Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence. Laura E. Levine
university and at regional and national conferences. Her work on the scholarship of teaching and learning can be found in New Directions for Teaching and Learning, College Teaching and the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Joyce Munsch received her PhD in human development and family studies from Cornell University. She was a faculty member in human development and family studies at Texas Tech University for 14 years, where she also served as associate dean for research in the College of Human Sciences for 2 years. In 2002, Dr. Munsch came to California State University at Northridge as the founding chair and professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Development and now is an emeritus professor in that Department.Dr. Munsch’s research focused on adolescent stress and coping and social network research. Her work has been published in the Journal of School Psychology, Adolescence, the Journal of Early Adolescence, the Journal of Research on Adolescence, and the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. Throughout her career, Dr. Munsch administered grants that supported community-based programs. She was the codirector of the Early Head Start program at Texas Tech University and co–principal investigator for three Texas Youth Commission (Department of Juvenile Justice) grants. At Cal State Northridge, she administered the Jumpstart program for 10 years. She also worked with the Los Angeles County Early Childhood Education Workforce Consortium, a collaborative project dedicated to preparing a well-qualified ECE workforce for the Los Angeles community. Her commitment to community service learning was recognized in 2005 when she was awarded the CSUN Visionary Community Service Learning Award. At Texas Tech, she was the College of Human Sciences nominee for the Hemphill-Wells New Professor Excellence in Teaching Award, the Barnie E. Rushing Jr. Faculty Distinguished Research Award, the El Paso Energy Foundation Faculty Achievement Award, and the President’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and she received the Kathryn Burleson Faculty Service Award and the College of Human Sciences Outstanding Researcher Award.
1 Issues and Themes in Child Development
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Learning Questions
1.1 Who needs to have a good understanding of child development and why?
1.2 What are the domains of child development and some recurring issues in the field?
1.3 What are the contexts for child development?
1.4 How can you be a smart consumer of information about development?
Take a moment to think about why you want to learn about children, adolescents, and their development. You may enjoy the interactions you have with children and want to understand them better, or your career goal may involve working with children or adolescents. Perhaps you want to better understand yourself or those you know by exploring how childhood has affected who you have become. Your interest may be more scientific, with a focus on understanding the research that explains the processes of development. Your particular goal will influence how you approach the information in this book.
The information and activities in this book have been designed to stimulate your thinking in all these ways. We want to share with you the excitement we feel about the topic of child and adolescent development and to pique your curiosity so that you will want to learn even more about it. By the time you finish reading this book, you will have a solid foundation in a number of important topics related to development. It is our hope that this will motivate you to continue learning about children and their development long after you have completed this course.
In this first chapter, we introduce some of the basic concepts of child and adolescent development. We first look at why people study children and some ways they use knowledge about children to promote positive development. If you are curious about how you might use this knowledge in a future career, an Active Learning feature leads you through the process of researching careers that require a good understanding of child and adolescent development. We then discuss some basic themes related to how development occurs and introduce you to the different contexts that influence children’s lives. Finally, we provide strategies and guidelines that will enable you to differentiate reliable information from other material you may encounter as you study child development.
Why Study Childhood?
>> LQ 1.1 Who needs to have a good understanding of child development and why?
Many people are interested in studying child development because the topic itself is fascinating and important. Some want information they will be able to use when they become parents. Many students want to be able to use the information in a future career as a professional who works with children or a policymaker who shapes social policy that affects children and families and some students want to become researchers to further the scientific understanding of children and how they grow and develop. These are all good reasons to study child development, and we explore them all in this chapter.
Understanding the Process of Development
One reason why students are interested in studying child development is to understand the role that infancy, childhood, and adolescence play in shaping who we become as adults. Researchers who study children as they develop over long periods of time have provided ample evidence that early traits, behaviors, and experiences are related to many adult outcomes. One well-known example of this is a study of gifted children begun by Lewis Terman in 1921 (Friedman & Martin, 2011). Many years later, others are still mining his data to answer questions about life span development. One finding is that those children who were rated high in the quality Terman called conscientiousness had many positive outcomes in adulthood, including living longer (Kern, Della Porta, & Friedman, 2014; Kern, Friedman, Martin, Reynolds, & Luong, 2009). How does earlier conscientiousness link with these later outcomes? The connection is partially explained by the fact that conscientious individuals were less likely to smoke and drink alcohol to excess, both of which are predictive of a shorter life span. Because the pathways between early personality characteristics and outcomes later in life are very complex, research continues to explore these connections to help us understand the process.
Conscientiousness. What long-term outcomes might result from this child’s willingness to work hard and cooperate with an adult?
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Saying that the earliest stages of development are important for later development and functioning does not necessarily mean they are any more important than later periods of development. Instead, development is seen as a process in which each stage lays a foundation for the stages that follow. An example of this principle comes from the research on competent parenting. Not surprisingly, receiving sensitive, competent parenting when you are an infant or young child is associated with being a sensitive, competent parent when you have your own children. However, the pathway to becoming a competent parent is also affected by social competence with peers during childhood and adolescence and later competence in romantic relationships during early adulthood (Raby et al., 2015). Although experiences early in life have consequences for functioning later in life, this research shows that experiences all along the path to adulthood contribute to an adult’s psychological functioning.
Using Our Knowledge of Child Development
A second reason to study child development is to be able to use this information to improve the lives of children and adolescents. An understanding of how children think, feel, learn, and grow, as