Week 1 Flashcards
What is child development ?
Child development focuses on the scientific study of systematic processes of change and stability in children
What were the first formal efforts of child development ?
“baby biographies” or “baby diaries”
What are modern tools used in child development ?
sensitive intruments and digital technology
What are sensitive instruments ?
intruments that measure eye movement, heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension
What digital technology is used ?
sensitive video recordings and computer based analyses
What do theories tell us ?
Theories tells us what questions to ask, where to look for answers, and how to interpret what we find
What does social construction mean ?
a concept or practice that is an invention of a particular culture or society
What are the periods of development ?
- Prenatal
- Infancy & Toddlerhood
- Early Childhood
- Middle Childhood
- Adolesence
What time span does each stage occur at ?
- Prenatal (conception - birth)
- Infancy and Toddlerhood (birth - 3yrs)
- Early Childhood (3yrs - 6 yrs)
- Middle Childhood (6yrs - 11yrs)
- Adolesence (11 - 20)
What are the domains of development ?
- Physical
- Cognitive
- Psychosocial
What are the influences of development ?
- Heredity, Environment and Maturation
- Contexts of Development
- Normative and Non-normative influences
- Timing of Influences
- Imprinting, critical vs sensitive periods, plasticity
What is involved in the influence of Heredity, Environment, and Maturation ?
- Genes and the environment
- Prenatal development (womb)
- Nature and nurture
- Experience-based brain development
What do Heredity, Environment, and Maturation mean/involve individually ?
- Heredity: inborn traits and characteristics from biological parents
- Environment: outside the body (e.g. womb and so on)
- Maturation: The unfolding of a universal, natural sequence, of physical changes and behaviour patterns
What is involved in the influence of Contexts of Development ?
- Family diversity, various structures
- Culture (invidiualistic vs collectivist), ethnicity, and race
- SES
- Climate change
- Historical contexts - politics, COVID, BLM, war
- Neighbourhood, community
What is the nuclear family ?
2 generational household unit consisting of 1 or 2 parents and their biological, adopted, or step children
What is an extended family ?
a multigenerational kinship network of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and more distant relatives, sometimes living together
What is polygamy ?
family structure in which 1 spouse marries more than one person
What is culture ?
- a society’s or groups total way of life
- e.g: traditions, customs, knowledge, law, etc
What is individualistic culture ?
place a priority on personal goals and encourage people to view themselves as distinct individuals
What is a collectivist culture ?
concerned with collective goals and group dynamics and respect their relationship with others
What is an ethnic group ?
consists of people united by a distinctive culture, ancestry, religion, language, or national origin
How does ethnicity affect development ?
Ethnic and cultural patterns affect child developemnt by their influence on the composition of household, economic and social resources, etc
What is race ?
a group of humans distinguished by thier outward physical characteristics or social qualitites from other groups
What does ethnic glass mean ?
overgeneralization that observes or blurts variations withing hetergeneous group
e.g: term “Hispanic”
What is SES ?
combination of economic and social factors , that describe an individual or family, including income, education, and occupation
What are risk factors ?
conditions that increase the likelihood of a negative outcome
What are normative influences ?
biological or environmental events that afffect society in similar ways
What are examples of normative influences ?
- Age related - puberty (biological events)
- History related - COVID
What is a cohort ?
a group of people born at about the same time who experiences similar influences
What is a historical generation ?
A group of people who experience the events at a formative time in their lives (e.g.: schooling during COVID)
What are nonnormative influences ?
atypical or unusual events disrupting life cycle such as accidents, poverty, and death
What is imprinting ?
instinctive form of learning thought to be automatic and irreversible
e.g: animal forms an attatchment to the first moving object it sees
What are critical periods ?
A critical period is a speficifc time when a given event, or its absence, has a profund and specific impact on development
e.g: imprinting or limb development and teratogens
What are sensitive periods ?
time in development when a developing person is especially responsive to certain kinds of experiences
What is plasticity ?
The modifiability of the brain through experience
What are the issues in development ?
- Nature vs Nurture
- Active and Passive Developmental Processes
- Continuous or Discontinuous Development
- An emerging consensus
What is nature (heredity) vs nurture (environment) ?
Heredity, inborn traits and characteristics inhered from biological parents AND the environment from the womb onwards (no debate)
What are passive developmental processes ?
- organismic; discontinuous
- Reactive
- Responding to enviromental stimuli
- Sponge soaking up experiences and responding as a result - a blank state
- “sum of its parts”
What are active developmental processes ?
- mechanistic; continuous
- Set own motion
- Intiative
- Change is internal
- Environmntal influence speed or slow development
- Create own experiences, active
What is continuous (quantitivative) development ?
- mechanistic
- change is gradual and incremental
- quantitative change: a change in amount or number (e.g: height, weight, etc)
What is discontinous (qualitative) development ?
- organismic
- see development occuring in a series of distinct stages
- qualitative change: change in kind, structure, or organization
What is envolved in the emerging consensus ?
- All domains of development are interrelated
- Typical development includes a wide variety of individual differences
- Influences are bidirectional
- Historical and cultural contexts strongly influence development
- Early expereince is important, but children can be remarkably resilient
- Development in childhood affects development throughout the lifespan
