1.11.1 Basic frameworks for conceptualising development

Domains, stages and maturation

• Developmental domains are biological, cognitive, emotional and social, and they influence each other: hearing impairment may look like cognitive delay or social withdrawal.

• Continuity versus discontinuity contrasts gradual quantitative change, such as vocabulary growth, with qualitative shifts, such as understanding false beliefs.

• Stability versus change asks whether people keep their position relative to peers while everyone changes.

• Stage theories propose an ordered sequence of qualitatively different ways of functioning, while continuous theories stress accumulated learning.

• Real development is less age-bound and less consistent across tasks than strong stage theories predict.

• Maturation is biologically guided development supported by ordinary experience, and Gesell stressed the consistent order of motor milestones.

• Maturational tasks (Havighurst) are age-related demands, such as toileting in early childhood or identity in adolescence, whose mastery supports later adaptation.

• A social clock sets cultural expectations for events such as leaving home, and being markedly early or late causes stress.

• Applying one culture's developmental expectations universally can cause both over-diagnosis and under-diagnosis.

Nature, nurture and adversity

• Gene-environment interaction means the effect of an environment varies with genotype.

• Gene-environment correlation is passive when parents provide both genes and care, evocative when a child's traits draw responses, and active when children select environments.

• Heritability describes variation within a population under particular conditions, so a heritability of 60% does not mean 60% of one person's intelligence is genetic.

• The heritability of measured intelligence rises with age.

• The Flynn effect, a twentieth-century rise in measured intelligence too fast to be genetic, shows that high heritability does not rule out environmental change.

• The effect of adversity depends on its timing, duration and severity, and on how many adversities accumulate.

• Romanian adoption studies showed severe effects of institutional deprivation and substantial recovery after family placement, with better outcomes after earlier placement.

• Turning points (Rutter) are later relationships or experiences that redirect development.

Tap to enlarge

Infant vision

Vision is the least mature sense at birth, with acuity of about 6/90, whereas touch, taste, smell and hearing already work before delivery.

A term newborn has only subcortical reflexes and basic capacities:

• The pupillary light reflex is a brainstem reflex established by 35 weeks' gestation.

• The newborn follows a slow target, tells a bright pattern from a dull one and has a fixed focus near 20 cm.

• The newborn already prefers face-like patterns.

Cortically dependent functions mature after birth in sequence.

• The visual cliff (Gibson and Walk) tests depth perception and the emergence of fear of heights in crawling infants.

Tap to enlarge

Developmental milestones

• Copying shapes follows a fixed order: a circle at about 3 years, a cross at 4, a square at 4 to 5, a triangle at 5 and a diamond at 6.

• Telling the time to the quarter hour comes at 6 to 7 years, not 5.

• Each milestone has a typical age and a later red-flag age, after which its absence is a concern.

Variation, delay and regression

Play

Symbolic play differs from sensorimotor play, which explores objects for themselves.

Freud's psychosexual model

• Libido moves through bodily zones in a fixed sequence: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital.

• Fixation can follow excessive gratification as well as excessive frustration, and under stress people regress to earlier patterns.

• The topographic model sorts mental content into unconscious, preconscious and conscious by access to awareness, whereas the structural model of id, ego and superego is defined by function.

Tap to enlarge

• Anal-retentive fixation is holding on, with order, parsimony and obstinacy.

• Anal-expulsive fixation is letting go, with messiness, carelessness, extravagance and defiance.

• Sublimation in latency redirects libido into non-sexual activity such as sport, hobbies and same-sex friendship.

The Oedipus complex

• The Oedipus complex is desire for the opposite-sex parent and rivalry with the same-sex parent, with castration anxiety in the boy and penis envy in the girl.

• It resolves through identification with the same-sex parent, whose rules and prohibitions the child takes in to form the superego.

• Freud linked the laying down of gender identity to this resolution.

• The female Oedipus complex is the girl's attachment to her father and rivalry with her mother, resolved by identifying with the mother.

• The Electra complex was Carl Jung's name for the girl's version; Freud rejected the label.

Freud's stages, ages and fixation claims lack empirical support and rest on retrospective accounts from a narrow clinical sample.

Klein

Mahler: separation-individuation

Margaret Mahler, not Winnicott, proposed the separation-individuation model, which runs from about 5 months to 5 years and has its own subphases. Two earlier phases come before it.

• Mahler's object constancy is emotional, whereas Piaget's object permanence is cognitive.

• An adult who failed to attain object constancy cannot hold a stable, whole image of important others while they are absent, and shows separation distress and all-good or all-bad views of them.

Winnicott and Bion

• The good-enough mother (Winnicott) adapts closely to the infant at first, then lessens that adaptation in tolerable steps, so small lapses build frustration tolerance, a sense of reality and independence.

• The transitional object (Winnicott) is a blanket or soft toy that carries the comfort of the primary carer, stands in for her during separation and reduces anxiety on the way to independence.

• Containment is Bion's term, not Winnicott's, for the mother processing the infant's projected feelings.

Erikson's psychosocial stages

Erikson described eight crises in a fixed sequence across the lifespan, each with a positive and a negative pole. The framework is descriptive and reflects Western expectations about education, work and family.

In identity versus role confusion, adults should support exploration rather than force early commitment.

Piaget

• Schemas organise action and thought, and children actively construct knowledge.

• Assimilation fits experience into an existing schema, whereas accommodation changes the schema.

• Equilibration resolves the mismatch between expectation and experience.

• Moral realism (heteronomous morality) lasts until about 9 or 10 years, and judges an act by the size of its consequences rather than the intention behind it.

• Piaget underestimated performance on simpler tasks, overstated consistency across domains and gave too little weight to teaching, language and culture.

Kohlberg's moral stages

Kohlberg proposed six moral stages, grouped into pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional levels.

Vygotsky and social learning

• The zone of proximal development (Vygotsky) is the gap between what a child can do alone and what they can do with help.

• Scaffolding (Wood, Bruner and Ross) is prompting that fades as the child's skill grows.

• Social learning holds that reinforcement and punishment shape behaviour, and that observation lets children learn without direct reward.

• Identification in social learning is adopting a model's wider characteristics and values.

• Bandura separated acquiring a behaviour from performing it, since expected consequences decide whether learning is shown.

• Reciprocal determinism (Bandura) means the child, their behaviour and the environment influence one another.

• Social learning underpins parent training, but explains acquired behaviour better than qualitative changes in understanding.

Bowlby's phases of mourning

Bowlby described four phases of mourning, which follow in order.

1. The first phase is numbness.

2. The second is yearning and searching, with pining and angry protest.

3. The third is disorganisation and despair.

4. The last is reorganisation.