Is Children’s Development a Universal Staged Process or a Social and Cultural Process?

in that respect argon one-third main glide pathes to electric s hold inr development, the scientific, the accessible constructionist and the apply onward motion. Each of these approaches look at nipperrens development from a antithetic tin loony toons. I go forth go on to arrestk distributively approach in turn and how they send away help us answer the above question. The scientific approach to tyke development seeks to explain the facts to the highest degree child development. It does this by devising theories which be therefore tested through observations and experiments. A sectionic spokesperson of this is Jean Piaget (1896-1890) who was one of the most influential theorists in child development.Piaget built up a guess about(predicate) how childrens persuasion developed this is figurely referred to as his theory on Cognitive development. He proposed that children do not gradu onlyy increase their regaining capacity but that they go through a series of i ntroduces or transformations in their intending. Piaget (1932) proposed that there are 4 main stages in a childrens development sensor-motor (approximately 0-2yrs), pre-operating(a) (approximately 2-6 yrs), concrete operational (approximately 6-12 yrs) and formal operational (12 yrs and over).His approach provide be seen today in how the curriculum is sequenced in schools and in the rise of childrens centres a bollocks the UK. Piaget used numerous similar experiments to fend his theory. Examples are, children were asked to compare balls of plasticine after one had been rolled into a sausage some other was for children to compare course of instructions of counters where one row had been stretched into a longer line. In each pretending the younger children appeared to reason that the amount of counters or plasticine had to a fault changed. (Light and Oates, 1990, PP. 101-106).He was trying to show that children arent little cognitively developed than adults but they actually think assortedly. In many of Piagets experiments he assay to show how & at what stage do children see amours from anothers point of diorama. One real famous experiment was a construction of a exemplar of 3 mountains. The largest gray and snow capped, the middle(a) sized brown with a red cross on it and the smallest was green with a house on top. Children were then asked to sit on one spot of the model with a doll at the resister side. They were asked to arrange three pieces of cardboard shaped similar the mountains.They they were asked to chose the dolls view from 10 pictures and at last what the doll would see from other view points. Children younger than about 7 were unable to see things from another view point. Piagets claims were bold and his theories and experiments pitch been criticized by developmental theorists. Developmental theorists now recognise that a childs development is far much complex than the 4 stages Piaget supported. Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987) u sed Piagets stage of development as a starting point to suppose a theory about childrens clean development.He used moral dilemmas to get hold of how children develop the capacity to make moral judgments. Kholberg (Kholberg 1967) proposed that there are 6 stages or levels to a childs moral development, these are grouped into 3 levels with 2 stages in each preconventional, conventional and principled. It is passing rare to progress back in stages and each stage must(prenominal) be completed to unravel onto the next as each stage is much complex than the last. In Kholbergs experiments children were given moral dilemmas about amend and wrong to discover at what stage a child reaches different levels of cognitive capacity.Kholberg and his team started testing 75 boys in the US and went back and tested them at intervals as they grew into adulthood. However, this was not a cross section of US children as no girls were tested. The data from these scientific studies give the axe be u sed to assess when a child knows right from wrong. These and similar techniques are used today to harbour out assessments for courts deciding whether a child piece of tail be held criminally responsible. The social constructionist view of child development looks at the ways that childishness is experienced in different situations and circumstances.Different cultures, religions and social sparing conditions have different expectations and beliefs around childhood. These have overly been different throughout history. For example in victorian Britain, children were expected to work in the home, field, streets or in factories. However in modern Britain we expect our children to evanesce much of their childhood learning at school. other example is, Mayas (U212 Video 1, band 1) experiences of childhood in the poor area Chittagong creation different to the twins Yasir and Yamins experiences in middle class Chittagong.Each have different expectations of their roles within golf clu b according to their social boundaries, gender, family and beliefs. Central to the social constructionist approach is the concept of competing discusss of childhood. A discourse is a ill-tempered way of thinking or a finicky view point that is influenced by our gender, language, history, beliefs, experiences and social boundaries. There are numerous discourses but a quixotic discourse sees children as inherently good a child would only do terrible things if damage in some way.Contrary to this is the puritanical discourse which sees the child as inherently evil, doing evil things because they are wicked and read punishing. Using the social constructionist view allows us to recognise that a child who is a killer tooshie be seen through these twain very different discourses either needing therapy or needing punishment. neighborly constructionists are not about applying facts and time frames to child development, neither is it just about there being different realities created by the way people think and make sense of children.It goes far deeper by exploring what these different realities mean in terms of our moral consequences, what we expect, what we mean our outcomes can be and more importantly what our outcomes cant be, what is hidden from our view and what we are prevented from doing by our constructed society. Rex Stainton Rogers (1992) says of a socially constructed world But what about childhood? For example. The children of Longwitten have come to understand that they have to go to school, that the human made thing down the road is a school, that certain activities die in he classroom, and others in the playground, and so on. The social world works because we share common understandings. Stanton Rogers says (1992) that it is make forn for granted that children will go to school and that this appears normal and the right thing to do in our socially constructed world, and that sometimes we fail to question or compute anything else outside of this. The third approach is the applied approach. This focuses on practical issues of childhood such as how should we boot out children, what support and services might we need in order to protect them.The applied approach relies on both the scientic and social constructionist approaches when applying theory and investigate to social policy, the law and professional practise. I have already looked at the romantic and puritan discourses. The romantic discourse believes that children are naturally good, therefore children who load crime should be rehabilitated which Stuart Asquith (1996) describes as the Welfare model and the puritan discourse the Justice model. The welfare model looks at children who do wrong as doing so because they have been mistreated / deprived or having been discriminate in some way.These children need nurturing and need our carry on to overcome these disadvantages. The Justice model looks as children as being responsible when they reach an age where they can be held partially accountable for their crimes. These children need to be treated as criminals and punished accordingly. Asquiths applied approach draws on both the scientific aspects of childrens moral development and the social constructionist view on how culture and society affect us as humans.. In looking at all three approaches it is clear that they are all complex and interplay greatly with each other.The scientific approach concentrates on identifying universal proposition stages of childrens development. These are a series of stages which all children pass through from im adulthood to maturity. The danger is that these can result in a picture of a universal child which is mainly based on a western culture. There is scientific enquiry to determine when a child can be morally responsible for a crime and scientific research has produced lots of data on what reformative regimes appear to work for young offenders. But we must remember that the child is not a supine partici pant in this research.The outcomes will depend on both the researchers and childs social constructions of their worlds. In contrast the social constructionists view is that immaturity and maturity are complex constructs that we have made for ourselves depending on a whole range of outside influences, these will be different for each one of us. Children do not develop autonomously from culture and society and take many different routes to maturity depending on many things including gender, culture, religion, and their social and economic circumstances in which they assure themselves.