Chapter 3: Human Development
In almost every home there is an old album, or a folder of photographs on someone’s phone, that nobody has opened in years. Suppose you open one this evening. The first photograph shows a baby of a few months, lying on a bed, one fist closed around a finger. Turn the page: the same child, now six, in a school uniform two sizes too large, holding a slate. Turn again: fourteen, taller, standing slightly apart from the family, not quite looking at the camera. Then twenty-eight, at a wedding. Then fifty. Then seventy, in a chair, with a grandchild on the lap.
The photographs are of one person. Yet almost nothing in them is the same. The body has changed size, shape and strength. The way this person thinks has changed even more — from a mind that could not imagine a hidden toy still existing, to one that can plan a career, argue about right and wrong, and worry about a child’s future. What that person wanted, feared and hoped for changed too, again and again.
Now ask the question a psychologist asks. What produced this sequence? Was it written in the genes at conception? Was it the home, the school, the street, the times the person lived through? And is any of it predictable?
Fig. 3.2 – Development across the human life-span.
This chapter will answer each of these questions.
3.1 Introduction
Look around you, at home, in school, in your neighbourhood. From the moment a person is born, changes of many kinds begin, and they do not stop in youth or middle age. They continue right through old age.
Over the years, a human being grows in size and strength. She or he learns to communicate, to walk, to count, to read and to write. Somewhere along the way, the person also learns to tell right from wrong. Friendships are made. Puberty arrives. Many people marry, raise children, and eventually grow old.
Notice that these changes are not random. We are all different from one another, and yet we share a great deal. Most of us learn to walk by the end of the first year, and to talk by the end of the second. The order is remarkably similar, even though the pace is not.
This chapter will familiarise you with the changes that appear in people over the course of their life-span, and in different areas of life at once — the body, the mind, and relationships with others. You will study the key developmental processes and the changes that take place during the major periods of life: the prenatal period, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age.
Reading about these periods is not only a study of other people. It is also a journey of personal understanding and self-discovery, one that should help you in your own future development. And because you will be learning what to expect of a two-year-old, a seven-year-old, a sixteen-year-old and a seventy-year-old, the study of human development will help you deal with others better as well.
3.2 Meaning of Development
When we think of development, we almost always think first of physical change. That is natural, because physical change is the change we can see. You see it at home in a younger sibling who suddenly outgrows a shirt, in parents and grandparents whose hair greys, and in school in classmates who shot up over a summer holiday.
But physical change is only one part of the story. From conception until the moment of death, we do not merely change in body. We also change in the way we think, in the way we use language, and in the social relationships we build. A ten-year-old and a thirty-year-old may be equally healthy, yet they reason, speak and relate to others quite differently.
It is important to remember that these changes are not confined to one area of a person’s life. They occur in the person as an integrated whole. A growth spurt at puberty is not only a change in height; it changes how a person is treated by others, and how the person feels about herself or himself.
This is what psychologists mean by development.
Read the definition carefully, because two words in it are easily misread. “Progressive” and “orderly” do not mean that everything keeps improving. Development mostly involves change, and change includes both growth and decline — decline being clearly observed during old age. What the definition claims is that the changes follow a direction and a sequence, not that they always move upward.
Three Processes Working Together
Development is influenced by the interplay of three kinds of processes: biological, cognitive and socio-emotional.
Biological processes are those that arise from the genes inherited from our parents. Changes in height and weight, and the development of the brain, heart and lungs, all point to the role of biological processes.
Cognitive processes are the mental activities associated with knowing and experiencing — thought, perception, attention, problem solving, and so on. When a child who once counted on fingers begins to solve the sum in the head, a cognitive process is at work.
Socio-emotional processes refer to changes in an individual’s interactions with other people, changes in emotions, and changes in personality. A child’s hug to her or his mother, a young girl’s affectionate gesture towards a sibling, or an adolescent’s sorrow at losing a match are all reflections of socio-emotional processes deeply involved in human development.
You will read about these processes separately in different chapters of this textbook, simply because a book must take one thing at a time. In the living person they are not separate at all. The biological, cognitive and socio-emotional processes are interwoven, and together they influence the development of the individual as a whole, throughout the human life-span.
3.2.1 Life-Span Perspective on Development
For a long time, psychologists studied childhood as though development ended there — as though the adult was a finished product. The Life-Span Perspective (LSP) rejects that assumption. It studies development according to the following seven assumptions.
1. Development is lifelong. It takes place across all age groups, starting from conception and continuing to old age. It includes both gains and losses, and these interact in dynamic ways — that is, a change in one aspect goes along with changes in others.
2. The processes of development are interwoven. The biological, cognitive and socio-emotional processes remain woven together in the development of a person throughout the life-span, as you have just seen.
3. Development is multi-directional. Some dimensions, or some components of a given dimension, may increase while others show decrement. For example, the experiences of adults may make them wiser and guide their decisions. Yet with an increase in age, performance is likely to decrease on tasks requiring speed, such as running.
4. Development is highly plastic. Within a person, modifiability is found in psychological development, though plasticity varies from individual to individual. This means that skills and abilities can be improved or developed throughout the life-span. It is why a sixty-year-old can still learn to use a new phone, and why “too late to learn” is a weaker claim than it sounds.
5. Development is influenced by historical conditions. The experiences of 20-year-olds who lived through the freedom struggle in India would be very different from the experiences of 20-year-olds today. Even within living memory, the career orientation of school students today is very different from that of students who were in school 50 years ago.
6. Development is the concern of a number of disciplines. Psychology, anthropology, sociology and the neuro-sciences all study human development, each trying to provide answers to development throughout the life-span. No single discipline owns the question.
7. An individual responds to and acts on contexts. These contexts include what was inherited, the physical environment, and the social, historical and cultural surroundings. Life events are not the same for everyone — the death of a parent, an accident, an earthquake — and such events affect the course of a life, as do positive influences such as winning an award or getting a good job. People keep on changing with changing contexts.
Notice the last three words of assumption 7: the individual responds and acts on contexts. The person is not a passive object on which the environment works. She or he also selects, resists and reshapes those surroundings.
3.3 Factors Influencing Development
Look around your classroom. Some of you have dark skin and others lighter skin; the colour of your hair and eyes differs; some are tall and some short; some are quiet or sad while others are talkative or cheerful. People also differ in intelligence, learning ability, memory and other psychological characteristics, quite apart from physical ones.
And yet, despite all these variations, no one in that room could be mistaken for a member of any other species. We are all homo sapiens. So two questions arise at once. What causes us to be so different from one another, and at the same time so like one another? The answer lies in the interaction of heredity and environment.
Genotype and Phenotype
Genetic transmission is very complex. Most of the characteristics we observe in humans are combinations of a large number of genes. You can imagine the number of combinations produced by 80,000 or more genes — enough to account for an enormous variety of characteristics and behaviours. It is also not possible to possess all the characteristics that our genetic structure makes available to us.
The actual genetic material, or a person’s genetic heritage, is known as genotype. However, not all of this genetic material is apparent, or distinctly identifiable, in our observable characteristics. Phenotype is the way an individual’s genotype is expressed in observable and measurable characteristics.
Phenotypes include physical traits such as height, weight, and eye and skin colour, and also many psychological characteristics such as intelligence, creativity and personality. Notice the crucial point: these observable characteristics are the result of the interaction between the person’s inherited traits and the environment. The phenotype is never the genotype simply made visible, as shown in Fig. 3.3.
Fig. 3.3 – The interaction of genotype and environment.
How the Environment Works
The genetic code predisposes a child to develop in a particular way. Genes provide a distinct blueprint and a timetable for the development of an individual. But genes do not exist in isolation, and development occurs within the context of an individual’s environment. This is what makes each one of us a unique person.
What, then, are the environmental influences, and how does the environment affect development? Imagine a child whose genotype predisposes her or him to be introverted, placed in an environment that promotes social interaction and extroversion. The influence of such an environment may make the child a little extroverted.
Now take another example. An individual with “short” height genes, even in a very good nutritional environment, will never be able to be taller than average. Good nutrition can push the person towards the upper end of what the genes permit; it cannot push the person past it.
Put the two examples together and the principle becomes clear. Genes set the limit, and within that limit the environment influences development. This is why a person can be changed by circumstances, and yet not changed without limit.
Genes and Environment Are Not Independent
So far we have spoken as though heredity and environment were two separate forces acting on a child from opposite directions. They are not so easily separated.
You know by now that parents provide the genes for the child’s development. But do you also see that they play an important role in determining the type of environment their children will encounter? Sandra Scarr (1992) believes that the environment parents provide for their children depends to some extent on their own genetic predisposition. For example, if parents are intelligent and are good readers, they would provide their children with books to read, with the likely outcome that their children would become good readers who enjoy reading — a result that could easily be mistaken for a purely genetic effect.
The child’s own genotype also shapes the environment the child receives. A child who is cooperative and attentive is likely to draw more pleasant responses from teachers and parents than a child who is not cooperative or not attentive. The same classroom is therefore not the same environment for two different children.
Besides these, children themselves choose certain environments on the basis of their genotype. Because of their genotype, some children may perform well in music or sports, and they will then seek out and spend more time in environments that allow them to practise those skills; an athletic child seeks a sports-related environment. These interactions with the environment keep changing from infancy through adolescence. Environmental influences, in short, are as complex as the genes we inherit.
3.4 Context of Development
Development does not take place in a vacuum. It is always embedded in a particular socio-cultural context. The transitions you will read about in this chapter — entering school, becoming an adolescent, finding a job, marrying, having children, retiring — are never purely biological events. Each of them is a joint function of the biological changes taking place in the person and the changes taking place in that person’s environment.
And the environment is not fixed either. It can change or alter at any time during an individual’s life-span. A family may move city; a school may improve; a job may be lost. The context is a moving thing, and development moves with it.
Bronfenbrenner’s Contextual View
Urie Bronfenbrenner’s contextual view of development emphasises the role of environmental factors in the development of an individual. He pictures the growing person as sitting at the centre of a set of environments, one inside the next, like circles drawn around a point. This is depicted in Fig. 3.1.
Fig. 3.1 – Bronfenbrenner’s contextual view of development.
The microsystem is the immediate environment or setting in which the individual lives. It is in these settings that the child directly interacts with social agents — the family, peers, teachers and the neighbourhood. If you can walk into it and be spoken to by name, it is probably part of your microsystem.
The mesosystem consists of the relations between these contexts. It is not a new place; it is the connection between two places the child already lives in. For instance, how a child’s parents relate to the teachers, or how the parents view the adolescent’s friends, are experiences likely to influence an individual’s relationships with others. A parent who trusts a child’s teacher and a parent who quarrels with that teacher have created two very different mesosystems for the same child.
The exosystem includes events in social settings where the child does not participate directly, but which nevertheless influence the child’s experiences in the immediate context. For example, the transfer of a father or mother to another city may cause tension among the parents, which might in turn affect their interactions with the child. The exosystem also covers the general amenities available to the child — the quality of schooling in the area, libraries, medical care, means of entertainment. The child never attends the parent’s office, and yet the office reaches the child.
The macrosystem includes the culture in which the individual lives — its attitudes, beliefs, ideologies and traditions.
The chronosystem involves events in the individual’s life course, and the socio-historical circumstances of the time — for instance, the divorce of parents, or the parents’ economic setback, and their effect on the child. It is the layer of time, and it reminds us that when something happens to a child matters as much as what happens.
In a nutshell, Bronfenbrenner’s view is that a child’s development is significantly affected by the complex world that envelops her or him — whether it be the minutiae of the conversations she or he has with playmates, or the social and economic life-circumstances into which she or he is born.
Sinha’s Ecological Model: The Indian Context
Durganand Sinha (1977) has presented an ecological model for understanding the development of children in the Indian context. He viewed the ecology of the child in terms of two concentric layers, as shown in Fig. 3.4.
Fig. 3.4 – Sinha’s ecological model for the Indian context.
The “upper and the more visible layers” consist of home, school, peer groups, and so on. The most important ecological factors influencing the development of the child in this visible upper layer are: (i) the home, and its conditions in terms of overcrowding, the space available to each member, toys, technological devices used, and so on; (ii) the nature and quality of schooling, and the facilities to which the child is exposed; and (iii) the nature of interactions and activities undertaken with peer groups from childhood onwards.
These factors do not operate independently. They constantly interact with one another. And since they are themselves embedded in a larger and more pervasive setting, the “surrounding layers” of the child’s ecology constantly influence the “upper layer” factors — though their influence is not always clearly visible.
The elements of the surrounding layer of ecology are: (i) the general geographical environment, which includes the space and facilities for play and other activities available outside the home, and the general congestion of the locality and the density of population; (ii) the institutional setting provided by caste, class and other factors; and (iii) the general amenities available to the child, such as drinking water, electricity, and means of entertainment.
The visible and the surrounding layer factors interact with one another, and may have different consequences for development in different people. The ecological environment, moreover, can change or alter at any time during the individual’s life-span. This is why, to understand differences in the functioning of an individual, it is important to see that individual in the context of her or his experiences.
3.5 Overview of Developmental Stages
Development is commonly described in terms of periods, or stages. You must have observed that your younger brother or sister, your parents, and even you yourself, all behave in different ways. If you observe the people living in your neighbourhood, you will find the same thing: they do not all behave in a similar manner. This variation is partly because everyone is in a different stage of life.
Human life proceeds through different stages. You, for example, are at present in the stage of adolescence, and after a few years you will enter the stage of adulthood. Fig. 3.5 sets out the whole sequence you will study in the rest of this chapter.
Fig. 3.5 – The six periods of the human life-span.
Developmental stages are assumed to be temporary, and are often characterised by a dominant feature, or a leading characteristic, which gives each period its uniqueness. Adolescence, for instance, is dominated by the search for an identity in a way that middle childhood is not.
During a particular stage, an individual progresses towards an assumed goal — a state or ability that she or he must achieve, in the same order as other persons, before progressing to the next stage in the sequence. The order is fixed; the calendar is not. Individuals do vary with respect to the time, or the rate, of development from one stage to another, and two children of the same age may be at somewhat different points.
Developmental Tasks
It may be noted that certain patterns of behaviour and certain skills are learned more easily and successfully during certain stages. Walking is learned with astonishing ease in the second year; a formal system of algebra is not. Once a society notices that most people master something at a certain age, it begins to expect it. These accomplishments of a person thus become the social expectations of that stage of development, and they are known as developmental tasks.
Note what this implies. A developmental task is partly biological, because the person must be ready for it, and partly social, because it is the society around the person that decides what counts as being “on time”. You will now read about the different stages of development and their main features.
3.5.1 Prenatal Stage
The period from conception to birth is known as the prenatal period. Typically, it lasts for about 40 weeks. You know by now that the genetic blueprint guides our development during the prenatal period and after birth. But the blueprint is not the whole story here either: both genetic and environmental factors affect our development during the different periods of the prenatal stage.
Prenatal development is affected by maternal characteristics, which include the mother’s age, her nutrition, and her emotional state. Disease or infection carried by the mother can adversely affect prenatal development. For example, rubella (German measles), genital herpes, and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) are believed to cause genetic problems in the newborn.
Another source of threat to prenatal development is teratogens.
Common teratogens include drugs, infections, radiations and pollution. The intake of drugs such as marijuana, heroin and cocaine, and of alcohol and tobacco, by women during pregnancy may have harmful effects on the foetus and increase the frequency of congenital abnormalities — that is, abnormalities present at birth. Radiations, such as X-rays, and certain chemicals near industrial areas, can cause permanent change in the genes. Environmental pollutants and toxic wastes such as carbon monoxide, mercury and lead are also sources of danger to the unborn child.
The common thread is worth stating plainly. Nothing reaches the developing foetus except through the mother’s body, and so the mother’s environment is, for those forty weeks, the foetus’s environment as well.
3.6 Infancy
The brain develops at an amazing rate both before and after birth. You have already read about the parts of the brain, and about the important role played by the cerebrum in human functions such as language, perception and intelligence. Just before birth, newborns have most, but not all, of their brain cells. What develops rapidly after birth are the neural connections among these cells.
The word infancy refers to the first two years of life, and the newborn who begins it is not as helpless as you might think. All the activities needed to sustain life are present in the newborn — it breathes, sucks, swallows, and discharges bodily wastes. Newborns in their first week of life are already able to indicate what direction a sound is coming from. They can distinguish their mother’s voice from the voices of other women, and can imitate simple gestures such as tongue protrusion and mouth opening.
Motor Development
The newborn’s movements are governed by reflexes — automatic, built-in responses to stimuli. They are genetically-carried survival mechanisms, and they are the building blocks for subsequent motor development. Before newborns have had any opportunity to learn, reflexes act as adaptive mechanisms: the baby who turns towards a touch on the cheek and begins to suck is being fed by a response it never had to acquire.
Some reflexes present in the newborn — coughing, blinking and yawning — persist throughout life. Others disappear as brain functions mature and voluntary control over behaviour starts developing. Table 3.1 lists some of the major reflexes and the age by which each of them normally goes.
Table 3.1: Some Major Reflexes in the Newborn
| Reflex | Description | Developmental Course |
|---|---|---|
| Rooting | Turning the head and opening the mouth when touched on the cheek | Disappears between 3 and 6 months |
| Moro | If there is a loud noise, the baby will throw her/his arms outward while arching her/his back, and then bring the arms together as if grasping something | Disappears in 6 to 7 months (although reaction to loud noises is permanent) |
| Grasp | When a finger or some other object is pressed against the baby’s palm, the baby’s fingers close around it | Disappears in 3 to 4 months; replaced by voluntary grasping |
| Babinski | When the bottom of the baby’s foot is stroked, the toes fan out and then curl | Disappears in 8 to 12 months |
Notice that the disappearance of a reflex is not a loss. It is a sign that the brain has taken charge. The grasp reflex fades precisely because voluntary grasping is taking its place.
As the brain is developing, physical development also progresses. As the infant grows, the muscles and the nervous system mature, and this leads to the development of finer skills. Basic physical, or motor, skills include grasping and reaching for objects, sitting, crawling, walking and running. This is what psychologists call motor development, and its sequence is universal, with minor exceptions — babies everywhere sit before they crawl and crawl before they walk.
Sensory Abilities
You know by now that newborns are not as incompetent as they look. They can recognise their mother’s voice just a few hours after birth, and they have other sensory capabilities as well.
How well can infants see? Newborns prefer to look at some stimuli rather than others — faces, for instance — although these preferences change over the first few months of life. The newborn’s vision is estimated to be lower than adult vision. By 6 months it improves, and by about the first year vision is almost the same as that of an adult (20/20).
Can a newborn see colour? The current consensus is that newborns might be able to distinguish between red and white colours, but that in general they are colour deficient. Full colour vision develops by 3 months of age.
What is the nature of hearing in newborns? Infants can hear immediately after birth. As the infant develops, proficiency at localising sound improves — the baby becomes better at telling where a sound came from. Newborns also respond to touch, and they can even feel pain. Both smell and taste capacities are present in the newborn.
Cognitive Development
Does a 3-year-old child understand things the same way as an 8-year-old would? Jean Piaget stressed that children actively construct their understanding of the world. Information does not simply enter their minds from the environment, as water enters an empty vessel. As children grow, additional information is acquired, and they adapt their thinking to include new ideas, which improves their understanding of the world.
Piaget believed that a child’s mind passes through a series of stages of thought from infancy to adolescence. These stages are set out in Table 3.2, and you will meet each of them in turn in this chapter and the next few sections.
Table 3.2: Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
| Stage | Approximate Age | Characteristics |
|---|---|---|
| Sensorimotor | 0–2 years | Infant explores the world by coordinating sensory experiences with physical actions. |
| Preoperational | 2–7 years | Symbolic thought develops; object permanence is established; the child cannot coordinate different physical attributes of an object. |
| Concrete operational | 7–11 years | The child can reason logically about concrete events and classify objects into different sets. Is able to perform reversible mental operations on representations of objects. |
| Formal operational | 11–15 years | The adolescent can apply logic more abstractly; hypothetical thinking develops. |
Each stage is characterised by a distinct way of thinking, and is age related. It is important to remember what makes one stage more advanced than another: it is the different way of thinking, and not the amount of information. An eight-year-old does not simply know more facts than a three-year-old; the eight-year-old thinks in a different manner altogether. This also explains why you, at your age, think differently from an eight-year-old.
The child during infancy — that is, in the first two years of life — is in the sensorimotor stage. Here the world is experienced through the senses and through interactions with objects: through looking, hearing, touching, mouthing and grasping. The newborn lives in the present. What is out of sight is out of mind.
For example, if you hide a toy in front of a child who has been playing with it, the young infant reacts as if nothing has happened. She or he will not search for the toy, as shown in Fig. 3.6. The child assumes that the toy does not exist. According to Piaget, children at this stage do not go beyond their immediate sensory experience — that is, they lack object permanence, the awareness that objects continue to exist even when they are not perceived. Gradually, by 8 months of age, the child starts pursuing an object that is partially covered in her or his presence.
Fig. 3.6 – An infant’s reaction before object permanence is acquired.
The basis of verbal communication also seems to be present in infants. Vocalisation begins with the infant’s babbling, sometime between 3 to 6 months of age. You will read about early language development in Chapter 7.
Socio-emotional Development
Babies are social creatures from birth. An infant starts preferring familiar faces, and responds to a parent’s presence by cooing and gurgling. Babies become more mobile by 6 to 8 months of age, and start showing a preference for their mother’s company. When frightened by a new face, or when separated from their mother, they cry or show distress. On being reunited with the parent or caregiver, they reciprocate with smiles or hugs.
The close emotional bond of affection that develops between infants and their parents or caregivers is called attachment.
Why does this bond form? A reasonable guess is that the infant becomes attached to whoever provides food. For many years this was the accepted view. A classic study on monkeys showed that the guess was wrong.
You too may have seen young children with a strong attachment to a favourite toy or blanket. There is nothing unusual in this. The children know perfectly well that the blanket or toy is not their mother. Yet it provides them comfort — a small, portable piece of contact-comfort. As children grow and become more sure of themselves, they abandon these objects.
Human babies form an attachment with those parents or caregivers who consistently and appropriately reciprocate their signals of love and affection. According to Erik Erikson (1968), the first year of life is the key time for the development of attachment. It represents the stage of developing trust or mistrust.
A sense of trust is built on a feeling of physical comfort, which builds an expectation of the world as a secure and good place. An infant’s sense of trust is developed by responsive and sensitive parenting. If the parents are sensitive, affectionate and accepting, this provides the infant a strong base from which to explore the environment. Such infants are likely to develop a secure attachment. On the other hand, if parents are insensitive, show dissatisfaction, and find fault with the child, it can lead to feelings of self-doubt in the child.
Securely attached infants respond positively when picked up, move freely, and play. Insecurely attached infants feel anxious when separated, cry due to fear, and get upset. A close interactive relationship with warm and affectionate adults is a child’s first step towards healthy development.
3.7 Childhood
The child’s growth slows down during early childhood as compared to infancy. The dramatic pace of the first two years is not maintained; what happens instead is a steady filling-out of abilities. The child develops physically, gains height and weight, learns to walk, runs, jumps and plays with a ball.
Socially, the child’s world expands. It reaches out from the parents to the wider family, to adults near home, and to school. The child also begins to acquire the concepts of good and bad — that is, begins to develop a sense of morality.
During childhood, children have increased physical capacities. They can perform tasks independently, set goals, and meet adult expectations. The increasing maturation of the brain, along with opportunities to experience the world, contributes to the development of children’s cognitive abilities.
Physical Development
Early development follows two principles, shown in Fig. 3.7.
First, development proceeds cephalocaudally — that is, from the cephalic, or head, region to the caudal, or tail, region. Children gain control over the upper part of the body before the lower part. This is why you would notice that an infant’s head is proportionately larger than the body during early infancy, and why an infant who is crawling will use the arms first and only then shift to using the legs.
Second, growth proceeds from the centre of the body and moves towards the extremities, or the more distal regions. This is the proximodistal trend: children gain control over their torso before their extremities. Initially, infants reach for objects by turning their entire body; gradually, they learn to extend just their arms to reach for things.
Fig. 3.7 – Cephalocaudal and proximodistal trends in physical development.
These changes are the result of a maturing nervous system, and not of any limitation in the child’s experience. The evidence for this is striking: even visually impaired children, who cannot see anyone reaching or walking, show the same sequence.
As children grow older, they look slimmer, as the trunk part of their bodies lengthens and body fat decreases. The brain and the head grow more rapidly than any other part of the body. The growth and development of the brain are important because they help in the maturation of children’s abilities, such as eye-hand coordination, holding a pencil, and the first attempts made at writing.
During the middle and late childhood years, children increase significantly in size and strength. The increase in weight is mainly due to an increase in the size of the skeletal and muscular systems, as well as the size of some body organs.
Motor Development
Gross motor skills during the early childhood years involve the use of the arms and legs, and moving around in the environment with confidence and more purposefully. Fine motor skills — finger dexterity and eye-hand coordination — improve substantially during early childhood. It is during these years, too, that the child’s preference for the left or the right hand develops.
The major accomplishments in gross and fine motor skills during the early childhood years are given in Table 3.3.
Table 3.3: Major Accomplishments in Gross and Fine Motor Skills
| Age in Years | Gross Motor Skills | Fine Motor Skills |
|---|---|---|
| 3 years | Hopping, jumping, running | Build blocks, pick objects with forefinger and thumb |
| 4 years | Climb up and downstairs with one foot on each step | Fit jigsaw puzzle precisely |
| 5 years | Run hard, enjoy races | Hand, arm, and body all coordinate with eye movement |
Cognitive Development
The child’s ability to acquire the concept of object permanence enables her or him to use mental symbols to represent objects. However, the child at this stage still lacks the ability that would allow her or him to do mentally what was done physically before.
Cognitive development in early childhood focuses on Piaget’s stage of preoperational thought (see Table 3.2). The child now gains the ability to mentally represent an object that is not physically present. You may have observed children draw designs or figures to represent people, trees, a dog, a house. A stick becomes a sword; a row of stones becomes a train. This ability of the child to engage in symbolic thought helps to expand her or his mental world, and the progress in symbolic thought continues through these years.
Egocentrism and animism
A salient feature of preoperational thought is egocentrism, or self-focus. Children see the world only in terms of their own selves, and are not able to appreciate others’ point of view. A child on a telephone call who nods in reply to a question is being egocentric in exactly this sense: it does not occur to her that the listener cannot see the nod.
Because of egocentrism, children engage in animism — thinking that all things are living, like oneself. They attribute life-like qualities to inanimate objects. For example, if a child while running slips on the road, she or he might show animism by saying “road hurt me”.
As children grow, and are approximately between 4 and 7 years of age, they want answers to all their questions: Why is the sky blue? How do trees grow? Such questions help the child to know why things are as they are. Piaget called this the stage of intuitive thought — intuitive, because the child is confident of knowing, but cannot yet say how she or he knows.
Centration
Another feature of thought during the preoperational stage is centration — decision to focus on a single characteristic or feature for understanding an event. For example, a child may insist on drinking a “big glass” of juice, preferring a tall narrow glass to a short broad one, even though both might be holding the same amount of juice. The child has centred on height, and everything else about the glass has dropped out of view.
Concrete operational thought
As the child grows, and is approximately between 7 and 11 years of age — the period of middle and late childhood — intuitive thought is replaced by logical thought. This is the stage of concrete operational thought, which is made up of operations — mental actions that allow the child to do mentally what was done physically before. Concrete operations are also mental actions that are reversible.
In a well-known test, the child is presented with two identical balls of clay. One ball is rolled by the experimenter into a long thin strip, while the other remains in its original shape, as shown in Fig. 3.8. On being asked which has more clay, the child of 7 or 8 years would answer that both have the same amount of clay. This is because the child imagines the ball rolled into the thin strip and then back into a ball again — that is, she or he is able to imagine a reversible mental action on concrete, real objects.
Fig. 3.8 – Concrete operations and the principle of reversibility.
What do you think a preoperational child would have done? She or he is likely to focus on only one aspect — length, or height. Concrete operations allow the child to focus on different characteristics of the object rather than fixing on one. This helps the child to appreciate that there are different ways of looking at things, which also results in the decline of her or his egocentrism.
Thinking now becomes more flexible. Children can think about alternatives when solving problems, or mentally retrace their steps if required. Yet a limit remains. Even at this stage, though the child can see relationships between the different properties of an object, she or he cannot do abstract thinking — that is, cannot manipulate ideas in the absence of objects. The steps required to complete an algebraic equation, or imagining the lines of longitude or latitude of the earth, are still out of reach.
The growing cognitive abilities of children also facilitate the acquisition of language. You will read in Chapter 7 how children develop vocabulary and grammar.
Socio-emotional Development
The important dimensions of children’s socio-emotional development are the self, gender and moral development.
During the early years of childhood, some important developments in the self take place. The child, through socialisation, has developed a sense of who she or he is, and whom she or he wants to be identified with. The developing sense of independence makes children want to do things in their own way.
According to Erikson, the way parents respond to these self-initiated activities leads to developing either a sense of initiative or a sense of guilt. Giving freedom and opportunities for play — cycling, running, skating — and answering children’s questions will create a sense of support for the initiative taken. In contrast, if children are made to feel that their questions are useless, and that the games they play are stupid, they are likely to develop feelings of guilt over self-initiated activities, and these feelings may persist through the children’s later life also.
How self-understanding changes
Self-understanding in early childhood is limited to defining oneself through physical characteristics: I am tall, she has black hair, I am a girl.
During middle and late childhood, the child is likely to define herself or himself through internal characteristics instead — “I am smart and I am popular”, or “I feel proud when teachers assign me responsibility in school”. The description has moved inward, from the body to the mind.
In addition to defining oneself through psychological characteristics, children’s self-descriptions also include social aspects of the self, such as references to social groups — being a member of the school’s music club, the environment club, or a religious group.
Children’s self-understanding also comes to include social comparison. Children are likely to think about what they can do or cannot do in comparison with others: “I got more marks than Atul”, or “I can run faster than others in the class”. This developmental shift leads to establishing one’s differences from others as an individual.
Once children enter school, their social world expands beyond their families. They also spend a greater amount of time with their age mates, or peers. Thus the increased time that children spend with their peers shapes their development.
Moral Development
Another important aspect of the child’s development is learning to differentiate between the rightness or wrongness of human acts. The way children come to distinguish right from wrong, to feel guilty, to put themselves in other people’s position, and to help others when they are in trouble, are all components of moral development.
Just as children pass through the various stages of cognitive development, according to Lawrence Kohlberg they pass through various stages of moral development, which are age related. Kohlberg interviewed children, presenting them with stories in which the characters face moral dilemmas. The children were asked what the characters in the dilemma should do, and why. What interested him was not the answer but the reasoning behind it.
According to him, children approach thinking about right and wrong differently at different ages. The young child — that is, before 9 years of age — thinks in terms of external authority. According to her or him, actions are wrong because she or he is punished, and right because she or he is rewarded.
As the child grows, that is, by early adolescence, she or he develops moral reasoning through a set of rules of others, such as parents or the laws of the society. These rules are accepted by the children as their own. They are “internalised” in order to be virtuous and to win approval from others — no longer merely to avoid punishment. Children at this point view rules as absolute guidelines, which should be followed, and moral thinking is relatively inflexible. As they grow further, they gradually develop a personal moral code.
You have seen that by the end of childhood, a more gradual growth rate enables the child to develop skills of coordination and balance. Language develops, and the child can reason logically. Socially, the child has become more involved in social systems such as the family and the peer group. The next section traces the changes in human development during adolescence and adulthood.
3.8 Challenges of Adolescence
The term adolescence derives from the Latin word adolescere, meaning “to grow into maturity”. It is the transitional period in a person’s life between childhood and adulthood — a bridge, and like most bridges it belongs fully to neither shore.
Adolescence is commonly defined as the stage of life that begins at the onset of puberty, when sexual maturity, or the ability to reproduce, is attained.
It has been regarded as a period of rapid change, both biologically and psychologically. But the two kinds of change do not have the same status. Though the physical changes that take place during this stage are universal, the social and psychological dimensions of the adolescent’s experiences depend on the cultural context.
For example, in cultures where the adolescent years are viewed as problematic or confusing, the adolescent will have very different experiences from someone in a culture where the adolescent years are viewed as the beginning of adult behaviour and, therefore, as a time for undertaking responsible tasks. Although most societies have at least a brief period of adolescence, it is not universal across cultures.
Physical Development
Puberty, or sexual maturity, marks the end of childhood and signifies the beginning of adolescence. It is characterised by dramatic physical changes in both growth rate and sexual characteristics. However, puberty is not a sudden event; it is part of a gradual process.
The hormones released during puberty result in the development of primary and secondary sexual characteristics. The primary sex characteristics include those directly related to reproduction. The secondary sex characteristics include features or signs of achieving sexual maturity.
Pubertal changes in boys are marked by acceleration in growth, facial hair, and changes in voice. In girls, rapid growth in height usually begins about two years before menarche, the onset of menstruation. The growth spurt generally begins at the age of 12 or 13 for boys, and at the age of 10 or 11 for girls, as shown in Fig. 3.9.
Fig. 3.9 – Growth spurts in height during puberty.
It is normal to have variations in the pubertal sequence. For example, among two boys, or two girls, of the same chronological age, one may complete the pubertal sequence before the other has even begun it. This is worth saying plainly, because at this age nothing feels more abnormal than being out of step with one’s classmates.
Both genetics and environment play a part in this. For example, identical twins reach menarche closer in time than do fraternal twins. On an average, girls from affluent families go through menarche earlier than girls from poor families. And historical trends show that the age of menarche is declining in industrialised nations, reflecting better nutrition and advances in medical care.
Psychological changes that come with puberty
Physical development during adolescence is also accompanied by a number of psychological changes. Around puberty, adolescents show an increase in interest in members of the opposite sex and in sexual matters, and a new awareness of sexual feelings develops.
This increased attention to sexuality is caused by factors such as the individual’s awareness of the biological changes taking place, and the emphasis placed on sexuality by peers, parents and society. Even then, many adolescents lack adequate knowledge, or have misconceptions, about sex and sexuality.
Sex is a topic parents find difficult to discuss with children, so adolescents tend to become secretive about sexual concerns, which makes the exchange of information and communication difficult. The concern over adolescent sexuality has become intense in recent times because of the risk of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Note the chain of cause and effect here: silence produces secrecy, secrecy produces misinformation, and misinformation carries a health cost.
The development of a sexual identity defines the sexual orientation and guides sexual behaviour. As such, it becomes an important developmental task for adolescents. How did you think of yourself at the beginning of puberty? Adolescents are preoccupied with what they are like, and develop individual images of what they look like.
Another important developmental task during adolescence is accepting one’s physical self, or physical maturity. Adolescents need to develop a realistic image of their physical appearance, one that is acceptable to them. It is important to keep in mind that puberty also involves cognitive and social changes along with the physical ones.
Cognitive Developmental Changes
Adolescents’ thought becomes more abstract, logical and idealistic. They become more capable of examining their own thoughts, others’ thoughts, and what others are thinking about them. This developing ability to reason gives them a new level of cognitive and social awareness.
Piaget believed that formal operational thought appears between the ages of 11 and 15. During this stage, adolescent thinking expands beyond actual concrete experiences, and they begin to think more in abstract terms and to reason about them. A concrete operational child can reason about a chair that is in the room; an adolescent can reason about justice, which is in no room at all.
In addition to being abstract, adolescent thought is also idealistic. Adolescents begin to think about ideal characteristics for themselves and for others, and compare themselves and others with these ideal standards. For example, they may think about what an ideal parent is like, and compare their parents with these ideal standards. This may at times make adolescents wonder which of the new-found ideal standards they should adopt.
In contrast to the trial and error approach used by children in earlier stages of development, adolescent thinking becomes more systematic in solving problems. Adolescents think of possible courses of action, ask why something is happening the way it is, and systematically seek solutions. Piaget called this type of logical thinking hypothetical deductive reasoning — reasoning that begins with a hypothesis and works out, step by step, what would follow if it were true.
Logical thought also influences the development of moral reasoning. Social rules are no longer considered absolute standards, and moral thinking shows some flexibility. The adolescent recognises alternative moral courses, explores options, and then decides on a personal moral code. For example: should I smoke as everyone I know does? Is it ethical to copy answers in the examinations?
This also opens up the possibility of adolescents not following society’s norms if those norms conflict with a personal code of ethics. For example, individuals at this age might participate in a protest march for a cause rather than adhere or conform to a college norm.
Adolescent egocentrism
Adolescents also develop a special kind of egocentrism — different from the egocentrism of the preoperational child, which you met in the previous section. According to David Elkind, imaginary audience and personal fable are two components of adolescents’ egocentrism.
Imaginary audience is the adolescent’s belief that others are as preoccupied with them as they are about themselves. They imagine that people are always noticing them and are observing each and every behaviour of theirs. Imagine a boy who thinks that everyone will notice the ink spot on his shirt, or a girl with a pimple who feels that all people would be thinking how bad her skin is. It is this imaginary audience which makes adolescents extremely self-conscious.
The personal fable is the part of adolescents’ egocentrism that involves their sense of uniqueness. Adolescents’ sense of uniqueness makes them think that no one understands them or their feelings. For example, an adolescent girl thinks that none can sense the hurt that she feels because of being betrayed by a friend. It is quite common to hear the adolescent say to the parents: ‘you don’t understand me’. To retain their sense of personal uniqueness, they may weave stories filled with fantasy around themselves, to create a world that is away from reality. Personal fables are often part of adolescent diaries.
Forming an Identity
You must have sought answers to questions such as: Who am I? Which subjects should I study? Do I believe in God? The answers to all these questions involve the quest to define one’s sense of self — the search for identity.
The primary task of adolescence is to establish an identity separate from the parents. During adolescence, a detachment process enables the individual to develop a personalised set of beliefs that are uniquely her or his own.
In the process of achieving an identity, the adolescent could experience conflict with parents and within herself or himself. Those adolescents who can cope with the conflicting identities develop a new sense of self. Adolescents who are not able to cope with this identity crisis are confused. This “identity confusion”, according to Erikson, can lead to individuals isolating themselves from peers and family, or else losing their identity in the crowd.
Adolescents, on the one hand, may desire independence, but may also be afraid of it and show a great deal of dependence on their parents. Rapid fluctuations between self-confidence and insecurity are typical of this stage. Adolescents may at one time complain of being “treated like a baby”, whereas on other occasions they may seek comfort by depending on their parents. Seeking an identity involves searching for continuity and sameness in oneself, taking greater responsibility, and trying to get a clear sense of who one is.
What shapes the search
The formation of identity during adolescence is influenced by several factors. The cultural background, family and societal values, ethnic background, and socio-economic status all prevail upon the adolescents’ search for a place in society.
Family relationships become less important as the adolescent spends more time outside the home and develops a strong need for peer support and acceptance. Increased interactions with peers provide them with opportunities for refining their social skills and trying out different social behaviours.
Peers and parents are dual forces having major influences on adolescents. At times, conflicting situations with parents lead to increased identification with peers. But generally parents and peers serve complementary functions and fulfil different needs of the adolescents.
Vocational commitment is another factor influencing adolescent identity formation. The question “What are you going to be when you grow up?” requires the ability to think about the future and to be able to set realistic and achievable goals. In some cultures, freedom is given to young people to choose an occupation, whereas in certain other cultures the option of making this choice is not given to the children; here the parents’ decision is likely to be accepted by the children. What has been your experience while making a choice in the selection of subjects? Career counselling in schools offers information regarding appraisal of the students for various courses and jobs, and provides guidance in making a decision about career choices.
Some Major Concerns
As adults, when we reflect on our adolescent years and recall the conflicts, the uncertainties, the occasional loneliness and the group pressures, we feel that it was definitely a vulnerable period.
During adolescence, peer influence, newly gained freedom, and unresolved problems may create difficulties for many of you. Conforming to peer pressure can be both positive and negative — the same pull that gets a student to join the debating team can get another to try a cigarette. Adolescents are often confronted with decisions regarding smoking, drugs, alcohol, and breaking parental rules, and these decisions are taken without much regard to the effect they can have.
Adolescents may face periods of uncertainty, loneliness, self-doubt, anxiety, and concern about themselves and their future. They are also likely to experience excitement, joy, and feelings of competence as they overcome the developmental challenges. Both halves of that sentence are true, and the second half is too often forgotten.
You will now read about some of the major challenges faced by adolescents: delinquency, substance abuse, and eating disorders.
Delinquency
Delinquency refers to a variety of behaviours, ranging from socially unacceptable behaviour and legal offences to criminal acts. Examples include truancy, running away from home, stealing or burglary, or acts of vandalism.
Adolescents with delinquency and behavioural problems tend to have a negative self-identity, decreased trust, and a low level of achievement. Delinquency is often associated with low parental support, inappropriate discipline, and family discord.
Often, adolescents from communities characterised by poverty, unemployment, and feelings of alienation from the middle class perform antisocial acts to gain attention and to be popular with their peers. Notice that the explanation runs through the context, not through the individual alone.
However — and this matters — most young people who behave in delinquent ways do not remain delinquent forever. A change in their peer group, becoming more aware of their social responsibilities, developing feelings of self-worth, imitating the positive behaviour of role models, breaking negative attitudes, and overcoming a poor self-concept all help in the reduction of delinquent behaviour.
Substance Abuse
The adolescent years are especially vulnerable to smoking, alcohol and drug abuse. Some adolescents take recourse to smoking and drugs as a way of coping with stress. This can interfere with the development of coping skills and responsible decision-making — the very skills that would have handled the stress in the first place.
The reasons for smoking and drug use could be peer pressure and the adolescents’ need to be accepted by the group; or the desire to act more like adults; or the felt need to escape the pressure of school work or social activities. The addictive powers of nicotine make it difficult to stop smoking once it has begun.
It has been found that adolescents who are more vulnerable to drugs, alcohol and nicotine use are impulsive, aggressive, anxious, depressive and unpredictable, have low self-esteem, and low expectation for achievement. Peer pressure and the need to be with their peer group make the adolescent either go along with demands to experiment with drugs, alcohol and smoking, or else be ridiculed.
Substance use, if continued long enough, can lead to physiological dependency — that is, addiction to drugs, alcohol or nicotine, which may seriously jeopardise the rest of a young person’s life. Positive relationships with parents, peers, siblings and adults play an important role in preventing substance use.
Eating Disorders
Adolescents’ obsession with the self, living in a fantasy world, and constant peer comparisons can lead to conditions in which young people become preoccupied with their own bodies.
Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder that involves the relentless pursuit of thinness through starvation. It is quite common to see adolescents eliminate certain foods from their diets, or eat only slimming foods. The media also projects thinness as the most desirable image, and copying such a fashionable image of thinness can lead to anorexia nervosa.
Bulimia is another form of eating disorder, in which the person follows a binge-and-purge eating pattern: episodes of eating a very large amount of food in a short time, followed by attempts to undo what has been eaten, sometimes alternating with fasting.
Anorexia nervosa and bulimia are primarily disorders affecting females, and are more common in urban families.
These are serious medical and psychological conditions, and they are treatable. Nothing in this section is a checklist. A worry about one’s weight is not an eating disorder, and no disorder can be identified from a textbook, a magazine quiz or an online test — a diagnosis can only be made by a qualified professional who has assessed the person.
3.9 Adulthood and Old Age
3.9.1 Adulthood
An adult is generally defined as someone who is responsible, mature, self-supporting, and well integrated into society. Read that definition again and notice that not one of its four terms is a matter of age. Not one of them arrives on a birthday.
There is a wide variation in developing these attributes, which suggests that there is a shift in timing when an individual becomes an adult or assumes adult roles. Some people take up jobs along with their college studies, or may get married and not pursue their studies. Others may continue to live with their parents even after getting married and being financially independent.
The assumption of adult roles is directed by an individual’s social context. The best time for some of the most important life events — marriage, a job, having children — might be quite different in different cultures. But within a culture, there is similarity in the course of adult development.
In early adulthood, two major tasks are: exploring the possibilities for adult living, and developing a stable life structure. The twenties represent the novice phase of adult development — the years of trying things out. Gradually, a transition from dependence to independence should occur. This could be marked by an image of the kind of life the young person wants, especially in terms of marriage and a career.
Career and Work
Earning a living, choosing an occupation, and developing a career are important themes for people in their twenties and thirties. Entering work life is a challenging event in anyone’s life.
There are apprehensions regarding different adjustments: proving one’s competence, maintaining performance, dealing with competition, and coping with the expectations both of the employers and of oneself. It is also the beginning of new roles and responsibilities. Developing and evaluating a career becomes an important task of adulthood.
Marriage, Parenthood, and Family
The adjustments that young adults have to make when entering a marriage relate to knowing the other person, if not known earlier, and coping with each other’s likes, dislikes, tastes and choices. If both the partners are working, adjustments are required regarding the sharing and performing of roles and responsibilities at home.
In addition to getting married, becoming a parent can be a difficult and stressful transition in young adults, even though it is usually accompanied by the feeling of love for the baby. How adults experience parenting is affected by different situations, such as the number of children in the family, the availability of social support, and the happiness or unhappiness of the married couple.
Family structures themselves vary. The death of a spouse, or divorce, creates a family structure in which a single parent — either the mother or the father — has to take up the responsibility of the children. In recent times, women are increasingly seeking employment outside the home, thus creating another type of family in which both parents work.
The stressors when both parents are working are quite the same as those of a single working parent: taking care of the children, their school-work, their illnesses, and coping with the workload at home and in the office.
Despite the stresses associated with parenting, it provides a unique opportunity for growth and satisfaction, and is perceived as a way of establishing concern for, and guiding, the next generation.
Physical and Cognitive Changes in Middle Age
Physical changes during the middle ages are caused by maturational changes in the body. Though individuals may vary in the rate at which these changes occur, almost all middle-aged people notice a gradual deterioration in some aspects of their physical functioning — a decline in vision, greater sensitivity to glare, hearing loss, and changes in physical appearance such as wrinkles, grey hair or thinning of hair, and weight gain.
Do cognitive abilities change during adulthood? It is believed that some cognitive abilities decline with age while others do not. The decline in memory is greater in tasks involving long-term memory than in tasks involving short-term memory. For example, a middle-aged person can remember a telephone number immediately after she or he has heard it, but may not remember it so efficiently after a few days.
In short, memory tends to show greater decline, while wisdom may improve with age, as suggested in Fig. 3.10. But remember that individual differences exist in intelligence at every age. Just as not all children are exceptional, neither do all adults show wisdom.
Fig. 3.10 – Cognitive gains and losses across adulthood.
3.9.2 Old Age
Just when “old age” begins is not easy to determine. Traditionally, the age of retirement was linked to old age. Now that people are living longer, the age of retiring from work is changing, and the cut-off point for the definition of “old age” is moving upward.
Some of the challenges which the aged have to cope with include retirement, widowhood, illness, or death in the family. Yet the image of old age is changing in certain ways. There are now people who have crossed seventy years of age or so and are quite active, energetic and creative. They are competent, and are therefore valued by society in many walks of life. In particular, we have aged people in politics, literature, business, art and science. The myth of old age as an incapacitating and therefore frightening phase of life is changing.
Of course, the experience of old age also depends on socio-economic conditions, the availability of health care, the attitude of people, the expectations of society, and the available support system.
There is a pattern in what matters most, and when. Work is most important during the early adult years; then the family becomes most important; and beyond that, health becomes the most important issue in the person’s life. Clearly, successful ageing for much of our adult life focuses on how effective we are at work, how loving our relationships are in our family, how good our friendships are, how healthy we are, and how cognitively fit we are.
Retirement
Retirement from active vocational life is quite significant. Some people perceive retirement as a negative change. They consider it a separation from an important source of satisfaction and self-esteem. Others view it as a shift in life with more time to pursue their own interests.
It is seen that older adults who show openness to new experiences, and more striving and achievement-oriented behaviour, prefer to keep busy and are better adjusted.
Older adults also need to adjust to changes in the family structure, and to new roles such as grand parenting, which have to be learnt. Children are usually busy in their careers and families, and may set up independent homes. Older adults may then depend on their children for financial support, and to overcome their loneliness after the children have moved out. In some people, this might trigger off feelings of hopelessness and depression.
In old age, the feeling of loss of energy, and the dwindling of health and financial assets, lead to insecurity and dependency. The elderly tend to look towards others to lean on and to care for them.
Death and Bereavement
Although death is more likely to occur in late adulthood, death can come at any point in development. The deaths, especially of children and younger adults, are often perceived to be more tragic than those of others. In children and younger adults, death is more likely to occur because of accidents, but in older adults it is more likely to occur because of chronic disease.
The death of a spouse is usually seen as the most difficult loss. Those left behind after the death of their partner suffer deep grief, cope with loneliness, depression and financial loss, and are also at risk of many health-related problems. Widows by far outnumber widowers, because studies show that women live longer than men and tend to marry men older than themselves. During such times, support from children, grandchildren and friends can help the individual cope with the loss of a spouse.
People in different cultures view death differently. In the Gond culture in our country, it is believed that death is caused by magic and demon. In the Tanala culture of Madagascar, natural forces are thought to cause death. Human development, as you have read in this chapter, thus helps you to understand the influence of various factors in an individual’s lifetime.
3.10 Summary
Development is the pattern of progressive, orderly and predictable changes that begin at conception and continue throughout life. It includes both growth and decline, and it is produced by the interplay of biological, cognitive and socio-emotional processes, which remain interwoven in the person as a whole.
The Life-Span Perspective holds that development is lifelong, involves interwoven processes, is multi-directional (gains alongside losses), is highly plastic, is shaped by historical conditions, is studied by several disciplines, and is a matter of the individual acting on contexts as well as being acted upon by them.
Development is the joint product of heredity and environment. The genotype is the genetic material a person inherits; the phenotype is the way that material is expressed in observable, measurable characteristics. Genes set the limits, and within those limits the environment influences development. Heredity and environment are also correlated, since genes influence the very environments a child is given, evokes and chooses.
Development is always embedded in a socio-cultural context. Bronfenbrenner describes the child as sitting inside nested systems — microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem. Sinha’s ecological model, developed for the Indian context, describes a visible upper layer of home, school and peer group inside a surrounding layer of geography, the institutional setting of caste and class, and basic amenities.
Life proceeds through stages, each with a leading characteristic. The accomplishments a society comes to expect at a given stage are its developmental tasks.
Prenatal development may be affected by maternal malnutrition, maternal drug use, and some maternal illnesses. Teratogens are environmental agents that cause deviations in normal development.
Motor development follows cephalocaudal and proximodistal trends. Early motor development depends on both maturation and learning.
Newborns arrive equipped with reflexes and with working senses, and infancy is a period of rapid brain, motor, sensory and social development.
The close emotional bond between an infant and the caregiver is called attachment. Harlow’s study with surrogate mothers showed that contact-comfort, rather than feeding, is central to attachment. Cultural variations in child rearing can affect the patterns of attachment between the child and the caregiver.
According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, the main characteristic of the sensorimotor stage is the child’s gradual recognition of the permanence of objects. The preoperational stage is marked by certain deficiencies in thinking such as centration, irreversibility and egocentrism.
During the concrete operations stage, children develop the ability to perform operations on mental representations, making them capable of conservation. The stage of formal operations is more abstract and systematic, and develops logical thought.
The important dimensions of children’s socio-emotional development are the self, gender and moral development. Sex is the biological dimension of being male or female; gender is the social dimension, learned through parents, peers and media.
According to Kohlberg, moral reasoning progresses through three levels that are related to age and determined by cognitive development.
The growth spurt at puberty is a prominent event involving the development of reproductive maturity and secondary sex characteristics. According to Erikson, the key challenge of adolescence is to make some progress towards a sense of identity.
Adolescent thought becomes abstract, idealistic and systematic, and uses hypothetical deductive reasoning. Adolescents also show a special egocentrism, seen in the imaginary audience and the personal fable.
Delinquency, substance abuse and eating disorders are major challenges of adolescence. Most young people who behave in delinquent ways do not remain so, and supportive relationships with parents, peers and adults are protective.
During adulthood, personality is marked by both stability and change. Many landmarks in adult development involve transitions in family relationships, including adjustment to marriage, parenthood, and children leaving home. Career and work are central themes of the twenties and thirties.
Age-related physical transitions during adulthood include changes in appearance, memory, and in the cognitive domain. Memory tends to decline, while wisdom may improve with age.
In old age, adjustment to retirement, to new family roles, and to bereavement becomes central. How well a person ages depends on health, socio-economic conditions, the available support system, and openness to new experience — and the image of old age as an incapacitating phase of life is changing.
3.11 Key Terms
Adolescence — The stage of life that begins at the onset of puberty, when sexual maturity is attained, and that forms the transition between childhood and adulthood.
Animism — The preoperational child’s tendency to think that all things are living, like oneself, and to attribute life-like qualities to inanimate objects.
Attachment — The close emotional bond of affection that develops between an infant and her or his parents or caregivers.
Centration — The preoperational child’s tendency to focus on a single feature of a situation while understanding an event, ignoring all others.
Cephalocaudal trend — The principle that development proceeds from the head region downwards to the tail region, so that control over the upper body is gained before control over the lower body.
Concrete operational stage — Piaget’s third stage (about 7–11 years), in which the child can reason logically about concrete events, classify objects, and perform reversible mental operations.
Deductive thought — Hypothetical deductive reasoning: the systematic adolescent thinking that starts from a possibility and works out, step by step, what would follow if it were true.
Development — The pattern of progressive, orderly and predictable changes that begin at conception and continue throughout life, including both growth and decline.
Egocentrism — Seeing the world only from one’s own point of view; in the preoperational child, an inability to appreciate another’s viewpoint, and in the adolescent, the imaginary audience and the personal fable.
Evolution — Species-specific change across generations, brought about by natural selection, which favours those best adapted to survive and reproduce.
Gender — The social dimension of being male or female: the roles, expectations and behaviours a society attaches to each sex.
Identity — Who a person is, and what her or his values, commitments and beliefs are; establishing it is the primary task of adolescence.
Infancy — The first two years of life, marked by rapid brain growth, reflexes, early motor and sensory development, and the formation of attachment.
Maturation — Changes that follow an orderly sequence largely dictated by the genetic blueprint, unfolding from within on an inner timetable characteristic of the species.
Menarche — The onset of menstruation, which in girls usually follows about two years after the rapid growth in height begins.
Motor development — The development of physical skills such as grasping, reaching, sitting, crawling, walking and running, whose sequence is universal with minor exceptions.
Object permanence — The awareness that objects continue to exist even when they are not being perceived; it is lacking in the young infant.
Operations — Mental actions that allow the child to do mentally what was earlier done physically, and that can be mentally reversed.
Phenotype — The way an individual’s genotype is expressed in observable and measurable characteristics, always as a result of the interaction between inherited traits and the environment.
Prenatal period — The period from conception to birth, lasting about 40 weeks.
Preoperational stage — Piaget’s second stage (about 2–7 years), in which symbolic thought develops but thinking is marked by egocentrism, animism, centration and irreversibility.
Primary sex characteristics — The bodily characteristics that are directly related to reproduction, which develop under the hormones released at puberty.
Proximodistal trend — The principle that growth proceeds from the centre of the body outwards to the extremities, so that control over the torso is gained before control over the hands and fingers.
Puberty — The attainment of sexual maturity, which marks the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence, and which brings dramatic changes in growth rate and sexual characteristics.
Reflexes — Automatic, built-in responses to stimuli that are present in the newborn, act as survival mechanisms, and form the building blocks of later motor development.
Secondary sex characteristics — The features or signs of having achieved sexual maturity, which are not directly involved in reproduction.
Self — A person’s sense of who she or he is, which develops through socialisation and shifts in childhood from physical descriptions to inner and social ones.
Sensorimotor stage — Piaget’s first stage (about 0–2 years), in which the infant explores the world by coordinating sensory experiences with physical actions and gradually acquires object permanence.
Teratogens — Environmental agents, such as drugs, infections, radiation and pollution, that cause deviations in normal prenatal development and can lead to serious abnormalities or death.
3.12 Points to Ponder
If genes set the limits and the environment decides where within those limits a person lands, then who is responsible for what a person becomes? Is it useful, or misleading, to ask how much of a trait is “due to” heredity?
Think back over the last two or three years of your own life — the disagreements you have had with your parents, the problems you faced, and the help you sought. Which of those episodes now look like ordinary features of a developmental stage, and which look like something particular to you? Does knowing that a difficulty is “typical of adolescence” make it easier to live through, or does it make the difficulty feel less real than it is?
Imagine writing a short script of an ordinary afternoon of play with friends, first from the point of view of a four-year-old and then from the point of view of someone your age. What exactly changes — the events, the reasoning, the sense of an audience, or the meaning the child attaches to the friends themselves?
Piaget’s stages describe how children think at each age. Are the ages simply averages that vary from child to child, or is there something in the order that could not have been otherwise? Could a child reach formal operational thought without ever having passed through concrete operations?
Bronfenbrenner and Sinha both describe the child as sitting inside layers of environment. If a school wanted to improve the development of its students, which layer should it try to change first — and which layers can a school not reach at all?
Society expects certain accomplishments at certain ages and calls them developmental tasks. What happens to a person who reaches them “late” — or who reaches them on time but does not want them? Who decides what counts as being on time?
Adolescents are said to have an imaginary audience. But young people today are also watched by a real one, on social media, that responds and keeps score. Does that make Elkind’s idea more relevant than it was, or less?
If wisdom improves with age while memory and speed decline, why do most institutions — schools, examinations, hiring — measure mostly the abilities that decline?
3.13 NCERT Questions
What is development? How is it different from growth and maturation?
Describe the main features of the life-span perspective on development.
What are developmental tasks? Explain by giving examples.
‘The environment of the child has a major role in the development of the child.’ Support your answer with examples.
How do socio-cultural factors influence development?
Discuss the cognitive changes taking place in a developing child.
Attachment bonds formed in the childhood years have long-term effects. Explain, taking examples from daily life.
What is adolescence? Explain the concept of egocentrism.
What are the factors influencing the formation of identity during adolescence? Support your answer with examples.
What are the challenges faced by individuals on entry to adulthood?
3.14 Objective Questions
- Development is best described as:
- an increase in the size of body parts that can be measured
- the pattern of progressive, orderly and predictable changes beginning at conception and continuing through life
- changes that follow an inner genetic timetable and unfold from within
- species-specific change brought about by natural selection [1 mark]
- The prenatal period typically lasts for about:
- 30 weeks
- 36 weeks
- 40 weeks
- 44 weeks [1 mark]
- Which of the following reflexes disappears in 3 to 4 months and is replaced by voluntary grasping?
- Rooting
- Moro
- Grasp
- Babinski [1 mark]
- A child who slips while running and says “road hurt me” is showing:
- centration
- animism
- conservation
- object permanence [1 mark]
- According to Piaget, hypothetical deductive reasoning becomes possible in the:
- sensorimotor stage
- preoperational stage
- concrete operational stage
- formal operational stage [1 mark]
- A father’s sudden transfer to another city creates tension between the parents, which changes the way they behave with their child. In Bronfenbrenner’s model, the father’s office belongs to the:
- microsystem
- mesosystem
- exosystem
- macrosystem [1 mark]
- The principle that children gain control over the torso before the fingers is known as the:
- cephalocaudal trend
- proximodistal trend
- maturational trend
- plasticity trend [1 mark]
- In Sinha’s ecological model, the institutional setting provided by caste and class belongs to the:
- upper, visible layer
- surrounding layer
- chronosystem
- mesosystem [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): An individual carrying genes for short stature will not grow taller than average even in an excellent nutritional environment. Reason (R): Genes set the limits within which the environment influences development.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
- A is true, but R is false
- A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): The disappearance of the grasp reflex at about four months is a sign of healthy development. Reason (R): Reflexes disappear as brain functions mature and voluntary control over behaviour begins to develop.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
- A is true, but R is false
- A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): Adolescence is experienced in the same way in every culture. Reason (R): The physical changes of puberty are universal.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
- A is true, but R is false
- A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): Feeding is the main basis on which an infant forms an attachment to a caregiver. Reason (R): Harlow and Harlow’s baby monkeys preferred the cloth surrogate mother whether or not she fed them.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
- A is true, but R is false
- A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
- Match the theorist in Column A with the idea in Column B.
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Jean Piaget | i. Two concentric layers of the child’s ecology in the Indian context |
| b. Urie Bronfenbrenner | ii. Imaginary audience and personal fable |
| c. Durganand Sinha | iii. Stages of moral reasoning studied through moral dilemmas |
| d. David Elkind | iv. Micro-, meso-, exo-, macro- and chronosystems |
| e. Lawrence Kohlberg | v. Four stages of cognitive development |
[1 mark]
- Match the term in Column A with its meaning in Column B.
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Genotype | i. Environmental agents that cause deviations in normal prenatal development |
| b. Phenotype | ii. The onset of menstruation |
| c. Teratogens | iii. A person’s actual genetic material or genetic heritage |
| d. Menarche | iv. Accomplishments that society comes to expect at a given stage of life |
| e. Developmental tasks | v. The way a genotype is expressed in observable, measurable characteristics |
[1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The awareness that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be perceived is called ____________. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: In girls, rapid growth in height usually begins about ____________ years before menarche. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: Mental actions that allow a child to do mentally what was earlier done physically, and that can be mentally reversed, are called ____________. [1 mark]
True or False: Full colour vision in the infant develops by 3 months of age. [1 mark]
True or False: According to the life-span perspective, development is plastic, which means that skills and abilities can be improved or developed throughout life. [1 mark]
True or False: Growth and development mean the same thing, since both refer to an increase in size that can be measured. [1 mark]
3.15 Check Your Concepts
Define development, and state one way in which it includes both gain and loss. [2 marks]
What are teratogens? Give any two examples. [2 marks]
State any two assumptions of the life-span perspective on development. [2 marks]
Define attachment, and state one behaviour that distinguishes a securely attached infant from an insecurely attached one. [2 marks]
Name the two principles that early physical development follows, and give one example of each. [2 marks]
What is meant by developmental tasks? Give one example from adolescence. [2 marks]
Differentiate between growth, development and maturation. [3 marks]
Differentiate between sex and gender, and give one example of gender socialisation by parents. [3 marks]
Distinguish between the imaginary audience and the personal fable, with one example of each. [3 marks]
Distinguish between the mesosystem and the exosystem in Bronfenbrenner’s model, giving one example of each. [3 marks]
Why does a child in the preoperational stage say that a tall thin glass holds more juice than a short broad one? Give reasons, using the concepts of centration and reversibility. [3 marks]
Differentiate between primary and secondary sex characteristics, and state what triggers their development. [3 marks]
Arrange Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development in order, giving the approximate age range and one leading characteristic of each. [4 marks]
Explain, with an example, how heredity and environment interact in shaping a characteristic. Why is it difficult to say how much each of them contributed? [4 marks]
Describe Harlow and Harlow’s study with surrogate mothers. What did it establish about attachment, and on what ethical grounds has it been criticised? [4 marks]
Draw and label Bronfenbrenner’s contextual model of development, and explain any two of its systems with examples from an Indian school-going child’s life. [4 marks]
Evaluate the claim that adolescence is necessarily a period of turmoil. Use the evidence in this chapter about culture and adolescent experience. [4 marks]
What would happen to a child’s development if the surrounding layer of Sinha’s ecological model changed — for example, if a family moved from a crowded locality with no play space to a well-provided one — while the home and the school remained the same? Explain your answer. [4 marks]
Describe Piaget’s theory of cognitive development in full, with the evidence that supports it and one criticism that has been made of it. [6 marks]
Describe the life-span perspective on development in detail, and explain, with examples, how it changes the way we look at old age. [6 marks]
Compare Bronfenbrenner’s contextual view of development with Sinha’s ecological model. What does Sinha’s model add for a child growing up in India? [6 marks]
Discuss the major challenges of adolescence described in this chapter, and explain what helps to reduce delinquent behaviour and to prevent substance use. [6 marks]
Describe Kohlberg’s account of moral development, with the method he used and one criticism of his theory. [6 marks]
Describe the main physical, cognitive and socio-emotional changes of adulthood and old age, and discuss what makes for successful ageing. [6 marks]
3.16 Case-Based Questions
- Meera is four years old and her brother Kabir is eight. Their grandmother divides a bar of chocolate equally between them. Kabir’s half is left whole; Meera’s half is broken into four small pieces. Meera immediately declares that she has more chocolate than Kabir because “I have four and he has only one”. Kabir laughs and tells her they are the same, because if her pieces were joined together they would make exactly what he has.
- Name the stage of Piaget’s theory each child is in, and give one reason for your answer in each case.
- Which feature of preoperational thought is Meera showing?
- What ability does Kabir’s reply demonstrate that Meera does not yet have? [6 marks]
- Anaya is ten months old. Her mother has recently rejoined work, and Anaya spends the day with her grandmother, who plays with her, holds her, and responds quickly when she calls out. When her mother leaves in the morning, Anaya cries; when her mother returns in the evening, Anaya reaches for her and settles quickly. A neighbour tells the family that the baby will “get attached to whoever feeds her”.
- Which concept from this chapter does Anaya’s behaviour illustrate?
- Using the evidence from the chapter, explain whether the neighbour’s claim is correct.
- What kind of caregiving is likely to produce the pattern Anaya is showing? [6 marks]
- Arjun is sixteen. He has spent a year teaching himself the guitar and plays with three friends after school, but at home it is assumed that he will take up engineering, as his elder cousin did. Arjun has not raised the subject. He spends a long time before the mirror each morning, convinced that a small mark on his cheek is the first thing anyone notices about him, and he tells his sister that nobody in the house has any idea what he actually feels.
- Identify the two components of adolescent egocentrism that Arjun is showing, and quote the detail from the case that shows each.
- Name the developmental task Arjun is struggling with, and explain why it produces conflict with parents and within himself.
- Suggest, using the chapter, two factors that will influence how Arjun resolves this. [6 marks]
- Two boys of the same age live in the same district. Ravi’s home has one room shared by six people, no space to study, and a school with no library; the locality has an irregular water supply and nowhere to play. Suhas has his own desk, a school with a well-stocked library, and a park nearby. Both are equally intelligent, and both work hard, but Ravi’s school performance is falling behind.
- Explain Ravi’s situation using Sinha’s ecological model, naming the layer each factor belongs to.
- Would Bronfenbrenner’s model describe the same situation differently? Explain.
- Which factors in this case could a school realistically change, and which could it not? [6 marks]
- Mrs Kaur retired last year after thirty years as a school teacher. Her children live in other cities and call on weekends. For the first few months she enjoyed the free time, but lately she says that nobody needs her any more and she has stopped going out. Her former colleague has asked her to help run a weekend reading class for children in the neighbourhood, and her doctor has suggested she talk to a counsellor about how low she has been feeling.
- Which challenges of old age described in the chapter is Mrs Kaur facing?
- Using the chapter, explain what predicts good adjustment to retirement, and what does not.
- Why is the doctor’s suggestion a reasonable one, and how would you respond to someone who said that seeking counselling at her age is a sign of weakness? [6 marks]