Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence. Laura E. Levine
How can you be a smart consumer of information about development?
Be sure you know your sources. Learn to critically evaluate information that comes from the Internet. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Be open to new ideas, but don’t assume that information is better simply because it is newer. Don’t generalize from a single example, but also don’t reject the results of research because your individual experiences don’t agree with the research findings. Realize that understanding development requires more than the ideas you bring to the course, and don’t fall prey to perceptual bias that just confirms what you already expected. Make good use of the pedagogical features that are included in your text because they can help you master the material.
Key Terms
Cognitive development 9
Culture 16
Developmental psychopathology 13
Equifinality 13
Incremental theories 11
Intersectionality 13
Multifinality 13
Nature 10
Niche picking 13
Nurture 10
Peer review 18
Perceptual bias 21
Physical development 9
Positive youth development 14
Qualitative changes 11
Quantitative changes 11
Social policy 7
Social-emotional development 9
Socialization 15
Socioeconomicstatus (SES) 15
Stage theories 11
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Go to https://edge.sagepub.com/levinechrono2e for additional exercises and resources. Select your chapter to access resources and activities that reinforce the concepts from this chapter.
Descriptions of Images and Figures
Back to Figure
The lifecycle of a sapling and a butterfly are seen here in four stages. The lifecycle of a tree and a butterfly are seen here in four stages from sapling to tree and egg to butterfly respectively to reflect the quantitative and qualitative changes that occur in the different growth stages.
In stage one, the sapling corresponds to the egg on a leaf.
A bigger sapling and a caterpillar on the leaf in stage two.
A plant and a cocoon on a branch are seen in stage three.
A tree and a butterfly are seen in stage four.
Back to Figure
This line graph show the changes in the self-esteem of four children from the ages of five to seventeen.
The x axis shows the age of the child from age 5 to 17 with a four-year interval. The y axis shows the measure of self-esteem from zero to sixteen. The approximate self-esteem scores for each child, at each age, is tabulated below.
2 Theory and Research in Development
Marmaduke St. John / Alamy Stock Photo
Test Your Knowledge
Test your knowledge of child development by deciding whether each of the following statements is true or false, and then check your answers as you read the chapter.
1 T□ F□ Well-designed research can tell us whether a theory is true or false.
2 T□ F□ Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is based on outdated ideas so it is not relevant to the field of child development today.
3 T□ F□ The best way to get rid of an undesirable behavior in a child is to punish the child for doing it.
4 T□ F□ Young children learn math more effectively from games such as pick-up sticks than from working out written arithmetic problems.
5 T□ F□ Infants must have skin-to-skin contact with their mother within the first few hours after birth for bonding, or love, to develop.
6 T□ F□ A good theory should be universal, applying to all children in all situations.
7 T□ F□ When conducting research by doing an observation, it is important that the person who is doing the observation does not know the purpose of the research.
8 T□ F□ Today over 900 colleges do not require the SAT or ACT for admission.
9 T□ F□ There is little scientific value in the study of single individuals.
10 T□ F□ Even if research consistently finds that children whose mothers talk to them a great deal have high self-esteem, we should not conclude that frequent conversations with parents build self-esteem in children.
Correct answers: (1) F, (2) F, (3) F, (4) T, (5) F, (6) F, (7) T, (8) T, (9) F, (10) T
Learning Questions
2.1 What do child development theories tell us?
2.2 What are the hypotheses and modern applications of the major child development theories?
2.3 What role do neuropsychology, genetics, and culture play in the study of child development?
2.4 How is research on child development conducted?
2.5 What are ethical considerations in research with children and adolescents?
When we observe and work with children and adolescents, we want to make sense out of what we see. The explanations we develop about why children behave in certain ways can become theories. In this chapter, we describe some of the major theories that have influenced how we understand child development today. All theories must be testable, so in the second half of the chapter we describe a variety of methods used to test these theories and to build our knowledge base. We begin with a discussion of why theories are an important basis for our understanding of development.
Why Theories of Development are Important
>> LQ 2.1 What do child development theories tell us?
To understand how and why children develop the way they do, it is not enough simply to observe them. Our observations should lead us to explanations that allow us to predict how they will behave. These explanations can be organized into a developmental theory. As we said in Chapter 1, we all have our own personal theories about human behavior, but the theories we use to build a scientific understanding about child and adolescent