infant education
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psychological development and societal directives. The adolescent must find an orientation to life that not only fulfills the attributes of the self but at the same time is consistent with what society expects; that is, a role cannot be self-destructive (e.g.,sustained fasting) or socially disapproved (e.g., criminal behaviour). In the search for an identity, the adolescent must discover what he believes in and what his attitudes and ideals are, for commitment to a role entails, to a greater or lesser degree, commitment to a set of values.
Development In Childhood
Language
The capacity for language usually emerges in infants soon after the first birthday, and they make enormous progress in this area during their second year. Language is a symbolic form of communication that involves, on the one hand, the comprehension of words and sentences and, on the other, the expression of feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The basic units of language are phonemes, morphemes, and words. Phonemes are the basic sounds that are combined to make words; most languages have about 30 phonemes, which correspond roughly to the sounds of the spoken letters of the alphabet. Although one-month-old infants can discriminate among various phonemes, they are themselves unable to produce them. By 4 to 6 months of age, however, infants usually express vowellike elements in their vocalizations, and by 11–12 months of age they are producing clear consonant-vowel utterances like“dada"and“mama.”
Virtually all children begin to comprehend some words several months before they speak their own first meaningful words. In fact, one- to three-year-olds typically understand five times as many words as they actually use in everyday speech. The average infant speaks his first words by 12–14 months; these are generally simple labels for persons, objects, or actions; e.g., “mommy,” “milk,” “go,” “yes,” “no,” and “dog.” By the time the child reaches his 18th month, he has a speaking vocabulary of about 50 words. The single words he uses may stand for entire sentences. Thus, the word “eat” may signify “Can I eat now?” and “shoe” may mean “Take off my shoe.” The child soon begins to use two-word combinations for making simple requests or for describing the environment: “Want juice,” “Daddy gone,” “Mommy soup.” These simple statements are abbreviated versions of adult sentences. “Where is the ball?” becomes “where ball?”; the sentence “That’s the ball” becomes “that ball.” These early two-word combinations consist mostly of nouns, verbs, and a few adjectives. Articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, or, but), and prepositions (in, on, under) are almost completely absent at this stage. In their telegraphic sentences, children usually place the subject, object, and verb in an order that is correct within certain broad limits for their native language. For example, an American child will say “want ball” rather than “ball want” for a sentence meaning “I want the ball
In the few months before the child’s second birthday, there is a major increase in the size of his vocabulary and in the variety of his two- and three-word combinations. By two years of age a child’s comprehension vocabulary contains an average of about 270 words. By the end of the second year, he understands interrogatives such as “where,” “who,” and “what,” and by three years of age he can correctly interpret the respective use of the words “this” or “that” and “here” or “there,” as well as the terms “in front of” and “behind.” By three years of age children are learning at least two new words a day and possess a working vocabulary of 1,000 words.
Children in their second and third years sometimes use words as overextensions; “doggie,” for instance, may refer to a variety of four-legged animals as well as to dogs, and the word “daddy” may be used in reference to all men. This occurs simply because, although the infant detects the differences among various types of animals, he has only one word (“dog”) in his vocabulary to apply to them. Overextensions are more common in speech than in comprehension, however; the child who uses the word “apple” for all round objects has no difficulty pointing to an apple in a picture illustrating several round objects. Other words are underextended; that is, they are defined too narrowly. Some infants will use the word “car” to refer only to cars moving on the street but not to cars standing still or to a picture of a car
Children learn the rules of syntax (i.e., the grammatical rules specifying how words are combined in a sentence) with very little explicit instruction or tutoring from adults. They begin to flesh out their noun-verb sentences with less critical words such as prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and auxiliary verbs. Children follow a typical sequence in their acquisition of grammatical rules, depending on the language they are learning to use. In English, a child first masters the grammatical rules for the present tense (e.g., “I want”) and begins to use the present progressive ending (“-ing”) and the plural. This is followed by mastery of the irregular past tense (“I made,” “I had”), possessives (my, mine, his), articles (a, an, the), and the regular past tense (“I walked,” “he stopped”). These successes are followed by mastery of the third person present tense (“he goes”) and auxiliary verbs (“I’m walking,” “we’re playing”).
Deaf children learning sign language from deaf-mute parents show in their signs the same course of development that is apparent in the speech of children with normal hearing. Deaf, like hearing, children make their first signs for objects and later display signs for more complex ideas like “Mommy eat” or “Daddy coat.”
By the middle of the third year, children tend to use more sentences containing four, five, or six words, and by the fourth year they can converse in adultlike sentences. Finally, five- and six-year-olds demonstrate metalinguistic awareness—i.e., a mastery of the complex rules of grammar and meaning. They can differentiate between sounds that are real words and those that are not—e.g., they regard “apple” as a word but reject “oope” as a word. They can tell the difference between grammatically correct and incorrect sentences and will make spontaneous corrections in their speech; that is to say, if a child makes a speech error, he recognizes it and will say the phrase or sentence correctly the second time.
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A major disagreement among theories of language acquisition is their relative emphasis on the role of maturation of the brain, on the one hand, and of social interaction, on the other. The most popular view assumes that biological factors provide a strong foundation for language acquisition but that infants’ social interaction with others is absolutely necessary if language is to develop. The special biological basis of language is supported by the fact that deaf children who are not exposed to a sign language invent a symbol system that is similar in structure to that developed by hearing children. But interaction with other people is also crucial. Even during the first year, children’s production and perception of speech sounds are increasingly shaped by the linguistic environment around them, reflecting their exquisite sensitivity and susceptibility to human speech. Indeed, the amount and variety of verbal stimulation is a critical factor in language development, as is the adult caregivers’ sensitivity to an infant’s own vocalizations; mothers who ask questions and encourage their infants’ vocal responses have children who show a more advanced language development.
Cognitive development
The mental activities involved in the acquisition, processing, organization, and use of knowledge are collectively termed cognition. These activities include selective attention, perception, discrimination, interpretation, classification, recall and recognition memory, evaluation, inference, and deduction. The cognitive structures that are involved in these processes include schemata, images, symbols, concepts or categories, and propositions. A schema is an abstract representation of the distinctive characteristics of an event. These representations are not photographic copies or visual images but are more like schematic blueprints that emphasize the arrangement of a set of salient elements, which supply the schema with distinctiveness and differentiate it from similar events. The child’s ability to recognize the face of another person is mediated by a schema, for example. Young children already display a remarkable ability to generate and store schemata. Another type of early cognitive unit is the image; this is a mental picture, or the reconstruction of a schema, that preserves the spatial and temporal detail of the event
Symbols represent the next level of abstraction from experience; they are arbitrary names for things and qualities. Common examples of symbols are the names for objects, letters, and numbers. Whereas a schema or image represents a specific experience, such as a sight or sound, a symbol is an arbitrary representation of an event. The letter A is a symbol, and children use schemata, images, and symbols in their mastery of the alphabet. Symbols are used in the development of higher cognitive units called concepts. A concept, or category, may be thought of as a special kind of symbol that represents a set of attributes common to a group of symbols or images. The concept represents a common attribute or meaning from a diverse array of experiences, while a symbol stands for a particular class of events. Concepts are used to sort specific experiences into general rules or classes, and conceptualthinking refers to a person’s subjective manipulations of those abstract classes.
Jean Piaget tried to trace specific stages in children’s progressive use of symbols and concepts to manipulate their environment. According to Piaget, two of the four stages of cognitive development occur during childhood: the preoperational stage (2 to 7 years), in which the child learns to manipulate the environment by means of symbolic thought and language; and the concrete-operational stage (7 to 12 years), in which the beginnings of logic appear in the form of classifications of ideas and an understanding of time and number. An important structure in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is the operation, which is a cognitive structure that the child uses to transform, or “operate on,” information. Children learn to use operations that are flexible and fully reversible in thought; the ability to plan a series of moves in a game of checkers and then mentally retrace one’s steps to the beginning of that sequence is one such example of an operation.
It is important to make a distinction between the knowledge and skills a child possesses, called competence, and the demonstration of that knowledge in actual problem-solving situations, called performance. Children often possess knowledge that they do not use even when the occasion calls for it. Adapting to new challenges, according to Piaget, requires two complementary processes. The first, assimilation, is the relating of a new event or object to cognitive structures the child already possesses. A five-year-old who has a concept of a bird as a living thing with a beak and wings that flies will try to assimilate the initial perception of an ostrich to his concept of bird. Accommodation, the second process, occurs when the information presented does not fit the existing concept. Thus, once the child learns that the ostrich does not fly, he will accommodate to that fact and modify his concept of bird to include the fact that some birds do not fly.
One of the central victories of cognitive development occurs during ages five to seven and, according to Piaget, marks the child’s entry to the concrete-operational stage. This is the ability to reasonsimultaneously about the whole and about part of the whole. For instance, if an eight-year-old is shown eight yellow candies and four brown candies and asked, “Are there more yellow candies or more candies,” he will say that there are more candies, whereas a five-year-old is likely to respond incorrectly that there are more yellow candies.
A child who has reached the concrete-operational stage is able to solve several other new kinds of logical problems. For example, a five-year-old who is shown two balls of clay of the same size and shape will tell an adult that they have the same amount of clay, but, when the experimenter rolls one of the balls into a long but thin sausage, the five-year-old will tend to say that the untouched sphere has more clay in it than the sausage-shaped object does. A seven-year-old, however, shows what is called the ability to conserve; when presented with the same problem, he will recognize that the two pieces still have the same amount of clay in them, based on his awareness that liquids and solids do not change in amount or quantity merely because their external shape changes. The seven-year-old is able to reverse an event in thought and knows that the sausage can be reshaped back into the original ball without a loss or gain in the total amount of clay. The knowledge that one can reverse one state of affairs into a prior state, which is called conservation, is a mark of this new stage of development.
Another cognitive advance children make during the concrete-operational stage is the knowledge that hierarchical relationships can exist within categories. This is illustrated by the ability to arrange similar objects according to some quantified dimension, such as weight or size. This ability is called seriation. A seven-year-old can arrange eight sticks of different lengths in order from shortest to longest, indicating that the child appreciates a relation among the different sizes of the objects. Seriation is crucial to understanding the relations between numbers and hence to learning arithmetic. Children in the concrete-operational stage also appreciate the fact that terms such as taller, darker, and bigger refer to a relation between objects rather than to some absolute characteristic.
One implication of the stage of concrete operations is that the child is now able to compare himself with other children in such qualities as size, attractiveness, intelligence, courage, and so on. Hence, the formation of the child’s sense of identity, or self-concept, proceeds at a faster rate because he is able to compare his characteristics with those of other children.
The final stage of cognitive development, called the stage of formal operations, begins at about age 12 and characterizes the logical processes of adolescents and adults. A child who has reached this stage of logical thinking can reason about hypothetical events that are not necessarily in accord with his experience. He shows a willingness to think about possibilities, and he can analyze and evaluate events from a number of different possible perspectives. A second hallmark of the stage of formal operations is the systematic search for solutions. Faced with a novel problem, the adolescent is able to generate a number of possible means of solving it and then select the most logical, probable, or successful of his hypotheses. The formal thinking of adolescents and adults thus tends to be self-consciously deductive, rational, and systematic. Finally, adolescents typically begin to examine their own thinking and evaluate it while searching for inconsistencies and fallacies in their own beliefs and values concerning themselves, society, and nature.
Symbolic ability and imitation
Symbolic ability, which appears at about one year of age, can be observed when a child imaginatively treats an object as something other than it is—pretending a wooden block is a car or using a cup as a hat. By the middle of their second year, children impart new functions to objects; they may turn a doll upside down and pretend it is a salt shaker or try to use a wooden block as if it were a chair. Many three-year-olds are capable of simple metaphor and will play with two wooden balls of different size as if they were symbolic of a parent and a child. Children’s drawings also become symbolic during the second and third years and begin to contain forms that look like (or at least are intended to represent) animals, people, and various objects.
Imitation may be defined as behaviour that selectively duplicates that of another person. Like symbolism, it is a basic capacity that is inherent in human nature. Infants engage in selective imitation by seven or eight months of age, and their imitations become more frequent and complex during the next two to three years. One-year-olds already imitate the gestures, speech sounds, and instrumental actions that they see performed by people around them. They also become capable of imitating an act some time after they have actually observed it; for example, one-year-olds may imitate an action they witnessed one day earlier. Children often imitate the instrumental behaviours of parents, like cleaning or feeding, but are less likely to imitate emotional expressions or parental behaviours that have no instrumental goal. Children are also more likely to imitate their parents than their siblings or characters they see on television.
Children imitate others for a variety of reasons. They are most likely to imitate those acts over which they feel some uncertainty regarding their ability to perform. If they are too uncertain, they will cry; if they are absolutely certain they can perform an act, they are less likely to imitate it. Children also imitate actions that win parental approval or attention or that enhance their similarity to other persons they want to be like (e.g., a boy imitating his father).
Memory
Memory, which is central to all cognitive processes, involves both the storage of traces of past experience and the retrieval of that stored information at a later time. It is useful to distinguish between short-term and long-term memory processes. Short-term, or working, memory may be defined as referring to traces available for a maximum of 30 seconds immediately after stimulation, but typically for a much shorter period. The ability to remember a phone number while redialing it is a good example of short-term memory. Long-term memory, or permanent memory, refers to stored information that is potentially available for relatively long periods of time, extending up to a lifetime.
Two-year-olds can usually hold in short-term memory only one or two independent units of information, while 15-year-olds can remember seven or eight units (numbers or words, for example). Both children and adults tend to perform much better when they have to recognize than when they have to recall, but this difference is most dramatic in young children. Thus, a four-year-old child can usually recognize almost all of 12 pictures he has seen but may be able to recall only 2 or 3 of them. A 10-year-old, by contrast, who recognizes the 12 pictures can also recall as many as 8 of them.
Besides improvements in capacity, older children demonstrate an increasing speed of recall and can search their memory for information more quickly. Another improvement in memory ability is selectivity. As they grow older, children become adept at choosing more important items to remember—i.e., at distinguishing fundamental from merely incidental information. In addition, older children acquire more efficient strategies for the coding, rehearsal, and retrieval of information that younger children do not possess. By eight or nine years of age, for example, most children know that it is easier to relearn a text passage than to learn it for the first time. Generally, older children are better able to plan their own behaviour, formulate problems, monitor their ability, control distraction and anxiety, and evaluate the quality of their cognitive products. And because older children have a more accurate understanding of their own abilities, they are better able to assess and predict the cognitive abilities of other people.
The makeup of intelligence
Controversy exists over whether children can be said to differ in a unitary abstract ability called intelligence or whether each child might better be described as possessing a set of specific cognitive abilities. Some children are especially proficient with verbal problems and less proficient at problems involving spatial relations or mathematical reasoning, for example. The American psychologist J.P. Guilford suggests that cognitive abilities can be classified along three dimensions: the content of the information (symbolic, semantic, behavioral, or figural); the operation performed on the content (memory, evaluation, convergence, divergence, or cognition); and finally the product of the cognitive work (a unit, a class, a relation, a system, a transformation, or an implication). This theory predicts that there are a very large number of different cognitive profiles, not just one.
Emotional and social development
Personality traits
Although earlier theorists believed that personality traits evident in the first three years of life would persist into later life, research indicates that this claim is exaggerated. Long-term studies that follow children from infancy through adolescence and into adulthood indicate that lasting personality traits do not emerge until after six or seven years of age and that most of the differences seen in children in the first three years of life are not preserved. The one possible exception to this claim holds for the temperamental qualities of inhibitedand uninhibited to the unfamiliar. Children who are extremely inhibited or uninhibited in the first three years of life are more likely than others to retain those qualities through late childhood.
Self-awareness and empathy
Perhaps the most important aspect of children’s emotional development is a growing awareness of their own emotional states and the ability to discern and interpret the emotions of others. The last half of the second year is a time when children start becoming aware of their own emotional states, characteristics, abilities, and potential for action; this phenomenon is called self-awareness. Two-year-old children begin to describe their own actions as they are performing them, can recognize a reflection of themselves in the mirror, and may become possessive with their toys for the first time. This growing awareness of and ability to recall one’s own emotional states leads to empathy, or the ability to appreciate the feelings and perceptions of others. Young children’s dawning awareness of their own potential for action inspires them to try to direct (or otherwise affect) the behaviour of others. This change is often accompanied by the urge to test the standards of behaviour held by parents, and, as a result, children’s second and third years are often called the “terrible twos.”
With age, children acquire the ability to understand the perspective, or point of view, of other people, a development that is closely linked with the empathic sharing of others’ emotions. Even six-year-olds are aware that other people have different perspectives, thoughts, and feelings from their own, and they are able to empathize with the characteristics they observe in others. By eight to nine years of age a child recognizes that people can become aware of others’ point of view, and he likewise knows that others can become aware of his own perspective. By 10 years of age the child can consider a social interaction simultaneously from his own point of view and from that of another person. Owing to this increased awareness, children from age seven on are more conscious of what others think of them and show more concern over others’ opinion of their behaviour. Finally, older children understand that a person’s genuine emotions can be stronger or different from those he actually reveals, and they thus appreciate that a person can disguise his emotions.
One major factor underlying these changes is the child’s increasing cognitive sophistication. For example, in order to feel the emotion of guilt, a child must appreciate the fact that he could have inhibited a particular action of his that violated a moral standard. The awareness that one can impose a restraint on one’s own behaviour requires a certain level of cognitive maturation, and, therefore, the emotion of guilt cannot appear until that competence is attained.
A moral sense
Empathy and other forms of social awareness are important in the development of a moral sense. Moralityembraces a person’s beliefs about the appropriateness or goodness of what he does, thinks, or feels. During the last few months of the second year, children develop an appreciation of right and wrong; these representations are called moral standards. Children show a concern over dirty hands, torn clothes, and broken cups, suggesting that they appreciate that certain events violate adult standards. By age two most children display mild distress if they cannot meet standards of behaviour imposed by others. After age two they will playfully violate rules on acceptable behaviour in order to test the validity of that standard. One of the signs of the child’s growing morality is the ability to control behaviour and the willingness to postpone immediate gratification of a desire.
Childhood is thus the time at which moral standards begin to develop in a process that often extends well into adulthood. The American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberghypothesized that people’s development of moral standards passes through stages that can be grouped into three moral levels. At the early level, that of preconventional moral reasoning, the child uses external and physical events (such as pleasure or pain) as the source for decisions about moral rightness or wrongness; his standards are based strictly on what will avoid punishment or bring pleasure. At the intermediate level, that of conventional moral reasoning, the child or adolescent views moral standards as a way of maintaining the approval of authorityfigures, chiefly his parents, and acts in accordance with their precepts. Moral standards at this level are held to rest on a positive evaluation of authority, rather than on a simple fear of punishment. At the third level, that of postconventional moral reasoning, the adult bases his moral standards on principles that he himself has evaluated and that he accepts as inherently valid, regardless of society’s opinion. He is aware of the arbitrary, subjective nature of social standards and rules, which he regards as relative rather than absolute in authority.
Thus the bases for justifying moral standards pass from avoidance of punishment to avoidance of adult disapproval and rejection to avoidance of internal guilt and self-recrimination. The person’s moral reasoning also moves toward increasingly greater social scope (i.e., including more people and institutions) and greater abstraction (i.e., from reasoning about physical events such as pain or pleasure to reasoning about values, rights, and implicit contracts). This transition from one stage to another is characterized by gradual shifts in the most frequent type of reasoning; thus, at any given point in life, a person may function at more than one stage at the same time. Different people pass through the stages at varying rates. Finally, different people are likely to reach different levels of moral thinking in their lives, raising the possibility that some people may never reach the later, more abstract, stages.
The evidence for these theoretical stages comes from children’s answers to moral dilemmas verbally presented to them by researchers, rather than their actual behaviour in time of conflict. Scientists have argued that many children display a more profound moral understanding than is evident in their responses on such tests. Others have argued that because even rather young children are capable of showing empathy with the pain of others, the inhibition of aggressive behaviour arises from this moral affect rather than from the mere anticipation of punishment. Some scientists have found that children differ in their individual capacity for empathy, and, therefore, some children are more sensitive to moral prohibitions than others. There is evidence suggesting that temperamentally inhibited children whose parents impose consistent socialization demands on them experience moral affect more intensely than do other children.
Self-concept, or identity
One of the most important aspects of a child’s emotional development is the formation of his self-concept, or identity—namely, his sense of who he is and what his relation to other people is. The most conspicuous trend in children’s growing self-awareness is a shift from concrete physical attributes to more abstract characteristics. This shift is apparent in those characteristics children emphasize when asked to describe themselves. Young children—four to six years of age—seem to define themselves in terms of such observable characteristics as hair colour, height, or their favourite activities. But within a few years, their descriptions of themselves shift to more abstract, internal, or psychological qualities, including their competences and skills relative to those of others. Thus, as children approach adolescence, they tend to increasingly define themselves by the unique and individual quality of their feelings, thoughts, and beliefs rather than simply by external characteristics.
One of the earliest and most basic categories of self to emerge during childhood is based on gender and is called sex-role identity. Children develop a rudimentary gender identity by age three, having learned to classify themselves and others as either males or females. They also come to prefer the activities and roles traditionally assigned to their own sex; as early as two years of age, most children select toys and activities that fit the sex-role stereotypes of their culture, and during the preschool years they begin to select same-sex playmates. Another component of a child’s self-concept concerns the racial, ethnic, or religious group of which he is a part. A child who is a member of a distinctive or specific group has usually created a mental category for that group by five to six years, and children from ethnic minorities tend to be more aware of ethnic differences than are nonminority children.
One of the important processes that mediates a child’s self-concept is that of identification; this involves the child’s incorporation of the characteristics of parents or other persons by adopting their appearance, attitudes, and behaviour. Children tend to identify with those persons to whom they are emotionally attached and whom they perceive to be similar to themselves in some way. They seem to identify most strongly with parents who are emotionally warm or who are dominant and powerful. The role models children adopt may have negative as well as positive characteristics, however, and can thus influence children in undesirable as well as beneficial ways.
More than 80 percent of American children have one or more sisters or brothers, and the presence of these siblings can influence a child’s personality development. Parents tend to be more involved and attentive toward the firstborn, stimulating him more (in the absence of other children) but then expecting and demanding more from him (as their oldest child). Because of this, firstborns tend to identify more closely with their parents, conform more closely to their values and expectations, and generally identify more closely with authority than do their younger siblings. Firstborns tend to be more strongly motivated toward school achievement, are more conscientious, more prone to guilt feelings, and less aggressive than those born later. A high proportion of eminent scientists and scholars have been firstborns, perhaps owing to the aforementioned traits, but firstborns also tend to be less receptive to ideas that challenge a popular ideological or theoretical position.
Peer socialization
During the first two years of life, infants do not spontaneously seek out other children for interaction or for pleasure. Although six-month-old infants may look at and vocalize to other infants, they do not initiate reciprocal social play with them. However, between two and five years of age, children’s interactions with each other become more sustained, social, and complex. Solitary or parallel play is dominant among three-year-olds, but this strategy shifts to group play by five years.
Problems in development
An estimated 6–10 percent of all children develop serious emotional or personality problems at some point. These problems tend to fall into two groups: those characterized by symptoms of extreme anxiety, withdrawal, and fearfulness, on the one hand, and by disobedience, aggression, and destruction of property on the other. The former set is called internalizing; the latter is termed externalizing. As indicated earlier, some fearful, timid, socially withdrawn children inherit a temperamental predisposition to develop this form of behaviour; other children, however, acquire it as a result of a stressful upbringing, experiences, or social circumstances.
Sex-linked differences in aggression are evident from about two or three years of age, with boys being more aggressive than girls. Although young children sometimes fight and quarrel, usually over possessions, such behaviour is generally not a serious problem in the first three or four years of life. Aggressive behaviour can become a serious problem in older children, however, and by seven years of age a small proportion of boys do display an extreme and consistent tendency to be aggressive with others. Children who are highly aggressive by age seven or eight tend to remain so later in life; these children are three times more likely to have police records as adults than are other children. By age 30 significantly more members of this group had been convicted of criminal behaviour, were aggressive with their spouses, and abused or severely punished their own children. Although biological factors can play a role in producing extreme aggression, the role of the child’s social environment is critical. Parents’ use of extreme levels of physical punishment, imposed inconsistently, is associated with high levels of aggression in children, as are extreme levels of parental permissiveness toward a child’s own aggressive acts. Psychologists frequently help parents deal with aggressive children by teaching them to observe what they do and to enforce rules consistently with their children. Parents can thereby learn effective but nonpunitive ways of controlling their aggressive children.
Although precise information is difficult to obtain, it is estimated that each year about one million children in the United States are abused by their parents or other adults. Child abuse is more common in economically disadvantaged families than in affluent ones but occurs in all social classes, races, and ethnic groups. The abuse of children is often part of a pattern of family violence that is transmitted from parent to child for generations. Children who were abused as infants tend to show much more avoidant, resistant, and noncompliant behaviour than do other children.
Parents and the socialization of the child
Parental behaviour affects the child’s personality and that child’s likelihood of developing psychological problems. The most important qualities in this regard are whether and how parents communicate their love to a child, the disciplinary techniques they use, and their behaviour as role models. There are, of course, cultural and class differences in the socialization values held by parents. In most modern societies, well-educated parents are more concerned with their children’s academic achievement and autonomy and are generally more democratic than are less well-educated parents. No single area of interaction can alone account for parents’ influence on a child’s behaviour and social functioning. One investigator has emphasized four factors, however: (1) the degree to which parents try to control the child’s behaviour, (2) the pressures imposed on the child to perform at high levels of cognitive, social, or emotional development, (3) the clarity of parent-child communications, and, finally, (4) the parents’ nurturance of and affection toward the child. Those children who appear to be the most mature and competent tend to have parents who were more affectionate, more supportive, more conscientious, and more committed to their role as parents. These parents were also more controlling and demanded more mature behaviour from their children. Although the parents respected their children’s independence, they generally held firm positions and provided clear reasons for them. This parental type is termed authoritative. A second class of children consists of those who are moderately self-reliant but somewhat withdrawn. The parents of these children tended to use less rational control and relied more heavily on coercive discipline. These parents were also slightly less affectionate, and they did not encourage the discussion of parental rules. This parental type is termed authoritarian. The least mature children had parents who were lax in discipline and noncontrolling but affectionate. They made few demands on the children for mature behaviour and allowed them to regulate their own activities as much as possible. This parentaltype is termed permissive.
Specific characteristics in children that have been linked to different parenting styles range from responsible independence and ability to cooperate easily with others to anxiety, distress, and depression. In general, authoritativeness appears to be associated with positive outcomes in children and adolescents, with individuals being confident and able to balance societal demands with their own needs. Authoritarian parenting, on the other hand, is associated with maladaptive features of perfectionism, such as feelingpressured to succeed and being overly self-critical and self-doubting. Research has indicated that parents who pressure their children to excel academically, such as by urging children to earn good grades and by pointing out their mistakes, foster the development of aspects of maladaptive perfectionism. Such children may be at increased risk of developing symptoms of anxiety and depression.
The effects of divorce on children appear to be very complicated. The major adverse impact of divorce on children is evident during the first year after the divorce and seems to be a bit more enduring for boys than for girls. Preschool children seem to be most vulnerable to the effect of divorce and adolescents the least.
In most modern industrialized countries, the proportion of working mothers with children under 18 greatly increased in the last few decades of the 20th century, to the point that one-half of all mothers with children under 5 were in the workforce. However, there is no clear evidence that this change in Western society had a profound influence on child development, independent of other historical changes during that same period.
Jerome KaganDevelopment In Adolescence
Adolescence may be defined as that period within the life span when most of a person’s characteristics are changing from what is typically considered childlike to what is typically considered adultlike. Changes in the body are the most readily observed, but other, less definitive attributes such as thoughts, behaviour, and social relations also change radically during this period. The rate of such changes varies with the individual as well as with the particular characteristic.
Physiological aspects
The physical and physiological changes of adolescence do not proceed uniformly; however, a general sequence for these changes applies to most people. It is useful to speak of phases of bodily changes in adolescence in order to draw important distinctions among various degrees and types of change. Bodily changes affect height, weight, fat and muscle distribution, glandular secretions, and sexual characteristics. When some of these changes have begun, but most are yet to occur, the person is said to be in the prepubescent phase. When most of those bodily changes that will eventually take place have been initiated, the person is in the pubescent phase. Finally, when most of those bodily changes have already occurred, the person is in the postpubescent phase; this period ends when all bodily changes associated with adolescence are completed.
The bodily changes of adolescence relate to both primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Primary sexual characteristics are present at birth and comprise the external and internal genitalia (e.g., the penis and testes in males and the vagina and ovaries in females). Secondarysexual characteristics are those that emerge during the prepubescent through postpubescent phases (e.g., breasts in females and pigmented facial hair in males).
Several important bodily changes occur specifically within each of the three periods that characterize adolescent physical maturation. The period of prepubescence begins with the first indication of sexual maturation. It ends with the initial appearance of pubic hair. In males, there is a continuing enlargement of the testicles, an enlargement and reddening of the scrotal sac, and an increase in the length and circumference of the penis. These changes all involve primary sexual characteristics. Insofar as secondary sexual characteristics are concerned, there is no true pubic hair at this stage, although down may be present. In females, prepubescent changes typically begin an average of two years earlier than in males. The first phenomena of female development in this period are the enlargement of the ovaries and the ripening of the ova. In contrast with those of males, these changes in primary sexual characteristics are not outwardly observable. However, changes involving secondary sex characteristics can be seen (e.g., the rounding of the hips and the first phase of breast development). The latter begins with an elevation of the areola surrounding the nipple, which produces a small conelike growth called the breast bud. As with the male, there is no true pubic hair, although down may be present.
The onset of pubescence in both sexes occurs with the appearance of pubic hair, and this period ends when pubic hair development is complete. The peak velocity of growth in height and weight also occurs during this phase. This so-called growth spurt occurs about two years earlier in females than in males. Another key change of pubescence in females is menarche, or the onset of menstruation, which occurs about 18 months after the maximum height increase of the growth spurt and typically is not accompanied initially by ovulation. In pubescence the primary sexual characteristics continue the development initiated in prepubescence. In females the vulva and clitoris enlarge; in males the testes continue to enlarge, the scrotum grows and becomes pigmented, and the penis becomes longer and increases in circumference. In regard to secondary sexual characteristics, in females there is increased breast development, with the breast buds enlarging to form the primary breast; in males, the voice deepens and pigmented axillary and facial hair appear, usually about two years after the emergence of pubic hair.
The phase of postpubescence starts when pubic hair growth is complete, a deceleration of growth in height occurs, changes in the primary and secondary sexual characteristics are essentially complete, and the person is fertile. Some changes in primary and secondary sexual characteristics occur in this phase. For instance, in males, it is during this period that the beard begins to grow; in females, there may be further breast development.
Although, as noted, the ordering of these bodily changes is fairly uniform among individuals, there is considerable variation in the rate of change. Some adolescents mature more rapidly and others more slowly than most of their peers. Of course, there are also youths who pass through the periods of bodily change at the average rate. Variations in the rate of bodily change in adolescence often affect psychological and social development. Early-maturing adolescent boys are typically better adjusted than late maturers and have more favourable interactions with peers and adults. These advantages of early maturation and disadvantages of late maturation tend to continue through the middle adult years for males. For females, however, early maturation is associated with more psychosocial disadvantages than is late maturation. Maturing at an average rate seems to be most advantageous for females. However, the relations between female maturation rates and personality and social functioning in later life have not been determined.
Bodily changes among adolescents can also differ according to sociocultural and historical influences. The age of menarche, for example, varies among countries and even among different cultures within one country. Moreover, there has been a historical trend downward in the average age of menarche, translating into a decrease of several months per decade from about 1840 to the present. This phenomenon is generally ascribed to the improved health and nutrition of children and adolescents.
Cognition
The dramatic physical and physiological changes characteristic of adolescence have an equally dramatic impact on cognitiveand social functioning. Adolescents think about their “new” bodies and their “new” selves in qualitatively new ways. In contrast with sensorimotor and more limited spatiotemporal modes of thinking—which according to Piaget characterize infancy and childhood—beginning at about puberty, the formal-operational mode of thought emerges, characterized by reasoning and abstraction. In the formal-operational stage, adolescents begin to discriminate between their thoughts about reality and reality itself and come to recognize that their assumptions have an element of arbitrariness and may not actually represent the true nature of experience. Thus, adolescent thinking becomes somewhat experimental in the scientific sense, employing hypotheses to test new ideas against outward reality.
In forming hypotheses about the world, adolescent cognition can be seen to grow along with formal, scientific, logical thinking. Consider, for example, a problem of combinatorial thought: An adolescent is presented with five jars, each containing a colourless liquid. Combining the liquids from three particular jars will produce a colour, whereas using the liquid from either of the two remaining jars will not produce a colour. The adolescent is told that a colour can be produced but is not shown which combination produces this effect. Children at the concrete-operational stage typically try to solve this problem by combining liquids two at a time, but after combining all pairs, or possibly trying to mix all five liquids together, their search for the workable combination usually stops. An adolescent at the formal-operational stage, on the other hand, will explore all possible solutions, systematically testing all possible combinations of two and three liquids until a colour is produced. As another example, consider adolescent thinking in respect to certain types of verbal problems—for instance, as represented by the question “If Jane is taller than Doris and shorter than Francine, who is the shortest of the three?” Concrete-operational children may be able to solve an analogous problem (e.g., one using sticks of various lengths, with the sticks actually present). Abstract verbal problems, however, are usually not solved until the capacity for formal operations has emerged.
Formal-operational thought does not seem to be a stage characterizing all adolescents. Studies of older adolescents and adults in Western cultures show that not all individuals attain formal operations. In turn, in some non-Western groups there is a failure ever to attain formal operations. Some researchers have attributed these differences to the differences between rural and urban societies and the different kinds of schooling offered by each. There is, however, little evidence for socioeconomic or educational differences being associated with the achievement of formal-operational thought.
Formal-operational thinking also has limitations, predicated in part on the fact that adolescents often think about their own thinking. Just as the infant is preoccupied with his physical self in a world of new stimuli, so the adolescent may be preoccupied with his own thinking in a world of new ideas. Such preoccupation often leads to a kind of egocentrism, which can manifest itself in two ways: First, the individual may presume that his own concerns, values, and preoccupations are equally important to everyone else; second, the urgency of this new thinking may paradoxically give rise to an overestimation of one’s uniqueness, often resulting in feelings of alienation or of being misunderstood. Although the formal-operational stage is the last stage of cognitive development in Piaget’s theory, the egocentrism of this stage diminishes over the course of the person’s life, largely as a consequence of interactions with peers and elders and—most importantly—with the assumption of adult roles and responsibilities.
The social context
The adolescent’s social context is broader and more complex than that of the infant and the child. The most notable social phenomenon of adolescence is the emergence of the marked importance of peer groups. The adolescent comes to rely heavily on the peer group for support, security, and guidance during a time when such things are urgently needed and since perhaps only others experiencing the same transition can be relied upon to understand what that experience is. Contrary to cultural stereotype, however, the family is quite influential for adolescents. Indeed, no social institution has as great an influence throughout development as does the family. Most studies indicate that most adolescents have relatively few serious disagreements with parents. In fact, in choosing their peers, adolescents typically gravitate toward those who exhibit attitudes and values consistent with those maintained by the parents and ultimately adopted by the adolescents themselves. For instance, while peers influence adolescents in regard to such issues as educational aspirations and performance, in most cases there is convergence between family and peer influences. While it is the case that adolescents and parents have somewhat different attitudes about issues of contemporary social concern (e.g.,politics, drug use, and sexuality), most of these differences reflect contrasts in attitude intensity rather than attitude direction. That is to say, rather than adolescents’ and parents’ standing on opposite sides of a particular issue, most generational differences simply involve different levels of support for the same position. In sum, there is not much evidence supporting the cultural stereotype of adolescence as a period of storm and stress. Most adolescents continue their close and supportive relationships with their parents, and their relationships with peers tend to support parental ideals rather than run against them.
Personality
The dramatic changes that characterize puberty present the adolescent with serious psychosocial challenges. A person who has lived for 12 years has developed a certain sense of self as well as of self-capacity. In adolescence, however, this knowledge of self is challenged. As has been discussed, the rather sudden bodily changes in this period are accompanied by equally dramatic changes in thoughts and feelings. Thus, not all the assumptions adolescents held about the self in earlier stages may still be relevant to the new individuals they find themselves to be. Because a coherent sense of self is necessary for functioning productively in society, adolescents ask a crucial psychosocial question: Who am I?
At precisely the time that adolescents feel unsure about who they are, society begins to ask them related questions. For instance, adolescents are expected to make the first steps toward career objectives. Society asks adolescents, then, what roles they will playas adults—that is, what socially prescribed set of behaviours they will choose to adopt. Thus, a key aspect of this adolescent dilemma is that of finding a role, which is generally taken to be the outward expression of identity. The emotional upheaval provoked by this mandate is called the identity crisis. In order to resolve this crisis and achieve a sense of identity, it is necessary to synthesize
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If the adolescent fails to resolve the identity crisis by the time of entry into adulthood, he will feel a sense of role confusion or identity diffusion. Some young adults waver between roles in a kind of prolonged “moratorium,” or period of avoiding commitment. Others seem to avoid the crisis altogether and settle easily on an available, socially approved identity. Still others resolve their crises by adopting an available but socially disapproved role or ideology. This latter option is called negative identity formation and is often associated with delinquent behaviour. Resolution of the adolescent identity crisis has a profound influence on development during later adulthood.
All societies traditionally prescribe stereotyped roles to each sex. These roles have adaptive significance; that is, they allow society to maintain and perpetuate itself. From this reasoning, it follows that differences in sex-role behaviour, at least initially, arose from the different tasks males and females performed for survival—especially those tasks centred on reproduction. Differing biologies exert differing pressures on psychosocial development; however, these pressures do not occur independently of the demands of cultural and historical milieus. The biological basis of one’s psychosocial functioning is believed to relate to adaptive orientations for survival. Many differences exist between males and females, but the nature of individual differences between the sexes is dependent on interactions among biological, psychological, sociocultural, and historical influences.
Development In Adulthood And Old Age
In sheer number of years, the periods labeled adulthood and aging constitute the major portion of the human life span. Historically, however, these periods were seen as less significant and interesting developmentally than infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Adulthood was viewed as a time of continuity, a period when what had been developed earlier was utilized. Aging was viewed as a time of decline, a period when what had been developed earlier was lost. Contemporary opinion is that adulthood and aging are just as significant and interesting as the earlier periods of the life cycle. Adulthood and aging are characterized by both growth and decline.
Central nervous system processing
There is relatively clear evidence that, with advancing age, individuals show a tendency toward decreasing speed of response. This is a gradual change occurring across the entire life span that shows up in a variety of so-called speeded tasks (those in which errors would be unlikely if the individual had an unlimited amount of time to complete the tasks). For example, reaction time tests (which measure the time elapsing between the appearance of a signal and the beginning of a responding movement) are usually viewed as a measure of central nervous system processing. Mean speed of response on such tasks increases with age until the late teens, remains constant until the mid-20s, and then declines steadily throughout the remainder of the age range.
Much evidence has been accumulated to link changes in brain electrical activity to the slowing of behaviour. The electroencephalogram (EEG) provides a record of the brain’s electrical activity. The normal human EEG displays continuous rhythmic activity in the form of wavelike patterns varying in frequency and amplitude. The dominant rhythm is the alpha wave, which reaches its maximum frequency in adolescence and begins to slow gradually after young adulthood. This slowing may be related to disease processes (particularly vascular disease) and to basic aging processes. The older adult’s central nervous system appears to be in a state of underarousal in comparison to that of the younger adult.
Cognition
Decline in the rate of central nervous system processing does not necessarily imply a similar change in learning, memory, or other intellectual functions. However, considerable evidence indicates that the learning ability of young adults is superior to that of older adults and that the faster the pace of the task the more difference age makes. Older learners benefit more from slower pacing of tasks than do younger learners. When allowed to regulate the pace of the task themselves, older learners often show an improvement in performance, whereas this is not necessarily the case with younger learners.
However, in regard to memory, as opposed to the learning or acquisition of information, research suggests that there are relatively few age-related differences within the primary-memory system, the temporary maintenance system for conscious processing of information. Age is a significant factor, however, in the functioning of the secondary-memory system. Secondary memory depends on the elaboration and organization of information in terms of its semantic content or meaning. Compared with younger adults, older adults appear to be deficient in these processes. Generally, they do not spontaneously use organizational strategies as extensively as do younger adults, or, if they use them, they do so less effectively. But, when organizational strategies are built into the situation, the performance of older adults improves markedly.
Most studies examining memory for general knowledge have found that older adults retrieve such information as well as or better than do younger adults. Within some contexts, older adults appear to integrate and retain the meaning of sets of sentences and texts as well as younger adults. For example, when young, middle-aged, and elderly adults are asked questions covering such topics as famous people, news events, history, geography, the Bible, literature, sports, and general information (e.g., “What was the former name of Muhammad Ali?”; “What is the capital of Cambodia?”), their answers typically show no evidence of age differences in the retrieval of knowledge. In fact, elderly people may actually answer more questions correctly than younger groups. Older adults also appear to have accurate knowledge about their own memory processes—knowledge that has been labeled metamemory. For example, research has found no age differences regarding subjects’ assessments of the relative reliability of visual and verbal memory, regarding the use of memory strategies (e.g., reminder notes), or regarding memory monitoring (e.g.,prediction of the number of items that would be recalled following memory tasks).
Psychometric approaches to cognitionsuggest that intelligence is characterized by two distinct properties. Fluid intelligence, measured by tests that minimize the role of cultural knowledge, reflects the degree to which the individual has developed unique qualities of thinking through incidental learning. Crystallized intelligence, measured by tests that maximize the role of cultural knowledge, reflects the degree to which the individual has been acculturated through intentional learning. Fluid intelligence shows a steady decline from adolescence through middle age. Across the same age range, however, a steady increase occurs in crystallized intelligence. When measures of both properties are taken, few age-related differences appear.
Finally, there are age-related differences on several measures of cognitive functioning. In general, older adults perform more poorly than younger adults on tasks requiring both concrete-operational thought and formal-operational thought.
Some features of cognitive functioning—speed of response, secondary memory, and fluid intelligence—seem to decline with age. Others—contextual memory and crystallized intelligence—increase. Aging does not inevitably precipitate a decline in cognitive functioning. Indeed, there is growing evidence that older persons can largely modify their intellectual performance, documenting a clear lifelong capacity for cognitive change in human beings.
Personality and social development
Several theories of personality development stress that adulthood and aging are periods of qualitative change, of discontinuity, and of transformations of earlier life patterns. These changes are believed to arise in relation to the demands of the person’s changing biological status and social context—the family, the workplace, and society in general. Thus, personality development is both an individual and a social phenomenon.
In the view of Erik Erikson, certain psychosocial demands, or crises, confront the individual at distinct intervals throughout life. The young adult, for instance, is expected to enter into an institution—i.e., marriage and family—that will perpetuate the society. The degree to which the basic need for intimacy on all levels—physical, emotional, and others—is met in such a relationship determines in most individuals the conception of the self as belonging or as isolated. In middle adulthood the crisis develops between the sense of generativity and the sense of stagnation. In this stage the individual is expected to play the role of a contributing, generative member of society. Generativity can take the form of providing the goods and services by which society functions or of producing, rearing, and socializing future members of society. The inability to develop a productive self-conception results in a feeling of stagnation. In maturity, according to Erikson, a crisis arises with regard to the sense of ego integrity versus the sense of despair. In this stage, individuals realize that they are reaching the end of life. If they have successfully progressed through the previous stages of development, they can face old age with satisfaction in the feeling that a full and complete life has been led. Individuals for whom this integrity of life is lacking often feel a sense of despair over “wasted” opportunity.
The American psychologist Daniel J. Levinson also divides adult life into qualitatively distinct periods. Confining his study to men, Levinson identified five eras within their lives that are not stages of biological, psychological, or social development but that together constitute a life-cycle structure. The eras are (1) preadulthood (birth to age 22), (2) early adulthood (age 17 to 45), (3) middle adulthood (age 40 to 64), (4) late adulthood (age 60 to 85), and (5) late late adulthood (age 80 and over). Each of these eras is in turn made up of a series of developmental periods and transitions. For example, in early adulthood a first major transition, ordinarily beginning at age 17 to 18 and extending until age 22 to 23, represents a developmental link between preadulthood and early adulthood. The young man in this early adult transition faces two major tasks. The first task is to modify relationships with his family and with other persons, groups, and institutions significant to his preadult world. The second task is to take a preliminary step into the adult world. This requires making initial explorations and choices for adult living. Major life events within this transition may include graduating from high school, moving out of the family home, seeking gainful employment, or attending college. Entering the adult world begins in the early 20s and extends until the late 20s. The focus of this period is on exploration and provisional commitment to adult roles and responsibilities. The young man faces two antithetical tasks. On the one hand, he must explore alternate possibilities for adult living, keeping options open and avoiding strong commitments. On the other hand, he must create a stable life structure, becoming responsible and “making something” of himself. Crucial life events during this period include occupational choice, first job, marriage, and the birth of children.
The age range of 28 to 33 years represents a transition between the period of entering the adult world and the next period of settling down. This transition provides the young man with an opportunity to adjust and enrich the provisional adult life structure that he created earlier. For most men, however, a moderate to severe crisis is common; divorce and occupational change are frequent during this time. A settling-down period then follows, beginning in the early 30s and extending until about age 40. This period, during which the man’s task is to become a full-fledged adult, emphasizes stability and security. The individual makes deeper commitments to his occupation, family, or whatever enterprises are significant to him. In addition, he often concentrates on “making it.” This involves long-range planning toward specific goals with a timetable for their achievement. Most men fix on a key life event, such as a promotion, as representative of ultimate affirmation by society. During the last years of the settling-down period, there is a distinctive phase designated as “becoming one’s own man,” ordinarily occurring at age 36 to 40. The man’s major task during this phase is to achieve greater independence and authority by striving for the goals of his various enterprises.
The midlife transition spans four to six years, reaching a peak in the early 40s. It forms a developmental link between early adulthood and middle adulthood and, being part of both eras, represents a beginning and ending, a meeting of past and future. A task of the midlife transition is to work on and partially resolve this discrepancy between what is and what might be. The transition may be fairly smooth, but it is more likely to involve considerable turmoil. The period of entering middle adulthood begins at about age 45 and extends until about age 50. Sometimes the start of this new life structure is marked by a significant life event, such as a change in job or occupation or a divorce or love affair. In other cases, the changes are more subtle.
Research evidence does not unequivocally support the discontinuous, stagelike changes in adult personality proposed by theorists such as Erikson and Levinson. In fact, several major studies of personality development during the adult and aged years present evidence for both change and constancy. For instance, studies of healthy adults between the ages of 40 and 80 residing in the area of Kansas City, Mo., U.S., during the 1950s found evidence for both continuity and change of adult personality. On the one hand, personality structure was stable; four personality types—integrated, defended, passive-dependent, and unintegrated—emerged among respondents regardless of age. Similarly, characteristics dealing with the socioadaptational aspects of personality (e.g., goal-directed behaviour, coping styles, and life satisfaction) were not age-related. It seems, therefore, that the ways in which healthy adults interact with the environment may be stable even though the roles they adopt alter with age. On the other hand, individual styles of coping with the inner world of experience showed marked age differences. For example, 40-year-olds felt in charge of their environment, viewed the self as a source of energy, and were positive about risk taking, whereas 60-year-olds saw the environment as threatening and even dangerous and viewed the self as passive and accommodating.
Other studies of personality development from birth through early adulthood have also found evidence for constancy and change. For example, behavioral dispositions of the early school years, including passive withdrawal from stressful situations, dependency on family, arousal of anger, involvement in intellectual mastery, sexual behaviour and sex-role identification, and anxiety over social interaction, have been found to carry over into adulthood. The degree of stability in these behaviours exhibited from childhood to adulthood seems to be closely related to cultural expectations of appropriate sex-role behaviour. If a pattern of childhood behaviour is consistent with sex-role expectations, it will more likely remain stable over time.
Other studies, concentrating on the development from adolescence into adulthood among people born in California in the late 1920s and early 1930s, found different personality types for males and females that showed substantial stability over time. Personality characteristics reflecting socialization and self-presentation, for example, tended to remain stable. On the other hand, two major types of personality characteristics, those reflecting information processing and those reflecting interpersonal relations, tended to change. There were differences between the sexes both in what was constant and in what changed across life. For example, lifestyle patterns among the parents of the California children were more continuous between young adulthood and old age for fathers than they were for mothers. Fathers who in early adulthood were unwell and disengaged from their families showed these same characteristics in late adulthood. In regard to personality, however, there was more apparent continuity between young adulthood and old age among mothers than among fathers. For example, mothers who were group-centred showed a more psychologically healthy personality and had a more satisfying life in later years than in earlier years, whereas non-group-centred mothers were happy and healthy at age 30 but lost their health and physical stamina by age 70.
In general, older adults tend to engage in greater introspection and self-reflection than younger adults, showing a general movement from the outer world toward the inner world. They tend to withdraw emotional investments, be less assertive, and avoid challenges. Adulthood and old age involve both constancy and change. These periods of life are continuations of the past as well as new phases in their own right.
Childhood
Language
The capacity for language usually emerges in infants soon after the first birthday, and they make enormous progress in this area during their second year. Language is a symbolic form of communication that involves, on the one hand, the comprehension of words and sentences and, on the other, the expression of feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The basic units of language are phonemes, morphemes, and words. Phonemes are the basic sounds that are combined to make words; most languages have about 30 phonemes, which correspond roughly to the sounds of the spoken letters of the alphabet. Although one-month-old infants can discriminate among various phonemes, they are themselves unable to produce them. By 4 to 6 months of age, however, infants usually express vowellike elements in their vocalizations, and by 11–12 months of age they are producing clear consonant-vowel utterances like “dada” and “mama.”
Virtually all children begin to comprehend some words several months before they speak their own first meaningful words. In fact, one- to three-year-olds typically understand five times as many words as they actually use in everyday speech. The average infant speaks his first words by 12–14 months; these are generally simple labels for persons, objects, or actions; e.g., “mommy,” “milk,” “go,” “yes,” “no,” and “dog.” By the time the child reaches his 18th month, he has a speaking vocabulary of about 50 words. The single words he uses may stand for entire sentences. Thus, the word “eat” may signify “Can I eat now?” and “shoe” may mean “Take off my shoe.” The child soon begins to use two-word combinations for making simple requests or for describing the environment: “Want juice,” “Daddy gone,” “Mommy soup.” These simple statements are abbreviated versions of adult sentences. “Where is the ball?” becomes “where ball?”; the sentence “That’s the ball” becomes “that ball.” These early two-word combinations consist mostly of nouns, verbs, and a few adjectives. Articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, or, but), and prepositions (in, on, under) are almost completely absent at this stage. In their telegraphic sentences, children usually place the subject, object, and verb in an order that is correct within certain broad limits for their native language. For example, an American child will say “want ball” rather than “ball want” for a sentence meaning “I want the ball.”
In the few months before the child’s second birthday, there is a major increase in the size of his vocabulary and in the variety of his two- and three-word combinations. By two years of age a child’s comprehension vocabulary contains an average of about 270 words. By the end of the second year, he understands interrogatives such as “where,” “who,” and “what,” and by three years of age he can correctly interpret the respective use of the words “this” or “that” and “here” or “there,” as well as the terms “in front of” and “behind.” By three years of age children are learning at least two new words a day and possess a working vocabulary of 1,000 words.
Children in their second and third years sometimes use words as overextensions; “doggie,” for instance, may refer to a variety of four-legged animals as well as to dogs, and the word “daddy” may be used in reference to all men. This occurs simply because, although the infant detects the differences among various types of animals, he has only one word (“dog”) in his vocabulary to apply to them. Overextensions are more common in speech than in comprehension, however; the child who uses the word “apple” for all round objects has no difficulty pointing to an apple in a picture illustrating several round objects. Other words are underextended; that is, they are defined too narrowly. Some infants will use the word “car” to refer only to cars moving on the street but not to cars standing still or to a picture of a car.
Children learn the rules of syntax (i.e., the grammatical rules specifying how words are combined in a sentence) with very little explicit instruction or tutoring from adults. They begin to flesh out their noun-verb sentences with less critical words such as prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and auxiliary verbs. Children follow a typical sequence in their acquisition of grammatical rules, depending on the language they are learning to use. In English, a child first masters the grammatical rules for the present tense (e.g., “I want”) and begins to use the present progressive ending (“-ing”) and the plural. This is followed by mastery of the irregular past tense (“I made,” “I had”), possessives (my, mine, his), articles (a, an, the), and the regular past tense (“I walked,” “he stopped”). These successes are followed by mastery of the third person present tense (“he goes”) and auxiliary verbs (“I’m walking,” “we’re playing”).
Deaf children learning sign language from deaf-mute parents show in their signs the same course of development that is apparent in the speech of children with normal hearing. Deaf, like hearing, children make their first signs for objects and later display signs for more complex ideas like “Mommy eat” or “Daddy coat.”
By the middle of the third year, children tend to use more sentences containing four, five, or six words, and by the fourth year they can converse in adultlike sentences. Finally, five- and six-year-olds demonstrate metalinguistic awareness—i.e., a mastery of the complex rules of grammar and meaning. They can differentiate between sounds that are real words and those that are not—e.g., they regard “apple” as a word but reject “oope” as a word. They can tell the difference between grammatically correct and incorrect sentences and will make spontaneous corrections in their speech; that is to say, if a child makes a speech error, he recognizes it and will say the phrase or sentence correctly the second time.
A major disagreement among theories of language acquisition is their relative emphasis on the role of maturation of the brain, on the one hand, and of social interaction, on the other. The most popular view assumes that biological factors provide a strong foundation for language acquisition but that infants’ social interaction with others is absolutely necessary if language is to develop. The special biological basis of language is supported by the fact that deaf children who are not exposed to a sign language invent a symbol system that is similar in structure to that developed by hearing children. But interaction with other people is also crucial. Even during the first year, children’s production and perception of speech sounds are increasingly shaped by the linguistic environment around them, reflecting their exquisite sensitivity and susceptibility to human speech. Indeed, the amount and variety of verbal stimulation is a critical factor in language development, as is the adult caregivers’ sensitivity to an infant’s own vocalizations; mothers who ask questions and encourage their infants’ vocal responses have children who show a more advanced language development.
Cognitive development
The mental activities involved in the acquisition, processing, organization, and use of knowledge are collectively termed cognition. These activities include selective attention, perception, discrimination, interpretation, classification, recall and recognition memory, evaluation, inference, and deduction. The cognitive structures that are involved in these processes include schemata, images, symbols, concepts or categories, and propositions. A schema is an abstract representation of the distinctive characteristics of an event. These representations are not photographic copies or visual images but are more like schematic blueprints that emphasize the arrangement of a set of salient elements, which supply the schema with distinctiveness and differentiate it from similar events. The child’s ability to recognize the face of another person is mediated by a schema, for example. Young children already display a remarkable ability to generate and store schemata. Another type of early cognitive unit is the image; this is a mental picture, or the reconstruction of a schema, that preserves the spatial and temporal detail of the event.
Symbols represent the next level of abstraction from experience; they are arbitrary names for things and qualities. Common examples of symbols are the names for objects, letters, and numbers. Whereas a schema or image represents a specific experience, such as a sight or sound, a symbol is an arbitrary representation of an event. The letter A is a symbol, and children use schemata, images, and symbols in their mastery of the alphabet. Symbols are used in the development of higher cognitive units called concepts. A concept, or category, may be thought of as a special kind of symbol that represents a set of attributes common to a group of symbols or images. The concept represents a common attribute or meaning from a diverse array of experiences, while a symbol stands for a particular class of events. Concepts are used to sort specific experiences into general rules or classes, and conceptual thinking refers to a person’s subjective manipulations of those abstract classes.
Jean Piaget tried to trace specific stages in children’s progressive use of symbols and concepts to manipulate their environment. According to Piaget, two of the four stages of cognitive development occur during childhood: the preoperational stage (2 to 7 years), in which the child learns to manipulate the environment by means of symbolic thought and language; and the concrete-operational stage (7 to 12 years), in which the beginnings of logic appear in the form of classifications of ideas and an understanding of time and number. An important structure in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is the operation, which is a cognitive structure that the child uses to transform, or “operate on,” information. Children learn to use operations that are flexible and fully reversible in thought; the ability to plan a series of moves in a game of checkers and then mentally retrace one’s steps to the beginning of that sequence is one such example of an operation.
It is important to make a distinction between the knowledge and skills a child possesses, called competence, and the demonstration of that knowledge in actual problem-solving situations, called performance. Children often possess knowledge that they do not use even when the occasion calls for it. Adapting to new challenges, according to Piaget, requires two complementary processes. The first, assimilation, is the relating of a new event or object to cognitive structures the child already possesses. A five-year-old who has a concept of a bird as a living thing with a beak and wings that flies will try to assimilate the initial perception of an ostrich to his concept of bird. Accommodation, the second process, occurs when the information presented does not fit the existing concept. Thus, once the child learns that the ostrich does not fly, he will accommodate to that fact and modify his concept of bird to include the fact that some birds do not fly.
One of the central victories of cognitive development occurs during ages five to seven and, according to Piaget, marks the child’s entry to the concrete-operational stage. This is the ability to reason simultaneously about the whole and about part of the whole. For instance, if an eight-year-old is shown eight yellow candies and four brown candies and asked, “Are there more yellow candies or more candies,” he will say that there are more candies, whereas a five-year-old is likely to respond incorrectly that there are more yellow candies.
A child who has reached the concrete-operational stage is able to solve several other new kinds of logical problems. For example, a five-year-old who is shown two balls of clay of the same size and shape will tell an adult that they have the same amount of clay, but, when the experimenter rolls one of the balls into a long but thin sausage, the five-year-old will tend to say that the untouched sphere has more clay in it than the sausage-shaped object does. A seven-year-old, however, shows what is called the ability to conserve; when presented with the same problem, he will recognize that the two pieces still have the same amount of clay in them, based on his awareness that liquids and solids do not change in amount or quantity merely because their external shape changes. The seven-year-old is able to reverse an event in thought and knows that the sausage can be reshaped back into the original ball without a loss or gain in the total amount of clay. The knowledge that one can reverse one state of affairs into a prior state, which is called conservation, is a mark of this new stage of development.
Another cognitive advance children make during the concrete-operational stage is the knowledge that hierarchical relationships can exist within categories. This is illustrated by the ability to arrange similar objects according to some quantified dimension, such as weight or size. This ability is called seriation. A seven-year-old can arrange eight sticks of different lengths in order from shortest to longest, indicating that the child appreciates a relation among the different sizes of the objects. Seriation is crucial to understanding the relations between numbers and hence to learning arithmetic. Children in the concrete-operational stage also appreciate the fact that terms such as taller, darker, and bigger refer to a relation between objects rather than to some absolute characteristic.
One implication of the stage of concrete operations is that the child is now able to compare himself with other children in such qualities as size, attractiveness, intelligence, courage, and so on. Hence, the formation of the child’s sense of identity, or self-concept, proceeds at a faster rate because he is able to compare his characteristics with those of other children.
The final stage of cognitive development, called the stage of formal operations, begins at about age 12 and characterizes the logical processes of adolescents and adults. A child who has reached this stage of logical thinking can reason about hypothetical events that are not necessarily in accord with his experience. He shows a willingness to think about possibilities, and he can analyze and evaluate events from a number of different possible perspectives. A second hallmark of the stage of formal operations is the systematic search for solutions. Faced with a novel problem, the adolescent is able to generate a number of possible means of solving it and then select the most logical, probable, or successful of his hypotheses. The formal thinking of adolescents and adults thus tends to be self-consciously deductive, rational, and systematic. Finally, adolescents typically begin to examine their own thinking and evaluate it while searching for inconsistencies and fallacies in their own beliefs and values concerning themselves, society, and nature.
Symbolic ability and imitation
Symbolic ability, which appears at about one year of age, can be observed when a child imaginatively treats an object as something other than it is—pretending a wooden block is a car or using a cup as a hat. By the middle of their second year, children impart new functions to objects; they may turn a doll upside down and pretend it is a salt shaker or try to use a wooden block as if it were a chair. Many three-year-olds are capable of simple metaphor and will play with two wooden balls of different size as if they were symbolic of a parent and a child. Children’s drawings also become symbolic during the second and third years and begin to contain forms that look like (or at least are intended to represent) animals, people, and various objects.
Imitation may be defined as behaviour that selectively duplicates that of another person. Like symbolism, it is a basic capacity that is inherent in human nature. Infants engage in selective imitation by seven or eight months of age, and their imitations become more frequent and complex during the next two to three years. One-year-olds already imitate the gestures, speech sounds, and instrumental actions that they see performed by people around them. They also become capable of imitating an act some time after they have actually observed it; for example, one-year-olds may imitate an action they witnessed one day earlier. Children often imitate the instrumental behaviours of parents, like cleaning or feeding, but are less likely to imitate emotional expressions or parental behaviours that have no instrumental goal. Children are also more likely to imitate their parents than their siblings or characters they see on television.
Children imitate others for a variety of reasons. They are most likely to imitate those acts over which they feel some uncertainty regarding their ability to perform. If they are too uncertain, they will cry; if they are absolutely certain they can perform an act, they are less likely to imitate it. Children also imitate actions that win parental approval or attention or that enhance their similarity to other persons they want to be like (e.g., a boy imitating his father).
Memory
Memory, which is central to all cognitive processes, involves both the storage of traces of past experience and the retrieval of that stored information at a later time. It is useful to distinguish between short-term and long-term memory processes. Short-term, or working, memory may be defined as referring to traces available for a maximum of 30 seconds immediately after stimulation, but typically for a much shorter period. The ability to remember a phone number while redialing it is a good example of short-term memory. Long-term memory, or permanent memory, refers to stored information that is potentially available for relatively long periods of time, extending up to a lifetime.
Two-year-olds can usually hold in short-term memory only one or two independent units of information, while 15-year-olds can remember seven or eight units (numbers or words, for example). Both children and adults tend to perform much better when they have to recognize than when they have to recall, but this difference is most dramatic in young children. Thus, a four-year-old child can usually recognize almost all of 12 pictures he has seen but may be able to recall only 2 or 3 of them. A 10-year-old, by contrast, who recognizes the 12 pictures can also recall as many as 8 of them.
Besides improvements in capacity, older children demonstrate an increasing speed of recall and can search their memory for information more quickly. Another improvement in memory ability is selectivity. As they grow older, children become adept at choosing more important items to remember—i.e., at distinguishing fundamental from merely incidental information. In addition, older children acquire more efficient strategies for the coding, rehearsal, and retrieval of information that younger children do not possess. By eight or nine years of age, for example, most children know that it is easier to relearn a text passage than to learn it for the first time. Generally, older children are better able to plan their own behaviour, formulate problems, monitor their ability, control distraction and anxiety, and evaluate the quality of their cognitive products. And because older children have a more accurate understanding of their own abilities, they are better able to assess and predict the cognitive abilities of other people.
The makeup of intelligence
Controversy exists over whether children can be said to differ in a unitary abstract ability called intelligence or whether each child might better be described as possessing a set of specific cognitive abilities. Some children are especially proficient with verbal problems and less proficient at problems involving spatial relations or mathematical reasoning, for example. The American psychologist J.P. Guilford suggests that cognitive abilities can be classified along three dimensions: the content of the information (symbolic, semantic, behavioral, or figural); the operation performed on the content (memory, evaluation, convergence, divergence, or cognition); and finally the product of the cognitive work (a unit, a class, a relation, a system, a transformation, or an implication). This theory predicts that there are a very large number of different cognitive profiles, not just one.
Emotional and social development
Personality traits
Although earlier theorists believed that personality traits evident in the first three years of life would persist into later life, research indicates that this claim is exaggerated. Long-term studies that follow children from infancy through adolescence and into adulthood indicate that lasting personality traits do not emerge until after six or seven years of age and that most of the differences seen in children in the first three years of life are not preserved. The one possible exception to this claim holds for the temperamental qualities of inhibited and uninhibited to the unfamiliar. Children who are extremely inhibited or uninhibited in the first three years of life are more likely than others to retain those qualities through late childhood.
Self-awareness and empathy
Perhaps the most important aspect of children’s emotional development is a growing awareness of their own emotional states and the ability to discern and interpret the emotions of others. The last half of the second year is a time when children start becoming aware of their own emotional states, characteristics, abilities, and potential for action; this phenomenon is called self-awareness. Two-year-old children begin to describe their own actions as they are performing them, can recognize a reflection of themselves in the mirror, and may become possessive with their toys for the first time. This growing awareness of and ability to recall one’s own emotional states leads to empathy, or the ability to appreciate the feelings and perceptions of others. Young children’s dawning awareness of their own potential for action inspires them to try to direct (or otherwise affect) the behaviour of others. This change is often accompanied by the urge to test the standards of behaviour held by parents, and, as a result, children’s second and third years are often called the “terrible twos.”
With age, children acquire the ability to understand the perspective, or point of view, of other people, a development that is closely linked with the empathic sharing of others’ emotions. Even six-year-olds are aware that other people have different perspectives, thoughts, and feelings from their own, and they are able to empathize with the characteristics they observe in others. By eight to nine years of age a child recognizes that people can become aware of others’ point of view, and he likewise knows that others can become aware of his own perspective. By 10 years of age the child can consider a social interaction simultaneously from his own point of view and from that of another person. Owing to this increased awareness, children from age seven on are more conscious of what others think of them and show more concern over others’ opinion of their behaviour. Finally, older children understand that a person’s genuine emotions can be stronger or different from those he actually reveals, and they thus appreciate that a person can disguise his emotions.
One major factor underlying these changes is the child’s increasing cognitive sophistication. For example, in order to feel the emotion of guilt, a child must appreciate the fact that he could have inhibited a particular action of his that violated a moral standard. The awareness that one can impose a restraint on one’s own behaviour requires a certain level of cognitive maturation, and, therefore, the emotion of guilt cannot appear until that competence is attained.
A moral sense
Empathy and other forms of social awareness are important in the development of a moral sense. Morality embraces a person’s beliefs about the appropriateness or goodness of what he does, thinks, or feels. During the last few months of the second year, children develop an appreciation of right and wrong; these representations are called moral standards. Children show a concern over dirty hands, torn clothes, and broken cups, suggesting that they appreciate that certain events violate adult standards. By age two most children display mild distress if they cannot meet standards of behaviour imposed by others. After age two they will playfully violate rules on acceptable behaviour in order to test the validity of that standard. One of the signs of the child’s growing morality is the ability to control behaviour and the willingness to postpone immediate gratification of a desire.
Childhood is thus the time at which moral standards begin to develop in a process that often extends well into adulthood. The American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg hypothesized that people’s development of moral standards passes through stages that can be grouped into three moral levels. At the early level, that of preconventional moral reasoning, the child uses external and physical events (such as pleasure or pain) as the source for decisions about moral rightness or wrongness; his standards are based strictly on what will avoid punishment or bring pleasure. At the intermediate level, that of conventional moral reasoning, the child or adolescent views moral standards as a way of maintaining the approval of authority figures, chiefly his parents, and acts in accordance with their precepts. Moral standards at this level are held to rest on a positive evaluation of authority, rather than on a simple fear of punishment. At the third level, that of postconventional moral reasoning, the adult bases his moral standards on principles that he himself has evaluated and that he accepts as inherently valid, regardless of society’s opinion. He is aware of the arbitrary, subjective nature of social standards and rules, which he regards as relative rather than absolute in authority.
Thus the bases for justifying moral standards pass from avoidance of punishment to avoidance of adult disapproval and rejection to avoidance of internal guilt and self-recrimination. The person’s moral reasoning also moves toward increasingly greater social scope (i.e., including more people and institutions) and greater abstraction (i.e., from reasoning about physical events such as pain or pleasure to reasoning about values, rights, and implicit contracts). This transition from one stage to another is characterized by gradual shifts in the most frequent type of reasoning; thus, at any given point in life, a person may function at more than one stage at the same time. Different people pass through the stages at varying rates. Finally, different people are likely to reach different levels of moral thinking in their lives, raising the possibility that some people may never reach the later, more abstract, stages.
The evidence for these theoretical stages comes from children’s answers to moral dilemmas verbally presented to them by researchers, rather than their actual behaviour in time of conflict. Scientists have argued that many children display a more profound moral understanding than is evident in their responses on such tests. Others have argued that because even rather young children are capable of showing empathy with the pain of others, the inhibition of aggressive behaviour arises from this moral affect rather than from the mere anticipation of punishment. Some scientists have found that children differ in their individual capacity for empathy, and, therefore, some children are more sensitive to moral prohibitions than others. There is evidence suggesting that temperamentally inhibited children whose parents impose consistent socialization demands on them experience moral affect more intensely than do other children.
Self-concept, or identity
One of the most important aspects of a child’s emotional development is the formation of his self-concept, or identity—namely, his sense of who he is and what his relation to other people is. The most conspicuous trend in children’s growing self-awareness is a shift from concrete physical attributes to more abstract characteristics. This shift is apparent in those characteristics children emphasize when asked to describe themselves. Young children—four to six years of age—seem to define themselves in terms of such observable characteristics as hair colour, height, or their favourite activities. But within a few years, their descriptions of themselves shift to more abstract, internal, or psychological qualities, including their competences and skills relative to those of others. Thus, as children approach adolescence, they tend to increasingly define themselves by the unique and individual quality of their feelings, thoughts, and beliefs rather than simply by external characteristics.
One of the earliest and most basic categories of self to emerge during childhood is based on gender and is called sex-role identity. Children develop a rudimentary gender identity by age three, having learned to classify themselves and others as either males or females. They also come to prefer the activities and roles traditionally assigned to their own sex; as early as two years of age, most children select toys and activities that fit the sex-role stereotypes of their culture, and during the preschool years they begin to select same-sex playmates. Another component of a child’s self-concept concerns the racial, ethnic, or religious group of which he is a part. A child who is a member of a distinctive or specific group has usually created a mental category for that group by five to six years, and children from ethnic minorities tend to be more aware of ethnic differences than are nonminority children.
One of the important processes that mediates a child’s self-concept is that of identification; this involves the child’s incorporation of the characteristics of parents or other persons by adopting their appearance, attitudes, and behaviour. Children tend to identify with those persons to whom they are emotionally attached and whom they perceive to be similar to themselves in some way. They seem to identify most strongly with parents who are emotionally warm or who are dominant and powerful. The role models children adopt may have negative as well as positive characteristics, however, and can thus influence children in undesirable as well as beneficial ways.
More than 80 percent of American children have one or more sisters or brothers, and the presence of these siblings can influence a child’s personality development. Parents tend to be more involved and attentive toward the firstborn, stimulating him more (in the absence of other children) but then expecting and demanding more from him (as their oldest child). Because of this, firstborns tend to identify more closely with their parents, conform more closely to their values and expectations, and generally identify more closely with authority than do their younger siblings. Firstborns tend to be more strongly motivated toward school achievement, are more conscientious, more prone to guilt feelings, and less aggressive than those born later. A high proportion of eminent scientists and scholars have been firstborns, perhaps owing to the aforementioned traits, but firstborns also tend to be less receptive to ideas that challenge a popular ideological or theoretical position.
Peer socialization
During the first two years of life, infants do not spontaneously seek out other children for interaction or for pleasure. Although six-month-old infants may look at and vocalize to other infants, they do not initiate reciprocal social play with them. However, between two and five years of age, children’s interactions with each other become more sustained, social, and complex. Solitary or parallel play is dominant among three-year-olds, but this strategy shifts to group play by five years.
Problems in development
An estimated 6–10 percent of all children develop serious emotional or personality problems at some point. These problems tend to fall into two groups: those characterized by symptoms of extreme anxiety, withdrawal, and fearfulness, on the one hand, and by disobedience, aggression, and destruction of property on the other. The former set is called internalizing; the latter is termed externalizing. As indicated earlier, some fearful, timid, socially withdrawn children inherit a temperamental predisposition to develop this form of behaviour; other children, however, acquire it as a result of a stressful upbringing, experiences, or social circumstances.
Sex-linked differences in aggression are evident from about two or three years of age, with boys being more aggressive than girls. Although young children sometimes fight and quarrel, usually over possessions, such behaviour is generally not a serious problem in the first three or four years of life. Aggressive behaviour can become a serious problem in older children, however, and by seven years of age a small proportion of boys do display an extreme and consistent tendency to be aggressive with others. Children who are highly aggressive by age seven or eight tend to remain so later in life; these children are three times more likely to have police records as adults than are other children. By age 30 significantly more members of this group had been convicted of criminal behaviour, were aggressive with their spouses, and abused or severely punished their own children. Although biological factors can play a role in producing extreme aggression, the role of the child’s social environment is critical. Parents’ use of extreme levels of physical punishment, imposed inconsistently, is associated with high levels of aggression in children, as are extreme levels of parental permissiveness toward a child’s own aggressive acts. Psychologists frequently help parents deal with aggressive children by teaching them to observe what they do and to enforce rules consistently with their children. Parents can thereby learn effective but nonpunitive ways of controlling their aggressive children.
Although precise information is difficult to obtain, it is estimated that each year about one million children in the United States are abused by their parents or other adults. Child abuse is more common in economically disadvantaged families than in affluent ones but occurs in all social classes, races, and ethnic groups. The abuse of children is often part of a pattern of family violence that is transmitted from parent to child for generations. Children who were abused as infants tend to show much more avoidant, resistant, and noncompliant behaviour than do other children.
Parents and the socialization of the child
Parental behaviour affects the child’s personality and that child’s likelihood of developing psychological problems. The most important qualities in this regard are whether and how parents communicate their love to a child, the disciplinary techniques they use, and their behaviour as role models. There are, of course, cultural and class differences in the socialization values held by parents. In most modern societies, well-educated parents are more concerned with their children’s academic achievement and autonomy and are generally more democratic than are less well-educated parents. No single area of interaction can alone account for parents’ influence on a child’s behaviour and social functioning. One investigator has emphasized four factors, however: (1) the degree to which parents try to control the child’s behaviour, (2) the pressures imposed on the child to perform at high levels of cognitive, social, or emotional development, (3) the clarity of parent-child communications, and, finally, (4) the parents’ nurturance of and affection toward the child. Those children who appear to be the most mature and competent tend to have parents who were more affectionate, more supportive, more conscientious, and more committed to their role as parents. These parents were also more controlling and demanded more mature behaviour from their children. Although the parents respected their children’s independence, they generally held firm positions and provided clear reasons for them. This parental type is termed authoritative. A second class of children consists of those who are moderately self-reliant but somewhat withdrawn. The parents of these children tended to use less rational control and relied more heavily on coercive discipline. These parents were also slightly less affectionate, and they did not encourage the discussion of parental rules. This parental type is termed authoritarian. The least mature children had parents who were lax in discipline and noncontrolling but affectionate. They made few demands on the children for mature behaviour and allowed them to regulate their own activities as much as possible. This parental type is termed permissive.
Specific characteristics in children that have been linked to different parenting styles range from responsible independence and ability to cooperate easily with others to anxiety, distress, and depression. In general, authoritativeness appears to be associated with positive outcomes in children and adolescents, with individuals being confident and able to balance societal demands with their own needs. Authoritarian parenting, on the other hand, is associated with maladaptive features of perfectionism, such as feeling pressured to succeed and being overly self-critical and self-doubting. Research has indicated that parents who pressure their children to excel academically, such as by urging children to earn good grades and by pointing out their mistakes, foster the development of aspects of maladaptive perfectionism. Such children may be at increased risk of developing symptoms of anxiety and depression.
The effects of divorce on children appear to be very complicated. The major adverse impact of divorce on children is evident during the first year after the divorce and seems to be a bit more enduring for boys than for girls. Preschool children seem to be most vulnerable to the effect of divorce and adolescents the least.
In most modern industrialized countries, the proportion of working mothers with children under 18 greatly increased in the last few decades of the 20th century, to the point that one-half of all mothers with children under 5 were in the workforce. However, there is no clear evidence that this change in Western society had a profound influence on child development, independent of other historical changes during that same period.
Jerome Kagan
Development In Adolescence
Adolescence may be defined as that period within the life span when most of a person’s characteristics are changing from what is typically considered childlike to what is typically considered adultlike. Changes in the body are the most readily observed, but other, less definitive attributes such as thoughts, behaviour, and social relations also change radically during this period. The rate of such changes varies with the individual as well as with the particular characteristic.
Physiological aspects
The physical and physiological changes of adolescence do not proceed uniformly; however, a general sequence for these changes applies to most people. It is useful to speak of phases of bodily changes in adolescence in order to draw important distinctions among various degrees and types of change. Bodily changes affect height, weight, fat and muscle distribution, glandular secretions, and sexual characteristics. When some of these changes have begun, but most are yet to occur, the person is said to be in the prepubescent phase. When most of those bodily changes that will eventually take place have been initiated, the person is in the pubescent phase. Finally, when most of those bodily changes have already occurred, the person is in the postpubescent phase; this period ends when all bodily changes associated with adolescence are completed.
The bodily changes of adolescence relate to both primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Primary sexual characteristics are present at birth and comprise the external and internal genitalia (e.g., the penis and testes in males and the vagina and ovaries in females). Secondary sexual characteristics are those that emerge during the prepubescent through postpubescent phases (e.g., breasts in females and pigmented facial hair in males).
Several important bodily changes occur specifically within each of the three periods that characterize adolescent physical maturation. The period of prepubescence begins with the first indication of sexual maturation. It ends with the initial appearance of pubic hair. In males, there is a continuing enlargement of the testicles, an enlargement and reddening of the scrotal sac, and an increase in the length and circumference of the penis. These changes all involve primary sexual characteristics. Insofar as secondary sexual characteristics are concerned, there is no true pubic hair at this stage, although down may be present. In females, prepubescent changes typically begin an average of two years earlier than in males. The first phenomena of female development in this period are the enlargement of the ovaries and the ripening of the ova. In contrast with those of males, these changes in primary sexual characteristics are not outwardly observable. However, changes involving secondary sex characteristics can be seen (e.g., the rounding of the hips and the first phase of breast development). The latter begins with an elevation of the areola surrounding the nipple, which produces a small conelike growth called the breast bud. As with the male, there is no true pubic hair, although down may be present.
The onset of pubescence in both sexes occurs with the appearance of pubic hair, and this period ends when pubic hair development is complete. The peak velocity of growth in height and weight also occurs during this phase. This so-called growth spurt occurs about two years earlier in females than in males. Another key change of pubescence in females is menarche, or the onset of menstruation, which occurs about 18 months after the maximum height increase of the growth spurt and typically is not accompanied initially by ovulation. In pubescence the primary sexual characteristics continue the development initiated in prepubescence. In females the vulva and clitoris enlarge; in males the testes continue to enlarge, the scrotum grows and becomes pigmented, and the penis becomes longer and increases in circumference. In regard to secondary sexual characteristics, in females there is increased breast development, with the breast buds enlarging to form the primary breast; in males, the voice deepens and pigmented axillary and facial hair appear, usually about two years after the emergence of pubic hair.
The phase of postpubescence starts when pubic hair growth is complete, a deceleration of growth in height occurs, changes in the primary and secondary sexual characteristics are essentially complete, and the person is fertile. Some changes in primary and secondary sexual characteristics occur in this phase. For instance, in males, it is during this period that the beard begins to grow; in females, there may be further breast development.
Although, as noted, the ordering of these bodily changes is fairly uniform among individuals, there is considerable variation in the rate of change. Some adolescents mature more rapidly and others more slowly than most of their peers. Of course, there are also youths who pass through the periods of bodily change at the average rate. Variations in the rate of bodily change in adolescence often affect psychological and social development. Early-maturing adolescent boys are typically better adjusted than late maturers and have more favourable interactions with peers and adults. These advantages of early maturation and disadvantages of late maturation tend to continue through the middle adult years for males. For females, however, early maturation is associated with more psychosocial disadvantages than is late maturation. Maturing at an average rate seems to be most advantageous for females. However, the relations between female maturation rates and personality and social functioning in later life have not been determined.
Bodily changes among adolescents can also differ according to sociocultural and historical influences. The age of menarche, for example, varies among countries and even among different cultures within one country. Moreover, there has been a historical trend downward in the average age of menarche, translating into a decrease of several months per decade from about 1840 to the present. This phenomenon is generally ascribed to the improved health and nutrition of children and adolescents.
Cognition
The dramatic physical and physiological changes characteristic of adolescence have an equally dramatic impact on cognitive and social functioning. Adolescents think about their “new” bodies and their “new” selves in qualitatively new ways. In contrast with sensorimotor and more limited spatiotemporal modes of thinking—which according to Piaget characterize infancy and childhood—beginning at about puberty, the formal-operational mode of thought emerges, characterized by reasoning and abstraction. In the formal-operational stage, adolescents begin to discriminate between their thoughts about reality and reality itself and come to recognize that their assumptions have an element of arbitrariness and may not actually represent the true nature of experience. Thus, adolescent thinking becomes somewhat experimental in the scientific sense, employing hypotheses to test new ideas against outward reality.
In forming hypotheses about the world, adolescent cognition can be seen to grow along with formal, scientific, logical thinking. Consider, for example, a problem of combinatorial thought: An adolescent is presented with five jars, each containing a colourless liquid. Combining the liquids from three particular jars will produce a colour, whereas using the liquid from either of the two remaining jars will not produce a colour. The adolescent is told that a colour can be produced but is not shown which combination produces this effect. Children at the concrete-operational stage typically try to solve this problem by combining liquids two at a time, but after combining all pairs, or possibly trying to mix all five liquids together, their search for the workable combination usually stops. An adolescent at the formal-operational stage, on the other hand, will explore all possible solutions, systematically testing all possible combinations of two and three liquids until a colour is produced. As another example, consider adolescent thinking in respect to certain types of verbal problems—for instance, as represented by the question “If Jane is taller than Doris and shorter than Francine, who is the shortest of the three?” Concrete-operational children may be able to solve an analogous problem (e.g., one using sticks of various lengths, with the sticks actually present). Abstract verbal problems, however, are usually not solved until the capacity for formal operations has emerged.
Formal-operational thought does not seem to be a stage characterizing all adolescents. Studies of older adolescents and adults in Western cultures show that not all individuals attain formal operations. In turn, in some non-Western groups there is a failure ever to attain formal operations. Some researchers have attributed these differences to the differences between rural and urban societies and the different kinds of schooling offered by each. There is, however, little evidence for socioeconomic or educational differences being associated with the achievement of formal-operational thought.
Formal-operational thinking also has limitations, predicated in part on the fact that adolescents often think about their own thinking. Just as the infant is preoccupied with his physical self in a world of new stimuli, so the adolescent may be preoccupied with his own thinking in a world of new ideas. Such preoccupation often leads to a kind of egocentrism, which can manifest itself in two ways: First, the individual may presume that his own concerns, values, and preoccupations are equally important to everyone else; second, the urgency of this new thinking may paradoxically give rise to an overestimation of one’s uniqueness, often resulting in feelings of alienation or of being misunderstood. Although the formal-operational stage is the last stage of cognitive development in Piaget’s theory, the egocentrism of this stage diminishes over the course of the person’s life, largely as a consequence of interactions with peers and elders and—most importantly—with the assumption of adult roles and responsibilities.
The social context
The adolescent’s social context is broader and more complex than that of the infant and the child. The most notable social phenomenon of adolescence is the emergence of the marked importance of peer groups. The adolescent comes to rely heavily on the peer group for support, security, and guidance during a time when such things are urgently needed and since perhaps only others experiencing the same transition can be relied upon to understand what that experience is. Contrary to cultural stereotype, however, the family is quite influential for adolescents. Indeed, no social institution has as great an influence throughout development as does the family. Most studies indicate that most adolescents have relatively few serious disagreements with parents. In fact, in choosing their peers, adolescents typically gravitate toward those who exhibit attitudes and values consistent with those maintained by the parents and ultimately adopted by the adolescents themselves. For instance, while peers influence adolescents in regard to such issues as educational aspirations and performance, in most cases there is convergence between family and peer influences. While it is the case that adolescents and parents have somewhat different attitudes about issues of contemporary social concern (e.g., politics, drug use, and sexuality), most of these differences reflect contrasts in attitude intensity rather than attitude direction. That is to say, rather than adolescents’ and parents’ standing on opposite sides of a particular issue, most generational differences simply involve different levels of support for the same position. In sum, there is not much evidence supporting the cultural stereotype of adolescence as a period of storm and stress. Most adolescents continue their close and supportive relationships with their parents, and their relationships with peers tend to support parental ideals rather than run against them.
Personality
The dramatic changes that characterize puberty present the adolescent with serious psychosocial challenges. A person who has lived for 12 years has developed a certain sense of self as well as of self-capacity. In adolescence, however, this knowledge of self is challenged. As has been discussed, the rather sudden bodily changes in this period are accompanied by equally dramatic changes in thoughts and feelings. Thus, not all the assumptions adolescents held about the self in earlier stages may still be relevant to the new individuals they find themselves to be. Because a coherent sense of self is necessary for functioning productively in society, adolescents ask a crucial psychosocial question: Who am I?
At precisely the time that adolescents feel unsure about who they are, society begins to ask them related questions. For instance, adolescents are expected to make the first steps toward career objectives. Society asks adolescents, then, what roles they will play as adults—that is, what socially prescribed set of behaviours they will choose to adopt. Thus, a key aspect of this adolescent dilemma is that of finding a role, which is generally taken to be the outward expression of identity. The emotional upheaval provoked by this mandate is called the identity crisis. In order to resolve this crisis and achieve a sense of identity, it is necessary to synthesize
psychological development and societal directives. The adolescent must find an orientation to life that not only fulfills the attributes of the self but at the same time is consistent with what society expects; that is, a role cannot be self-destructive (e.g., sustained fasting) or socially disapproved (e.g., criminal behaviour). In the search for an identity, the adolescent must discover what he believes in and what his attitudes and ideals are, for commitment to a role entails, to a greater or lesser degree, commitment to a set of values.
If the adolescent fails to resolve the identity crisis by the time of entry into adulthood, he will feel a sense of role confusion or identity diffusion. Some young adults waver between roles in a kind of prolonged “moratorium,” or period of avoiding commitment. Others seem to avoid the crisis altogether and settle easily on an available, socially approved identity. Still others resolve their crises by adopting an available but socially disapproved role or ideology. This latter option is called negative identity formation and is often associated with delinquent behaviour. Resolution of the adolescent identity crisis has a profound influence on development during later adulthood.
All societies traditionally prescribe stereotyped roles to each sex. These roles have adaptive significance; that is, they allow society to maintain and perpetuate itself. From this reasoning, it follows that differences in sex-role behaviour, at least initially, arose from the different tasks males and females performed for survival—especially those tasks centred on reproduction. Differing biologies exert differing pressures on psychosocial development; however, these pressures do not occur independently of the demands of cultural and historical milieus. The biological basis of one’s psychosocial functioning is believed to relate to adaptive orientations for survival. Many differences exist between males and females, but the nature of individual differences between the sexes is dependent on interactions among biological, psychological, sociocultural, and historical influences.
Development In Adulthood And Old Age
In sheer number of years, the periods labeled adulthood and aging constitute the major portion of the human life span. Historically, however, these periods were seen as less significant and interesting developmentally than infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Adulthood was viewed as a time of continuity, a period when what had been developed earlier was utilized. Aging was viewed as a time of decline, a period when what had been developed earlier was lost. Contemporary opinion is that adulthood and aging are just as significant and interesting as the earlier periods of the life cycle. Adulthood and aging are characterized by both growth and decline.
Central nervous system processing
There is relatively clear evidence that, with advancing age, individuals show a tendency toward decreasing speed of response. This is a gradual change occurring across the entire life span that shows up in a variety of so-called speeded tasks (those in which errors would be unlikely if the individual had an unlimited amount of time to complete the tasks). For example, reaction time tests (which measure the time elapsing between the appearance of a signal and the beginning of a responding movement) are usually viewed as a measure of central nervous system processing. Mean speed of response on such tasks increases with age until the late teens, remains constant until the mid-20s, and then declines steadily throughout the remainder of the age range.
Much evidence has been accumulated to link changes in brain electrical activity to the slowing of behaviour. The electroencephalogram (EEG) provides a record of the brain’s electrical activity. The normal human EEG displays continuous rhythmic activity in the form of wavelike patterns varying in frequency and amplitude. The dominant rhythm is the alpha wave, which reaches its maximum frequency in adolescence and begins to slow gradually after young adulthood. This slowing may be related to disease processes (particularly vascular disease) and to basic aging processes. The older adult’s central nervous system appears to be in a state of underarousal in comparison to that of the younger adult.
Cognition
Decline in the rate of central nervous system processing does not necessarily imply a similar change in learning, memory, or other intellectual functions. However, considerable evidence indicates that the learning ability of young adults is superior to that of older adults and that the faster the pace of the task the more difference age makes. Older learners benefit more from slower pacing of tasks than do younger learners. When allowed to regulate the pace of the task themselves, older learners often show an improvement in performance, whereas this is not necessarily the case with younger learners.
However, in regard to memory, as opposed to the learning or acquisition of information, research suggests that there are relatively few age-related differences within the primary-memory system, the temporary maintenance system for conscious processing of information. Age is a significant factor, however, in the functioning of the secondary-memory system. Secondary memory depends on the elaboration and organization of information in terms of its semantic content or meaning. Compared with younger adults, older adults appear to be deficient in these processes. Generally, they do not spontaneously use organizational strategies as extensively as do younger adults, or, if they use them, they do so less effectively. But, when organizational strategies are built into the situation, the performance of older adults improves markedly.
Most studies examining memory for general knowledge have found that older adults retrieve such information as well as or better than do younger adults. Within some contexts, older adults appear to integrate and retain the meaning of sets of sentences and texts as well as younger adults. For example, when young, middle-aged, and elderly adults are asked questions covering such topics as famous people, news events, history, geography, the Bible, literature, sports, and general information (e.g., “What was the former name of Muhammad Ali?”; “What is the capital of Cambodia?”), their answers typically show no evidence of age differences in the retrieval of knowledge. In fact, elderly people may actually answer more questions correctly than younger groups. Older adults also appear to have accurate knowledge about their own memory processes—knowledge that has been labeled metamemory. For example, research has found no age differences regarding subjects’ assessments of the relative reliability of visual and verbal memory, regarding the use of memory strategies (e.g., reminder notes), or regarding memory monitoring (e.g., prediction of the number of items that would be recalled following memory tasks).
Psychometric approaches to cognition suggest that intelligence is characterized by two distinct properties. Fluid intelligence, measured by tests that minimize the role of cultural knowledge, reflects the degree to which the individual has developed unique qualities of thinking through incidental learning. Crystallized intelligence, measured by tests that maximize the role of cultural knowledge, reflects the degree to which the individual has been acculturated through intentional learning. Fluid intelligence shows a steady decline from adolescence through middle age. Across the same age range, however, a steady increase occurs in crystallized intelligence. When measures of both properties are taken, few age-related differences appear.
Finally, there are age-related differences on several measures of cognitive functioning. In general, older adults perform more poorly than younger adults on tasks requiring both concrete-operational thought and formal-operational thought.
Some features of cognitive functioning—speed of response, secondary memory, and fluid intelligence—seem to decline with age. Others—contextual memory and crystallized intelligence—increase. Aging does not inevitably precipitate a decline in cognitive functioning. Indeed, there is growing evidence that older persons can largely modify their intellectual performance, documenting a clear lifelong capacity for cognitive change in human beings.
Personality and social development
Several theories of personality development stress that adulthood and aging are periods of qualitative change, of discontinuity, and of transformations of earlier life patterns. These changes are believed to arise in relation to the demands of the person’s changing biological status and social context—the family, the workplace, and society in general. Thus, personality development is both an individual and a social phenomenon.
In the view of Erik Erikson, certain psychosocial demands, or crises, confront the individual at distinct intervals throughout life. The young adult, for instance, is expected to enter into an institution—i.e., marriage and family—that will perpetuate the society. The degree to which the basic need for intimacy on all levels—physical, emotional, and others—is met in such a relationship determines in most individuals the conception of the self as belonging or as isolated. In middle adulthood the crisis develops between the sense of generativity and the sense of stagnation. In this stage the individual is expected to play the role of a contributing, generative member of society. Generativity can take the form of providing the goods and services by which society functions or of producing, rearing, and socializing future members of society. The inability to develop a productive self-conception results in a feeling of stagnation. In maturity, according to Erikson, a crisis arises with regard to the sense of ego integrity versus the sense of despair. In this stage, individuals realize that they are reaching the end of life. If they have successfully progressed through the previous stages of development, they can face old age with satisfaction in the feeling that a full and complete life has been led. Individuals for whom this integrity of life is lacking often feel a sense of despair over “wasted” opportunity.
The American psychologist Daniel J. Levinson also divides adult life into qualitatively distinct periods. Confining his study to men, Levinson identified five eras within their lives that are not stages of biological, psychological, or social development but that together constitute a life-cycle structure. The eras are (1) preadulthood (birth to age 22), (2) early adulthood (age 17 to 45), (3) middle adulthood (age 40 to 64), (4) late adulthood (age 60 to 85), and (5) late late adulthood (age 80 and over). Each of these eras is in turn made up of a series of developmental periods and transitions. For example, in early adulthood a first major transition, ordinarily beginning at age 17 to 18 and extending until age 22 to 23, represents a developmental link between preadulthood and early adulthood. The young man in this early adult transition faces two major tasks. The first task is to modify relationships with his family and with other persons, groups, and institutions significant to his preadult world. The second task is to take a preliminary step into the adult world. This requires making initial explorations and choices for adult living. Major life events within this transition may include graduating from high school, moving out of the family home, seeking gainful employment, or attending college. Entering the adult world begins in the early 20s and extends until the late 20s. The focus of this period is on exploration and provisional commitment to adult roles and responsibilities. The young man faces two antithetical tasks. On the one hand, he must explore alternate possibilities for adult living, keeping options open and avoiding strong commitments. On the other hand, he must create a stable life structure, becoming responsible and “making something” of himself. Crucial life events during this period include occupational choice, first job, marriage, and the birth of children.
The age range of 28 to 33 years represents a transition between the period of entering the adult world and the next period of settling down. This transition provides the young man with an opportunity to adjust and enrich the provisional adult life structure that he created earlier. For most men, however, a moderate to severe crisis is common; divorce and occupational change are frequent during this time. A settling-down period then follows, beginning in the early 30s and extending until about age 40. This period, during which the man’s task is to become a full-fledged adult, emphasizes stability and security. The individual makes deeper commitments to his occupation, family, or whatever enterprises are significant to him. In addition, he often concentrates on “making it.” This involves long-range planning toward specific goals with a timetable for their achievement. Most men fix on a key life event, such as a promotion, as representative of ultimate affirmation by society. During the last years of the settling-down period, there is a distinctive phase designated as “becoming one’s own man,” ordinarily occurring at age 36 to 40. The man’s major task during this phase is to achieve greater independence and authority by striving for the goals of his various enterprises.
The midlife transition spans four to six years, reaching a peak in the early 40s. It forms a developmental link between early adulthood and middle adulthood and, being part of both eras, represents a beginning and ending, a meeting of past and future. A task of the midlife transition is to work on and partially resolve this discrepancy between what is and what might be. The transition may be fairly smooth, but it is more likely to involve considerable turmoil. The period of entering middle adulthood begins at about age 45 and extends until about age 50. Sometimes the start of this new life structure is marked by a significant life event, such as a change in job or occupation or a divorce or love affair. In other cases, the changes are more subtle.
Research evidence does not unequivocally support the discontinuous, stagelike changes in adult personality proposed by theorists such as Erikson and Levinson. In fact, several major studies of personality development during the adult and aged years present evidence for both change and constancy. For instance, studies of healthy adults between the ages of 40 and 80 residing in the area of Kansas City, Mo., U.S., during the 1950s found evidence for both continuity and change of adult personality. On the one hand, personality structure was stable; four personality types—integrated, defended, passive-dependent, and unintegrated—emerged among respondents regardless of age. Similarly, characteristics dealing with the socioadaptational aspects of personality (e.g., goal-directed behaviour, coping styles, and life satisfaction) were not age-related. It seems, therefore, that the ways in which healthy adults interact with the environment may be stable even though the roles they adopt alter with age. On the other hand, individual styles of coping with the inner world of experience showed marked age differences. For example, 40-year-olds felt in charge of their environment, viewed the self as a source of energy, and were positive about risk taking, whereas 60-year-olds saw the environment as threatening and even dangerous and viewed the self as passive and accommodating.
Other studies of personality development from birth through early adulthood have also found evidence for constancy and change. For example, behavioral dispositions of the early school years, including passive withdrawal from stressful situations, dependency on family, arousal of anger, involvement in intellectual mastery, sexual behaviour and sex-role identification, and anxiety over social interaction, have been found to carry over into adulthood. The degree of stability in these behaviours exhibited from childhood to adulthood seems to be closely related to cultural expectations of appropriate sex-role behaviour. If a pattern of childhood behaviour is consistent with sex-role expectations, it will more likely remain stable over time.
Other studies, concentrating on the development from adolescence into adulthood among people born in California in the late 1920s and early 1930s, found different personality types for males and females that showed substantial stability over time. Personality characteristics reflecting socialization and self-presentation, for example, tended to remain stable. On the other hand, two major types of personality characteristics, those reflecting information processing and those reflecting interpersonal relations, tended to change. There were differences between the sexes both in what was constant and in what changed across life. For example, lifestyle patterns among the parents of the California children were more continuous between young adulthood and old age for fathers than they were for mothers. Fathers who in early adulthood were unwell and disengaged from their families showed these same characteristics in late adulthood. In regard to personality, however, there was more apparent continuity between young adulthood and old age among mothers than among fathers. For example, mothers who were group-centred showed a more psychologically healthy personality and had a more satisfying life in later years than in earlier years, whereas non-group-centred mothers were happy and healthy at age 30 but lost their health and physical stamina by age 70.
In general, older adults tend to engage in greater introspection and self-reflection than younger adults, showing a general movement from the outer world toward the inner world. They tend to withdraw emotional investments, be less assertive, and avoid challenges. Adulthood and old age involve both constancy and change. These periods of life are continuations of the past childhood.
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