Early childhood years shape the ground of personality, intelligence, learning capacities, social behavior of adults. Scholars agree that habits and experiences of childhood years may result in non-communicable diseases in the time of adulthood. In this context, if a child receives sufficient support , stimulation, and nurturance, his or her development into an adult is adequate. It is a well-known fact that many psychological problems in adults are rooted in adverse childhood experiences. Given this, all psychology professionals, even if they do not work specifically with kids, should have an understanding of developmental psychology.
Important theorists in the field of developmental psychology were Piaget, Erickson, and Vygotsky. Let us discuss how each of them viewed child development. For Piaget, the focal point in child development was the change of mental abilities in children over time given the child’s active interaction with the environment. His theory of child development is constructivism, which sees kids’ development as a process during which children construct systems of meaning and their own understanding of reality through active interaction with the world around them. For Vygotsky, children’s development is preceded by learning.
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Children learn through social learning: they develop cognitively owing to the input from others, i.e, are influenced by the cultural and historical contexts. In this sense, children learn as they stay within the zone of proximal development, which is made of tasks that a child can potentially learn (with the help of an instructor), but has not yet learnt. Scaffolding has a special meaning in Vygotsky’s social learning theory: it refers to assistance that adults or older friends give to a child. As for Erickson, he viewed child development in terms of psychosocial stages. Development is about successfully resolving crises which happen at every stage. Overall, during a lifespan, every person has to go through 8 stages of psychosocial development, when further development is about building on a previous stage. Most people successfully resolve crises at each stage and leave them far behind to resolve new crises, but there are people who do not fully resolve the crises and so must deal with them later in their lives.
While it is hard to say which theory best describes the basics of child development, these theories’ interrelatedness is a good reason to form a combined view. Therefore, each theory is important in its own unique way.
- Shaffer, D. & Kipp, K. (2013). Developmental psychology: Childhood and adolescence. Cengage learning.
- Thomas, R. (2005). Comparing theories of child development. Thomson/Wadsworth.
