Discuss different issues in child development.

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Children’s development of social skills is affected by the nature of their family and early educational experiences (NRC, 2001). Whether in a nuclear, blended, or extended family; a communal arrangement; or a single-parent family, the child learns social patterns and skills within this context. Children find love and security and form attachments with people who protect and care for them. In the family, children become socialized through interactions with parents, siblings, relatives, and neighbors; once in a school setting, they need new ways of acting, relating, and socializing. Children who have had a strong attachment to a nurturing figure and see themselves as separate from this nurturing figure are ready for a group situation. Children who have not fully developed strong attachments to another person may have a more difficult time adjusting to the complexity of the social system of the school.

The child development theories vary widely in scope and content. Psychoanalytic theory focuses on the emotional and motivational aspects of development. Learning theory is concerned generally with the effects of the environment on behavior and, more specifically, with how those who deal with children can control their behavior. Piaget's theory focuses on the development of intellectual functioning: adaptive problem-solving, reasoning, and concept formation. Information processing theory is concerned primarily with children's attention, memory, and problem solving abilities. Ethological theory explores the effects of evolution on children's adaptive behavior.

But the theories do not just differ in content; They take very different positions on certain fundamental issues about the nature of development. Is the child an active force in its own development? Is development continuous or discontinuous? Are there critical periods in development? Is development the product of nature or nurture? 

Are children an active force in their own development?

Some theories portray children as essentially passive with respect to developmental change. In this view, children do not initiate behavior or spontaneously act upon the environment; they merely react to stimuli from the environment. Thus, some developmentalists see development as the accumulation of learned associations between environmental stimuli and responses (Skinner, 1953; Bijou & Baer, 1961; Bijou, 1989)

Other theories portray children as active agents in their own development. In this perspective, children selectively and spontaneously involve themselves with specific aspects of the environment and alter the environment in ways that affect the nature of their experiences. For example, a child who develops an interest and aptitude for motor skills may begin to select activities--such as joining a team and practicing--that further develop these motor skills. Thus from the moment of conception, each individual must be understood as an active force in development, affecting the environment as much as he or she is influenced by that environment (Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981). This view promotes a sense of humility among those who seek to steer children's development by external interventions. To promote development, we must understand what children bring to a situation, what they want and need, and whether they will spontaneously cooperate with our efforts.

There is no simple resolution to the differences between the passive and active views. Both seem valid. Children do appear to actively affect some developmental changes, such as acquiring language and social skills. Other changes, such as physical growth and changes in certain infant reflexes, seem to occur with less, or perhaps no active participation of the child. Thus the complexity of development can be best explained by theories that encompass both passive and active involvement of the child in developmental change.

Is development continuous or discontinuous?

Many developmentalists believe that the accumulation of developmental change is not a matter of adding one new skill after another. Instead, they believe that developmental change causes "the rules of the system to change" (Green, 1989, p.17), or to reorganize. For example, when a thirteen-month-old suddenly discovers that that he can let go of furniture and toddle across the living room, the rules for the system of movement in space change irreversibly. At a more advanced level of development, when a five-year-old child discovers that a few cookies can be called one, two, and three, her mental system for conceptualizing quantity is completely reorganized. She can now count cookies and tell whether her brother has more or fewer than she has.

The controversy of continuity versus discontinuity is this: Some theorists say that children go through various developmental stages defined by reorganizing changes, while other theorists reject the notion of stages. A developmental stage refers to the time elapsing between any two sequential developmental changes that reorganize the system. Sigmund Freud (1939) proposed that personality emerges in a sequence of five developmental stages organized around qualitatively different aspects of sexual functioning. Jean Piaget (1983) proposed that cognitive development emerges in a series of four sequential stages organized around qualitatively distinct forms of thinking and problem solving. Theorists who accept the concept of stages view development as discontinuous.

Other theorists such as social learning theorists (Bandura, 1989) and information-processing theorists (Bjorkland, 1987; Klahr, 1989) explain development without reference to the stage concept. They view development as a gradual accumulation of minute changes and see no basis for arbitrarily dividing development into stages. Developmentalists who reject the concept of stages view development as continuous.

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