intentionality.[41] He posed ideas about unaware processes during social learning after birth to explain processes in shaping Intentionality.[41] Other researchers developed the notion, by observing this collaborative interaction in psychophysiological research.[42][43][44]

This concept has been expanded to the intrauterine period. Research professor in bioengineering at Liepaja University Igor Val Danilov developed the idea of Michael Tomasello by introducing a hypothesis of neurophysiological processes occurring during Shared intentionality.[37][39][45] It explains the onset of childhood development, describing this cooperative interaction at different levels of bio-system complexity, from interpersonal dynamics to neuronal interactions.[39] The Shared intentionality hypothesis argues that nervous system synchronization provides non-local neuronal coupling in a mother-child pair, contributing to the proper development of the child's nervous system from the embryo onward.[39] From the cognitive development perspective, this non-local neuronal coupling enables the mother to indicate the relevant sensory stimulus of an actual cognitive problem to the child, helping the child to grasp the perception of the object.[39] A growing body of evidence in neuroscience supports the Shared intentionality approach. Hyperscanning research studies show inter-brain coordinated activity under conditions without communication in pairs while subjects are solving a shared cognitive task[46][47][48][49][50][51] This increased inter-brain activity is observed in pairs, which differs from the result in the condition where subjects solve a similar task alone. The significance of this knowledge is that although Shared intentionality enables social cooperation to be achieved in the unaware condition (unconsciously), it constitutes society. While this social interaction modality facilitates child development, it also contributes to grasping social norms and shaping individual values in children.[52]

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