Early childhood development is a term that applies to the mental and physical changes a child goes through while growing up. People seek to care for children's physical changes with pediatric medicine, while the mental changes are dealt with via the field of developmental psychology. Several psychologists have developed widely studied theories of early childhood development.
Piaget's Theory
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget first envisioned Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Piaget believed a child's intelligence is developed through a series of learning experiences wherein the child's mind assimilates and integrates the knowledge she has and applies it to the world and her experiences. This theory of cognitive development involves four stages of learning. The first stage, the sensorimotor stage, is characterized by the child reacting to the world around her: By the end of this stage, a child is able to determine the self and objects that are not part of the self, thus acquiring a sense of object permanence. The pre-operational stage is marked by the emergence of reasoning and logic. The concrete operational stage is developed when children learn how to use logic. The functional operational stage occurs when children can successfully demonstrate the application of both logic and abstract thinking.
Erickson's Theory
German-American psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erickson divided human existence into eight stages of development, some of which were based on the theories of his teacher and mentor, Sigmund Freud. The stages are thought to represent the challenges and struggles a person endures during each time, and the stages are roughly separated by age. From infancy to one year, a child struggles with hope and trust. It is during that time, Erickson proposed, that a person learns how to trust or mistrust others. From age two through three, Erickson's theory states, a person struggles with will and learns self-reliance. Children aged four through six experience a question of purpose and whether their actions are "good" or "bad." Children aged seven through 11 experience a crisis of competence: Are their efforts futile? Adolescents aged 12 through 19 experience a crisis of identity and fidelity, questioning their life and where they are going.
Mahler's Theory
Margaret Mahler, a Hungarian physician, developed a series of stages that she postulated every child goes through on his quest to adulthood. The three phases Mahler attributes to childhood development include the normal autistic phase, the normal symbiotic phase and the separation-individuation phase. The normal autistic phase occurs in the first few weeks of life when the child is self-absorbed. Controversy abounds, as Mahler abandoned this phase later in her research. The normal symbiotic phase lasts until five months, when the child is aware of his mother but is not separate from her--the mother and child are like one entity. The separation-individuation phase marks the separation of child from mother, as the child begins to sense that he is an individual. This phase is marked by multiple sub-phases: from nine to 16 months, the child tries to become more distant from his mother by learning to crawl, though he still believes they are one entity. In the rapprochement sub-phase, from 15 to 24 months, the child realizes that physical mobility marks separateness from his mother, and he seeks to reconnect with her.
References
- "Exploring Psychology"; David G. Myers; 2009
- "Developmental Psychology: Childhood and Adolescence"; David R. Shaffer, Katherine Kipp; 2009
- "Theories of Developmental Psychology"; Patricia H. Miller; 2009
- "Introduction to Psychology"; Lionel Nicholas; 2009
- "Psychology: A Concise Introduction"; Richard A. Griggs; 2008
