Friday, December 30, 2011

Development During Infancy and Childhood


Most scientists eventually decided that child development is not a mini replay of evolution and but most continue to believe that studying children and how they develop can tell us a lot about human beings in general. This belief helped to spark a scientific field now known as developmental psychology. Developmental psychologists study the changes that occur during all or part of the life span in  the processes of perception, learning, thinking, social activity and other aspects of human behavior.


Three major issues in developmental psychology have stimulated recurring conflicts.

NATURE VERSUS NURTURE

The nurture side of the nature –nurture debate had its strong advocates too – people who believed that environmental forces have a more powerful influence on our development than does heredity. The nature-nurture debate really concerns the relative impact of heredity and environment. Virtually no one believes that nature alone, or nurture alone, completely determines the course of our development. Psychologists agree that development is shaped by the interaction of heredity and environment.

PASSIVITY VERSUS ACTIVITY

Some psychologists picture as fairly passive, doing what we do largely because of the environmental forces around us. Jean Piaget attacked the view that the developing person merely “submits passively to the environment”. Instead Piaget argued that people actively manipulate the objects and  events around them. They don’t merely copy or learn about reality as they develop. Instead, they construct their own ways of understanding the world; psychologically speaking they all invent their own reality.

CONTINUOUS VERSUS DISCONTINOUS

Some psychologists see development as a sort of continuous progression – that is a steady accumulation of skills, knowledge and maturity. According to this view, development is best viewed as a smooth curve, it can be measured in quantitative ways – that is ways that tell us how much of a particular ability the child has. Other psychologists see development as a discontinuous progression – that is as a sequence of leaps from one stage to another. Here it measures developmental changes in qualitative ways – that is in terms of the characteristics of people’s behavior.

 

Methods of Studying Development


Development psychologists focus on time and transformation. They study the changes that occur as the developing individual unfolds – changes in processes as basic as perception and as complex as forming a self concept. The psychologists rely on research methods geared specifically to the study of development. Two of the most important are the longitudinal method and the cross sectional method.

THE LONGITUDINAL MEHTOD

A psychologist using the longitudinal method observes the same individuals at different points in time. The individuals may be the children of oil barons and migrant workers studied at yearly intervals from birth. This research can be much more difficult. People who enlist in a study may move away, lose interest, or for other reasons be unavailable for later observation or testing. This is a logistical problem for the investigator, and it is a source of bias, it might mean that the findings of the completed study would apply only to people who rarely move and who are interested in research. Another risk of this research is that a study will seem less important or sophisticated at its end than it did at its beginning; this is because the central issued and the preferred research methods of psychology are continually shifting.

Carefully conducted longitudinal research, despite its problems, is highly regarded by most developmental psychologists, who recognize the value of repeatedly observing ithe same individuals as they mature.

THE CROSS-SECTIONAL METHOD

Most developmental research involves the cross-sectional method. In studying dependency, for example, many investigators simply compare representative samples of youngsters at two or more age levels on the same measures. They found large group differences, with dependency most pronounced in the youngest children and least pronounced in the oldest. This of course, suggests that dependency as measured by these researchers probably declines from the early to the mid elementary years. Such cross sectional research is an efficient way of spotting age group differences as such. It has its disadvantages, though because it does not involve repeated measurements of the same individuals, it cannot tell us how stable people’s characteristics are as they mature.

Infancy: Early steps in the March to Maturity

For centuries, the deeply private world of the infant was cloaked in mystery. Because babies could not talk, the adults in their world were reduced to guesswork and speculation about them. In recent decades, however, ingenious investigators have figured out ways of peering into the infant’s world. The neonatal (newborn) period is the first 4 weeks after birth. This is the time of transition from the total dependency of prenatal life to a more independent, creative existence. It is a time when rhythms of breathing, feeding, sleeping, and elimination are established and when babies and parents make some critical adaptations to one another. 

THE NEONATE:
Most of the psychologists agree that neonates are born with abilities to perceive and respond to some parts of their world in an organized and effective way. For example, reflexes that are in place at birth permit the neonate to grope, or ‘root’ for the breast, to suck when a object is placed in its mouth and to swallow milk and other liquids.

Neonates show perceptual abilities that would surprise most people. They show positive reactions to certain sweet tastes and negative reactions to certain sour, bitter or salty taste. They turn in the direction of certain sounds, including human speech. Some of the most exciting findings about neonates involve their visual abilities. They not only orient toward light but they can under the right conditions, actually follow a light.

Some surprising findings of a study conducted by Meltzoff and Moore suggested that neonates are even capable of imitation. The research appeared to show that babies as young as 2 to 3 weeks can mimic certain adult behaviors such as facial expressions.

Some researchers now suspect that the apparent imitation may be most pronounced among very young infants and that it may be reflexive – something like the early rooting.

MOTOR DEVELOPMENT

The development of motor activity in the period of infancy has been studied extenisively. Investigators have built up a rich fund of normative data on the ages at which certain motor milestones are attained.   The below mentioned chart shows the norms for several such milestones. It shows that there is a fairly broad age range within which individual infants may reach each milestone, the order in which the milestones are reached rearely differs.






Age (in months)                               Mile stones

At 1 level                                           arms and legs thrust in play
At 2 level                                           hands erect and steady
At 3 level                                           hand predominantly open
At 4 level                                           turns back to side
At 5 level                                           one handed reaching                                             
At 6 level                                           sits alone steadily
At 7 level                                           crawls or creeps
At 8 level                                           pulls up by furniture
At 9 level                                           Neat pincer ( thumb)
At 10 level                                        Pat –a – cake
At 11 level                                        stand alone
At 12 level                                        walks alone
At 13 level                                        throws ball forward


The order of events is quite consistent, but the age at which each milestone will be reached is hard to predict for a given child. For example, 5% of the infants walk alone by the age of 9 months but that another 5% percent do not walk alone until after their sixteenth month. Walking is another good example of the interaction of nature and nurture; although it seems to be a wired in developmental sequence, it can be speeded up or slowed down by variations in the infant’s experience.

Prehension - the use of the hands as tools, shows another predictable developmental sequence. It begins with infants thrusting their hands in the direction of a target object, essentially “taking a swipe” at the object. This is followed by crude grasping involving only the palm of the hand. Then there is a sequence of increasingly well-coordinated finger and thumb movements. Later in the first year of life, most infants can combine thumb and finger action into a pincer motion that allows them to pick up a single chocolate chip from a tabletop.

What they will then do with the chocolate chip depends upon the state of yet another motor system, mouthing. The most common form of mouthing in infancy is sucking.

DEVELOPMENT OF PERCEPTION

The past two decades have seen an explosion of research on infant perception, particularly visual perception. There are lot of ways in which infants organize and interpret what they see. For example – a kind of research is a study of depth perception conducted by Gibson and Walk. To judge whether infants can read the perceptual cues that adults use to judge depth, these researchers used the visual cliff. It involved an apparent drop-off made safe by a clear glass cover. Despite the cover, Gibson and Walk found that none of the 6-14 month old infants they tested would cross the “deep” area to get to their mothers.  Yet all 36 of them eagerly crawled to their mothers when the moms were stationed on the “shallow” side. This strongly suggests  that even 6 month old infants have depth perception.

Investigators have traced significant development changes in face watching. One month olds show only a moderate interest in real human faces; when they do focus on a face they focus mostly on edges and points of light dark contrast. Two month olds, by contrast, spend more time looking at the interior of the face, especially the eyes, than at the outer edges. Most researchers agree that by the fourth or fifth month, infants can ‘assemble’ parts of a face into a meaningful whole. By five months, for instance, babies can distinguish between two dissimilar faces.

COGINITIVE DEVELOPMENT – PIAGET’S THEORY

For the infant, the cognitive development is expressed through perceptual and motor activity. When a baby looks intently at the points and contrasts of a triangle or inspects her father’s face, she is manifesting one of her few means of “thinking about” or “knowing” the triangle or the face. When another infants sucks on the handle of his rattle, this motor activity is his way of knowing, or understanding that rattle.

This point has been emphasized by Jean Piaget, a Swiss biologist, philosopher, and psychologist who has developed the most detailed and comprehensive theory of cognitive development. Piaget called his approach genetic epistemology. In Piaget’s view, the development of knowledge is a form of adaptation and as such involves the interplay of two processes, assimilation and accommodation.  Assimilation  means modifying ones environment so that it fits into one’s already developed ways of thinking and acting.
Accommodation means modifying oneself so as to fit in with existing characterisitics of the environment.

According to Piaget, the processes of assimilation, accommodation and equilibrium operate in different ways at different age levels.

Piaget called the period of infancy the sensorimotor stage. This label reflects something as the infant’s ways of knowing the world are sensory, perceptual and motoric. Piaget called each specific ‘way of knowing’ a scheme. A scheme is an action sequence guided by thought. For example, when infants suck, they are exercising a suckling scheme. Their first sucking is primitive and not very flexible in style being sucked.  In making the necessary adjustments, they accommodate their sucking scheme to the shape of the nipple. This allows them to assimilate the nipple into their sucking scheme. This combination of assimilation and accommodation results in adaptive behavior that helps the infant survive.

Piaget described many specific cognitive changes that take place during the sensorimotor stage.  When young infants sees the object and the object is hidden, they seem unaware that the object continues to exist.  For example, hold an object within view of the baby until he or she is clearly interested and is reaching for it, and then quickly cover the object with a cloth. Chances are that the baby will stop in mid reach and will not search for the object at all. If we repeat the same with an younger age level (14-16mth)  we will see that the baby search for the hidden object. The search suggests that the baby has attained what Piaget called Object permanence – the idea that objects continue to exist even when we can no longer see them.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

The first ‘social’ relationship most infants form is with a parent and in most cultures that parent is the mother. Various theorists have offered various ideas about the psychological significance of that relationship.

Piaget emphasized the cognitive aspects of infancy. In the infant’s ways of “relating” to parents and others, Piaget saw signs of sensorimotor intelligence. Freud’s view was quite different. He saw infancy, the oral stage, as a time when issues of dependency were being dealt with and when physical satisfaction was derived from stimulation in the oral region of the body.  Erik-Erikson argued that mother-infant interaction is a context for the baby’s basic conflict between trust and distrust of the world.

Despite their differences, all three theorists agreed that infants typically form intimate attachments to their mothers.

Attachments :
Attachment is an early, stable, affectional relationship between a child and another person, usually a parent. Early efforts to study this relationship were clinical and somewhat informal. Various researchers studied attachment in a structured way. Their work yielded a surprisingly consistent picture

1.      Initially, the infant develops an attraction to social objects in general and to humans in particular; the baby shows proximity – maintaining behaviors (crying, clinging, and other behaviors that serve to keep humans nearby)
2.      Next, the baby distinguishes familiar from unfamiliar people and the primary caretaker (usually the mother) from other familiar people; then proximity – maintaining behaviors begin to be aimed more directly at familiar persons, particularly at the primary caretaker.
3.      By the second half of their first year, most infants develop a true attachment to the primary caretaker; they recognize that person and direct proximity maintaining behaviors toward that person and not toward others.
4.      By the first birthday, the attachment is so strong that children react negatively to separation from the primary caretaker, they grow fearful and tearful, for example, when their parent leave them with a sitter.


EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

When babies smile, does it mean they are happy? This seemingly simple question is actually very complicated because what looks like an emotion may not always be one. Evidently smiling happens for different reasons at different ages. Some smiling is seen even in new borns, but much of this seems automatic and hardly emotional. For example, some smiling seems to be triggered merely by the infant’s bodily state, as when babies break in to grin during REM sleep in the first few days after their birth. In the second month, smiles can be brought on by events in the environment – particularly the sound of human voice or the sight of a human face. A powerful smile evokes is a combination of a voice and a moving face, particularly if the voice is high-pitched. By the third or fourth month, babies smile more for their mothers than for an equally encouraging female stranger. By the beginning of the fifth month most babies have begun to combine smiling with laughing.  By their first birthdays, tactile fun evokes fewer laughs; but interesting visual displays like a human mask, get more laughs.

ADJUSTMENT PROBLEMS IN INFANCY

In an ideal world, infancy would be a time when baby and parent would quickly adjust to one another and develop a smooth harmony of styles that is called a “Waltz”. Quite common in the first year of life are infant feeding problems – especially a digestive discomfort known as colic and vomiting. Constipation and diarrhea, irregular sleep patterns, and mystifying bursts of crying also occur very often in the first year. Near the end of the first year and well into the second, the problems most often involve a conflict between the baby’s growing physical and mental processes and the parents efforts to regulate behavior that seems to them to be aggressive or dangerous.

A number of clinical disorders make their first appearance during infancy. Among these are several that are known to be caused by genetic or other biological factors. Down syndrome for example, involves mental retardation and a characteristic physical appearance noticeable even in the newborn.

Early signs of the disorder known as infantile autism make their appearance during the first year and a half of life. Autistic youngsters fail to show several of the landmark features of infancy. They fail to focus on other people’s eyes, they do not smile regularly in response to people’s voice or faces, they do not show key signs of attachment as protest when a parent leaves them. Infants suffering from a failure to thrive show apathy, lack of normal social interest, and stunted growth despite seemingly adequate nutrition.

ADJUSTMENT PROBLEMS IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

In the  preschool year, children acquire a risky combination: mobility, language, and immature judgement. Their limited powers of reasoning make it hard for them to foresee the consequences of their physical activity. They are physically able to cross the street but unable to envision all the dangers that crossing the street poses. Preschoolers also use their newfound language skills with a distinct lack of restraint. Their cognitive egocentrism prevents them from taking the perspective of their listener; the result can be painfully honest comments such as “Hello, fat lady” or “you have ugly teeth.

Preschoolers pay a price for their powers of representational thought. That price is a lively imagination that can careen out of control at times. Shadows on the wall at bedtime can become burglars, kidnappers or ghosts. There is a perpetual tension between the rational and irrational uses of imagination.  A common fear among preschoolers is that something under the bed will grab a hand if it hangs free. Surveys of parents show that fears are amoung the most common behaviors problems of early childhood, but what children fear changes markedly during this period.

Problems such as temper tantrums decline over the preschool years.

Early Childhood : Play, Preschool, and Preoperations

From the age of about 18 mths through the age of 6, the comfortable confines of the child’s family give way to the world of peers. The play that goes on in that world may seem frivolous to many adults, but we are now coming to recognize it as , to use Piaget’s expression, “the work of the child”. In the context of play, children make the transition from sensorimotor thinking to thinking that involves internal manipulatiohn of symbols. The elegant symbol system is known as language takes shape at a pace that leaves even experienced parents dazzled. The frequency and intensity of peer interaction force the child to deal with interpersonal issues, such as coping with aggressive impulses and learning how to help.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

The period between about the ages of 2 and 7 was labeled the preoperational stage by Piaget. By this label, he meant that these years are preliminary to the development of truly logical operations.

Operations are flexible mental actions that can be combined with one another to solve the problems.

The primitive identity concept is an important milestone. One reasons is that it enters into the way children think about their gender identity. Another reason is that identity concepts seem to be necessary steps on the way to concentration, a defining feature of the next major Piagetian stage, concrete operations. Finally these early object-identity concepts may be linked to a more personal sense of identity – that is the self concept.

Another important development in the preoperational period is representational thought – the ability to form mental symbols to represent objects or events that are not present. As early evidence of representational thought, Piaget cites delayed imitation.

Early in the preoperational stage, reasoning is not truly deductive nor is it truly inductive. Instead very young children show transductive reasoning; that is they reason from the particular to the particular, often in ways that are influenced by their desires.

Some other characteristics of preoperational thought can be surveyed briefly. Egocentrism, means an inability to take the point of view of another person. Preoperational children tend to assume that others see the world just as they themselves see it. Egocentrism as thus defined, does not mean selfishness; instead , it refers to an intellectual limitation. Preoperational children also display animism, the belief that inanimate objects which have certain characteristics of living things are in fact alive. Finally, preoperational children do not understand cause effect relationships very well. They tend to see unrelated events and objects as causally related to one another. Infact, they tend to believe that each event has a clearly identifiable cause, and thus they often fail to recognize the operation of chance and luck.

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Achieving mature thought requires achieving a mature use of language.  One can view the course of language development as either continous or discontinuous . vocabulary development appears to be a fairly smooth, continuous process. The infant’s first legitimate English word usually appears around the time of the first birthday. By the age of 2 , the vocabulary has usually expanded to about 50 words, and by age 3, it consists of about 1000 words.

Language development looks more discontinous or stagelike, when we focus on syntax, the formation of grammatical rules for assembling words into sentences. There are large differences among children in their rate of development and because children do not always use their most advanced forms of language. In many children, syntactic development actually begins before stage 1 (12-18 mths)

The recurring conflict between active and passive views of the developing person canbe seen in the study of language development. Some theorists, have argued that children learn language by trying  various combinations of sounds and being rewarded by their parents and other for those sounds that represent true language. Others, such as Piaget have argued that children create their language by constructing their own rules and revising them as needed. There can be little doubt that some of children’s language acquisition  comes from being rewarded or encouraged by others; all of us have seen this process in action. Yet it also is hard to deny that children are active builders of their own language. One line of evidence often used to support this view is the erroneous language that children use – language that reveals rules the children have constructed but that is not likely to have  been rewarded.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

Along with the increasing mobility and accelerating language skills of the preschool child comes an expanding social world. The process by which the child’s behavior and attitudes are brought into harmony with that world is called socialization.

Freud’s theory focused mainly on the child’s socialization with respect to parents during this period. Freud believed that during the anal stage, roughly the second year of life, key interactions center around toilet training. The child takes physical satisfaction from stimulation in the anal region of the body and social issued including self control and orderliness are confronted. Freud believed that children forge a lasting identity with their same sex parent.

Freud and erikson did theirs, with a focus on the parent-child relationship.

The parent –child relationship: The first part of early childhood has been dubbed “the terrible 2s. one reason for this label is that the child’s increasing physical prowess, intellectual power, and language skill transform the nature of the parent child relationship, the child becomes less compliant and manageable than before.

In teaching specific skills to their children, parents may profit from the work of behavioral psychologists. In addition to teaching specific skills, the parent during this period is called upon to be disciplination.

First a combination of general parental warmth and specific explanations for specific prohibitions seems to promote effective discipline. Parental warmth seems to make the child eager to maintain the parent’s approval and to understand the parent’s reason for the prohibition.  Parental style may influence the way these patterns are expressed, but parental style is also partly a response to the child’s style.

Sex roles : children’s identification with their parents influence their ideas about sex roles. Children of both sexes may initially adopt may traditionally feminine and maternal behavior patterns but by the age of 4 or 5, boys have already begun to show traditional male types of behavior. One reason for the divergence of boys and girls is that children pick up sex-typed behavior through observational learning – that is boys observe and imitate males, particularly their mothers. There is a large differential imitation of males and females not shown up strongly until children are 4 or 5 years old. The reason seems to be that children’s awareness of sex differences is influenced by their cognitive development.
- Cognitive development and environmental factors, there seem also to be biological causes for sex role development.

Peers and Play : As children mature, their relationships with their parents are increasingly rivaled by their relationships with their peers. The nature of child to child interaction in the context of play change sin predictable ways over the early childhood years.

Initially children engage in solitary play, they may show a preference for being near other children and show some interest in what those others are doing. Solitary  play us eventually replaced by parallel play in which children use similar materials and engage in similar activity; typically near one another, but they hardly interact at all. By age 3, most children show at least some co-operative play a form that involves direct child-to-child interaction and requires some complementary role taking. Additional signs of youngster’s growing awareness of peers can be seen at about age 3 or 4. at this age, at least some children beign showing a special faithfulness to one other child. At the age of 4 or 5 they step on the way to the stable sense of gender identity.

Aggression: In early childhood, boys and girls face an important new task: learning to express unpleasant feelings in socially acceptable ways. Often the feelings are vented in the form of aggressive behavior. Studies show that aggressive behavior, across many cultures, is more common in boys and girls ; also more common in early childhood.

Aggressive behavior may be fostered not only by observational learning but also by direct reinforcement, or reward. In many settings where children play, the aggressive children play, the aggressive children often triumph over others, have easier access to preferred toys, and even get extra attention from adults who are encouraging them to be less combative. Social influences such as television may, through modeling, encourage aggression.  Parent often respond to such behavior by paying special attention to the child and even by giving in to the child’s demands “just to get a little peace and quiet”.

Prosocial behavior: Preschoolers can be aggressive, but they can also be touchingly helpful, generous, and comforting. Such behavior is called presocial. Some have argued that these children are motivated to be involved with other children; and whether the involvement is aggressive or prosocial will depend upon the situation. Others argue that aggressive children, who themselves are easily upset, finds it easier to empathize with others who are upset.

According to Hoffman, children pass through four predictable stages in the development of the empathy that makes prodocial behavior possible. In the first stage, infants have trouble differentiating self from others. Their behavior is triggered by and often looks like, the strong emotional displays of others. After the first year, children gradually develops a sense of self as different from others, and at that point they enter a second stage. Although they have come to recognize that another person is, in fact another person, their egocentric thinking leads them to “help” the other person in ways that they themselves would want to be helped. In the third stage children recognize that a distressed person may have feelings and needs that are different from their own. In the fourth stage the children are likely to empathize  with and seek to help, say an unpopular child  who seems generally morose or withdrawn.

ADJUSTMENT PROBLEMS IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
In the  preschool year, children acquire a risky combination: mobility, language, and immature judgement. Their limited powers of reasoning make it hard for them to foresee the consequences of their physical activity. They are physically able to cross the street but unable to envision all the dangers that crossing the street poses. Preschoolers also use their newfound language skills with a distinct lack of restraint. Their cognitive egocentrism prevents them from taking the perspective of their listener; the result can be painfully honest comments such as “Hello, fat lady” or “you have ugly teeth.

Preschoolers pay a price for their powers of representational thought. That price is a lively imagination that can careen out of control at times. Shadows on the wall at bedtime can become burglars, kidnappers or ghosts. There is a perpetual tension between the rational and irrational uses of imagination.  A common fear among preschoolers is that something under the bed will grab a hand if it hangs free. Surveys of parents show that fears are amoung the most common behaviors problems of early childhood, but what children fear changes markedly during this period.
- Problems such as temper tantrums decline over the preschool years.

- Later Childhood : Cognitive Tools, Social Rules , Schools


COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

The intellectual tools that children develop in this period were labeled concrete operations by Piaget, and that is also the name he has given to this stage of development. This stage involves a major advance in the power of the child’s reasoning.

With the advent of these operations, children’s awareness of the ways the world is organized begins to mushroom. They understand not only conversation of length but conservation of other physical entities – like mass, number and area.

In many ways the concrete-operational child’s thinking shows a power and versatility that would have been literally unthinkable in the preoperational period. But even this more advanced level of thought has its limitations. The operations are concrete in the sense that they are tied to the real world of objects and events. It is also hard for the concrete-operational child to grasp the broad meaning of abstract concepts such as freedom, integrity or truth.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

As their social world expands to include classmates and teachers, children’s ways of thinking about people show a corresponding change. Studies of “person perception” show that a child even as old as 6 or 7 will describe others in egocentric ways, referring to what the other people do to or for the child. Descriptions at this age also focus on concrete, observable characteristics of others, such as their physical appearance or their outward behavior.

During the next few years, children begin to use more and more descriptive statements involving psychological characteristics – statements that require some inference about the other person.

Friendship:  The development of “person perception” goes hand in hand with changes in the nature of friendship. Their first friendships tend to be self-serving; a friend is someone who “does what I want”. Later during the elementary school years, friendships become not only outgoing but reciprocal as well; friends are seen as people who “do things for each other”. Quality of exclusion or possessiveness goes along with many friendships in the middle and late elementary years, and also in adolescence.

Groups:  At the same time that children are learning to form one to one relationships with friends, they are learning to organize themselves into groups. Groups have certain defining characterisitics: goals shared by its members, rules conduct and a hierarchical structure.

Peers versus Adult influence : During the elementary school years, as we have just seen, friends and groups of peers take on central importance in a child’s social life, parents also influence . by the late elementary school period, there are many situations in which American youngster prefer relying on peers to relying on parents. Perhaps more importantly, there are many situations in which children, if forced to choose, will opt for behavior approved by their peers rather than behavior approved by their parents and other adults.
- Later Childhood : Cognitive Tools, Social Rules , Schools

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
The intellectual tools that children develop in this period were labeled concrete operations by Piaget, and that is also the name he has given to this stage of development. This stage involves a major advance in the power of the child’s reasoning.

With the advent of these operations, children’s awareness of the ways the world is organized begins to mushroom. They understand not only conversation of length but conservation of other physical entities – like mass, number and area.

In many ways the concrete-operational child’s thinking shows a power and versatility that would have been literally unthinkable in the preoperational period. But even this more advanced level of thought has its limitations. The operations are concrete in the sense that they are tied to the real world of objects and events. It is also hard for the concrete-operational child to grasp the broad meaning of abstract concepts such as freedom, integrity or truth.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

As their social world expands to include classmates and teachers, children’s ways of thinking about people show a corresponding change. Studies of “person perception” show that a child even as old as 6 or 7 will describe others in egocentric ways, referring to what the other people do to or for the child. Descriptions at this age also focus on concrete, observable characteristics of others, such as their physical appearance or their outward behavior.

During the next few years, children begin to use more and more descriptive statements involving psychological characteristics – statements that require some inference about the other person.

Friendship:  The development of “person perception” goes hand in hand with changes in the nature of friendship. Their first friendships tend to be self-serving; a friend is someone who “does what I want”. Later during the elementary school years, friendships become not only outgoing but reciprocal as well; friends are seen as people who “do things for each other”. Quality of exclusion or possessiveness goes along with many friendships in the middle and late elementary years, and also in adolescence.

Groups:  At the same time that children are learning to form one to one relationships with friends, they are learning to organize themselves into groups. Groups have certain defining characterisitics: goals shared by its members, rules conduct and a hierarchical structure.

Peers versus Adult influence : During the elementary school years, as we have just seen, friends and groups of peers take on central importance in a child’s social life, parents also influence . by the late elementary school period, there are many situations in which American youngster prefer relying on peers to relying on parents. Perhaps more importantly, there are many situations in which children, if forced to choose, will opt for behavior approved by their peers rather than behavior approved by their parents and other adults.

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