Child Development

We all know that the environment influences the individual's behavior. Something in the environment may not influence you if you have no idea that it is there. However, if you are convinced that some one is hostile to you or your behavior, then you may be influenced by this belief, whether or not he is actually hostile.

A person separated from his goal acts in order to reach his goal. In other words, there are psychological forces at work on the person that have a certain strength and a certain direction that can be either positive, attracting in a certain direction or negative repelling us. The strength of a force towards or away from us increases or decreases with distance. A cookie easily seen and close to a child motivates him to take it more readily than if it is in a jar high up on a shelf. Similarly, the child will show more fear of some animal if it is nearby.

However, we tend also to react in terms of a total situation which we know well. For example, a person planning to mail a letter does not always head toward the nearest mail box. He may go about his regular business until he comes across a mailbox, at which time this mailbox becomes a positive force affecting his behavior.

As a child grows older, he exhibits a greater variety of behaviors. Some activities drop out, but he learns more of a range of emotional expressions and social responses; his needs expand and his interest and knowledge takes on more variation. The space of free movement expands with growth and realism begins to take over. With development we learn the difference between, "how things are" and "how we wish they were".

Psychologists divide a child's development into four main periods. First is the sensory-motor period of the first two years, where the child acquires skills and learns to integrate information from his different senses. He sees the world as a permanent place, not one whose existence depends upon his perceiving it. He can experiment with things about him and deliberately vary his actions. But the child gets into trouble in this first stage because of a lack of understanding corresponding to his behavior.

Following the years of infancy, the years of two to seven build a conceptual scheme, which becomes organized. During this period, the child oversimplifies his thinking. For the four-year old, when the red light on the stove goes out, dinner is ready. His understandings are often not logical, yet in free play he may be most sensible. From seven to eleven comes the third period, that of concrete operations, where the child organizes things well and his thought processes are stable and reasonable.

The fourth period of formal operations comes in early adolescence. At this point, the child can understand the basic principles of casual thinking and scientific experimentation. He develops a fundamental grasp of logical thought.