What is child development and what can families do to support it?

Child Development: the influence of families

Reporting the science: how families support healthy child development

Early Childhood Development (0-3)

Child Development (4-12)

What is child development and what can families do to support it?

Index

1. What is child development?

2. Nature or nurture?

3. The role of the family in child development

4. Early childhood development: attachment

5. The components of child development

6. Key concepts that explain how families influence child development

1. What is child development?

Child development involves four changes that take place from birth to adulthood:

physical: how children’s bodies grow and develop

cognitive: how children think, explore, and figure things out

social: how children learn to interact with those around them

emotional: how children understand who they are and what they feel

Through these changes, individuals move from complete dependency at birth to increasing independence and autonomy as they reach adolescence and young adulthood.

The process of child development is strongly intertwined with a child’s genetic makeup. But because development is an interactive process, genes alone do not determine who someone will become. The environment in which a child is raised also affects who he or she will be as an adult. It is not possible to say which is more important: Inheritance and experience are both key influences.

Perhaps most crucially, within the environment in which children are raised, families play a central role in their development.

All children go through stages of development, with each stage providing a foundation for the next. Many different stages have been described. For example, focusing on children’s cognitive development, Jean Piaget described four stages:

The first two years—the “sensorimotor stage.” Babies develop action schemes like sucking, pushing, hitting, and grasping.

Two to seven years—the “pre-operational stage.” Children develop the ability to think, but have limited ability to apply logic to a situation to deduce something by thought alone.

Seven to 11 years—“concrete operational stage.” Children start working things out through logical thought rather than just action.

12 to 15 years—“formal operational stage.” Children engage in systematic experimentation, forming hypotheses, testing them, and trying alternatives.

Focusing on social development, John Bowlby described four stages: pre-attachment (first 6 weeks), attachment in the making (until 7-8 months, as the child shows increasing preferences), attachment (until the start of the third year, marked by distress when separated from attachment figures), and goal-corrected partnerships (when the child starts to take into account the attachment figure’s needs).