More screen time for young children is linked to poorer communication and daily living skills later one.
Is one parent enough to raise a well-adjusted child?
Is one parent enough to raise well-adjusted children?
Children who bond closely with one or other parent grow up the most well-adjusted, research finds.
Young children only need to feel a bond with one parent to boost their emotional stability later on.
A warm, secure and positive bond is enough to meet the child’s need for security.
Bonded children are less likely to grow up to be aggressive, troubled, or to display emotional and behavioural problems at school.
Dr Sanghag Kim, study co-author, said:
“There is a really important period when a mother or a father should form a secure relationship with their child, and that is during the first two years of life.
That period appears to be critical to the child’s social and emotional development.”
The conclusions come from research on 86 infants who were followed until the age of 8.
Both parents and teachers were asked about any concerns they had for the children.
Dr Kim said:
“Parents and teachers have different perspectives.
They observe children in different contexts and circumstances.
That is why we collected data from many informants who know the child.”
The news is good for both stay-at-home dads and single parents.
While being bonded with both parents is no bad thing, it is heartening to know that one parent can provide the required emotional closeness and support.
Dr Kim said:
“Some people think the father is not good enough to be the primary caregiver.
Our data show otherwise.”
Children who did not feel a secure attachment were more likely to report fears, worries and aggressive tendencies at school-age.
The study was published in the journal Child Development (Kochanska et al., 2012).
Discover ten classic developmental psychology experiments that study how children’s self, memory, language, learning and more emerge.
Discover ten classic developmental psychology experiments that study how children’s self, memory, language, learning and more emerge.
Once upon a time, although it seems barely credible to us now, we were all children.
We gurgled, we cried, we laughed, we explored, we fell down, and we had very little idea about the journey on which we had just embarked.
Barring mishap, over the first few years of our lives we developed memory, language, self-concept, cognitive, social and emotional abilities.
We took our first steps towards our future selves.
Child psychology — or, more broadly, developmental psychology — is not just the study of children, it is the study of you and me and how we came to be this way.
Just as discovering your history can teach you about the future, so developmental psychology shows us what we once were and even what we will become.
Here are 10 classic developmental psychology studies that have illuminated crucial areas of childhood development.
Each one is a piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is ourselves, and each one reminds us, through examining just one piece, how aspects of experience we now take for granted were once so complex.
Click the links for a more extensive description of each developmental psychology experiment.
Some argue it’s impossible for us to remember anything much from before around two to four years of age.
Others think our memories can go way back – perhaps even to before birth.
The question of infant memory is thorny because it’s hard to test whether adults’ earliest memories are real or imagined.
What psychologists have done, though, is examine the emergence of memory in our first few years with a series of now classic experiments in developmental psychology.
These have found that our memory systems actually work quite well from very early on.
Infants’ memories also seems to work in much the same way as adult memories – it’s just that infant memories are much more fragile.
To this day the ‘mirror test’ remains the best developmental psychology experiment yet developed for examining the emergence of self-concept in infants using the mirror test.
Most people look out for number one, themselves, which makes it strange to think that there was ever a time when we had no concept of ‘me’.
A simple study dating from the early 70s suggests that before the age of around two years old we can’t recognise ourselves in the mirror.
Because of this study, and the many variations in developmental psychology that have followed, some claim that it isn’t until our second birthday that our self-concept emerges.
A classic study of childhood learning suggests true understanding comes from letting go of established preconceptions.
How children revise their understanding of the world is one of the most fascinating areas of developmental psychology.
But it is not just relevant to children; we all have to take on new concepts from time-to-time – even though they may not be as profound as the origin of the species.
It’s tempting to think that learning is largely about memory – especially since in the bad old days of education learning was largely accomplished by rote.
However, the idea of ‘mental models’ suggests children create, and then test, mental models of the way the world works in order to build up our understanding, and that is how children learn.
Attachment styles analyse how people respond to threats and problems in their personal relationships.
People who find relationships difficult often become unable to participate in the ordinary give-and-take of everyday life.
They may become hostile towards others, have problems in education as well as a greater chance of developing psychiatric disorders later in life.
These difficulties sometimes have their roots in the most important early relationships, evidenced in attachment styles.
It’s no wonder that developmental psychologists are so interested in the first relationships we build with our primary caregivers.
These attachment styles are likely to prove a vital influence on all our future relationships, including those with our spouse, our workmates and our own children.
While you can’t blame everything on your parents, early relationship attachment styles are like a template that we take forward with us in life.
One of the most basic forms of social behaviour is copying another person.
Although imitation is something we adults take for granted, it’s actually a pretty demanding process for a young infant.
At the heart of imitation is understanding the difference between yourself and others – something that famous Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget thought didn’t emerge immediately in infants.
Consequently, he argued that infants could not imitate others until they were 8 to 12 months of age.
However, now some researchers think tiny infants who are between 12- and 21-days-old can imitate others.
Theory of mind is when we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes to try and imagine their thoughts, intentions and possible actions.
Without the ability to simulate what other people are thinking we would be lost in the social world.
The emergence of theory of mind in children is a vital developmental milestone; some psychologists think that a failure to develop a theory of mind is a central component of autism.
Some developmental psychology experiments suggest that at about 4- to 6-years old a range of remarkable skills start to emerge in young children that are vital for their successful functioning in society.
They begin to understand that others can hold false beliefs, they themselves can lie, and that others can lie to them — they have a theory of mind.
Object permanence, or object constancy, in developmental psychology is understanding that things continue to exist, even if you cannot seem them.
Research in developmental psychology has found that infants as young as 3.5 months seem to have a basic grasp of object permanence.
It appears that young infants are not necessarily trapped in a world of shapes which have little meaning for them.
Instead, they seem to be intuitive physicists who can carry out rudimentary reasoning about physical concepts like gravity, inertia and object permanence.
An infant’s very first step in their year-long developmental journey to their first word is perhaps their most impressive.
This first step is discriminating and categorising the basic sound components of the language they are hearing.
To get an idea how hard this might be think about listening to someone speaking a language you don’t understand.
Foreign languages can sound like continuous streams of noise in which it’s very hard to pick up where one word starts and another word begins.
Research in developmental psychology finds that until about 11 months of age infants are masters of discriminating phonemes used in all different types of languages.
But after 11 months infants settle down with one set of phonemes for their first language, and lose the ability to discriminate the phonemes from other languages.
The pioneering developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky thought that, in the preschool years, play is the leading source of development.
Through play children learn and practice many basic social skills.
They develop a sense of self, learn to interact with other children, how to make friends, how to lie and how to role-play.
The classic developmental psychology study of how play develops in children was carried out by Mildred Parten in the late 1920s at the Institute of Child Development in Minnesota (Parten, 1933).
She closely observed children between the ages of 2 and 5 years and categorised the types of play.
She found six different types of play, ranging from solitary, through associative to cooperative
Jean Piaget was a developmental psychologist whose four-stage theory, published in 1936, has proved extremely influential.
Piaget’s four stages of development theory has the dubious claim to fame of being one of the most criticised psychological theories ever.
From the sensorimotor stage, through the pre-operational stage, the concrete operational stage and the formal operational stage, his theory attempts to describe how childhood development progresses.
However, Piaget’s experiments and theories about how children build up their knowledge of the world have faced endless challenges, many of them justified.
Read on about them here.
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Babies do not start preferring mom until later than you think.
Babies do not start preferring mom until later than you think.
A misconception often entertained by rookie psychology students is that babies develop a very quick psychological connection to their mothers, perhaps within hours or days of birth.
The reality is, though, that newborn babies don’t have much of a clue what’s going on right after birth.
Although mother (and father) are likely to very quickly form close attachments to their offspring, from the baby’s perspective it takes longer, much longer.
Newborn babies do not begin to prefer mother, father or anyone at first.
In fact, it usually takes infants until they’re about 2 or 3 months old before they start to show a strong preference for mom, dad or anyone.
While a baby is primed for social interaction soon after birth, its abilities are pretty limited.
Here’s the timeline (Simpson, 1999):
Overall, though, the preference for the mother (or other caregiver) is usually fairly weak at first.
Real communication from the baby’s perspective probably doesn’t begin until they’re about 3 or 4 months old.
At around that time they start to initiate social contact with their mothers.
Only between about 3 and 7 months of age do babies start to show a strong preference or attachment for mothers, fathers or members of their own family in general.
This misconception that babies show a preference for mom very quickly may stem from the study of other animals.
Famously, ducks and geese will ‘imprint on’ and follow around the first thing they see after they hatch.
Konrad Lorenz, a pioneer in ethology (animal psychology) found that newly born geese would imprint on him, then try to follow him everywhere, as though he were their mother.
Babies are much more fickle and probably wouldn’t follow you anywhere, even if they could.
The misconception might also stem from a confusion with research from the 1970s that found there was a critical ‘sensitive period’ shortly after birth that was particularly important for bonding between mother and baby.
Again, this research refers to the mother’s bonding with the baby and not vice versa.
Also, as later researchers have pointed out, this so-called critical period turns out not to be that critical at all.
Attachment between mother, father or another caregiver and child can successfully be done at a later stage, just as well as early on.
→ This post is part of a series on 10 myths about the mind.
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The two best parenting strategies help raise the happiest, wealthiest and most moral children.
The two best parenting strategies help raise the happiest, wealthiest and most moral children.
Research finds that the happiest, wealthiest, most moral and smartest children are raised by parents who:
In contrast, parents who combine a strict upbringing with positive attention tend to produce children who are less happy.
These children were, however, just as academically and financially successful.
Naturally, harsh parents produce children with the most negative mentalities who felt the least secure.
Children raised by easygoing parents, though, perform relatively poorly.
They were second only to those raised by harsh parents for low levels of security, financial success, and happiness.
The conclusions come from a Japanese study of 5,000 men and women.
For the research, an online survey asked people a series of question about their relationships with their parents during childhood.
These included statements like:
From this, the researchers found six different types of child-rearing:
“Supportive: High or average levels of independence, high levels of trust, high levels of interest shown in child, large amount of time spent together.
Strict: Low levels of independence, medium-to-high levels of trust, strict or fairly strict, medium-to-high levels of interest shown in child, many rules.
Indulgent: High or average levels of trust, not strict at all, time spent together is average or longer than average.
Easygoing: Low levels of interest shown in child, not strict at all, small amount of time spent together, few rules.
Harsh: Low levels of interest shown in child, low levels of independence, low levels of trust, strict.
Average: Average levels for all key factors.”
These findings are from a discussion paper by Professors Kazuo Nishimura and Tadashi Yagi to be presented at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry in Japan.
Not learning from mistakes? Part of the reason is down to childhood and how people weigh risk and reward.
Not learning from mistakes? Part of the reason is down to childhood and how people weigh risk and reward.
Adults who don’t learn from their mistakes often have had stressful childhoods and find it harder to sense risky situations approaching, research finds.
As a result, looming health, financial or legal problems could be more difficult to spot for people who were maltreated early in life.
But when the bad luck hits, people who have had stressful childhoods get hit harder — perhaps because it is more of a surprise.
Professor Seth Pollak, who led the study, said:
“It’s not that people are overtly deciding to take these negative risks, or do things that might get them in trouble.
It may very well be that their brains are not really processing the information that should tell them they are headed to a bad place, that this is not the right step to take.”
For the study, young adults — some of whom were highly stressed as children — were given a series of tests of risk and reward.
The study showed that those who were maltreated at around 8-years-old found it harder to learn from their mistakes and to sense that loss was coming.
They made the same poor decisions when weighing risks against reward over and over again.
Professor Pollak said:
“It was our observation not that they couldn’t do math, but that they weren’t really attending to the right things.
We didn’t see people improving over time.
You might say, ‘Well, they don’t get how it works.’
But the people with high-stress childhoods, even after many trials, they weren’t using negative feedback to change their behavior and improve.”
Brain scans also revealed that there was relatively low activity in areas related to loss as people were considering their choice — helps to explain why some people don’t learn from their mistakes.
Professor Pollak continued:
“And then, when they would lose, we’d see more activity than expected—an overreaction—in the part of the brain that responds to reward, which makes sense.
If you didn’t catch the cue that you were likely to lose, you’re probably going to be pretty shocked when you don’t win.”
Professor Rasmus Birn, the study’s first author, said they want to expand this finding:
“Now that we have this finding, we can use it to guide us to look at specific networks in the brain that are active and functionally connected.
We may find that childhood stress reshapes the way communication happens across the brain.”
The study was published in the journal PNAS (Birn et al., 2017).
55% of people reported childhood spankings, with men more likely to have been spanked than women.
55% of people reported childhood spankings, with men more likely to have been spanked than women.
Childhood spanking can lead to many adult mental health problems, research concludes.
Adults spanked as children are more likely to feel depressed, drink too much, use illegal drugs and attempt suicide.
Dr Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, who led the research, said:
“Placing spanking in a similar category to physical/emotional abuse experiences would increase our understanding of these adult mental health problems.”
The study involved over 8,300 people aged 19 to 97.
They were asked how often they endured childhood spankings and whether they were abused in any way.
55 percent reported childhood spankings, with men more likely to have been spanked than women.
Those who were spanked had a higher risk of being depressed as adults, along with increased risk of other mental health problems.
It is important to avoid harsh parenting at all costs, said Dr Shawna Lee, an expert in the effects of child mistreatment:
“This can be achieved by promoting evidence-based parenting programs and policies designed to prevent early adversities, and associated risk factors.
Prevention should be a critical direction for public health initiatives to take.”
The study was published in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect (Merrick et al., 2017).
Cool kid problems mean that despite being popular in high school, things can go wrong after that.
Cool kid problems mean that despite being popular in high school, things can go wrong after that.
Teenagers who try to ‘act cool’ in early adolescence grow up to experience a range of problems in early adulthood, research finds.
‘Cool kids’ tend to do things like hang out with more attractive people, become romantically involved at an early age and engage in delinquent activity (smoking, drinking and petty crimes).
However, by the age of 22, these ‘cool kids’ are rated as less socially competent than their peers.
They were also more likely to have substance abuse problems and to be engaged in criminal activities.
The conclusions come from a study of 183 teens who were followed from the age of 13 through to the age of 23.
They all attended public schools and were from ethnically and racially diverse backgrounds.
Professor Joseph P. Allen, the study’s first author, said:
“It appears that while so-called ‘cool’ teens’ behavior might have been linked to early popularity, over time, these teens needed more and more extreme behaviors to try to appear cool, at least to a subgroup of other teens.
So they became involved in more serious criminal behavior and alcohol and drug use as adolescence progressed.
These previously cool teens appeared less competent – socially and otherwise – than their less-cool peers by the time they reached young adulthood.”
The study was published in the journal Child Development (Allen et al., 2014).
Research on the psychology of play suggests that both children and adults benefit.
Research on the psychology of play suggests that both children and adults benefit.
Children who play outdoors have a stronger sense of purpose and self-fulfilment than those who don’t, a study finds.
The study, published in the Journal of the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, found that kids who were outdoors playing for between 5 to 10 hours a week had a stronger spiritual connection to the Earth (Van Wieren & Kellert, 2013).
The study’s lead author, Gretel Van Wieren, said:
“These values are incredibly important to human development and well-being.
We were surprised by the results.
Before we did the study, we asked, ‘Is it just a myth that children have this deep connection with nature?’
But we found it to be true in pretty profound ways.”
The small study of the psychology of play involving 10 children from a mostly Christian background (7 of the 10) examined how they interacted with the natural world through in-depth interviews, diaries and simple observation.
The children who spent more time outside felt more humbled by nature’s power as well as feeling a sense of belonging in the world.
Being outdoors more also enhanced the children’s appreciation of beauty.
These children took greater notice of colour, symmetry and balance in nature as well as displaying greater imagination and curiosity themselves.
Van Wieren continued:
“This is the first generation that’s significantly plugged in to a different extent and so what does this mean?
Modern life has created a distance between humans and nature that now we’re realizing isn’t good in a whole host of ways.
So it’s a scary question: How will this affect our children and how are we going to respond?”
In a fascinating coda, the researchers also interviewed the parents and it emerged that the children who spent the most time outdoors had parents who had done the same when they were children.
The parents felt that this experience had significantly shaped their adult lives.
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Toxic early life stress may critically affect memory, learning and the way emotions are processed.
Toxic early life stress may critically affect memory, learning and the way emotions are processed.
Chronic early life stress — like that from abuse, neglect or poverty — can have a lasting impact on the developing brain, according to research.
Toxic stress at an early age may critically affect memory, learning and the way emotions are processed, finds a study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.
The research investigated exactly why early life stress can lead to such a wide range of negative outcomes later in life, including depression, anxiety, poor educational achievement and also physical problems (Hanson et al., 2014).
Seth Pollak, co-leader of the study, said:
“We haven’t really understood why things that happen when you’re 2, 3, 4 years old stay with you and have a lasting impact.
Given how costly these early stressful experiences are for society…unless we understand what part of the brain is affected, we won’t be able to tailor something to do about it.”
The researchers recruited 128 children at around the age of 12 who had experienced neglect, abuse or other serious, chronic stressors in the first few years of their lives.
The children and their caregivers were interviewed about their early life experiences and any behavioural problems they now had.
Their brains were also scanned, with a special focus on the hippocampus and amygdala, both of which are heavily involved in how the brain processes emotions.
The results from these children were compared with other children from middle-class backgrounds who had not been maltreated.
What emerged was that those who had suffered chronic stress in early life had smaller amygdalas than those who had not.
In addition, those who were from very poor backgrounds or who had been physically abused also had smaller hippocampi.
While the implications of the reduced size of the amygdala is unknown, a smaller hippocampus is a recognised risk factor for negative outcomes.
Unsurprisingly the children who’d suffered early life stress also had more behavioural problems, and the smaller the affected brain structures were, the greater the behavioural problems.
Seth Pollak said:
“For me, it’s an important reminder that as a society we need to attend to the types of experiences children are having.
We are shaping the people these individuals will become.”
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