Theories of Child Development

This entry will be about some of the theories we learned in our first child development class. We started talking about psychoanalytic theories. Since I don’t have so much background information about these theories, in this entry I will only talk about the things we discussed in class. We said that psychoanalytic theories have discontionuos stages, they are more nature based and more passive. We also said that psychosocial refers to the development which takes place with other people, it occurs in a social setting. Later, we started talking about Erikson. We said that his theory has 8 stages which cover the entire life. These stages are:
1. Trust vs. Mistrust
2. Autonomy vs. Shame & Doubt
3. Initiative vs. Guilt
4. Industry vs. Inferiority
5. Identity vs. Role Confusion
6. Intimacy vs. Isolation
7. Generativity vs. Stagnation
8. Ego Integrity vs. Despair
I believe students majoring in psychology have learned about Erikson’s stages last year but all this stuff is very new to me so I guess I should start reading about them a little.

We didn’t spend so much time on Erikson and started talking about Freud. Of course I’ve heard of him before but mainly in my philosophy lessons. Now I’m looking at his work from a whole new perspective. In our first lesson, I learned that Freud believes that biology is your destiny, his theories are biologically deterministic and he has five stages. These stages are:
1. Oral
2. Anal
3. Phallic
4. Latency
5. Genital
Then we compared Freud and Erikson and said that they are both on the nature side but Erikson is less than Freud, he is more on the nurture side.

In the last part of our lesson, we studied the learning theories. We talked about classical and operant conditioning. We said that Pavlov’s dog is an example for classical and Skinner’s pigeon is an example for operant conditioning.

Classical Conditioning:
There is an unconditioned stimulus which can be referred as an automatic response from and animal or person. For example if we show food to a dog, the dog will start salivating. Here, the food will be the unconditioned stimulus and the reflex response will be salivating. If we start ringing a bell while showing the food and then take the food and just ring the bell, the dog will still keep on salivating. In this case the bell will be the conditioned stimulus and salivation will be the conditioned response.


I believe that this is very interesting. Then we passed on to the operant conditioning. I thought I wouldn’t understand it but I easily understood with the child and the toy example.

Operant Conditioning:
Let’s think of a child crying for a toy. The mother can either buy the toy for the child or she won’t buy it. We shouldn’t forget that the mother’s actions will shape the behaviour of the child. If the mother buys the toy, she will reinforce the behaviour so the frequency of the behaviour will increase and the child will always cry for the toy. However if the mother says “No! I’m not buying the toy”, if she uses punishment rather than reinforcement, the frequency of the behaviour will decrease. We concluded this topic by saying that operant conditioning is continuous, nurture and universal.

While studying this example, I remembered my childhood. When I was a child, my mother never bought me a toy if I cried for it. I grew up in a society where wealthy families would do anything to make their children happy but my parents didn’t think it was the right way to raise their kid. Now I’m really thankful to them because I learned to be happy with what I’ve got. I never feel the need to ask for a lot more. If my parents have raised me in a different way, I could have been one of those girls who are never satisfied with what they’ve got.