CHYS 2P10 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Tabula Rasa, Age 12, Behaviorism

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Goal: find out how biological and environmental factors influence children's intellectual, social
and emotional growth
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Introduction:
Understanding how children develop can improve child rearing, promote the adoption of wiser
social policies regarding child welfare, and answer intriguing questions about human nature
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Cons: studies show that spanking makes the problem behaviors worse and the
effects are long-lasting
Spanking children- in Canada about 25% of parents report spanking their children
Expressing sympathy: when parents respond to children with sympathy, the
children are better able to cope with the situation causing the distress
Finding positive alternatives: encouraging children to do something they like
helping them cope with hostile feelings
Turtle technique: when children feel themselves becoming angry, they are
told to move away from the other children and retreat into their "turtle shell",
where they can think and calm down
Spanking Alternatives:
Universal problem: how can parents help their children control their anger and other
negative emotions
Raising Children:
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This analysis indicated that the effect was very minimal, but minimal is
not the same as nonexistent, there was a small increase in aggression
due to playing violent video games, but it is not a major cause of a
child's aggression
Meta-analysis: a method for combining the results from independent studies
to reach conclusions based on all of them
Violent video games making children more aggressive
2012, about 40% of children who were victims of sexual offences in Canada
were 11 years of age or younger
If children falsely testify that they were abused, the stakes are extremely high
because innocent people may spend years in jail
If juries do not believe children who accurately report abuse, the perpetrators
will go free and may abuse other children
Children were lead to remember not only plausible events
that never happened, but also unlikely ones that the social
worker heard
Are you sure?
Biased questioning effects the accuracy of young children and
questioning
Question: What can be done to promote reliable testimony from young
children and to avoid leading them to report experiences that never occurred?
3-5 year-olds are not asked leading questions, their testimony is usually
Trust in preschoolers testimony
Make informed decisions about the wide variety of social policy questions that effect
children in general
Choosing social policies:
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Reasons to learn about child development:
Textbook Chapter 1: An Introduction to Child
Development
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3-5 year-olds are not asked leading questions, their testimony is usually
accurate, even if they leave out important details
Leading questions make testimonies inaccurate, especially when questions are
repeated
The younger the children are the more effected they will be by the questions
Dolls
Drawings
Doesn’t improve events that occurred, but increase the probability of
inaccurate claims
Tools used to recall sexual abuse:
These is ongoing practices being set in place to improve children's eyewitness
testimony
Most intriguing questions of human nature concern children
From the time of the ancient Greek civilization of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates more than
200 years ago, child development has been viewed as essential to understanding human
nature
Studying infants and young children helps us understand what people are like before they
are effected by influences of family and society
Nativists: contemporary group of philosophers that argue that evolution has created many
remarkable capabilities that are present even in early infancy, particularly in areas of
special importance such as understanding basic properties of physical objects, plants and
animals and other people.
Empiricists: argue that infants possess general learning mechanisms that allow them to
learn a great deal quite quickly, but they lack particular specialized capabilities that
nativists attribute to them
Now developmental scientists have methods that enable us to observe, describe and
explain the process of development, which deepens our understanding of how we
become who we are.
Understanding human nature
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Improve child rearing practices
Help society promote well-being of children in general
Better understand human nature
Review: there are at least 3 good reasons to learn about child development:
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Both believed that the long-term welfare of society depended on the prosper raising
of children
Plato and Aristotle
Careful upbringing was essential because it prevented them from becoming rebellious and
unruly
Plato: emphasized self-control and discipline
Aristotle: emphasized child rearing that fits the individual
Plato: children have an innate knowledge
Aristotle: all knowledge comes from experience
Parents need to set good examples
Most important is growth of character
Locke: child as tabula rasa (blank slate), child knowledge is very dependent on
nurturing and society
Children learn from their own spontaneity
Age 12: "the age of reason"- can make their own opinions and judge
Children shouldn’t receive formal education till the age of 12
Rousseau: parents and society should give children maximum freedom from the
beginning
How children acquire knowledge:
Early philosophers view of children's development
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Historical foundations of the study of child development
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Age 12: "the age of reason"- can make their own opinions and judge
what they are being told
Devoted to improving children's lives by changing the conditions in which they lived
Children worked as paid laborer's with few legal protections
Youngs as 5 or 6 years old
Worked up to 12 hour days
Mines of factories, with hazardous circumstances
Industrial revolution (1700s, 1800s, 1900s)
Speech in the British House of Commons in 1843
Brough partial success: law forbidding employment of girls and boys under the age
of 10
The Earl of Shaftesbury's
Social reform movements
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Late 19th century
Work inspired scientists to study children's development
"A Biographical Sketch of an Infant" (1877): observations of motor, sensory and emotional
growth of his own infant son
Influenced topics: children's attachment to their mothers, innate fear of natural dangers,
sex differences, aggression and altruisms and the mechanics of learning
Darwin's theory of evolution
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Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory: biological drives, especially sexual ones, are
a crucial influence on development
John Watson's behaviorist theory: children's development is determined by
environmental factors, especially the rewards and punishments that follow the
children's actions
Late 1800s- early 1900s: first theories of child development that incorporated research
findings were formulated
The beginning of research0 based theories of child development
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Genetic inheritance influences every aspect of our makeup: physical appearances,
personality, intellect, mental health
Nature: refers to our biological endowment, in particular, the genes we receive from our
parents
The womb
The home we grow up in
The schools we attend
Communities we live in
Our social interaction's
Environment examples:
Nurture: refers to the wide range of environments, both physical and social, that influence
our development
This either/or proposition is very misleading because all human characteristics are created
through a joint working of nature and nurture because of the constant interaction
between our genes and the environment that are occurring
Genetics: children are more likely to get it if their parents had it. If one
identical twin has it the other one as 40-50% likely to get it
Environment: children who grow up in troubled homes are more likely to get
it.
Interaction: the only children who have a substantial likelihood of becoming
schizophrenic were those who had a parent that was and lived in a troubling
home/family
Example: Schizophrenia
Don’t ask or, ask how nature and nurture work together
1) Nature and Nurture: how do nature and nurture together shape development?
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Enduring themes in child development
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