Child psychology is the scientific study of developmental change from birth through approximately age 12. It asks how children think, feel, relate to others, and understand the world — and how individual differences, relationships, and social contexts shape these processes. PSY6025 gives practitioners the developmental knowledge that contextualizes assessment findings, informs intervention design, and anchors parent consultation in evidence.
Cognitive development: Piaget's theory
Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development (1952, 1954, 1963) proposed that children construct knowledge through two complementary processes: assimilation (incorporating new information into existing schemas) and accommodation (modifying schemas to fit new information). Piaget described four invariant stages of cognitive development, each representing qualitatively different ways of thinking:
- Sensorimotor stage (0–2 years): Infants learn through sensory experience and motor action; object permanence (understanding that objects continue to exist when not perceived) develops progressively through six sub-stages, achieving full object permanence by 18–24 months.
- Preoperational stage (2–7 years): Symbolic thinking and language emerge; children are characterized by egocentrism (difficulty taking another's perspective), animism (attributing life to inanimate objects), and lack of conservation (failure to understand that quantity is preserved despite changes in appearance). Centration and irreversibility characterize this stage.
- Concrete operational stage (7–12 years): Children master conservation, classification, seriation, and transitive inference in relation to concrete objects and events; logical operations are limited to tangible, present experiences.
- Formal operational stage (12+): Abstract and hypothetical reasoning emerges; adolescents can reason about possibilities, test hypotheses systematically, and use propositional logic.
Neo-Piagetian and information processing perspectives have refined the Piagetian framework, demonstrating that infant capabilities were underestimated (habituation studies show object permanence understanding earlier than Piaget claimed) and that cognitive development is more domain-specific and continuous than stage theory suggests.
Attachment theory
Bowlby and Ainsworth's attachment framework
- Bowlby's attachment theory (1969, 1973, 1980): Attachment is an evolutionary-based system that keeps the vulnerable infant in proximity to a protective caregiver. The attachment behavioral system is activated by threat (internal: hunger, pain; external: danger, separation) and deactivated by proximity to the attachment figure. Internalized working models of attachment — cognitive-emotional representations of self, others, and relationships formed through repeated interaction patterns — guide relationship expectations throughout life.
- Ainsworth's Strange Situation (1978): A structured laboratory procedure revealing four patterns of infant attachment: Secure (B) — distressed by separation, easily comforted on reunion, uses caregiver as safe base for exploration; Anxious-avoidant (A) — minimally distressed by separation, avoids caregiver on reunion, suppresses attachment behavior; Anxious-ambivalent/resistant (C) — highly distressed by separation, difficult to comfort on reunion, angry and clingy; Disorganized/disoriented (D) — no consistent strategy, fearful or confused behavior on reunion; most associated with maltreatment and later psychopathology.
- Internal working models and continuity: Secure early attachment predicts better social competence, emotion regulation, and mental health in childhood and adolescence; though continuity is not deterministic — later relationships and life experiences can alter attachment patterns (earned security).
Key topics in PSY6025
- Language acquisition: Nativist (Chomsky's LAD/UG) vs. social-interactionist (Bruner's LASS, social scaffolding) vs. statistical learning accounts; critical period for language; bilingualism and language development; language milestones (joint attention by 9–12 months; first words ~12 months; two-word combinations ~18–24 months; grammar explosion 24–36 months); language impairment identification
- Temperament: Thomas and Chess's nine dimensions (activity level, rhythmicity, approach/withdrawal, adaptability, intensity, mood, persistence, distractibility, threshold) and three temperamental constellations (easy, difficult, slow-to-warm-up); Rothbart's three-factor model (surgency/extraversion, negative affectivity, effortful control); goodness-of-fit between child temperament and parental/environmental demands
- Play: Parten's (1932) social play stages (solitary, parallel, associative, cooperative); Smilansky's elaboration (functional, constructive, dramatic, games-with-rules); play as a vehicle for cognitive, social, language, and emotional development; play deficits in autism spectrum disorder and their implications for intervention
- Theory of mind: Understanding that others have beliefs, desires, and mental states that differ from one's own; false-belief tasks (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) show typical acquisition at ~4 years; theory of mind deficits in ASD and their implications for social skill intervention
- Moral development: Piaget's two-stage model (heteronomous → autonomous morality); Kohlberg's six-stage model (pre-conventional → conventional → post-conventional); Gilligan's critique (Kohlberg overemphasized justice over care); moral emotions (guilt, shame, empathy) and prosocial behavior development
- Child psychopathology: DSM-5 diagnoses common in childhood — ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, specific learning disorders, oppositional defiant disorder, separation anxiety, childhood-onset depression; developmental considerations in diagnosis and treatment
PSY6025 assignments include developmental case analyses, theory comparison papers, and attachment assessment write-ups
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Developmental case studies, cognitive development papers, attachment analyses, Piaget/Vygotsky comparisons, child psychopathology write-ups.
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Frequently asked questions
Piaget and Vygotsky represent two of the most influential frameworks in developmental psychology and are frequently compared in PSY6025 papers. Piaget viewed cognitive development as a primarily biological, universal process driven by the child's own active exploration and logical reasoning — the child as "lone scientist" constructing knowledge through direct manipulation of the environment. Social interaction plays a supporting role but does not drive development. Vygotsky (1978) placed social interaction and cultural tools at the center of cognitive development — "the zone of proximal development" (ZPD) captures the distance between what a child can do independently and what they can do with the guidance of a more knowledgeable other (MKO). Developmental progress happens through guided participation — scaffolding — that begins with external support from an MKO and gradually becomes internalized (private speech, then inner speech). Key contrasts: Piaget saw language as dependent on thought (you need to develop the cognitive structures first, then language represents them); Vygotsky saw thought and language as initially separate systems that merge around age 2, with verbal thought thereafter dependent on social language. For practitioners, Vygotsky's ZPD has direct implications for teaching and intervention design — working at the upper boundary of a child's current competence with appropriate scaffolding is more effective than working at the level the child has already mastered.