Chapter 2: Theoretical Perspectives

Developmental theories attempt to explain the changes that take place between conception and adulthood. Modern developmental research has followed several different lines of thought and there is considerable variation between ideas and views within each perspective.

A good theory requires a coherent set of interconnected concepts and must be able to generate hypotheses that can test its validity.

Psychodynamic psychology is rooted in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Main elements are the importance of the early years, an inner psychic structure consisting of id, ego and superego, unconscious motives and defense mechanisms. However, Anna Freud and Erikson emphasize ego development, and Winnicott and Kohut, the development of the self. Psychodynamic theories are concerned with the child’s relationships with other people, often seen in the form of object relations. Emde, Stern and Fonagy have integrated general infant psychology with psychoanalytical theory.

Behaviorism emphasizes the role of learning in development, but also that humans are different from other species. An important element of cognitive learning theory is that people are conscious and goal-oriented agents in their own life. It integrates cognitive processes, individual beliefs and assumptions about the self and the world but builds on the idea that development is a cumulative learning process and that learning is the basis for most of the individual differences between children.

In logical constructivism, the child’s perception of the world is constructed by the organism, and cognitive development is thought to follow logical principles. Children perceive the world qualitatively differently from adults, actively seek knowledge and go through a long-lasting developmental process before they have acquired adult understanding and thinking. Neo-Piagetians such as Pascual-Leone, Case, Halford and Fischer share Piaget’s constructivist basis, build on his ideas and integrate them with elements from other theories, notably information processing. Kohlberg extends Piaget’s theory on moral development. Piaget’s new theory takes earlier criticisms into account and is less based on logic.

According to social constructivist theory children’s cognition is shaped through interaction with others and through internalization of the mental tools of the culture. Children are guided into the activities and using the strategies and mental tools of their culture, first together with others, then on their own. Neo-Vygotskians have made innovative changes and revisions and elaborated Vygotsky’s ideas in activity theory.

Nativism assumes that important aspects of human development are constrained by the genetic endowment, and that experience has limited influence on many aspects of development. The main argument is that children’s experiences alone are insufficient for adapting to the world, their own mind has to contribute from the start. According to evolutionary psychologists, development of aggression, altruism and morality must be understood in terms of their significance for survival in evolution. Bowlby’s ethological theory of attachment has strongly influenced the understanding of children’s early relations and has been important for clinical psychology, social work with children and raising children in general.

Bronfenbrenner’s bio-ecological theory comprises the proximal processes with interactions between children and the people around them, and also meaningful objects or symbols. The person encompasses the individual’s biological, cognitive, emotional and behavioral characteristics. The context consists of four systems:  the  micro-,  meso-,  exo-  and  macrosystems. Time encompasses the developmental time of the individual, as well as family time, historical time and so on.

Information processing models explain mental phenomena as information processed in one or several systems. Developmental change can be due to increases in processing speed or capacity and knowledge, and the use of new strategies. Information processing models have particularly influenced cognitive developmental psychology, but also social development and the development of emotions, personality and behavior disorders.

Critical developmental psychology or childhood psychology maintains that assumptions about developmental regularities in children’s internal processes should be replaced by analyses of the cultural practices. The course of development does not depend on any biological givens, but on the child’s social and cultural setting. Cultural narratives define childhood, who the child is and the reasons why, and her position in society. When social and cultural changes alter widely held views about children, earlier knowledge about them is invalidated and has to be re-written.

Theories about developmental psychology differ markedly in their ways of describing and explaining what children are capable of, can perceive, feel, think and do at different ages. This reflects children’s very varied capacities and the complexity of the developmental process. It can be difficult to establish which of the contradictory theories may be correct but the truth is not likely to be found somewhere halfway between two perspectives. If a theoretical assumption is shown to be correct, a contradictory assumption must be wrong.

Chapter 3: Methods of gaining knowledge about children

Choice of method is determined by the information one wishes to obtain, the purpose of the study and its theoretical framework.

Observations are about what children and adults do. An observer can participate in activities or merely observe. Observations imply choosing one of several possible perspectives. Observations are divided into categories that are specified and defined. Categories must be unambiguous and are often mutually exclusive.

Naturalistic observation takes place in children’s own environment and without influence by the observer. Experiments are carried out under controlled conditions. Laboratory experiments consist of customized situations. Field experiments combine naturalistic observation and experimental control. Questionnaires with close-ended questions or archival studies are often used to gather information about larger groups of children. Interviews can provide more detailed insight into children’s and adults’ thoughts and feelings.

Quantitative methods involve categorization, quantification, measurements and statistics, and are suitable for research questions such as who, what, when and how many. Qualitative methods are used to describe processes, and are suitable for research questions such as why and how something happens; processing typically involves text rather than numbers. Microgenetic methods combine quantitative and qualitative approaches. Mixed methods provide more information and a broader perspective.

Group studies compare children with different characteristics, or children who are, or are not, exposed to a certain influence. The experimental group should correspond to the control group in every way, except that the experimental group is exposed to the experimental treatment or influence.

Case studies describe individual children who have particular biological characteristics, grow up under particular conditions or receive a particular type of treatment. By going into greater depth, case studies represent a complement to group studies, but the findings can be difficult   to generalize and apply to children in other contexts. Case studies are especially important to clinical developmental psychology.

Cross-sectional studies compare children at different age levels. Longitudinal studies observe   the same group of children at two or more points in time. Prospective studies follow children over time. Retrospective studies are based on collecting past information, mostly from parents and others who know the children well. Cross-cultural studies compare children growing up      in different cultures and offer a broad insight into the impact of the environment.

Studies of infants use habituation and dishabituation, conditioning, visual exploration (including preferential looking), as well as physiological and neurophysiological measures. The studies are important but the results are often difficult to interpret, and there is significant disagreement about their implications for infants’ cognitive skills and perception of their surroundings.

Research must be transparent, and all the details of the method must be openly available. The sample of children must be representative of the population they are part of. Methods must be reliable and valid, measure what they are intended to measure and provide answers to the questions raised. It is the validity that relates observations of children to the understanding of their development.

An assessment is usually undertaken in response to a concern or referral. Methods include conversations and interviews, observations, tests and checklists. Tests are observations of children’s ability to solve problems under predetermined conditions. Testing must be adapted to the individual child and requires test competency and good communication. Dynamic assessment focuses on the learning process and the child’s learning potential. The results of an assessment are interpreted, analyzed and collated.

The most fundamental ethical issue behind all research is whether to conduct a study when weighing the potential benefits of gathering knowledge against any possible drawbacks and discomfort. Since children are vulnerable and unable to assess the consequences of participating in a study, a particular ethical responsibility rests with anyone conducting research on children. Parents must consent on behalf of their child, and children must be informed in a way they can understand. Ethical committees typically assess whether a research project meets the necessary ethical criteria before the project can be launched.

Chapter 4: Child and Adolescent Disorders

A disorder is a relatively severe reduction or deviation in development, learning and function within a specific area. Children may have difficulties in meeting social or academic requirements without having a disorder. Some disorders are “specific,” meaning they are characterized by a gap between expected performance and actual performance. There is a seamless transition between ordinary difficulties and disorders.

The two main international classification systems are ICD and DSM. DC 0-3 is for children below the age of 3 years. ICF and ICF-CY are used to describe children’s and adults’ overall functioning and participation.

Sensory impairments include visual impairment, hearing impairment and combined visual and hearing impairment. The most common causes of motor impairment are cerebral palsy, spina bifida and brain damage following accidents. In addition, various diseases and syndromes can affect motor control. Developmental motor coordination disorder and dyspraxia affect the performance of motor actions, but do not involve paralysis or mobility impairment.

Neurodevelopmental disorders begin early in childhood and have a varied course of progression clearly linked to the organism’s maturation and development as well as to the influence of experience. They include intellectual disabilities, communication and language disorders, autism spectrum disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, learning disorders, some motor disorders, tic disorders, schizophrenia and other psychoses.

Delayed language development is common in preschool age, but language disorders can continue into school age. Children may have problems with different aspects of speech and language. The prevalence of mental disorders is higher among children with language disorders, and vice versa.

The most common learning disorders are reading and writing disorders (dyslexia) and mathematics disorders (dyscalculia). Intellectual disability influences cognitive, language, motor and social abilities. There are considerable differences between children with regard to the causes, degree and symptoms of intellectual disabilities.

Autism spectrum disorder is characterized by problems related to communication and social interaction, as well as limited, repetitive and stereotyped interests and behaviors.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder includes two subgroups: predominantly hyperactivity and impulsivity, and predominantly inattention. It presents differently from childhood to adult- hood, as well as in boys and in girls.

Behavioral or externalizing disorders include destructive, bullying, fraudulent and aggressive actions of such a scope that they become disruptive to children and adults in the environment.

Internalizing disorders include mood and anxiety disorders. Mood disorders include depression, mania and bipolar disorder, and are among the most frequent psychological disorders among children and adolescents. Depression is relatively rare during childhood, but its prevalence increases toward adolescence. Anxiety disorders occur at all ages and mainly include separation anxiety, phobias, social anxiety and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Children with selective mutism speak only at home and with their immediate family.

The most characteristic feature of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) consists of recurrent thoughts and impulses to perform specific actions, such as repeated hand washing or licking a dish. The disorder is usually accompanied by anxiety, and the individual’s compulsive actions are intended to avert a situation that is perceived to be dangerous. Because they can be observed, compulsive actions are easier to identify than obsessive thoughts, which must be determined based on conversation.

The most common eating disorders are anorexia, involving under-eating, and bulimia, involving binge-eating and “countermeasures” against food intake, such as intentional regurgitation or use of a laxative. Eating disorders are often accompanied by fear of obesity and negative thoughts about oneself.

Reactive attachment disorder and disinhibited social engagement disorder emerge in the first years of life and are related to severe neglect or abuse. Post-traumatic stress disorder can occur at all ages and is a reaction to a stressful or traumatic event a child has experienced or learned about.

Although problems with alcohol and substance abuse do occur in adolescence, they are not common. Some children and adolescents show signs of gaming disorder related to Internet, and some adolescents show signs of Internet addiction.

Acquired disorders are usually the result of injury or illness, and progressive disorders involve the loss of acquired skills.

Chapter 5: Genes, evolution, heredity and environment

Genes are an essential biological component in human functioning. How human genes have evolved through evolution (phylogeny) and how they contribute to the physical, perceptual, cognitive and social development of human beings (ontogeny) are key questions in develop- mental psychology.

With the exception of reproductive cells (gametes), every human cell normally contains 23 pairs of chromosomes with a total of approximately 23,000 different genes. Each gene can have several alleles.

Genetic inheritance refers to the information transmitted to a human being or animal via the genes contained in the parents’ sperm and egg cell. A child’s complete genetic material is called the genotype, its observable characteristics the phenotype. In order for recessive genes to affect development, children must inherit them from both parents. If a gene is dominant, it only needs to be transmitted by one of the parents in order to be expressed. A mutation is a sudden change in a gene structure.

Genomic imprinting means that a gene can be “switched off,” and that the function of the gene depends on which parent it comes from. Genomic imprinting has an important function    in regulating brain development.

Genes affect processes on other levels and are in turn affected by those processes. The genetic information inside the cells thus constantly interacts with what has previously been established via development and environmental influences. Plasticity is greatest in areas related to neurological function and development.

Genes affect and are in turn affected by other genes, as well as by external factors. Epigenesis refers to experience-driven changes in gene function without changes in gene structure. Gene expression seems to be “calibrated” early on, creating a preparedness that continues through- out life, but requires specific environmental conditions in order to be realized.

The influence of heredity and the environment on specific aspects of development are investigated with family studies and gene studies. Studies of twins, siblings and other biological and adopted family members show a complex interaction between genetic predisposition and environment in the development of individual traits. Heritability estimates are based on the difference in correlation between identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins. They indicate the relative importance of genes for various traits, but there is disagreement about the usefulness of such estimates.

Studies of candidate genes compare individuals with or without a particular trait or disorder with regard to the presence of one or a few genes. In a genome-wide search, the gene structure of subjects with a particular trait or disorder is compared to individuals without this trait or disorder.

There is rarely a direct effect of a gene on human traits and disorders. Some studies have found that certain alleles of MAOA, 5-HTT and other genes cause an increased susceptibility to environmental influences, but many of the findings are inconsistent and contradictory. The behavioral differences between individuals with different alleles of a gene are often smaller than the differences caused by culture, class, ethnicity or gender.

Development is a balance between constraint and plasticity. Behaviorists maintain that development is plastic and the development of individual differences mainly a result of learning; while nativists believe that such differences are largely the result of genetic constraints and maturation. Other theorists believe development to be the result of interaction between genes and the environment, but vary in their emphasis on nature and nurture.

Chapter 6: Stimulation and activity during fetal development

Development begins at conception. The characteristics and abilities of a child at birth emerge as the result of 9 months of development. The germinal period consists of the first 10 days.  The 6 weeks following the germinal period are called the embryonic period, while the fetal period lasts until the child is born.

Several diseases can affect fetal development. In addition to the mother’s use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs, chemical substances in the environment have also proved to be of importance. The particular effect of various substances depends on when and for how long the fetus has been exposed to them. 

The sensory systems develop in a fixed order, and all senses are functional by week 26. Gradually, the fetus changes in its reactions to stimulation. 

After about 7 weeks, the fetus begins to move and performs up to 20,000 movements per day by week 16. Following this, the inactive periods last progressively longer. Activity strengthens the body of the fetus, develops its senses, provides feedback about its physical growth and forms the basis for the behavior the child shows at birth.

Sensory stimulation of the fetus helps to activate the nervous system. On the whole, the fetal environment is characterized by repetitive and non-specific types of stimulation in preparation for the more intense and varied stimulation the child will meet after birth.

During the fetal period, learning can take place by means of habituation and exposure, but it is uncertain when the human fetus is sufficiently developed to form associations through conditioning. Newborns are more attentive to their mother’s voice than the voices of strangers, and must therefore have formed some kind of memory of the maternal voice.

It is assumed that the course of fetal development has a certain bearing on the child’s future development, “fetal programming” and epigenesis. There is a certain continuity in fetal activity, and a correlation between fetal reactions to stimulation and temperament during infancy. This can increase the probability of children attending to their own mother.

Chapter 7: Brain Development

An important task is to identify how the brain works, and psychological models provide the basis for mapping the brain’s functions. However, there is no simple relationship between the structure of the brain and the mind.

The brain is examined using advanced electroencephalography (EEG and MEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI and fMRI). MRI and fMRI provide precise localization but inaccurate temporal data, while MEG and EEG result in inaccurate localization and precise time resolution.

A neuron consists of a cell body (nucleus), an axon and a substantial number of dendrites. The transition point between cells is called a synapse. Excitation and inhibition are fundamental brain processes, and the activity of a neuron is determined by the excitatory and inhibitory impulses it receives. The central nervous system consists of the brain stem, the cerebrum and the cerebellum.
The cerebral cortex is 2–5 millimeters thick and forms the outer    layer of the brain.

Experience affects the thickness, height, length and weight of the brain. An environment offering little stimulation results in a smaller brain size than under normal upbringing conditions. Experience-independent processes are not dependent on stimulation and mostly occur during the fetal period. Experience-expectant processes depend on external stimulation for the brain to develop in a typical way. Experience-dependent processes are the result of an individual’s experiences, represent adaptation to the child’s ecology and contribute to individual differences in brain development and functioning.

The nervous system evolves from the outer layer of the embryo, forming a neural tube after 2–3 weeks. Cells migrate to different areas at different times, while their functions become more differentiated. The cerebral cortex begins to develop at around 8 weeks, and the folds are almost fully formed at birth. The weight of the brain at birth is about 20 percent of that of an adult, with 25 percent of its volume. At 6 years of age, its volume has reached 90 percent of that of an adult brain. At 10 years, the brain’s weight is the same as in adults. Myelination begins during the fourth month of gestation, but has barely gotten started at birth and takes many years to complete.

During fetal development and early infancy, the brain overproduces cells. About half of the cells disappear as a result of experience and maturity, with an uneven distribution through-   out the brain. Newborns have relatively few synapses, but between the ages of 9 and 24 months, the cerebral cortex has about 50 percent more synaptic connections than that of an adult. Inactive synapses disappear, while the connection between simultaneously activated neurons is strengthened. The reduction in neurons and synapses strengthens those that are left, and prevents the brain from using energy on maintaining unused functions.

The period from adolescence to early adulthood is a transitional period with considerable myelination and reorganization. The fine-tuning of overall connections continues into adulthood, with a reduction of short-range connections and a strengthening of long-range connections. Adolescent brain development is characterized by an imbalance caused by an earlier maturation of systems related to rewards and the not yet fully mature prefrontal control system, which may play a role in the higher frequency of mood disorders typical of adolescence.

The brain functions as a whole, but also distributes its tasks. The two hemispheres control perception and motor skills in the opposite side of the body, and some functions are lateralized. A child’s brain shows little specialization to begin with, but develops a number of specialized systems that are organized into networks capable of solving increasingly complex tasks.

“Mirror neurons” are activated both when performing an action and observing an action with the same intention. Some researchers argue that mirror neurons are necessary in order to under- stand or imitate the actions of others and experience empathy. Others have pointed out that mirror neurons are not unique to human beings, and therefore do not explain exclusively human development. There is also disagreement as to whether mirror neurons are genetically determined or originate through experience.

Many areas of the brain are more plastic during early development than later in life. Children have a better prognosis than adults when the brain is injured. This may be due to superior restitution of injured areas or functional substitution by “vacant” areas. However, compensation may lead to slower development or the impairment of other functions. In the longer term, the consequences of some injuries may be more severe for younger children than for older children and adults, since they interfere with a long development.

A critical period entails that the organism needs specific forms of stimulation within a certain time window to develop the ability to process it. A sensitive period means that the brain is particularly malleable for a certain period of time, and that some things are more easily learned than during other developmental periods. Critical periods are rare, sensitive periods are more common. Critical and sensitive periods save resources and stabilize established functions. They are a natural consequence of the brain’s increasing tendency to specialize and adjust.

There are some differences in the brain development of men and women. Studies indicate that their brains are somewhat differently organized, but the results are uncertain and sometimes contradictory. The number of connections within and between the hemispheres differs to a certain extent. Some of the differences appear to be related to sex hormones, and appear too early to be the result of social and cultural conditions. However, there is no such thing as a male or a female brain; the brain is a mosaic of different “male” and “female” functions, and every individual has a unique mosaic of “masculine” and “feminine” features. There is a wide range of abilities and significant overlap between cognitive and social attributes in boys and in girls.

The brain is a complex organ, and many different factors can lead development in the wrong direction. The cause of developmental disorders is as complex as any other development, and developmental disorders emerge gradually as the result of irregular and abnormal processes   in the development of the brain. According to neuroconstructivism, basic congenital factors do not determine the brain’s final functions, but instead may initiate a process that allows the brain to develop typically or atypically, based on genetic predisposition and the child’s perception and action.

The brain’s ability to regulate development, and the fact that experience is of significance to its development, are important arguments for adopting suitable measures for children with developmental disabilities. Early stimulation is usually indirect by influencing how people in the environment perceive and react to the child.

Chapter 8: Perceptual development

The senses are functional at birth, but not fully developed. It takes time for a child to use its senses in the same way as an adult. Children get better at perceiving what is common in their environment and worse at perceiving things that occur only rarely. The visual and auditory systems have characteristics that promote children’s social orientation.

According to Piaget, perception occurs “indirectly” – children construct their perception by interacting with objects (in the broadest sense). Gibson’s ecological theory maintains that infants’ perceptual equipment “fits” the environment and thus allows them to perceive “directly” without learning. Children automatically perceive possibilities for action or affordances. Perception leads to action, the opposite of Piaget’s view. There is research to support both views, and a number of theorists believe that the development of perception includes elements of both theories. According to Bremner the most important milestone in perceptual development is children’s ability to use their perceptual knowledge to guide their own actions.

Most aspects of visual perception show a rapid development during the first year. There is disagreement about the importance of innate abilities and experience for this development. Normal development of vision is dependent on relevant visual experiences.

Right after birth, infants “prefer” the visual features typical of faces. According to Carey, children have an innate module for facial recognition, while Slater and Butterworth maintain that early facial recognition is an expression of children’s overall aptitude for learning. With increasing age, children improve at distinguishing faces in their own environment, while their ability  to recognize faces of people from races with which they have less experience declines.

Children get better at integrating multiple visual elements and gradually become more susceptible to optical illusions. Throughout infancy, children improve at using representations of reality in images and videos as a “map,” and begin to understand when a photo or a video depicts themselves. Visual impairment affects all areas of development, particularly orientation and mobility. Children with visual impairments often have a delayed motor development and can be passive. They use sound to orient themselves physically, emotionally and socially. Blind children engage in joint attention, and language is often one of their strengths. Because of their unique experience, they use words in a somewhat different way. Many children with severe visual impairment have multiple disorders.

Newborns are able to distinguish between all aspects of auditory stimulation, but have higher hearing thresholds than older children and adults and require varied acoustic stimulation to develop full auditory perception. Early auditory attention is directed at human voices.

Newborns can localize sound approximately, and are able to locate sounds with increasing accuracy in the course of the first 2 years of life. At the end of the first year, visual and auditory localization are fairly well integrated.

Hearing impairments affect children’s orientation in the environment and their speech. Communication and speech can be supported by improving the perception of sound and facilitating visual communication. Many children with a severe hearing impairment benefit from a cochlear implant but need additional visual support. Some function best by using sign language. Many children with hearing impairments also have other disorders such as ADHD and learning disorders.

Children with hearing impairments are socially vulnerable and have a higher rate of behavioral and emotional problems than others.

Children show an early interest in music. They are able  to  recognize  short  melodies  and tonal patterns, and make up “babbling songs.” Musical ability has a certain genetic basis, but TEXT ENDED HERE IN DOCUMENT

Chapter 9: Motor development

Newborns have a limited repertoire of reflex actions that are activated under certain external conditions. They are essential for survival and help initiate movements that allow children to experience the environment. The coordination of perception and movement is important in   the development of an action repertoire, and motor precision requires forward control.

Gross motor skills overcome the forces of gravity and control body posture, crawling, walking and other forms of locomotion. The ability to move independently alters the psychological environment and affects areas such as attachment, language, self-perception and autonomy.

The development of fine motor skills includes all use of the hands such as grasping, exploring, handling objects and using tools, including pencils for drawing and writing. With increasing age, many movements become automatized.

The development of motor skills follows a relatively stable pattern with individual variation in relation to how and when skills develop. These differences are the result of both biological factors and different cultural practices.

Traditional explanations of motor development have been based on maturation. Dynamic systems theories view motor development as the result of interaction between the child’s individual traits and the physical environment. According to the theory of neuronal group selection, motor development is the result of an evolutionary-based set of actions and variation, exploration and selection of movements in connection with the environment.

The development of drawing skills reflects general motor development, the ability to perceive and abstract characteristics of people and things, and the child’s interests and creativity. Children’s drawings reflect their culture, perception of reality and the particular aspects of the environment that capture their attention.

Motor disorders affect independent locomotion and the use of hands, as well as attachment, social participation and autonomy. While many children with severe motor impairments have other disorders, it is uncertain what is caused by neurological damage and what is due to the developmental consequences of their motor impairment.

Chapter 10: Theories of cognitive development

The central question of theories of cognitive development is how children perceive and adapt to the world around them, retain experiences and develop new knowledge and new ways of categorizing, thinking and reasoning.

The theories place varying emphasis on modules, domains and activities. Cognitive processes can be domain-general, domain-specific or activity-specific. Some theorists argue for the existence of innate neurological modules that correspond to specific areas of knowledge. Others believe that development is based on a process of modularization.

Piaget’s theory has a decisive impact on most approaches to cognitive development. His is the only major theory to describe the development from infant to adult as a coherent develop- mental pathway of qualitative changes in thinking and reasoning, and to explain how this development takes place. Piaget’s key concepts are that thought has its roots in action and that children construct their understanding of the world through their experiences with the physical and social environment. Children develop a cognitive structure that consists of schemas, enabling children to abstract and store experiences. The basic processes are assimilation, accommodation and organization – mental schemas and processes undergo change as children solve problems and acquire new experiences. Development is driven by an innate ability to perceive contradictions and a search for equilibrium between established schemas and new experiences. Piaget divides cognitive development into four universal stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. The cognitive structure manifests itself in the types of tasks children are able to understand and solve in the different stages.

Piaget’s theory has also received more criticism than any other in the field of cognitive development. Many are skeptical about the role of domain-specific processes and the division into stages, but stage thinking is still present in many theories. Studies show that children are capable of solving similar tasks at a much earlier age than Piaget found by facilitating a different set of circumstances, and often there are significant differences in age levels at which tasks with the same presumed operational structure are mastered. Additionally, there are major differences in how various cultures solve cognitive tasks. Piaget’s ideas are being further developed by neo-Piagetians, including his stage theory.

The main principle behind Piaget’s new theory is that schemas are formed when children dis- cover correspondences in the external world. Correspondences that go beyond a comparison of identical features are called morphisms. They are tools for establishing constants, conditions that do not vary across the phenomena in question. Thinking traverses three levels: intramorphic, intermorphic and transmorphic. They do not represent general stages of development; instead, a child’s thinking can involve different levels in different domain-specific areas.

Information-processing theories build on the assumption that all cognitive phenomena can be described as information that flows through one or more processing systems, and search for a set of basic processes of human cognition. There are different views on what development consists of. As children develop, they may increase the capacities, perform several processes simultaneously, gain more knowledge and organize it in new ways, develop metacognition and acquire new strategies for solving problems. Critics claim that the computer is not suitable as a model for children’s cognitive development and that information processing has a biased focus on children’s performance of isolated tasks without placing them in the social and cultural context to which they belong.

Connectionism uses computer models and simulations to investigate the basic processes underlying different abilities, based on models where external stimulation lead to various activating or inhibitory processes. These processes determine what an individual perceives and how he or she acts. Critics point out that connectionism to date has focused mainly on the acquisition of relatively simple perceptual, cognitive and linguistic skills, and not taken sufficient account of the child’s own active role in development.

Nativism is based on the assumption that children are born with a mental “model” of various aspects of the world, and that the brain “knows” something about how to interpret certain forms of stimulation. Genes impose constraints on what children can perceive and learn. Studies of cognitive abilities in infants and toddlers constitute an important but also disputed empirical basis. In strong forms of nativism, it is largely genes that determine the design of cognition, often in the form of neurological modules. Spelke and Kinzler suggest that children begin with a core knowledge of 4–5 modules that form the basis for further development. Weaker forms of nativism attribute a somewhat lesser role to genes. According to Gopnik and Meltzoff’s theory-theory, children are born with a domain-general cognitive structure that enables them to form hypotheses and try them out. Children begin with innate theories that are revised as the children gain more experience. Nativism has a strong position in twenty-first century cognitive developmental psychology. Critics point out that there is little room for development because the structure is predetermined. They also argue that nativists ascribe greater cognitive skills to infants than empirically warranted, and that there are major differences between the infant competence inferred from indirect methods and the explicit understanding and ability to apply knowledge in older children.

From a social constructivist perspective, cognitive development is the result of collaboration between children and adults. Social interaction and cultural knowledge and activities become a part of a child’s cognitive structure, and there are cognitive differences between children   who grow up under different social and cultural conditions. The acquisition of cultural cognitive tools, like language and other symbolic systems, facilitates thinking and makes it possible for children to plan actions, act mentally and reflect, and develop higher mental functions. The internalization of cultural tools requires social interaction, since children are unable to create these tools on their own. The social process of internalization makes it necessary to distinguish between what children master independently and what they are able to do in col- laboration with others, their zone of proximal development.  The strategies  contributed by adults are figuratively known as scaffolding, a flexible external structure that can support and promote the child’s functioning and development. Vygotsky and Elkonin describe six phases or levels of children’s participation in activities, further developed by Leontiev and other neo-Vygotskians. Social constructivism has been criticized for placing too little emphasis on the independent exploration that characterizes an infant’s early development in particular, and for its bias towards adult-communicated knowledge and the interaction between a single adult and child. Many child activities involve numerous participants, such as  educational settings.

There is today no single description or explanation of cognitive development that everyone  can agree on. All the four main traditions of cognitive development continue to be developed today. They represent significant theoretical and empirical differences, but are also further expanded and integrated with ideas that lie outside the individual tradition.

Chapter 11: Attention, memory and executive function

Attention is an active, alert state that affects children’s perception and priorities in the here- and-now. During the first year of life, children become more alert and better at orienting them- selves, filtering stimulation and shifting as well as sustaining attention. Throughout childhood, attention is increasingly directed at what is relevant in a situation, but children can also develop a tendency to take particular notice of either positive or negative emotional cues. Atypical attention processes are a key element in attention disorders and many other neurodevelopmental disorders. Results at attention training are modest. Medication may help some but not all children and is controversial. Intervention directed at behavior disorder in children with attention problems are often useful.

Memory is the mental representation and recognition or recall of experiences. Short-term memory can store material for a few seconds or minutes. Working memory stores and processes and is used when an individual tries to remember something for a short period of time or works on a problem. Long-term memory is the relatively permanent storage of experiences. Autobiographical memory includes personally experienced events that are meaningful to the individual.

Memory is functional even before birth, but initially the capacity of working memory is severely limited. Through childhood and adolescence, it increases with the formation of concepts, the ability to process larger units and improved memory strategies.

Early long-term memory is limited and depends on perfect uniformity – infants quickly forget once the circumstances or the situation change. Refreshment in the form of full or partial repetition increases the length of time for which children remember, provided it takes place within a certain time window. The extent of what children remember, and for how long, increases with age. The recall of action sequences depends on their meaningfulness, the relationship between the actions and how many times the child has seen them. With age, memory can be refreshed by partial repetition, images or language.

In toddlers, expressive language at the time of the experience affects their ability to recount the event at a later age, but not their ability to imitate the action that took place. It is difficult for children to “translate” pre-linguistic memories into verbal form.

A script is a mental representation of something that usually happens in a given context. Children start to form scripts at an early age, and with time they accumulate a large supply of scripts that make up an important part of their social and cultural knowledge.

Autobiographical memory consists of temporal sequences of significant personal events, and forms the basis for the development of the self. It begins at the age of 3 to 4 and continues to develop throughout life. The elaboration style of the parents affects what children remember. Also cultural differences affect children’s autobiographical memory. Some children experience dramatic and traumatic events; exactly how they remember and recall these events is related to the types of events they were exposed to, how often they occurred, how much stress they caused, the child’s past experiences and how parents and others talk about the events.

Childhood amnesia is the phenomenon that older children and adults rarely recall events from before the age of three. The reason may be that the neurological structures involved in storing memories undergo significant development during the first 2 years of life, and that the organization of memory material differs so much between adults and children that adults are unable to activate memories of events that were coded when they were young children. In addition, much of the knowledge of infants and younger children is replaced by new knowledge.

False memories can occur as the result of intentional or unintentional influence by other people, and can be difficult for a person to distinguish from actual memories.

Learning and reading place high demands on the ability to remember, and memory problems may be found in many developmental disorders, including attention disorders, language disorders, learning disorders and autism spectrum disorder. Also children who have been subjected to severe neglect and abuse can be vulnerable to memory impairment.

Children can be reliable witnesses, but younger children often provide fewer details and are more susceptible to influence from adults. They are used to reconstructing events together with
adults and are vulnerable to leading questions, especially about things they do not fully under- stand, and when questioned by an authority figure.

Executive functions have to do with the planning, execution and monitoring of voluntary actions. “Cold” executive functions are associated with cognitive processes, and “hot” executive functions with emotional and motivational factors. Inhibitory control shows a marked increase in preschool age, but continues to develop all the way to adolescence and adulthood. The ability to inhibit thoughts and actions contributes to the development of cognitive flexibility that characterizes adolescence and adulthood. Planning is necessary to solve intricate tasks and perform complex actions. A reduction in executive functioning is associated with many disorders. The development of executive functions is influenced by experience but results of training is modest.

Relations have been found between delayed or inadequate development of executive functions and social functioning and academic performance at school. An early reduction in executive functioning is associated with many developmental disorders, later criminal behavior, difficulty coping with adult life and mental problems.

Chapter 12: Conceptual development and reasoning

Children’s developing understanding of the world includes a spatial dimension, a temporal dimension and causal relationships. From an early age, children perceive that objects exist and have a physical location even when they cannot be experienced directly (object permanence). “A, not B-error” means that children search where they recently found an object rather than where they last saw it being hidden. With age, children make increasingly precise use of geometric cues and landmarks. Independent locomotion and exploration of the physical environment are important elements in this development.

Children in preschool age understand time, speed and distance as separate entities. Closer to school age, children are able to manage two dimensions at a time, and three by the age of 9.     By counting, using a stopwatch or other “timing aid,” children are able to manage this type of task earlier.

Children’s initial understanding of time comes from their own experiences with routines and schedules. Conversations with parents and other adults help children organize days and events on a timeline between past and future. Formal and informal training are important for a cultural understanding of time.

Physical causality has to do with the physical behavior of objects and how they interact. Studies have found an emerging understanding of physical causality in 3-month-olds, but children are much older before the concept of causality includes a sense of physical necessity. According to a nativist view, it is an understanding too complex to be acquired and must therefore be innate. In contrast to this, Baillargeon suggests that the development of physical causality is based on an innate principle of persistence. Children’s early understanding of individual events is later transformed into a general understanding of physical causality. From an information processing perspective, children are assumed to notice events that occur simultaneously and gradually form an understanding of physical causality, for example what happens when objects collide.

According to feature-based theories, children’s earliest object categorizations are based on the perceptual or functional properties of objects.   Mandler describes a development that moves from perceptual to conceptual categories by way of perceptual meaning. Features and categories are initially global and gradually become more differentiated.

From the perspective of prototype theory, Rosch suggests that people, animals, things and so forth are assigned to three conceptual levels: superordinate, basic and subordinate, and that children develop basic level categories first. Quinn describes a development from collections  of individual exemplars to the creation of prototypes that form conceptual “magnets.” New objects are assigned to concepts that are perceived to have important similarities with the prototype. Prototypes are summary-level representations, traits are perceived in context.

Mandler interprets her results to mean that children acquire global categories before categories at the basic level. Quinn and Eimas’ findings suggest that children’s early differentiations mainly occur at the basic level. According to Rakison, children initially become aware of one or two perceptually prominent features. Gradually, they form overall categories with complex pat- terns of perceptual and functional traits. Early categorization is affected by the characteristics of the things children are aware of in the moment.

Nelson describes slot-filler categories in children’s transition from “spontaneous” to “scientific” concepts. Slot-fillers are linked to a particular situation and do not form hierarchies based on their own function, but consist of things that can fill the same place in an event or activity. Class inclusion is a necessary property in any hierarchical system.

Beginning in early childhood, language becomes increasingly important for children’s categorizations. Words are cues to meaning and contribute to both the formation of new concepts and to the reorganization of previously established concepts. Children under the age of 21⁄2 years rarely use superordinate terms generally in the same way as adults, but in the way their parents use them in conversation with the child.

Analogical reasoning is based on relational similarity. Goswami suggests children have an innate ability to notice such similarities, and that relations continue to become more complex with age. Others believe development to be the result of an age-related increase in cognitive capacity. Compared with younger children, older children are able to keep several models in mind and consider them at the same time. Analogy is a key element in all teaching and the development of analogical reasoning is of importance for children’s schoolwork.

Younger children are able to draw deductive inferences, but their reasoning is mostly based on experience rather than logic. Adolescents and adults make more use of logic, but studies based on selection tasks and similar problems show that also adults are able to master reasoning tasks better when they can relate them to events they have experience with. One explanation is that children and adults use pragmatic reasoning schemas abstracted from past experience. Another explanation is that reasoning has a basis in mental models formed in connection with certain situations, and that it is easier to activate mental models that lie closer to the individual’s own experiences. Children are able to solve reasoning tasks that are not too complex and for which they have the relevant mental models. Pragmatic schemas underline the importance of activities for children’s knowledge about the world.

Dialectical reasoning sets the perspectives of two or more persons against each other.  Children’s ability to reason and reflect is the result of internalized dialectical social processes.

Cognitive disorders can affect children’s concept formation and reasoning, including children with learning disorders, intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorders.

Chapter 13: Mind understanding

Mind understanding is people’s understanding of each other’s perceptions, thoughts, attitudes and feelings. Since the mind is not directly observable, children must be able to make inferences beyond what they can observe directly and become “mind readers.”

Visual perspective-taking at Level 1 involves the understanding that other people see the world around them. Level 2 additionally involves the understanding that something can appear differently from various viewpoints. According to Piaget and Inhelder, younger children are ego- centric and unable to take a visual perspective other than their own. Donaldson and others have found that children are able to solve perspective-taking tasks earlier when they include more familiar situations and distinctive landmarks.

According to Piaget, toddlers use private speech because they are egocentric. Vygotsky points   to the fact that younger children talk aloud to solve problems and to plan and regulate their own actions. Their speech is private but not egocentric. Both may be true to a certain extent – children may be a little egocentric and use speech for self-regulation in non-communicative contexts. Children with ADHD and behavioral disorders use overt private speech longer than other children.

Children become aware of others’ desires early on. Eighteen-month-olds understand that people’s desires affect their actions; at 2^1⁄2 years, they understand that people can have conflicting opinions about the same thing. Three-year-olds have difficulty distinguishing between intention and action, while 4-year-olds understand that a person can try to do something without succeeding.

Children develop an understanding of the fact that people can have a false belief about a situation. Most children begin to solve theory-of-mind tasks involving unexpected transfer and content between the ages of 3 and 5 years. Studies based on non-verbal tasks suggest that children as early as their second year of life have an implicit understanding of what others know. Theories must be able to explain early mind understanding as well as problems with explicit mind understanding in early childhood.

One explanation is that mind understanding is rooted in an innate neurological module for meta-representation or a theory-of-mind mechanism. According to the theory-theory, children form a domain-specific commonsense theory about other people’s minds that they use to explain and predict the actions of others. According to the simulation theory, children use their under- standing of their own mind to simulate the relationship between other people’s feelings and beliefs about particular things. Several researchers suggest that there are two social cognitive systems: System 1 is intuitive and allows children to immediately grasp what others see, and thus know, and to ascribe motives to them. System 2 enables children to understand that others may have a belief about something that differs from reality. From a social-constructivist point of view, mind understanding is a social construction of a mentally shared world that arises from the experiences children form in conversation with adults about situations involving the human mind. They discover that people can believe different things, and that these differences are related to the experiences of each individual. From a psychoanalytic perspective, mentalizing is seen as the primary developmental objective of the attachment process.

The earliest forms of make-believe suggest that young children have an understanding of the difference between what is real and what is pretense. Toddlers do not seem to understand that pretense does not have to involve an external action, while children aged 4–5 years perceive it more as a mental function.

Relatively few 3-year-olds tell outright lies, while 5-year-olds are able to use lying as a strategy to prevent someone else from getting hold of something desirable. Telling a lie to hide   one’s own knowledge of something or portray one’s thoughts in a more positive light involves a deliberate attempt to influence what others think about one’s own thoughts, and thus requires second-order mind understanding.

Children show second-order belief attribution once they understand what a person thinks about what another person is thinking. It develops 1–2 years after first-order understanding and some- what earlier if simpler stories and language are used. At around 7–8 years of age, children begin to understand that the mind is interpretative. Development of mind understanding in later childhood and adolescence also involves the ability to infer how a particular belief affects another person emotionally, and the understanding that different people can perceive the same event in different ways.

The development of mind understanding is affected by many environmental factors. There is a relationship between children’s mind understanding and their language skills, their parents’ mind-mindedness and how the parents talk with their children about mental states. Children with siblings develop mind understanding earlier than only-children. Also the effects of practical training have shown that experience is of importance in the development of mind under- standing.

Although the development of mind understanding appears relatively consistent across cultures, there are also a number of age differences in the development of children from different cultures.

Children with autism spectrum disorders have difficulty with mind understanding, but there is considerable variation in the group. Some never develop second-order understanding, and there are different theories about the underlying mechanisms. Their problems are most likely caused by an interaction between basic deficiencies in perceptual, linguistic and cognitive processes, rather than damage to a particular module for mind understanding. The studies of mind understanding have been extremely important to gain insight into the problems faced by children with autism spectrum disorder, as well as for a general understanding of human mind understanding.

Blind children develop mind understanding somewhat later than sighted children since their lack of visual experience makes its acquisition more difficult. Compared with their peers, children with specific language disorders have a delayed mind understanding; this also applies to children with severe motor impairment and speech disorders. Deaf children with hearing parents show a later development in both language and mind understanding, while deaf children with deaf parents and a good sign language environment show a development similar to children with normal hearing.

A slow or deficient development of mind understanding may create problems in the daily life of children with autism spectrum disorders. Sensitivity to criticism, anxiety, depression and behavioral disorders may be related to confusion originating in the children’s problems with mind understanding and general cognitive problems. By facilitating positive social interaction with other children, this group can be supported in the development of social skills and learning in general. Results from training mind understanding are mixed.

Good mind understanding is associated with good peer relations, friendship and popularity in class. Good mind understanding can make it easier to deal with criticism from teachers but can also involve greater sensitivity to criticism from teachers and others. Spitefulness is associated with deficits in mind understanding. Some juvenile offenders have inadequate social skills and have profited from measures to promote mind understanding and social problem solving.

Chapter 14: Intelligence

There is no widely accepted definition of intelligence, but intelligence involves the understanding of complex ideas, adaption to the environment, learning from experience, reasoning, overcoming and problem solving. Some believe intelligence is a domain-general ability, others that it consists of many domain-specific abilities, while others yet believe that it includes both a g-factor and several s-factors.

Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence consists of three parts: process, experience and adaptation. Process involves the mental processes that form the basis for intelligent action; the experiential sub theory deals with the application of processes in the outer world. The contextual sub theory is based on the notion that intelligent actions have a purpose and that human beings use cognitive mechanisms to adapt to the world they live in.

Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences includes eight domain-specific modular intelligences. It is controversial and there is disagreement on whether the different areas of competence can be called intelligence.

Intelligence tests build on the assumption that intelligence has a normal distribution. Tests are norm-referenced by testing a large, representative sample of children in the relevant age groups. IQ is a measure of how children perform on a test compared with their peers. Most intelligence tests consist of various types of task and provide a cognitive profile in addition to a full-scale IQ. The age score indicates the age at which children on average achieve a specific raw score. Experience, culture and language background affect the test results.

The most common reason for testing intelligence is to assess whether a child needs special education or support, based on the assumption that tests are able to predict future development. Correlations between early test scores and later childhood IQ are low. Measures of information processing in the first year – but not later – have a higher average correlation with later IQ scores. After toddler age, IQ scores correlate relatively high with later IQs, although there is also significant variation. It is not the goal of tests to predict too well, since this would imply a predetermined view of intelligence. Interventions are based on the assumption that developmental problems and disorders can be remediated by training and adaptation.

Twin studies and other family studies show that genes are important to intellectual development, and that improvement to the environment results in higher IQ. The correlations between IQ scores increase with the amount of shared genetic material. Many genes have been associated with intelligence, but the effect of individual genes is very small. Children who are adopted into families with a higher socioeconomic background have higher IQs than children adopted into families with a lower socioeconomic background. Heredity estimates have been found to vary with socioeconomic background.

Many environmental factors impact children’s intellectual development, including nutrition. Orphanage studies have shown that environmental factors can have a dramatic effect on children’s intellectual development. Although lack of stimulation and social contact can lead to decreased cognitive functioning, the effects can be reversed. A low socioeconomic status is associated with risk factors that result in lower IQ. Most environments are stable, and the majority of children grow up in the same good or bad environment. Many countries have pro- grams to support children who grow up in high-risk environments.

Based on the hypothesis of a reaction range, genes determine the amount of environmental impact on the development of a given area. The reaction range is also a zone of modifiability with possibilities and constraints. The Rosenthal effect illustrates how assumptions about a child’s intelligence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The ability profiles of boys and girls show certain differences, most likely due to differences in biology, culture and experience. The differences among boys and among girls are greater than the average difference between boys and girls as a group.

Many studies have found variation in average IQ scores among different ethnic groups. Some attribute differences to genes, others to environmental factors. The difference between average IQ in the Black and the White populations is best explained by environmental factors.

The mean raw score on intelligence tests has increased in most countries over time, making it necessary to standardize tests at regular intervals. The Flynn effect is probably caused by changes in economic factors, nutrition, parenting, education, reading ability and the influences of media. In many countries, the effect is currently declining or even on the reverse. The Flynn effect has an impact on the number of people categorized as intellectually disabled or especially gifted.

Performance on intelligence tests is positively influenced by education. Higher intelligence is associated with better academic achievement, but also the achievement of gifted children is dependent on social factors, motivation and self-regulation. Some gifted children have learning disorders.

Intellectual disability is a complex condition that affects all aspects of a child’s functioning, and cognitive profiles vary as much as those of children with typical development. For optimal development, children with intellectual disability rely on a specially adapted environment. Child rearing requires more time and effort from parents, and parent guidance and support are important elements in any work involving children in this group.

Especially gifted children may require individually tailored programs beyond the school’s ordinary curriculum. Other gifted children who do well in school may need some form of adaptation within the regular curriculum.

Chapter 15: Learning and instruction

Learning is commonly defined as a relatively permanent change in knowledge and skills that result from experience. Instruction includes both formal and informal strategies to provide children with knowledge and skills.

Habituation means that children react less after repeated presentations of a stimulus. Dishabituation occurs when the presentation of a new stimulus once again leads  to  an  increase in reaction. Children regulate the stimulation from the environment.

Classical conditioning involves the association of two stimuli. In operant conditioning, learning occurs when a child’s action is followed by reinforcement, an event that increases the likelihood of repeating the action.

Imitation is social learning, the deliberate replication of someone else’s action. One point of discussion is when infants are able to “translate” other people’s actions into movements they themselves perform. After the age of 6 months, infants learn many skills through immediate and deferred imitation and by observing and copying the actions of others. Imitation is particularly important during the first years, but remains a learning strategy throughout life. The development of cultural knowledge is based on cooperation, imitation and instruction.

Children are new to many situations and often have to use trial and error to find the strategy in their repertoire best suited to solving the problems they face. Insight learning is characterized by a sudden shift in skills as the result of mental trial and error, reasoning, or by combining different elements.

A pedagogy based on logical constructivism assumes that children’s development sets limits to what they are capable of learning. Learning in the narrow sense comes after development. Social constructivism centers on children’s active participation in the process while the adult lays the groundwork for the child to discover the problem and find a solution together with the adult. Training must remain within the child’s zone of proximal development for different areas.

Learning disorders imply a difficulty meeting the school’s educational objectives. Even milder forms of reading and writing disorders (dyslexia) can have major consequences for children’s learning and development. Some children struggle most during childhood, but disorders can persist throughout adolescence and adulthood. Various strategies can mitigate and prevent reading and writing disorders, and different methods seem to be useful at earlier and later stages. Although many children struggle with math, some have such severe problems that they are diagnosed with dyscalculia. Early detection of potential disorders and remedial follow-up with or without compensatory strategies and assistive technology can reduce the incidence and consequences of these disorders.

Children and adolescents with learning disorders often have low self-esteem and are vulnerable to developing internalizing and externalizing disorders. When learning disorders are accompanied by social and emotional disorders, academic performance can be improved by parallel interventions.

Vertical learning relationships involve children together with adults or more competent children, while horizontal learning relationships are reciprocal. Peer tutoring means that more competent children teach children who need help. In cooperative learning, a group of children jointly solves an assignment given by the teacher. In peer collaboration, the learning process consists of jointly exploring an area of knowledge based on the group’s interests rather than the teacher’s authority. The fact that two or more children solve a task better together than on their own may be related to “socio-cognitive conflicts,” where children have to integrate different perspectives and experiences.

Chapter 16: The development of communication and language

Communication and language distinguish human beings from other species and represent two of the main topics in developmental psychology.

In the second half of the first year of life, children gradually pay more attention to where others are looking. Joint attention means that two or more people are aware of the same thing and    are aware of sharing this attention. Joint attention is independent of modality and provides a necessary foundation for the development of communicative skills and language. Children with autism spectrum disorder have difficulties with non-verbal communication and establishing and engaging in joint attention.

According to Trevarthen, primary and secondary intersubjectivity reflect an innate basis for communication. In Bloom’s intentionality model, humans have an intrinsic motive to create and maintain intersubjectivity. Tomasello maintains that communication is rooted in a species- specific ability to understand and convey intentions and to cooperate.

Early dialogues largely take place during play or in the context of daily routines and involve
turn-taking between children and adults.

Toward the end of the first year of life, children begin to follow pointing and other deictic gestures. Some theorists consider pointing to be primarily social, rooted in an innate motive to share knowledge and experiences with others. Others view pointing as a way of obtaining information and an extension of children’s early exploration with their fingertips. Imitation does not seem to play a major role in the development of pointing. Symbolic gestures appear at the same time as children begin to say their first words and probably have their basis in children’s imitation of their parents. Gestures are never completely replaced by words and remain part of the communicative repertoire throughout life.

Nativists claim that children have an innate language acquisition device (LAD) in the form of a universal grammar. Language stimulation in itself is too “impoverished” to give rise to language, and children must therefore have an innate mechanism that perceives and processes linguistic stimulation based on a set of grammatical rules. Behaviorism explains language acquisition just like any other behavior as the result of conditioning and imitation. Social constructivism views language as a cultural tool that children learn to apply within a social framework. By adapting their interaction with children, adults represent a language acquisition support system, or scaffolding. Emergentism explains language development as the result of interaction between cognitive abilities and language experience. The language environment has “rich” enough information to allow children to learn a language. The usage-based theory maintains that children construct language by using it for communication; an innate predisposition is associated with communication rather than syntax and grammar. Based on current evidence, it is not possible to determine which of the theories provides the most accurate description of the language development process.

Children usually begin to babble when they approach the age of 6–7 months, and by 10 months their babbling clearly begins to absorb the sound of the surrounding language. Children learn to differentiate, recognize and produce precisely those speech sounds that distinguish meaning in the language(s) they grow up with.

Children comprehend some words before they begin to speak. They usually produce their first words around the age of 1 year, with major variation. Toward the end of the second year, their vocabulary rapidly increases. Following the vocabulary spurt, children learn between 5.5 and 9 new words per day.

The first time children hear a new word, they must fast map it, form an assumption about its meaning in order to recognize and use the word later. Early in development, children use words both in a broader sense (overextension) and in a narrower sense (underextension) than adults.

Infants spend a lot of time exploring the environment and often ask adults what things are called. Some children’s early vocabulary contains many object words, while others have a more expressive early vocabulary. Object words usually make up less than half of children’s vocabulary in the second year of life. Other important word classes are verbs and adjectives. Function words are related to sentence formation and many of them are acquired relatively late. Later language development is characterized by the increasing use of metaphors and other figurative language.

The transition from single- to multi-word utterances is the most important qualitative change in language development. Children understand multi-word utterances before they themselves begin to produce them. Initially, children use successive single-word utterances that are thematically related but not linked together by an intonation contour. As inter-word pauses get progressively shorter, more words fall within the same intonation contour. Verbs represent an early conceptual framework for constructing sentences since they implicitly involve someone performing an action and someone or something acting as recipient. Formulas turn into more abstract sentence structures. Complex sentences are first constructed by combining sentence types that previously were expressed separately. Once children are well on their way to using sentences, they begin to inflect words and use function words such as above and below.

Conversation skills include taking initiative, responding, taking turns, clarifying misunderstandings and ending the conversation. Adults guide children’s early conversations and support the child’s participation. As they grow older, children’s contributions become more equal and they become better at resolving misunderstandings, but they continue to have difficulty maintaining long-term focus on a single topic.

At an early age, children begin to construct narratives and share events they have experienced. The stories of younger children generally describe physical attributes, while descriptions of the characters’ thoughts, feelings and motives are rare even among 5- to 6-year-olds. With age, narratives become more coherent, detailed and evaluative.

When adults talk to young infants and young children, they use short utterances and simple sentence structures with clear pronunciation and a somewhat lighter vocal register than in speech directed at adults. However, the characteristics of child-directed speech have not been found to be essential for language development. Variation sets in adults’ language directed at young children demonstrate that children draw on information from different sources when learning to express themselves through language.

Girls generally have somewhat better language skills than boys. This is particularly evident during school age, but some differences can be observed as early as preschool age. Parents speak differently to boys and to girls starting at an early age.

Multilingual development is common. Children with bilingual first language  acquisition  or early second language acquisition must learn the phonetic systems of both languages, learn which words correspond to each other in the two languages, and when to use them. Early in life, this is no more difficult than learning a single language, but children’s competence in each language depends on how much it is used. Many bilingual children develop a flexibility  in solving problems and thinking creatively.

Language can be acquired in different modalities. The development of sign language follows the same principles as the development of speech, although its grammar and sentence structure are quite different.

Some children with motor impairments, autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability or severe language disorders have difficulty acquiring spoken language normally, even if they grow up in an adequate language environment and receive speech therapy. Intervention with manual signs and graphic symbols may give them new possibilities for communication and support their development of speech.

Language disorders will influence children’s learning and development, whether they develop spoken language or sign language. Problems with comprehension are more critical than problems involving expressive language only. Children with language impairments are vulnerable to developing dyslexia. Early intervention is important and with age, most children with language disorders develop relatively inconspicuous language skills. However, some adolescents need additional language support and reduced language understanding may be a major hindrance to their academic success at school.

Children with language and communication disorders experience many difficult situations and are vulnerable for developing mental health problems. Children with mental disorders have a higher incidence of language disorders than other children.

Chapter 17: Emotions and emotion regulation

Emotional development involves changes in an individual’s understanding and use of emotional expressions and emotional regulation. Emotions comprise seven key elements: expression, understanding, experience, bodily responses, direction, action and regulation.  There is no clear distinction between generating and regulating emotions. Development progresses from reactive to largely voluntary regulation, and from seeking adult protection and help to self- regulation and seeking help from one’s peers.

Some emotions seem to be universal; they share similar expressions and are elicited by the same types of situations in all cultures. Others show significant cultural differences in expression, perceived value, and the different ages at which children are expected to show and regulate particular emotions.

Nearly all theories of emotional development are based on Darwin. According to differential emotions theory, children start with two innate forms of general positive or negative arousal, which are divided into progressively more demarcated and structurally consistent emotions. Theories of discrete emotions maintain that infants have an innate capacity to experience and express a number of basic emotions that are gradually combined into more complex emotions. From a behavioral point of view, development is determined by classical conditioning and differential responses. Functionalist theories focus on the relationship between emotions and the “object” at which they are directed, often another human being. Development reflects the changes in children’s goals and their ability to regulate themselves and their social environment.

The reflexive smile is present at birth, while the social smile usually appears at the age of 6–10 weeks. Laughter comes at 3–4 months of age. Blind children begin to smile later than sighted children. This shows that experience is of importance, but also that the development of smiling does not depend on seeing others smile. Newborns cry when they experience high levels of physiological activation. Crying patterns are altered due to both maturation and changes   in children’s activities.

In the middle of the first year of life, children begin to show fear, and the elicitation of fear depends on the child’s development of other skills, such as independent locomotion. In preschool age, children are often scared of fantasy characters, while fear in school age is mostly related to physical injury and danger. In adolescence, social fear becomes dominant. Clear expressions of anger commonly emerge at 4–6 months, such as when children are impeded in their movements or when parents do not fulfill their expectations. In the course of early childhood, anger is increasingly less accepted by parents. Children are perceived to be sad when they show little facial expression, activity and positive response. Infants show many expressions resembling the emotional expressions of adults, but not always in relevant situations; interpreting the infant’s inner state based on these expressions is unreliable.

Children show an early ability to distinguish the emotional expressions of voices a little before faces. Initially expressions have to be distinct, but with age, children gradually improve at recognizing more subtle emotional expression. They also develop a better understanding of the relationship between emotions and events, desires and beliefs, the differences between other people’s expressions and feelings, and the fact that emotions can be mixed or contradictory.

Researchers disagree on when children begin to imitate emotional expressions. Some maintain neonate imitation is made possible by a connection between the sensory and action systems, for instance in the form of a mirror neuron system. Others suggest the emotional expressions   of adults can trigger emotional reactions in newborns, which prepare them for later imitation of emotional expressions.

Infants have a limited repertoire of self-regulating strategies and depend on help from caregivers. Stern uses the term affect attunement to describe adults’ adaptation of emotional actions and expressions to those of the child, which helps children understand the emotions that under- lie actions. Social referencing means that children use other people as a cue to what they them- selves should feel, think and do in uncertain situations. With age, children learn to delay, modify or hide their emotional expressions in accordance with the social situation.

Self-referential emotions are founded on a personal standard. Shame is related to violating this standard, while pride is related to exceeding it. Children can be embarrassed at being observed and evaluated by others. Moral emotions are based on a personal moral standard.  Guilt and pride are aimed at oneself, while (justified) anger, contempt and disgust are directed at others. Self-referential emotions help to identify and correct social errors, and vary across cultures.

Children’s emotional experiences within the family affect the child’s emotions. Parental sensitivity helps shape children’s feelings about themselves and others. When children are pre- vented from showing negative emotions, they are unable to learn to regulate them and feel unsafe in situations that can give rise to these types of emotions. Children who receive help in regulating their negative emotions show fewer such emotions in interaction with other children. The way in which help is offered is not a deciding factor. Children who are able to deal with their emotions are also better at helping others than children with poorer emotional regulation. By the age of 3, conversations with parents often concern the causes of emotions. This gives children the opportunity to learn about emotional states, share their own feelings with others and understand and express emotions in new ways, in turn affecting their reaction to emotional situations.

Empathy and sympathy are emotional reactions to the situation of others. Hoffman describes four stages in the development of empathy. The emotional style of parents and other adults is important to children’s development of empathy and sympathy. Negative experiences do not lead to insight and empathy in children. Children with self-regulation problems are often unable to help others who experience difficulties.

When parents or other adults show anger and aggression, children usually become anxious   and find it difficult to regulate their emotions. Children are more vulnerable than adolescents, who have better self-regulation. Children growing up in families with high levels of anger and aggression are vulnerable to developing internalizing and externalizing problems. Children whose parents are depressed may develop a smaller repertoire for emotion regulation.

Since peers share many of the same experiences, norms, challenges and perspectives, peer inter- action is essential for learning when and how emotions are expressed. Children’s ability to self-regulate and deal with anxiety and stress is important for how they are met by their peers and for developing independence and social participation in childhood and adolescence.

Anxiety disorders appear early in life, and their development seems related to the child’s temperament, attention to threats and need for security. When and how they emerge depends on many factors. Although anxiety is not related to the family’s overall level of functioning, there is a relation between anxiety disorders and overprotective, “hostile” upbringing with little autonomy encouragement. Anxiety disorders can have negative cascading effects on learning and social development. There are many programs to prevent and treat anxiety disorders in children and adolescents, but studies show varying efficiency of such programs.

Children and adolescents with depression tend to focus on hopelessness and loss, and temperament, cognitive style and environmental factors can contribute to the development of depression. Adolescence is a particularly vulnerable period. Studies of programs for the prevention and treatment of depression have shown varying results.

There is a relationship between behavioral disorders and underregulation of anger, but problems with emotional regulation can involve both excessively strong or weak expressions, uninhibited and inhibited behavior, internalizing disorders with shyness and withdrawal, and externalizing disorders with aggressive, disruptive and antisocial behavior. Depression in girls is usually related to over controlled behavior and anxiety, while depression in boys seems to be associated with under controlled behavior and aggression. Regulation disorders can have a major impact on children’s social development and academic achievement.

Chapter 18: Temperament and personality

Children differ with respect to emotionality, irritability, activity level and how they handle emotional situations, novelty and changes. Traditional temperament types include easy, difficult and slow to warm up. More recent categories include sociability, positive and negative emotionality, extraversion, effortful control of attention and distractions, endurance, likeability and adaptability. Reaction to novelty is an especially important trait that indicates whether children are cautious and timid, or approach when they meet strangers and new situations. Temperament can be assessed through physiological measures, questionnaires, parent inter- views and observations.

Temperament heritability ranges from 0.2 to 0.6, changes with age, and shows greater stability over shorter than longer periods. There is generally a moderate continuity of temperament, but more for children with a pronounced trait.

Children’s temperaments affect the way in which they are treated by their parents, whose reactions change with the child’s age and can both strengthen or weaken the effect of the child’s temperament. The “goodness of fit” of parents’ and children’s temperaments differ. A generally positive parental trait is sensitivity and the ability to adapt to the child’s temperament.

Children’s temperament can entail both vulnerability to internalizing and externalizing dis- orders, and resilience to such disorders. Positive environmental characteristics and children’s interactions with other people can protect children with a difficult temperament from developing problems. Temperament can contribute to both vulnerability and protection against dis- orders.

Personality is the tendency to feel, think and act in certain ways. The “Big Five” personality traits include extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism (emotional lability) and openness to experience, each consisting of six sub-facets. Younger children are typically described as active, irritable, independent and mature for their age. According to Bandura and Mischel, children’s tendencies to act and react in certain ways are adaptations to actual situations that variously characterize a child in different situations, like a behavioral signature.

The main elements of Freud’s psychodynamic theory of personality development are id, ego and superego, the psychosexual phases and the defense mechanisms. Many modern theorists build on Freud’s basic ideas but have changed major parts of his theory. Erikson represents ego psychology. Each of eight lifespan phases is associated with a social crisis that form the basis for an individual’s personality. The theory has been criticized for being too male-oriented and poorly suited to modern society, but is still widely used.

McCrae and Costa’s theory is based on evolutionary principles and the hypothesis that the Big Five and their 30 facets are universal and develop through maturation. Personality is not the result of individual adaptation, but instead forms the basis for adaptation. The theory has been criticized for failing to explain the mechanisms underlying personality development.

Behaviorism describes personality in terms of response tendencies acquired through conditioning and imitation like all other behavior. The theory has been criticized for taking insufficient account of the diversity of children’s minds and the complexity of development. In cognitive behavior theory, children’s reactions and behaviors are the result of environmental adaptation related to children’s self-esteem and expectations, and especially their perception of themselves as agents in a social world. They learn from the consequences of their own actions and by observing the consequences of others’ actions. Cognitive behavior therapy based on Bandura’s theory is very influential in clinical child and adolescent psychology, but he has been criticized for not integrating knowledge of general cognitive development.

Early temperament and later personality are partially related. Descriptions of children’s personality traits differ from descriptions of adults. New personal characteristics appear in preschool age, and toward adolescence personality is increasingly described with the same personality traits as adults.

Personality traits are stable over shorter time spans and low to moderate over longer time spans. Some children have a stable personality development, while others are more characterized by change. Although early disorders involve a greater risk of later disorders, it is generally not the same children who show disorders at all age levels.

Heritability varies for each trait, with estimates rarely exceeding 0.4–0.5, indicating that the genes and environment play equal roles. The influence of genes seems to decrease with age. Some genes have an impact on how vulnerable children are to neglect, parenting style and other environmental factors.

The personality traits of parents and their children generally show low correlations. Family affects the development of children’s personalities, but not always in such a way that they   come to resemble their parents or siblings. Parenting style and behavior reflect parents’ experiences, personality and any possible disorders, as well as influences from their children. Children of parents with a democratic parenting style tend to be active, social and able to speak up for themselves. Children with controlling parents are obedient, fearful and with- drawn. Friends and activities outside the home gain increasing influence on the development of personality. Social and cultural factors affect parenting style and thereby contribute to shaping children’s personalities.

Early childhood is often viewed as a developmentally sensitive period that leads to vigilance with increased vulnerability or resilience to stress and problems later in life. Children who have been subjected to severe neglect usually show poor adaptation, but the risk of developing mental health problems can be reduced by improved domestic conditions or by adoption into solid rearing environments. Maltreatment and sexual abuse increase children’s vulnerability and can have a profound and lasting impact on their development. It affects children’s perception of their surroundings, and some children react by withdrawing from their peers, others by showing aggression and hostility. Divorce involves sudden and major changes in children’s lives, but the effects are relatively short-lived.

Some children are resilient and manage to cope with relatively serious early neglect without apparent damage. It is the continuous exposure to an environment of neglect or abuse, rather than isolated incidents, that can impact the development of children’s personality in the long term.

The diagnosis “personality disorder” is not usually given before the age of 18 but many claim that such disorders may be observable in adolescence, and it is a common assumption that   they are rooted in the individual’s experiences in childhood and maladaptive variants of personality traits.

Personality development is an adaptive transactional process. The environment can either hinder or promote children’s ability to self-regulate and adapt, and is in turn affected by the child’s self-regulating mechanisms. One of the most basic personality traits is the ability to choose appropriate action strategies in new situations. Developmental lines represent the consistency in children’s ability to meet and adapt to new contexts.

Chapter 19: Attachment

Attachment is about developing relationships and feelings for other people. The function of attachment behaviors is to ensure a feeling of safety by reducing the physical distance to specific individuals, attachment figures.

In Bowlby’s ethological theory, attachment is an innate behavioral system whose aim is to provide security. Inner working models carry information from interaction with important persons, their availability and responsiveness, and form the basis for how children meet their social environment. Adults have a caregiving behavioral system.  Traditional psychoanalysis and behaviorism view attachment behavior as a means of satisfying primary needs. According to Mahler’s psychodynamic theory, attachment relationships are formed as a relation between self-object and maternal object once children begin to distinguish between mental representations of themselves and their mother.

At 2 months of age, children begin to show selective attention for familiar people, and positive and negative selection by 7 months. Attachment behavior includes signaling behavior and approach behavior, activated when children are at a physical distance from the attachment figure and experience pain, anxiety, insecurity and stress. Proximity to an attachment figure provides security and ceases the attachment behavior.

Attachment behavior is most pronounced in the second and third year of life, and by around 3–4 years of age, the basic attachment period is over. Children are now able to be apart from their attachment figures for longer periods, and do not need to take direct contact to restore a sense of security. With age, attachment reactions become rarer and less intense, and know- ledge of future availability becomes more important than physical proximity. Adolescence is characterized by increasing autonomy, but the attachment system remains functional throughout life.

Explorative behavior is activated when children are interested in something new and do not experience too much insecurity. The attachment figure represents a secure base for exploration of new objects and places.

Children’s experiences in connection with separation or loss lead to individual differences in attachment behavior. The Strange Situation is based on the fact that separation from an attachment figure in unfamiliar surroundings elicits attachment behavior. Behavior is categorized as insecure-avoidant (A), secure (B), insecure-resistant (C) and insecure-disorganized (D). Most children show secure attachment. A secure relationship depends on the availability, reliability and predictability of the attachment figure. Prolonged separation and absence or loss of an attachment figure can lead to protest with crying and despair. As children form attachments with different people, their behavior toward them can vary.

According to Bowlby and Ainsworth, the attachment figure’s availability and sensitivity is an essential prerequisite for secure attachment, but studies have found a low correspondence between maternal sensitivity and children’s attachment. The mobile phone influences the availability of parents and other attachment figures. Parents seek to be easily available, but mobile telephones can also create “absent presence”. A difficult life situation may increase parental stress and contribute to insecure attachment in the child.

Some theorists believe differences in attachment are caused by temperament rather than how the child is treated by the caregiver. In a unified theory, temperament forms part of the basis   for infants’ interpretations of other people and themselves and their reaction to separation. Attachment is a robust system, and children with intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorders and other disabilities largely show the same distribution of attachment types as children with typical development, even if their behavior may be delayed and somewhat different, and some continue to  exhibit  physical  approach  behavior  at  a  much  later  age  than others.

A high degree of stability in attachment behavior is expected but observations of attachment behavior toward the same person at different ages show varying results. Correlations are usually modest or low. This may partly be due to different measures. Stability in parental sensitivity in childhood is modest.

Attachment is found in all cultures but cultural caregiving patterns result in differences in the proportion of children who show a given attachment type.

Secure attachment to both parents increases the likelihood of positive social development and relationships. Disorders are somewhat more common in children with early insecure attachment than children with secure attachment, but the differences are minor. Insecure disorganized attachment carries the greatest risk of developing emotional and behavioral disorders.

Robertson and Bowlby describe reactions related to prolonged or permanent separation from an attachment figure. Children with reactive attachment disorder have grown up with relatively unavailable and inconsistent attachment figures and show inadequate or deviant attachment behavior. Children with disinhibited social engagement disorder show little restraint toward strangers and behave indiscriminately in situations that elicit attachment behavior.  This social disorder commonly occurs in children who have lived in orphanages. Children who are adopted relatively late usually establish attachment relationships with their adoptive parents. Some children are resilient in negative environments.

All forms of attachment involve social learning and adaptation. The actions and behaviors of attachment figures are incorporated into working models that provide children with clues to the type of environment they can expect. Insecure attachment behavior is not necessarily a deviation from “healthy” development, but rather an adequate adaptation to the world as experienced by the child.

Attachment theory has had a major impact on child welfare practice and similar social ser- vices. Large orphanages have been closed down in many countries and replaced with foster homes and smaller institutions, with greater emphasis on promoting stable relationships between children and adults.

Chapter 20: Sibling and peer relations

Peer relations refer to a broad set of direct and indirect experiences with non-familial age mates, constitute a social setting that exerts immediate and proximal influence on the child. In vertical relationships one part has more knowledge and social power than the other. In a horizontal relationship, social power is more equally distributed.

Siblings are part of the child’s immediate environment. They share many experiences and have positive interactions as well as conflicts, which may have to be resolved by their parents. Although they can support each other in difficult situations, these can also put a strain on the relationship. It is a combination of warmth and conflict that uniquely contributes to the social learning and development among siblings.

When one of the siblings is disabled, the relationship is often characterized by more warmth and care than other sibling relationships. Since they generally spend less time together, they also experience less conflict and shared prosocial behavior.

Children show an early interest in other children and spend increasing amounts of time together throughout childhood, while leisure time with adults decreases. Preschoolers essentially represent a collection of separate individuals, groups begin to form during school age, and children have to reconcile their friendships with the competing demands of the groups they belong to. Adolescence sees a growing number of relationships across the sexes.

Friendship is a horizontal relationship with a strong emotional bond. By the age of 4 years, children usually have well-established friendship relations, and the number of friends increases slightly with age. For preschoolers, friends are the children they do things together with. For older children and adolescents, friendship is more about perceived closeness and emotional fellowship. While schoolchildren describe their friends as understanding, loyal and trustworthy, older children place more weight on similar values and attitudes. In adolescence, descriptions of friendship include shared secrets and feelings, and opportunities for emotional support. Friends have as many conflicts as non-friends, but they are better at resolving them. In adolescence, intimacy and personal issues becomes increasingly important for friendships.

Toddlerhood friendships typically last for 1–2 years. In preschool age, friendships are some- what more variable, and in school age, many children regularly change best friends. In the course of adolescence, friendships become more stable and selective. In preschool age and child- hood, girls have a slightly smaller network of friends than boys, but in adolescence the trend reverses.

Social selection means children choose friends who are similar to themselves, social deselection that they choose not to become friends with children who are different from themselves. Friends affect each other’s attitudes and behaviors through social influence. Male friends tend to be similar in terms of physical activity, female friends in attractiveness and the size of their social network.

Female friends share more similarities in prosocial and antisocial behavior than male friends. The opposite is true of shyness, which is less problematic for girls than for boys.

One-third of all children and adolescents say they have enemies. Mutual antipathy is an active relationship and integral part of a child’s social network, even if its dynamic is negative. Adolescents with many enemies are less accepted and subjected to more bullying. Some enemy relationships are founded on bullying.

Popular children are often physically strong, with an attractive appearance, but their willingness to share, their ability to cooperate and other social skills are equally important for their popularity. About 50 percent of the unpopular group show socially disruptive, aggressive behavior, while socially withdrawn and submissive children make up 10–20 percent. Some rejected children are immature and childish compared with their peers. Neglected children are neither accepted nor rejected. Controversial children share common traits with both popular and unpopular children, and are both accepted and rejected. Neutral children are neither particularly popular, rejected or controversial, but are not neglected either.

Popular and unpopular children have a different understanding of other children’s perspectives and intentions, and may have completely different motives and expectations. Aggressive unpopular children often mention rivalry, while popular children express interest and pleasure in companionship as such. Some unpopular children put the blame on others when conflicts and problems arise. Other unpopular children believe their social success is the result of external circumstances, while blaming social failure on their own personal characteristics. Cultures differ with regard to the types of characteristics they consider positive, and thus also the characteristics of popular and unpopular children.

Most children take part in the process of relational learning and enculturation a reciprocal friendship usually involves. Younger children learn to cooperate, resolve conflicts and other social skills. Among older children and adolescents, peer relations contribute to the development of identity and a broader understanding of other people. Unpopular children are at risk   of social isolation and missing out on social skills, especially when they do not have friends.

Adolescents influence the groups they are part of and are in turn influenced by them. The groups’ rules, values and norms are important for their attitudes and behaviors, and can both promote and inhibit the development of prosocial and antisocial behavior patterns. A high degree of conformity with friends and groups is typical of adolescence, but in relation to society, the attitudes and norms of a group can either be conformist, non-conformist or anti-conformist.

Studies have found relations between early social acceptance and later disorders. Friendship and group affiliation can contribute to a strengthened self-image and protect against disorders. Children in the aggressive rejected group are vulnerable to developing behavioral disorders and antisocial behavior, submissive rejected children to developing anxiety, depression and low self-esteem. Children who experience chronic rather than intermittent rejection have the greatest risk of later disorders. Nonetheless, most unpopular children without good peer relations do not develop disorders, and there exist interventions that can reduce rejection, promote social skills and positive relationships, and guard against disorders.

Chapter 21: Self and identity

The self as knower, or I, is the experience of being a unique individual acting in the world.  The self as known, or me, is the individual’s perception of self, an awareness of being in possession of certain characteristics and qualities.

In the middle of their second year of life, children begin to realize that a mirror shows a reflection of themselves, and sometime later also recognize themselves in a photograph or a video. Toddlers start referring to themselves by name or I and rarely make a mistake between you and I.

According to Mahler, the newborn child is unable to differentiate between herself and the mother. Through a separation process, children gradually develop a sense of being a self-separate from others. During the individuation process, they develop a sense of themselves as autonomous individuals with characteristics independent of the mother. Winnicott suggests children first go through an undifferentiated phase and gradually develop a sense of self through the mother’s mirroring and other maternal reactions. Later theorists are critical to the assumption that infants starts with a differentiated experience of themselves and their mother, and have revised this part of the theory.

Stern describes a multi-layered self that experiences being both independent and part of a social world. Some layers are present at birth, others emerge later in development: emergent self, core self I and II, intersubjective self, verbal self and narrative self. Stern emphasizes interaction, social relations and affect attunement in the development of the self. His theory has been of major influence, but has been criticized for the assumption that very young infants can recognize the process underlying their development of self-perception and conclusions that are difficult to verify.

Lewis describes four levels in the development of a representational self that emerges in the first 3 years of life: level 1 is I know, level 2 is I know I know, level 3 is I know you know    and level 4 is I know you know I know. Children become aware that they may be both the subject that experiences and the “object” being experienced.

Questions about the self revolve around the distinction between the self as knower and the self as known. Kagan believes children must have a primitive sense of self-as-known before they can acquire a sense of self-perception.

Children’s self-descriptions include four aspects: physical, activity, psychological and social. The distribution of these changes with age, and children’s descriptions become more differentiated and integrated. Adolescents experience themselves to be different in different con- texts and describe several selves. Self-descriptions also reflect the culture.

Memories are a core element of the self and the autobiographical narrative is an essential part of self-perception, and the result of co-construction with others, initially in conversation with adults, later also with peers.

The culture constitutes a foundation for self development. Some cultures are individualistic and autonomous, others are more social and relationally oriented. Selfways reflect the culture’s ideas and values about the nature of the self, and children’s self-perception is the result of cultural selfways and individual experience.

Self-disclosure is the sharing of personal information with others, face-to-face or on social media. Self-disclosure to friends increases with age, while self-disclosure to parents remains stable or decreases slightly. Children and adolescents achieve self-clarification; they are either validated in their beliefs and attitudes through agreement with and recognition from parents or friends, or they realize that their thoughts and viewpoints are unacceptable. Gender differences in self-disclosure seem to be partly due to the different characteristics of male and female group interaction.

Younger children rarely compare themselves with others and use the reactions in their sur- roundings as a basis for self-evaluation. In school age they start comparing themselves with peers, seeming to determine their own competence. Adolescents use comparisons to ascertain reactions to themselves and others, and as a basis for changing their own behavior.  Parents with realistic goals for their child promote positive self-evaluation, while parents with expectations that do not match the child’s prerequisites can contribute to low self-evaluation. Inflated praise from parents may lead to lower self-esteem, or to an increase in narcissistic features.

Self-efficacy is the experience of personal agency and control over one’s own life. Children with low self-efficacy feel their lives are controlled by external forces. Comparisons with others are important for children’s development of self-efficacy, for example whether the children they use for comparison succeed in tasks they themselves master or do not master. Adolescents with low self-efficacy may have learned that what they do will not matter – learned helplessness.

Self-perception varies somewhat in children with atypical development but most show com- parable development to typically developing children. Children with minor disabilities may have lower self-esteem than children with more severe disabilities. The self-images of adolescents with autism spectrum disorder are similar to those of adolescents with typical development, but they have problems telling how others might perceive them.

Studies have found associations between emotional and behavioral disorders and self-esteem and the influences may be reciprocal. Disordered self-perception is a core feature of eating disorders but these disorders are complex and have been linked to a range of biological and social factors.

Research indicates a developmental distinction between typical and atypical self-esteem. Narcissism may be rooted in parental over evaluation, and high self-esteem in parental warmth. Aggression and bullying may imply unstable self-esteem and have been connected to narcissism.

Identity formation involves the exploration and selection of different values and attitudes, and finding one’s place in society. In Erikson’s theory, a positive transition through the social crisis of the fifth phase leads to a mature identity, while a suboptimal transition leads to role con- fusion and uncertainty about one’s identity. The theory is deeply rooted in the social and historical context of Erikson’s time, and neo-Eriksonians have revised the theory in various ways and adapted it to today’s social reality, including an increased emphasis on integration of personal and social identity, and the development of narrative identity theory.

Ethnicity and race are essential elements in identity formation. Adolescents gradually develop an awareness of their cultural background, with varying impact on their identity. Phinney describes three phases in the development of ethnic identity. Multicultural societies lead to new processes in identity formation. Young people from ethnic minorities have to deal with the expectations of society at large, their peers within the majority population, and their own ethnic group.

Chapter 22: Moral development

Morality is the understanding of right and wrong. Moral reasoning involves reflection on the correctness of one’s own and others’ actions.

Logical constructivism associates morality with cognitive development. Piaget divides moral development into three stages, arguing that social conflicts between peers give rise to cognitive conflicts that drive the development from premoral reasoning to moral realism and moral subjectivism. Critics point out that children show moral understanding earlier than Piaget claims.

Kohlberg extends Piaget’s stage theory and methodology by introducing the moral judgment interview. Pre-conventional morality is determined by what others say is good or bad, conventional morality is linked to the group’s views on morally right actions, while post- conventional morality is determined by the values of society. In adulthood, morality is tied to the individual’s conscience and universal moral principles. Although children in different countries largely show the same development in moral reasoning, this applies to a lesser extent to post-conventional morality.

Gilligan distinguishes between justice-oriented male morality and care-oriented female morality and describes three stages in the development of women’s morality: 1) caring for oneself, 2) caring for other people, 3) integrated care of oneself and others. Both men and women reason based on care and justice, but women are more concerned with relationships and there- fore reason more often based on a morality of care.

Hauser believes humans have an innate universal moral grammar that sets the parameters for moral development. According to the theory of ethical intuitionism, moral judgments are immediate, unconscious and intuitive, and moral reasoning only justifies an action after a situation has been evaluated.

Social domain theory views morality as one of three forms of social understanding. The development of norms and values is a collaborative process, and children gradually become more sensitive to moral issues through their experiences with social interaction within and outside the family.

Children show different reactions to violations of moral norms and social conventions early on, both in regard to themselves and others, and with increasing age distinguish more clearly between actions belonging to the moral, social and personal domain.  With age, they also improve at taking into account several factors at the same time.

Most theorists believe emotions to be central to moral development and an understanding of others’ feelings. According to Hoffman, empathy-related guilt leads children to avoid hurtful actions or try to repair the damage that has been done. Dunn, Campos and Dahl emphasize the importance of social joy and parents’ positive emotional expressions when young children help others. Children’s understanding of the relationship between moral violations and experienced emotions undergoes a gradual development. Children with behavioral disorders have a more immature understanding of transgressions of moral rules and norms.

Conscience is characterized by negative self-evaluations and feelings of guilt directed at one’s own actions. Different developmental pathways can lead to a sense of conscience, depending   on the child’s temperament, the parents’ way of meeting the child’s actions and the child–parent relationship.

Some children with callous-unemotional traits may have an atypical conscience development and show signs of psychopathy.

Chapter 23: Prosocial and antisocial development

Typical prosocial actions are helping, sharing and comforting. Around 1 year of age, children begin to show helping behavior, followed a little later by sharing with and comforting others. Children differ in the development of social skills and disposition for prosocial behavior, and parents in how they guide their children toward such behavior. Extrinsic rewards have little effect, while warm and supportive parenting promotes children’s prosocial actions. A sense of justice, regardless of self-interest, is established in school age. In adolescence, various forms of prosocial behavior develop in slightly different ways and depend on the particular situation.

The most common form of antisocial behavior is aggression, and children begin to show aggressive actions in their second year. With age, there is a reduction in openly aggressive acts, while relational aggression increases. Other forms of antisocial behavior, such as lying, cheating and shoplifting, increase during school age. Following adolescence, there is a general decrease in antisocial behavior, but a small group continues to show such behavior.

Bullying consists of repeated negative actions such as teasing and physical or verbal aggression directed at one or more particular individuals over time. Bullying typically begins to show up in middle childhood, and its prevalence declines with age. Boys bully more than girls. Children who are bullied early in school age are at risk of being bullied at later ages. Individuals who bully have a higher probability of developing criminal behavior and alcohol abuse in adult- hood, especially adolescents who bully. Bullying relationships can last for many years.

Children with behavioral disorders and callous-unemotional traits are characterized by proactive aggression, while children with emotion-regulation problems show more reactive aggression and perceive the environment as threatening. Both genes and the environment are contributing factors. Children whose parents are cold, punitive and dismissive typically show high levels of aggression, which in turn can trigger negative parental reactions. Children are affected by the way in which conflicts are resolved at home and in their local community.  With age, peers gain more importance. Antisocial children commonly seek out each other because they are rejected by other children; as adolescents, they are more often involved with violent and criminal gangs than others.

Gender differences are generally small. Boys show more hostile and instrumental aggression in both physical and verbal behavior,and are more involved in all types of criminal activity. There is no gender difference in verbal aggression, but girls show somewhat more relational aggression in the form of gossip, group exclusion and the like. Behavioral disorders show significant gender differences in incidence.

The relation between antisocial behavior in childhood and later adaptation can follow different developmental pathways. Children with low levels of prosocial behavior risk being rejected by their peers. Children with high levels of antisocial behavior are often unpopular among their peers and have an increased likelihood of poor personal relationships and social mal- adjustment later in life, but only a small minority show persistent aggression and antisocial behavior. The connections between early development and later antisocial behavior are often statistically significant, but correlations are generally low and occasionally moderate.

The model based on social information processing emphasizes children’s interpretation of exte nal and internal situational cues and how they use them to ascribe intentions to others and make causal assumptions. Aggressive children are more attentive to signs of aggression in others than nonaggressive children, and their social scripts tend to incorporate more hostile elements and can be difficult to change.

Parenting styles can both promote and inhibit prosocial and antisocial behavior. Baumrind describes four different parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, permissive and uninvolved. Authoritative parenting best promotes prosocial behavior, while an authoritarian style with high demands on obedience and a low degree of emotional responsiveness has the opposite effect. There is a link between strict and callous disciplinary upbringing in school age and later acting-out behavior and criminal activities.

The relationship between corporal punishment and behavioral problems is affected by cultural differences and depends on how common such punishment is in a given culture. There is no clear link between the way in which cultural values are conveyed and the specific underlying values. A loving parenting style promotes collective cultural values, no matter what those values may be.

Today’s knowledge provides guidelines for promoting prosocial and preventing antisocial behavior, and community-wide parenting programs and legislation against corporal punishment can bring about both human and economic gains.

Chapter 24: Gender development

Gender is a salient biological characteristic as well as a social and cultural construct. Children are at an early age aware of differences between boys and girls, and begin to acquire society’s expectations of males and females.

Kohlberg describes three stages in the development of gender awareness: gender identity, gender stability and finally gender constancy.

Gender roles consist of the expectations society has of children and adults by virtue of their gender. Boys seem to be under greater pressure than girls to live up to their gender role, and incur more social sanctions for behavior typical of the other sex.

Gender stereotypes are beliefs about the characteristics of adults and children solely based on their gender. From 3–4 years of age, children gradually adopt culturally transmitted attitudes about the typical vocations and personalities of men and women.

Sex-typing refers to the acquisition of what culture regards as appropriate play, behavior and attitudes for boys and girls. Children vary in their developmental trajectories of gender-typical activity preferences. Adolescents continue to show sex-typed behavior, but also more interest in gender-neutral activities.

Children prefer to play with same-sex peers, but joint play and activities take place at all ages. In mid-adolescence, mixed groups replace gender-segregated groups, and friendships with the other sex become increasingly common.

Boys and girls are in different ways met and treated somewhat differently by their environment, in the home, in kindergarten and school, among peers, and in children’s literature and mass media.

A small percentage of children experience a discrepancy between their anatomical and their perceived gender. Some children and adolescents meet the criteria for a diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” or “gender incongruence.” In the majority, the problems are temporary, but for some they do not desist until the person has decided to change gender. Atypical gender behavior typically leads to relationship problems and emotional disorders, and any intervention entails major professional and ethical issues.

Evolutionary psychology stresses the biological basis of gender-typical behavior patterns. One argument in favor of the theory is that variation in the prenatal sex hormones seem to con- tribute to individual differences in sex-typed behavior, although the influence on gender identity is small. Studies suggest that biology imposes certain constraints, but that gender identity is also affected by upbringing.

Behaviorist theories largely view gender differences as the result of the environment encouraging and penalizing various types of behavior among boys and girls. According to cognitive behavioral theory, children gradually form a generalized understanding of what boys and girls are and how they behave, leading to a development from external control to internal regulation of gender-typical behavior.

Kohlberg’s theory views children’s development of gender concepts as part of their general cognitive development. Gender identity forms the basis for developing gender-typical behavior: boys do “boy things” while girls do “girl things.” According to Bem, sex-typing is the result of adults helping children to develop gender concepts by directing children’s attention to the characteristics of the child’s own and others’ gender-typical behavior from an early age. Developmental intergroup theory views gender as an important group characteristic in society, and therefore as a key element in children’s social identity. Children’s social identity as a boy   or a girl leads them to view the world through “male lenses” or “female lenses,” and act in accordance with what is considered appropriate for one’s own sex and avoid acting like the other sex.

Overall, research suggests that boys and girls are biologically “primed” to develop gender- typical behavior, but that the content of their gender schemas and identities is affected by upbringing. Cultural differences and changes in women’s participation in the workplace and sports are examples of how culture affects gender roles. The multiple interaction between biological differences impacting temperament, cognition and action, the typical activities and experiences of boys and girls, and the responses and influences from their surroundings form the development of children’s perception of the social world.

Chapter 25: Play

Play is difficult to define. Important characteristics are that play has no extrinsic goal and is motivating in itself. Exercise play is the most common form of play in the first 3 years of life. Rough-and-tumble play is a form of social play. Exercise play does not aim at the practical consequences of an action, but the joy of mastery. Simple constructive play shows up in the beginning of the second year and stands for a major part of toddlers’ play, especially in kindergarten. Symbolic play or pretend play involves imagination and taking on the role of a person or an animal, and using objects for other functions than their usual ones. Pretend play often involves several children, but can also be solitary.

The earliest form of play takes place in interaction with adults, while solitary play becomes more dominant in the second year. In parallel play, children play side by side with each other.  In associated group play, children play with the same toys and interact to a certain degree, while collaborative play involves complementary roles and tasks. Nonsocial play can reflect a preference for solitary play, while children who show active social avoidance are at risk of being rejected by their peers and developing internalizing disorders.

Different forms of play first appear at different ages and continue as part of children’s repertoire as long as they play. Play gradually becomes more symbolic and involves more participants.

Decentration means that play includes others than the child itself, decontextualization that children move away from concrete actions and use substitute or imaginary objects in play, and integration that children include several actions in the same play activity. Younger children need help to initiate and sustain play.

There are several views on the function of play. According to Piaget, play reflects cognitive development, but also contributes to development through the activities children participate in. The increase in interactive play is the result of cognitive development. In Vygotsky’s theory, pretend play is acquired through social activities that eventually enable children to play on their own. Although play is fundamentally social and cultural, the individual child gradually develops the ability to create the various roles independently.

The same forms of play are found across cultures, but their content varies with the economic and cultural characteristics of each society. In some societies, children spend a lot of time playing, while in others they have many tasks in and outside the home. The extent to which the amount of play affects development has been difficult to ascertain.

Play reflects children’s motor, cognitive, social and language skills and abilities, and any atypical development in these areas will affect how they play. Children with disabilities may need help to initiate and carry out play activities. However, play is equally important for children in this group as for other children.

Chapter 26: Media and understanding of society

Children are exposed to electronic media early on, with a continual increase in use throughout childhood and adolescence, but with large individual differences. Parents try to regulate their children’s media use and to some extent spend time on media together with their younger children. Media takes away time from other activities.

The learning effect of electronic media is small for toddlers, and two-dimensional images cannot replace the experience of a three-dimensional physical world. Slightly older children and adolescents may profit from media with educational content and purpose, but many educational programs only show a minimal learning effect. There is disagreement about potential positive influences of computer games on cognitive functioning. There is a negative relation between a lot of time spent gaming and academic performance.

The psychodynamic assumption that watching violence leads to a reduction in violent behavior has little support in research. According to cognitive behavioral theory, children imitate aggressive behavior when they see others perform violent actions on video and have less inhibition of aggressive behavior. Another explanation is that the content contributes to shaping children’s and adolescents’ expectations of other people’s behavior and their perceptions of how conflicts can be resolved. Children who witness large amounts of violence in the media form scripts containing aggressive elements, while children who watch prosocial programs more often form scripts with prosocial content. Exposure to violent games can lead to a desensitization to violence.

Prosocial games can lead to an increase in prosocial behavior. Many electronic games include make-believe destructive actions that give a higher score and lead to higher levels of arousal, more aggressive thoughts and behavior, and less empathy and helping behavior. There is a moderate relation between children’s preference for violent games and later violent and criminal behavior. Excessive amounts of time spent on electronic games can be an expression of social and personal problems.

Social media use increases with age, and most adolescents use social media daily. Children and adolescents follow up their existing friends and look for new relationships online. Cyberbullying has the same consequences as other types of bullying but can be more pervasive because it is impossible to protect against. Some children are drawn to social media because they are socially isolated and have difficulty establishing social relationships in real life. Some adolescents show atypical use and signs of Internet addiction.

Societal cognition involves the construction of a set of concepts or a “theory” about society. In preschool age, children have no coherent understanding of society’s functions. In early school age, children begin to understand the parts of society they themselves belong to, and on their way to adolescence, children acquire a basic understanding of societal functions and how different systems work.

Children notice differences between people early on. In preschool age, they become aware that some people earn more than others. In early school age, children begin to use more judgemental terms to describe different professions, but also give more rational explanations for differences in wages and status. Children typically argue that differences are unjust, while positive justifications become more prominent in adolescence. Social background impacts these evaluations.