Chapter 1: Introduction
Total Teaching Package Outline
Lecture Outline / Resource ReferencesIntroduction / PowerPoint Presentation: See www.mhhe.com
Cognitive Maps: See Appendix A
The Life-Span Perspective
· Why Study Life-Span Development?
· The Historical Perspective
-Child Development
-Life-Span Development
-The Twentieth Century
· Characteristics of the Life-Span Perspective
-Development is Lifelong
-Development is Multidimensional
-Development is Multidirectional
-Development is Plastic
-Development is Contextual
-Development is Multidisciplinary
-Development Involves Growth, Maintenance, and Regulation
· Some Contemporary Concerns
-Health and Well-Being
-Parenting and Education
-Sociocultural Contexts
-Social Policy / LO1
CA1: Ice Breaker
PA1: Who Are You?
PA2: What Do You Want to Know?
RP1: Answering Questions about Development
LO2
OHT1 & IB: Contrasting Views on Development
LS1: Historical Views of Childhood
F/V: Child Development
OHT2 & IB: The Aging of America
OHT3 & IB: Human Life Expectancy
OHT4 & IB: Maximum Recorded Life Spans
LO3
OHT5 & IB: Characteristics of the Life-Span Pers.
LO4
OHT6: Influences on Developmental Change
PA3: Event of a Lifetime
LO5
LS2: Interesting Statistics Regarding Dev. Psych
RP2: Monitoring Contemporary Concerns
F/V: Culture, Time, and Place
F/V: Childhood: Great Expectations
WS: American Family Policy Institute
WS: Children’s Action Alliance
WS: Children’s Defense Fund
WS: The Future of Children
The Nature of Development
· Biological, Cognitive, Socioemotional Processes
· Periods of Development
-Prenatal Period
-Infancy
-Early Childhood
-Middle and Late Childhood
-Adolescence
-Early Adulthood
-Middle Adulthood
-Late Adulthood
· Age and Happiness
· Conceptions of Age
-Chronological Age
-Biological Age
-Psychological Age
-Social Age
· Developmental Issues
-Nature and Nurture
-Continuity and Discontinuity
-Stability and Change
-Evaluating Developmental Issues / LO6
OHT22 & IB: Biological, Cognitive, and
Socioemotional Processes
LS3: The Concept of Development and Interaction
LO7
CA2: Developmental Myths Quiz
F/V: Development and Diversity
LO8
OHT7 & IB: Conceptions of Age
F/V: Development and Diversity
LO9
F/V: Nature/Nurture
OHT114: Continuity and Discontinuity
Careers in Life-Span Development / LO10
IB: Jobs and Careers in Life-Span Development
LS4: Guest Speaker Idea
WS: Chronicle of Higher Education Job List
Review
/ OHT8: Critical Thinking about Life-SpanCA3: Critical Thinking Multiple-Choice
CA4: Critical Thinking Essays
Chapter Outline
THE LIFE-SPAN PERSPECTIVE
Why Study Life-Span Development?
· Development is the pattern of movement or change that begins at conception and continues through the human life span.
· Individuals can gain insight into their own childhood and better anticipate potential changes they may experience in adulthood.
· Life-span development is an important college course, as it links many areas of psychology.
The Historical Perspective
Child Development
· Historically, three philosophical views have been proposed to explain the nature of children and how they should be reared.
· The concept of original sin from the Middle Ages viewed children as being bad, born into the world as evil beings. Childrearing focused on salvation.
· The 17th century English philosopher Locke’s concept of tabula rasa stated that children were not innately bad, rather children were blank slates. Children acquired their characteristics through experience. Parenting focused on shaping children to be good citizens.
· In the 18th century, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed the innate goodness view that children were born inherently good. Children should be allowed to develop with little monitoring or supervision.
Life-Span Development
· The traditional approach emphasizes extreme change from birth to adolescence, little or no change in adulthood, and decline in old age.
· The life-span approach emphasizes that developmental change occurs during adulthood as well as childhood.
The Twentieth Century
· Life expectancy has changed considerably in the last century. Improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and medical knowledge led to this increase of 30 years.
Characteristics of the Life-Span Perspective
· Baltes states that the life-span perspective has seven basic characteristics.
Development is Life-Long
· Individuals continue to develop and change from conception to death. No one age dominates development.
Development is Multidimensional
· Development consists of biological, cognitive, and socioemotional components.
Development is Multidirectional
· Some components of a dimension increase in growth, others decrease.
Development is Plastic
· Plasticity involves the degree to which characteristics change or remain stable.
Development is Contextual
· Individuals respond to and act upon contexts, including one’s biological makeup, physical environment, cognitive processes, and social, historical, and cultural contexts. Within the contextual view, the following three sources influence development:
· Normative age-graded influences are biological and environmental influences that are similar for individuals in a particular age group.
· Normative history-graded influences are common to people of a particular generation because of the historical circumstances they experience.
· Nonnormative life events are unusual occurrences that have a major impact on an individual’s life. The occurrence, pattern, and sequence of these events are not applicable to many individuals.
Development is Studied by a Number of Disciplines
· Psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and medical researchers all study human development.
Development Involves Growth, Maintenance, and Regulation
· The mastery of life often involves conflicts and competition among three goals of human development: growth, maintenance, and regulation.
Some Contemporary Concerns
Health and Well-Being
· An individual’s behavior and psychological states influence health and well-being.
Parenting and Education
· In today’s society, family functioning and education are influenced by various issues (e.g., day care, maltreatment, homelessness, ethnicity and social class, and bilingualism).
Sociocultural Contexts
· A context is the setting in which development occurs. This setting is influenced by historical, economic, social, and cultural factors.
· Culture is the behavior patterns, beliefs, and all other products of a particular group of people that are passed on from generation to generation.
· Cross-cultural studies involve a comparison of a culture with one or more other cultures. The comparison provides information about the degree to which development is similar across cultures or is instead culture-specific.
· Ethnicity involves cultural heritage, nationality characteristics, race, religion, and language.
· Gender is the sociocultural dimension of being female or male.
Social Policy
· Social Policy is a government’s course of action designed to influence its citizen’s welfare.
· Generational inequity is the condition in which an aging society is being unfair to its younger members (older members receiving inequitably large allocations of resources).
THE NATURE OF DEVELOPMENT
· Development is the pattern of movement or change that begins at conception and continues through the life span. Development involves an interplay of biological, cognitive, and socioemotional processes.
Biological, Cognitive, and Socioemotional Processes
· Biological processes involve changes in the individual’s physical nature.
· Cognitive processes involve changes in the individual’s thought, intelligence, and language.
· Socioemotional processes involve changes in the individual’s relationships with other people, changes in emotions, and changes in personality.
Periods of Development
· The life span is commonly divided into the following periods of development:
· Prenatal period is the time from conception to birth.
· Infancy is the developmental period extending from birth to 18 or 24 months.
· Early childhood (preschool years) extends from the end of infancy to about 5 or 6 years.
· Middle and late childhood (elementary school years) extends from about 6 to 11 years.
· Adolescence is the developmental period of transition from childhood to early adulthood, entered at approximately 10 to 12 years of age and ending at 18 to 22 years of age.
· Early adulthood begins in the late teens or early twenties and lasts through the thirties.
· Middle adulthood begins at approximately 35 to 40 years of age and extends to the sixties.
· Late adulthood is the developmental period beginning in the sixties or seventies and lasting until death.
Age and Happiness
· When individuals report how happy they are and how satisfied they are with their lives, no particular age group says they are happier or more satisfied than any other age group.
Conceptions of Age
· A full consideration of age requires consideration of four dimensions:
· Chronological Age is the number of years that have elapsed since a person’s birth.
· Biological Age is a person’s age in terms of biological health.
· Psychological Age is an individual’s adaptive capacitates compared to those of other individuals of the same chronological age.
· Social Age refers to social roles and expectations related to a person’s age.
Developmental Issues
Nature and Nurture
· The nature-nurture controversy involves the debate about whether development is primarily influenced by nature or nurture. Nature refers to an organism’s biological inheritance, nurture to its environmental experiences.
Continuity and Discontinuity
· This issue focuses on the extent to which development involves gradual, cumulative change (continuity) or distinct stages (discontinuity).
Stability and Change
· This issue involves the degree to which we become older renditions of our early experience or we develop into someone different from who we were at an early point in development.
Evaluating the Developmental Issues
· The way in which researchers and policy makers approach development is influenced by their stance on several issues (nature and nurture, continuity and discontinuity, stability and change). Most developmentalists do not take extreme positions on these issues, though debates still ensue.
CAREERS IN LIFE-SPAN DEVELOPMENT
· Rewarding careers can be built around life-span developmental psychology. A variety of career options are offered in education, helping, and health professions.
Learning Objectives
1. Explain the importance of studying life-span development.
2. Describe the history of interest in children and adolescents and indicate how contemporary concerns have arisen from previous views.
3. Describe the seven basic characteristics of the life-span perspective.
4. List and describe the three interacting systems of contextualism.
5. Describe the role that experts in developmental psychology have regarding health and well-being, parenting and education, sociocultural contexts, and social policy.
6. Define and distinguish between biological processes, cognitive processes, and socioemotional processes.
7. Understand the major developmental periods from conception to death.
8. Define and distinguish between chronological age, biological age, psychological age, and social age.
9. Understand the three major developmental issues (nature and nurture, continuity and discontinuity, stability and change).
10. Identify several options that are available to individuals who are interested in careers in life-span development.
Key Terms
biological age generational inequity
biological processes innate goodness view
chronological age life-span perspective
cognitive processes nature-nurture issue
context original sin view
continuity-discontinuity issue psychological age
cross-cultural studies social age
culture social policy
development socioemotional processes
ethnicity stability-change issue
gender tabula rasa view
Key People
Philippe Aries John Locke
Paul Baltes Bernice Neugarten
Marian Wright Edelman Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jerome Kagan
Lecture Suggestions
Lecture Suggestion 1: Historical Views of Childhood The purpose of this lecture is to supplement the textbook material regarding changing perceptions of children. Somerville’s book, The Rise and Fall of Childhood, is easy reading and provides an interesting historical view of children. The purpose of this book is to show ways children have been important to adults throughout history and reasons for the changes in their status. It is an examination of adult attitudes toward children and childhood and how these attitudes have changed over history. The actual plight of children in the past and currently is explored in order to examine the relationship between attitudes and reality with respect to children. Specific issues that are discussed include major trends in childrearing attitudes and practices from ancient Greece to Puritan times, practice of infanticide, views concerning education, control over children, and the changing family structure and function over the history of Western Civilization.
The first chapter asks, “What would others notice about our treatment of our children, and which of our attitudes would strike them as curious?” In these questions, “others” refers to our ancestors or future historians. Have your students generate their own answers to these questions. We’ve noted a few of Somerville’s ideas.
· Most would notice that our attitudes are contradictory. We claim to care about children, yet 25 percent of children in the U.S. live in poverty. Child abuse is believed to have increased in last few decades. One could assume that the increase is due to an increase in reporting, however, most violent crimes have increased (e.g., between 1960 and 1980, the U.S. murder rate doubled, assault tripled, robbery and rape quadrupled), so many experts assume that child abuse has increased too.
· We read a lot about children; the all-time best-selling book in American history (excluding the Bible) is Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care (it has sold over 30 million copies in its first 30 years). Despite our many concerns for children, the amount of interaction between parents and children has been declining for at least 20 years. Smaller families are more common, so one might assume that parents could spend more time with children, though this is not the case.
· Are there any potential problems with parents seeking expert advice? Spock admits expert advice often undermines parents’ self-confidence for parenting. Many parents don’t use the advice they seek anyway. One study found that child-rearing books affect primarily what parents say they are doing and have little relation to what they can be observed doing under pressure of circumstances.
· Ann Landers (advice columnist) found that 70 percent of the readers answering one of her polls reported that they would not have children if they could do it over again. Why? (Expensive, fear of responsibility, general disenchantment with children).
· According to Somerville, the modern crisis with regard to children is that Americans are having an identity crisis in that there is confusion about which values to transmit to our children. He thinks Americans lack direction and cultural cohesion. The commitment to children and families is deteriorating. He states that we need to re-establish the significance of the family and commitment to children and transmit the value of service to others to our children.
We’ve noted several interesting issues that are raised in the book and can be used to stimulate discussion. Some of these issues may spark significant emotion in students. Be sure to discuss the importance of discussing ideas that are either consistent or inconsistent with one’s personal opinions as part of one’s educational experience. Stress the importance of discussing ideas and not attacking individuals for their ideas. Encourage them to keep an open mind to ideas that they may initially disagree with. It is important to understand varying points of view.