Child psychology: child psychology and development

Child psychology is a branch of developmental psychology that studies the psychology of the child, his behavior and the patterns of his mental development.

The social development of a child begins with his relationship with his parents.

Smile Opinions about what causes a baby to smile are controversial, but it is well known that by the age of two months it can appear at the sight of a human face.

At this age, the baby does not distinguish the mother’s face from others, but by 6-7 months the child’s smile becomes selective. Now he smiles at his mother and those whom he knows well, and meets strangers with restraint. For children of this age, fear and embarrassment at the appearance of unfamiliar faces are typical. This indicates the development of a socially important ability to distinguish “us” from “them”.

Already for babies, father and mother perform different functions. According to a study, kids perceive their father primarily as a toy. For both boy and girl, dad is the best toy: an interactive toy from which you can learn everything. Babies perceive mom differently: as a subject from whom you can get food, warmth and protection.

No matter how different children are, all young children from 9 months to 9 years old have common, at least similar features and characteristics. Which?

A small child is a natural energy and ingenuity. Talking about the fragility of a child’s soul is a myth; a child has a stronger psyche than adults. The child is small, but helpless is not. This is a lively, this is a trained combat unit, a small energetic predator and manipulator, using any mistakes of adults, easily jumping on the neck of parents and seizing power over them. The child’s arsenal of influence is much poorer than that of an adult, but the child has more energy, imagination and perseverance. See →

A small child is a proactive activity in caring for one’s own interests. The child has his own tasks regarding life and regarding you. While. when an adult approaches a small child with his tasks, the child does to the adult what is included in his plans and interests. Children know what they want and get it.

Situation. I’m at the airport, flying on a business trip. I see a family, four adults: mom, dad, grandma and grandpa. In the arms of the father is a small child. The child, shooting with lively eyes in the direction of the grandmother, reaches out to the grandfather. He shows his grandmother that he is more interested in his grandfather. The grandfather is happy, pulls his hands to the child, the child gets to him, the grandmother is upset. But then the child turns around to face the naive grandfather and cries in his face. Grandfather is washed … Mom takes the child from grandfather, he cuddles up to her, but is already looking at dad … The child plays with these adults, pushes them against each other, has fun to the fullest. At the same time, it seems that the adults themselves, included in this situation, did not really understand who actually controls them in this situation.

From the very first days of his life, the child actively uses his emotions (innate, learned and invented) in order to achieve from those around him what he wants from them. At least some children have been consciously controlling their parents and other adults since the age of one.

From the early memories of people about their childhood, the story: “I remember I was two years old, I was lying in bed, my grandfather came in and smiled at me, wanted me to smile at him too. I loved my grandfather and treated him well. I played with him and smiled at him. And I didn’t love my grandmother much, I didn’t smile at her, and often cried in her face.

Most of the emotions of children are not reactions, not a mechanical reflection of your actions, but their little creative projects. Sometime exploration, sometime play, sometime testing your strength, sometime revenge.

A small child is an active relationship manager. A child always has a lot of ideas and plans, and what will happen to you with him is not only you who decide, this is already your common romance. And it is possible that not you, but the child will determine who will learn from whom and who will put up with whom.

If you did not buy a game for your child at his request, he will cry for you, but this is not an unfortunate insult, but an attack on you and revenge for your bad behavior. When a child forgives you, he will decide for himself, and in the history of your relationship, the main player is more often a child, and you are a puppet in his hands.

It is good that children are usually quick-witted and forgive us quickly enough.

Each child initially has his own world. The child was born — and created his own world. He now lives in his own world, with his characters and his stories. Will he let you in, ask him. You won’t get there by force, but if the child wants to, he will slightly open the doors and you can look in there.

Interaction between children

The process of interaction between children develops with age. Up to a year, two children who are together usually do not pay attention to each other at all. A little older, they already begin to interact, often because both want to take the same object at the same time and are simply forced to pay attention to each other. The game of two-year-old children is not essentially a joint activity — everyone plays on their own. In the preschool period, the game gradually becomes more socially oriented. By the age of five, kids in kindergarten play alone less than half the time, they already have joint games in which four or five people participate. In later years, the social structure of the games becomes more complex; already established social roles are developed and partly supported.

With age, specific types of social behavior also change with age. For example, in the preschool period, when children begin to compare themselves with others, competition between them intensifies. The number of fights and quarrels almost does not depend on the age of the child, but their nature changes. Instead of short-term purely physical conflicts, older children start more sophisticated, verbal quarrels, in which resentment persists much longer.

Similarly, the stability of friendships changes. The friendships of young children are fleeting. According to one study, even at the age of 11, only 50% of children have the same best friend as they did two weeks ago. In a similar survey of 18-year-old schoolchildren (in the same study), 80% of them named the same person both times.

One of the most acute social problems at present is the formation of negative social attitudes, especially national and racial prejudices. Children from families and social groups with pronounced prejudice begin to internalize the same negative attitudes at an early school age; in adolescence, these views are fixed.

Development of sensations and perception

It has been proven that a newborn distinguishes speech sounds (phonemes), i.e. he already has an ability that will allow him to understand speech in the future. The newborn seems to perceive the constancy of form. When the infant is shown the same object over and over again, he gets used to its shape, and the time of visual fixation on it becomes shorter and shorter. Despite these first advances, the infant is still relatively undeveloped. But gradually his sensations become more clear. So, with age, sensory abilities improve: perception of color and depth, hearing acuity. Some early onset abilities then disappear and reappear a few months later in a more complex form. Whatever abilities a child shows, they improve with age, becoming more differentiated.

The development of emotions and feelings in childhood

According to one of the most interesting hypotheses, there is a limited number of so-called. basic emotions, apparently innate, although not all of them appear immediately after birth. These include fear, discontent, anger, joy, surprise, and a number of others. Anger, for example, is caused by interfering with the actions of the child; facial expressions and behavior that express anger can be recognized at a very early age. The same emotional manifestations are found in different cultures, which confirms the idea of ​​their innate character.

Emotions and feelings of children are a product of social learning, and this social learning goes in two directions: while children master those states that most effectively protect them from their parents or allow them to be controlled by their parents, adults teach children those states that are comfortable and interesting for adults. The child, with the help of the adults around him and the influence of culture as a whole, masters the feelings accepted in this society, in particular, joins the feelings of friendship, love, gratitude, patriotism and other high feelings. It is thanks to socialization that children develop composure and will, boys master the role of a man and lay the foundation for the future role of a father, girls master female roles, interiorize the values ​​of being a wife and mother, and master the skills necessary for this.

Value-semantic sphere of the child and the formation of life values

How do life values ​​appear in a child’s life? Differently. Sometime it is a gradual maturation, crystallization of something originally amorphous into something definite, sometime it happens abruptly, suddenly, like an insight. Sometimes it comes from within, sometimes it is set from outside, by the traditions and rituals of society. The birth of life values ​​usually occurs as a result of the addition of several factors: 1) behavior that has developed or is ready to develop, 2) an internally or externally motivating situation, and 3) semantic forms that tell a person the name and status of his new life value. If the child began to behave «boy», if his «boyish behavior» is supported by others; if everyone calls him a “boy”, and especially those whom he would like to be like, soon the child will have masculine values ​​… [/ CO]

However, the same question can be posed more meaningfully: thanks to what are the future life meanings and values ​​of the child formed (or not formed)? The main sources here seem to be the children’s subculture, the (still) family, and the already heavily influenced virtual reality media and computer games.

Exploratory behavior

Healthy children are usually curious, although there is no evidence to suggest that children have a natural tendency to self-development. Rather, the evidence suggests that children only develop when their parents develop them.

From the moment of birth, a child actively explores, and first of all, those objects that move or change in some way. The infant explores his surroundings, although at first not very skillfully; he starts to follow large moving objects with his eyes very early. At the same time, auditory and visual perception are already coordinated to some extent. The visual field does not remain a blurry spot for long — the baby tries to make it clear. If the experiment is designed in such a way that rapid sucking on the nipple brings the object into focus of the infant’s visual field, he will suckle very quickly; in the opposite situation, i.e., when the object goes out of focus during fast sucking, the child begins to suck slowly.

In early infancy, exploratory behavior is unsystematic and not well controlled, but by five months, the baby is already able to reach for objects and put them in his mouth. A few months later, he begins to search for objects himself and by the end of the first year he is actively exploring everything that surrounds him. When a child begins to walk, his research activity expands significantly.

The development of speech

From the moment of birth, the child begins to make sounds, but he does not really begin to use speech until he reaches about two years of age.

A gradual change in baby talk occurs under the influence of both congenital and environmental factors. Many sounds of modern languages ​​are difficult to pronounce, and at first only simple articulatory movements are available to the child, such as closing and opening the lips. Therefore, the syllables «pa» and «ma» or, when repeated, «papa» and «mama» appear early.

During the first year of life, the articulation of the child becomes more complicated, and the number of sounds that he can make increases many times over. In the second year of life, the sounds made by the child already correspond to the language that he hears around him.

Between the ages of two and five, a child is already really mastering his native language. He begins to designate with words the actor, the action itself, what is being acted upon, and masters various turns of speech found in his native language. The child learns to change words correctly (for example, inflect and conjugate), can transform an affirmative sentence into an interrogative one, and make questions starting with the words “what”, “where”, “when”. Finally, he masters complex sentences.

The fact that there are different languages ​​and that children in different cultures learn the language spoken by others would seem to preclude any innateness of speech. Nevertheless, it has been proven that the development of some fundamental speech features is innate. For example, a wide variety of languages ​​have common features: they all have nouns and verbs, as well as parts of speech, such as prepositions, indicating the connection between an object and an action. These common features form the fundamental basis of speech, which is innate and constitutes the basic, or deep, structure of the language. The so-called external structure of the language is formed by various transformations of the basic structure.

When the language is extremely simplified, as in small children, or when people who speak different languages ​​communicate, it is the basic structure that is used to convey the main meaning. The similarity of children’s speech to the basic structure of language is confirmed by the fact that many of a child’s first phrases are remarkably similar across languages. Two-word sentences composed by American children in the second half of their second year of life, when translated literally from English into Russian, turn out to be the same expressions used by Russian children of the same age.

Moreover, these children’s statements do not imitate the phrases that parents use. Not knowing or not being able to reproduce this or that correct expression, children often come up with their own (such as «runaway milk»), which they certainly could not hear from their parents.

Another amazing feature of the speech development of children is the speed with which they learn language nuances. By the age of five, the child reproduces more than 95% of the specific turns of the native language. This fact alone shows that children have an innate ability to master speech.

Children over the age of five continue to expand their vocabulary and learn more complex grammatical structures, but the development of spoken language at this age has already been completed. Now the child faces the equally difficult task of mastering written language.

Intelligence development

The most developed theory of intellectual development was proposed by the Swiss scientist Jean Piaget. He singled out four stages in this development.

The sensorimotor stage covers the period of infancy. In the first months of life, the child behaves as if the objects that he cannot observe at the moment simply do not exist, and only gradually begins to look for objects that have gone out of sight, starting to guess where they are. He is also capable of coordinating information from different senses, so that the tactile, visual, and auditory perceptions of an object are not three independent elements of his experience, but three aspects of the same object. Another significant achievement at this stage is the development of the ability to purposeful actions. At the first stages, the baby makes only those voluntary movements that are attractive and interesting for him in some way, but gradually he moves on to actions aimed at achieving the goal. Initially, they are based only on previously mastered voluntary movements; in the future, the child begins to independently and intentionally vary his behavior.

Stage of pre-operational thinking. At this stage, verbal and conceptual thinking begins to form. The first stage, or the first stage of the development of thinking, is characterized by the fact that the child masters the world around him at the behavioral level, but cannot foresee or verbally express the consequences of an event. For example, he recognizes an object if he sees it from a different angle, but is not able to foresee how it will look in a new position. In the second stage, the child begins to acquire knowledge, make comparisons, and predict consequences. However, his thinking is not yet systematic.

Stage of specific operations. In the third stage, beginning at about seven years of age, the child is able to consider problems conceptually and acquires the simplest concepts of such categories as space, time, and quantity. If at the previous stage the child thinks that, for example, when pouring water from a narrow glass into a wide one, there is less water, then at the third stage he understands that the amount of water does not depend on the shape of the vessel. By the end of the second stage, the child can tell which of the two sticks is larger, but cannot arrange several sticks lengthwise in the correct sequence. At the third stage, he acquires the concept of the ordering of objects.

The stage of formal operations begins at about 11 years of age. The child’s thinking is systematized, he is able to determine the consequences based on the causes of a phenomenon. For example, if liquids A and B turn red when mixed, the color disappears when liquid C is added, and liquid D does not change anything, the child will systematically go through all possible combinations until he establishes the features of the action of each liquid. Thus, at the 4th stage, the child acquires the ability to formulate and test hypotheses through systematic scientific research.

Boy and girl development

The difference between boys and girls seriously begins to appear somewhere from the age of 6 … Boys have their own stages of development, girls have their own.

Literature

Karabanova Developmental psychology.docx — M.: 2005.