LIFE SPAN DEVELOPMENT

The study of human development is a rich and varied subject. We all have personal experience with development, but it is sometimes difficult to understand how and why people grow, learn, and act as they do. Theories of child development provide a useful framework for thinking about human growth, development, and learning. If you have ever wondered about what motivates human thought and behavior, understanding these theories can provide useful insight into both individuals and society. The following are just a few of the major theories that have emerged to explain various aspects of human development:

1. Stage Theories

Several famous psychologists, including Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Lawrence Kohlberg, describe development as a series of stages. A stage is a period in development in which people exhibit typical behavior patterns and establish particular capacities. The various stage theories share three assumptions:

1. People pass through stages in a specific order, with each stage building on capacities developed in the previous stage.

2. Stages are related to age. 3. Development is discontinuous, with qualitatively different capacities emerging in each stage.

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

While conducting intelligence tests on children, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget began to investigate how children think. According to Piaget, children’s thought processes change as they mature physically and interact with the world around them. Piaget believed children develop schema, or mental models, to represent the world. As children learn, they expand and modify their schema through the processes of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the broadening of an existing schema to include new information. Accommodation is the modification of a schema as new information is incorporated.

Age Crisis Virtue Description Freud

Stage 1 0-1

Trust vs

Mistrust

Hope At this stage babies learn to trust that their parents will meet their basic needs. If a child's basic needs aren't properly met at this age, he or she might grow up with a general mistrust of the world.

Oral

Stage 2 2-3

Autonomy vs

Shame & Doubt

Will As toddlers, children begin to develop independence and start to learn that they can do some things on their own (such as going to the toilet). If a child is not encouraged properly at this age, he or she might develop shame and doubt about their abilities.

Anal

Stage 3 4-6

Initiative vs

Guilt

Purpose As preschoolers, children continue to develop more independence and start to do things of their own initiative. If a child is not able to take initiative and succeed at appropriate tasks, he or she might develop guilt over their needs and desires.

Phallic

Stage 4 7-12

Industry vs

Inferiority

Competence Throughout their school years, children continue to develop self-confidence through learning new things. If they are not encouraged and praised properly at this age, they may develop an inferiority complex.

Latent

Stage 5 13-19

Identity vs

Role Confusion

Fidelity When they reach the teenage years, children start to care about how they look to others. They start forming their own identity by experimenting with who they are. If a teenager is unable to properly develop an identity at this age, his or her role confusion will probably continue on into adulthood.

Genital

Stage 6 20-34

Intimacy vs

Isolation

Love During early adulthood most people fall in love, get married and start building their own family. If a person is unable to develop intimacy with others at this age (whether through marriage or close friendships), they will probably develop feelings of isolation.

Stage 7 35-65

Generativity vs

Stagnation

Care This is the longest period of a human's life. It is the stage in which people are usually working and contributing to society in some way and perhaps raising their

children. If a person does not find proper ways to be productive during this period, they will probably develop feelings of stagnation.

Stage 8 65+

Integrity vs

Despair

Wisdom As senior citizens, people tend to look back on their lives and think about what they have or have not accomplished. If a person has led a productive life, they will develop a feeling of integrity. If not, they might fall into despair.

Erik Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development

Like Freud, Erik Erikson believed in the importance of early childhood. However, Erikson believed that personality development happens over the entire course of a person’s life. In the early 1960s, Erikson proposed a theory that describes eight distinct stages of development. According to Erikson, in each stage people face new challenges, and the stage’s outcome depends on how people handle these challenges. Erikson named the stages according to these possible outcomes:

Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development

Lawrence Kohlberg focused on moral reasoning, or why people think the way they do about right and wrong. Influenced by Piaget, who believed that moral reasoning depends on the level of cognitive development, Kohlberg proposed that people pass through three levels of moral development. He divided each level into two stages.

2. Sigmund Freud’s Psychosexual Theory of (Personality) Development

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3. Maslow’s Humanistic Eight Basic Needs and the Eight Stage Developmental model

Most of us are familiar with the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs . Though we tend to think of them as five basic

needs, Maslow had modified the hierarchy later to include three other needs at the top taking the total to

eight. The modified diagram is given below.

Out of these the first four needs, Maslow identified as deficit needs: i.e if the needs are not met, they make us

uncomfortable and we are motivated or driven by these needs in as much as we are able to sufficiently fulfill

these needs.

The last four needs, he identifies as growth needs: i.e. we never get enough of these . We are constantly

motivated by these needs as they pertain to our growth and development.

He also arranged them in a hierarchy such that we are motivated primarily by a need only if lower level needs

have been met. Thus, before one is motivated by cognitive or self actualization needs, one should have taken

care of basic deficit needs like physiological, security, belonging and esteem.

Now, everyone knows I am sold to the eight stage developmental model. As such I see clear parallels here

between developmental tasks that are archived ad needs that are met.

Let me now present the eight Maslow needs and explain it using analogies form other eight stage models.

1. Physiological needs: These are the basic animal needs for such things as food, warmth, shelter, sex, water,

and other body needs. If a person is hungry or thirsty or his body is chemically unbalanced, all of his

energies turn toward remedying these deficiencies, and other needs remain inactive. If one’s basic

biological needs are not met, one would never be able to trust the environment and would be stuck with

high neuroticism and anxiety.

2. Safety needs:With his physical needs relatively satisfied, the individual’s safety needs take over and

dominate his behavior. These needs have to do with man’s yearning for a predictable, orderly world in

which injustice and inconsistency are under control, the familiar frequent, and the unfamiliar rare. This

need for consistency, if not satisfied leads to feelings of doubt and shame (as opposed to feelings of

autonomy or being in control) and lead to high conscientiousness or need for discipline and orderliness.

3. Belonging needs:After physiological and safety needs are fulfilled, the third layer of human needs is social.

This psychological aspect of Maslow’s hierarchy involves emotionally-based relationships in general, such

as friendship, sexual intimacy and having a supportive and communicative family. If one finds failure in

having such close relationships, one is bedeviled with such negative social emotions like guilt (vis a vis

initiative) and has low extraversion values.

4. Self-esteem needs: All humans have a need to be respected, to have self-esteem, self-respect, and to

respect others. People need to engage themselves to gain recognition and have an activity or activities that

give the person a sense of contribution, to feel accepted and self-valued, be it in a profession or hobby.

This need if not satisfied leads to feelings of inferiority vis-a-vis feelings of industry. Feelings of inferiority

in turn may lead to low agreeableness.

5. Cognitive needs:Maslow believed that humans have the need to increase their intelligence and thereby

chase knowledge. Cognitive needs is the expression of the natural human need to learn, explore, discover

and create to get a better understanding of the world around them.This growth need for self-actualization

and learning, when not fulfilled leads to confusion and identity crisis. Also, this is directly related to need

to explore or the openness to experience.

6. Aesthetic needs: Based on Maslow’s beliefs, it is stated in the hierarchy that humans need beautiful

imagery or something new and aesthetically pleasing to continue up towards Self-Actualization. Humans

need to refresh themselves in the presence and beauty of nature while carefully absorbing and observing

their surroundings to extract the beauty that the world has to offer. This need is a higher level need to

relate in a beautiful way with the environment and leads to the beautiful feeling of intimacy with nature

and everything beautiful.

7. Self-actualization needs: Self-actualization is the instinctual need of humans to make the most of their

abilities and to strive to be the best they can.This need when fulfilled leads to feeling of generativity.

8. Self-transcendence needs: Maslow later divided the top of the triangle to add self-transcendence which is

also sometimes referred to as spiritual needs. Spiritual Needs are a little different from other needs,

accessible from many level. This need when fulfilled, leads to feelings of integrity and take things to

another level of being.

4. Behavioral Child Development Theories

Behavioral theories of child development focus on how environmental interaction influences behavior and are based upon the theories of theorists such as John B. Watson, Ivan Pavlov and B. F. Skinner. These theories deal only with observable behaviors. Development is considered a reaction to rewards, punishments, stimuli and reinforcement. This theory differs considerably from other child development theories because it gives no consideration to internal thoughts or feelings. Instead, it focuses purely on how experience shapes who we are. Learn more about these behavioral theories in these articles on classical conditioning and operant conditioning.

John Watson In The Ways of Behaviorism, Watson states that behaviorism is the scientific study of human behavior. It is simply the study of what people do. Behaviorism is intended to take psychology up to the same level as other sciences. The first task is to observe behavior and make predictions, then to take determine causal relationships. Behavior can be reduced to relationships between stimuli and responses, the S --- R Model. A stimulus can be shown to cause a response or a response can be traced back to a stimulus. All behavior can be reduced to this basic component. According to Watson, "life's most complicated acts are but combinations of these simple stimulus- response patterns of behavior."

5. Social Child Development Theories

John Bowlby There is a great deal of research on the social development of children. John Bowbly proposed one of the earliest theories of social development. Bowlby believed that early relationships with caregivers play a major role in child development and continue to influence social relationships throughout life. He also saw a basis on what he called attachment theory.

Albert Bandura Psychologist Albert Bandura proposed what is known as social learning theory. According to this theory of child development, children learn new behaviors from observing other people. Unlike behavioral theories, Bandura believed that external reinforcement was not the only way that people learned new things. Instead, intrinsic reinforcements such as a sense of pride, satisfaction and accomplishment could also lead to learning. By observing the actions of others, including parents and peers, children develop new skills and acquire new information.

Lev Vygotsky

Another psychologist named Lev Vygotsky proposed a seminal learning theory that has gone on to become very influential, especially in the field of education. Like Piaget, Vygotsky believed that children learn actively and through hands-on experiences. His sociocultural theory also suggested that parents, caregivers, peers and the culture at large were responsible for the development of higher order functions.

Stage 1: Assistance provided by more knowledgeable others (MKO's) (Think of a child learning to tie his shoes, first, you show him how, then you talk him through it, usually with some little memorable story about rabbit ears, loops or something like that, and eventually… Stage 2: Assistance provided by self (the child is able to guide himself through tying his shoes, usually repeating the story that you taught him—the interaction has become internalized. Children often talk themselves through difficult tasks—Vygotsky called this private speech. You’ll notice that this private speech is generally pretty close to directions provided by MKO’s.) Stage 3: Automatization through practice (With practice, tasks become less difficult, so we no longer have to talk to ourselves through them. What began as an interaction becomes an effortless, almost automatic behavior. The “private speech” becomes more internalized—it “goes underground,” and it only arises again when we are faced with another challenging task.) Stage 4: De-automatization; recursiveness through previous three stages (If time goes by and you don’t use a skill—say, you switch to all Velcro shoes as a child--it gets harder again. Then you have to go through stages 1 – 3 again. Even if you continue to practice a skill, it is often necessary to go through the ZPD stages again when planning to use that skill in a new way or in combination with other skills.)

Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory

The ethological theory focuses on the impact of biology on human behavior, while the ecological theory

focuses on the impact that environment plays on the growth and development of an individual. A researcher

by the name of Urie Bronfenbrenner theorized that there were five environmental factors that impacted an

individual's growth and development; the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem, the macrosystem

and the chronosystem.