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Example research essay topic: Plays A Major Role Development Of Children - 1,321 words

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... Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought otherwise. "He argued the view that nature, the totality of predispositions and abilities we are born with, shapes development. " People are noble savages corrupted by contact with society. Since then new discoveries have been made and contemporary developmental psychologists now acknowledge that both, heredity and the environment shape development and that neither one is sufficient alone. The epigenetic model, with which most psychologists agree with, states that "development is influenced by the forces of both nature and nurture. " It is a result of the interaction of our genes and our past and present experiences. In 1801 a young boy around the age of twelve was discovered in Aveyron, France.

Animals had apparently raised this "wild boy." Because he was uncivilized, he became known as the Wild Boy of Aveyron. Children like him are called feral (meaning wild) children, and the majority of times they are "completely unable to cope with human society and usually die soon after they are recovered from the wild, either from human illnesses to which they have no immunity or dietary shock, or psychological trauma... Feral children are not the same as those tragic children raised in extreme isolation or locked in cupboards and cellar for years at a time by mentally disturbed parents. " Plasticity is "the capacity of a developing organism to be molded and shaped by the environment, nurture, and experience. " Individuals themselves differ about the extent of plasticity. Plasticity differs as well according to different stages or periods in development. "Your heredity establishes you potential, but is your experiences that determine how, and how much of, that potential will be realized. " Each person is an individual with his or her own developmental schedule and pattern, however it is convenient to group the occurrence of various developmental changes into stages. Nonetheless, one must not forget that there is no one specific point at which a task suddenly appears or disappears, because each area of development is continually interacting and influencing the others.

The basic stages of development are childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and sometimes late adulthood is considered a separate stage. Only recently has the neonate period of development been carefully examined and considered. In spite of this, there are some general principles of development. Development follows a predictable pattern with common characteristics such as the early physical development of infants. In babies development spreads downward from the head, which develops first, to the feet. The individual first develops general responses and then proceeds to specific responses.

A third characteristic of development is that it is a continuous process. A fourth principle is that some individuals have a different rate of development, and each stage has unique features, depending on the society and the period of development involved. The neonate is the newborn through the first two weeks to a month of life. Neonates, within a few hours of life, given certain stimulus are capable of various responses. Almost all of these behaviors "are reflexive - simple, unlearned, involuntary reactions to specific stimuli. Many of these responses serve the purpose of helping to respond to a basic need. " Because different psychologists name certain stages differently, Jean Piaget named the first stage the sensory-motor stage, which involves the neonatal stage as well as infancy.

It is during this stage in which infants learn by concrete actions; they learn opposability. This "grasping" usually takes takes place between the age of three and five months. Opposability is of utmost importance in aiding the processes of the mind. The first schemes involve its senses, actions and abilities, in which opposability plays a major role. "It seems that babies start to build up their knowledge of the world by observing relations between connected sensory events. " It is in this manner that they learn to survive. Approaches for survival and / or success begin to develop in childhood. "Regardless of the rate of one's motor development, there are regularities in the sequence on one's development. " Children grow very rapidly, both physically and cognitively and they develop certain intellectual abilities. It is during childhood that individuals acquire language skills, which are presumed to have been forming since infancy.

Human beings are presumed to be born with language learning abilities, and "social interaction motivates children to learn language so they can communicate with others. " It is believed that learning abilities are innate because all individuals are born with vocal chords, and even as young as newborns, they already babble and make certain sounds. Children all over the world seem to go through similar steps of learning language. Reinforcers as well as punisher's play a vital role in the development of language. "Piaget say the human mind as an active biological system that seeks, selects, interprets, and recognizes environmental information to fit with or adjust to its own existing mental structures. " Jean Piaget greatly influenced the trying to successfully figure out a way to understand the mental processes (including the process of opposability) children go through to understand physical realities. He named the mental structures or programs that guide developing sequences of thinking schemes. Although Piaget's theory has greatly influenced developmental psychology, since then more research has been made, and thus has caused some questioning of some of his basic ideas. "The two major criticisms of Piaget's theory are that (1) the borderlines between his proposes stages are much less clear-cut than his theory suggests, and (2) Piaget significantly underestimated the cognitive talents of preschool children. " Another important disparagement is that his theory focuses solely on the development of children, and as we have already proven, development does not stop until the day we die.

He also gives little consideration to the influence that language development has on an individual. He also did not elaborate much about the capacity of a child's memory. Erikson, on the other hand, proposed a theory which he divided into eight stages of human development, his first stage beginning at age zero and the eighth stage referring to late adulthood. He too included the characteristics of cognitive development, however, he focused on much more than that. Also, "many of his observations had more of a cross-cultural basis than did Piaget's. " Unlike Freud, Erikson decided to emphasize the social environment, and thus his theory is referred to as psychosocial. To Erikson, development is not so much periods of time, but a series of crises that need to be resolved.

In whichever way these conflicts or crises are resolved affects greatly the development of the subsequent stages. According to Erikson we "naturally go through the resolution of each conflict or crisis in order and that facing any one type of crisis usually occurs at about the same age for all of us. " Piaget agreed that moral development is closely related to one's cognitive awareness, yet it was Lawrence Kohlberg who assembled a theory of moral development. The theory is based on standards of moral judgement. According to Piaget these cognitive abilities develop only as the child progresses through developmental stages. Kohlberg's theory is too divided into stages. He proposed three major levels of moral reasoning, or development.

According to Kohlberg, his three stages occur in that same order in all cultures. Development is closely related to socialization, because as we have discussed earlier, nurture, or the environment plays a major role in the development of an individual. Socialization the perceptual "process of shaping an individual's behavior patterns, values, standards, skills, attitudes, and motives to conform to those regardless as desirable in a particular society. " Sexuality is closely related to socialization. Psychologists differ in their approaches towards development because the view it from distinct points of view.

Piaget, for example, proposed a theory of the cognitive development of children, while Erikson proposed a theory based on the psychosocial development of individuals. Although Kohlberg based his theory on Piaget's, his theory focused on moral reasoning.


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Research essay sample on Plays A Major Role Development Of Children

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