Introduction Ethan Beardsley is a four year old boy from a single parent family. He has eight brothers and sisters in total, and their father and head of the family, Frank Beardsley. Individuals experience several stages of development, some of which include: physical development, intellectual development, emotional development, social development and moral development. Nonetheless, each unique individual grows and develops in a different way and probably at faintly varying rates. Ethan has many systems which play a key role in his stages of development and how he grows during each of them. His family, parent, siblings and school are just to mention a few of these influential systems. During this analysis, each stage of Ethan’s development …show more content…
Although not quite in the concrete operational stage of thinking he does show signs of being at this stage as well as signs of being preoperational which is why it is Safe to say Ethan is somewhere in between but still developed above his years particularly in language development. Language development in individuals six and older (concrete operational) usually speeds up quite rapidly. Characteristics of this is they have a wider use of memory and start to develop automatic processing. In the opening scene of the movie Frank shouts to the family commands to movie it. And then Ethan repeats these commands. He also then repeats his dads head ashore (go into the house) commands. This illustrates automatic processing as he does not need to think about what to do he already knows. As well as his not commanding directly “Go into the house”, but rather in a metaphorical way relating to sailors (Head ashore) he tells Ethan to go into the house and Ethan has no delay understanding the command. Understanding metaphorical language is a characteristic of individuals in the concrete operational stage. Another characteristic is also the language and style used by individuals in the concrete operational stage is adopted to the specific situation. For instance when him and his step brother are listening to their parents fighting in the room and the sibling asks Ethan “So does this mean you not going to be my brother anymore?”. Ethan replies in a soft let down tone “I don’t know.”. Although these examples support the concrete operational stage, an example to support the preoperational stage of thinking is when Frank is disciplining the children and he says he will bring down the hammer if they misbehave again and Ethan asks “Should I go get the hammer sir?”. This illustrates that he was not able to differentiate between figurative speech and literal speech supporting he is in the preoperational stage. Ethan has shown