Theories Of Early Childhood Development

Chapter 1: History, Theory & Research Strategies

1.) When we say that an ability or trait is due to nature, we are saying that the ability or trait was inherited genetically from one’s parents at the moment of conception. The concept of nature is different from the effects of nurture because nurture is conceived traits that one gets from their environment. An example of a nurtured trait will be someone’s personality while an example of a natured trait will be eye color. There is also the idea of nature via nurture this means that both genes and environment affect every human characteristic. Scientist were so interested with this idea of nature vs nurture that they created the study of the many ways the environment alters the genetic expression.

With these stages, comes main developmental challenges that must be resolved in that stage of life. There are eight different stages of his theory. The first being basic trust vs mistrust, this stage starts from birth and ends after one year. In the first stage a child learns to trust that the world is a good place by being cared for responsibly but if the child is neglected or treated harshly, the child will learn to mistrust. The second stage happens from ages one to three. This stage is autonomy vs shame and doubt stage. The developmental challenge in this stage is that if a child is shamed or forced to do something to much, the child would lose the sense of autonomy and would not use their newly developed mental and motor skills making the child unable to decide for themselves. After the second stage comes the third stage of initiative vs guilt which occurs from the ages of three to six. In these three years, a child can develop initiative through make believe play, but if a parent demands to much self-control the child can develop the sense of guilt. The fourth stage is industry vs inferiority which occurs from the ages of six to elven years. In the fourth stage of Erikson’s theory, a child can develop inferiority when negative experiences at home and in school

One of these research designs is a longitudinal study. Longitudinal works when researchers take a group of people and study them repeatedly at different ages. For example, if researchers wanted to see if memory improves from ages two to six, they will take a group of two-years-old and give them a memory test, like finding pairs of cards, and having them do the same test each year until they are six-year-old and see if the time they take to find the pairs improve. Another study is a cross-sectional study. In this study, investigators study groups of participants, differing in age, at the same point in time. An example, would be a medical study looking at the commonness of breast cancer in a population. Along with longitudinal and cross-sectional studies there are cross-sequential studies. In these studies, researchers measure groups of people of different ages, following them across different points in