Lecture 1 Issues

On friday, we had our first lecture. Mainly,we talked about some basic issues and theories on child development.

There are 4 basic issues, such as Nature vs nurture, continuous vs. discontinuous, universal vs.culturally-specific and finally active vs. passive.
When we take a look at these issues, we can observe these facts presented in the following.

Nature vs. Nurture

Talking about the issue "nature vs.nurture" psychologists usually mean the observation, where they try to find out whether a behavior is naturally constructed, that means that genes took a role, or whether it is by nurture, that means by environmental factors, such as social life, which may influence the person to create that specific behavior.

In this context "Gender" is one of the most important topics, where scientists try to examine, whether it is naturally or environmentally constructed.
But in relation to child development the basic question won't be: nature or nurture? Far from it the question is: "How does heredity and environment interact?"

Continuously vs. discontinuously

In this issue, the main question, which is important for the observation is: "How does the development creature proceed?"

When we talk about discontinuously development, we talk about a qualitative change in the bahavior. To illustrate this more efficiently we can think about the logic of a child. When a child is at the age of 5 it would give different answers to questions than it would in it's teenage years. A child would identify peace as to not hurt a friend, which is in this case a non abstract answers. But laterly this same child can tell us that for example peace is harmony or a world without war etc. when it grew up to a teenager. This would be a logical and abstract answer.

The development here is qualitative and discontinuously, because the child has an step to step development, where the change of it's logic takes time and becomes completely different in contrast to how it was before.

On the other hand, there is the continuously development. This kind of development is quantative and has a straight linear change (incrementally).
In this case, we can think about the idea, that children learn continuously new abilities and skills, which gives them a quantitative rise of the things they know, which affects on their development.

Universal vs. context-specific

The idea of universal means that all children around the world go through the same experiences in life.
For example all babies cried at least once in their life.

Culture-specific means that a specific behavior is limited or shaped somehow, because it is influenced by culture.
For example emotions are universal, whereas a man isn't able to cry in public in some areas on the world, because culture asks men to be strong, in short: Men don't cry.

Active vs. passive

In this issue, the importance is to find out, whether the child interacts actively or passively with the environment.

Active:
child -----> environment
When there is an active situation, the child and it's behavior are interacting with the environment

Passive:
environment-------> child
When we talk about passive, we mean that the environment influences the child and of course it's behavior.