Is childrens development a universal staged process or a social and cultural process?

Authors Avatar

TMA 1 Option 1

Is children’s development a universal staged process or a social and cultural process?

Children’s development can be looked at and understood in contrasting approaches.  The scientific approach looks at the facts about children by composing theories and consequently testing them through observing and experimenting.  Jean Piaget is a developmental theorist who did his research in this way.  The second type of approach used to understand child development is that of the social constructionist.  The social constructionist approach takes into account the way people make sense of the world and how they look at it from an overall point of view i.e. world view.  The final approach used is one most commonly used by organisations, institutions and people that are in the roles of providing children’s care and ensuring their welfare.  The applied approach deals with the practical questions about children in everyday life in regards to what the obligations and needs are towards them from their parents or professionals that are working with or for them.  By looking at the first two approaches in more detail and looking at the contrasting views surrounding them a conclusion will be drawn as to whether it is one specific approach that applies to the development of children or whether it is a combination of the two.

The general idea behind the scientific approach is that all children go through the same stages of development on a physical, emotional and moral level at the same time regardless of where they are in the world.    The scientific approach was used by theorists such as Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg and by using this they were “seeking to establish universal laws of cause and effect” (Rogers, 2003 p.12) for development in children and did this by devising theories and then testing them through observing and experimenting.  

Piaget watched groups of boys playing marbles for one of his earlier studies and noticed that different ages approached the game in different ways with regards to making up rules and the interactions between them at different ages.  Through his observations he devised a theory which is referred to as his theory of ‘cognitive development’ which was the idea that the thinking capacity of children do no gradually improve as they get older but that the way in how they think changes.  The conservation of liquids task (Rogers, 2003 p.13) which is one of Piaget’s experiments was used to assess this theory and Piaget found that the child was not able to confirm that the amount of water was the same and that it was merely being put into a different shaped cylinder making it look like there was more water than previously.

Join now!

Moral values and judgements are developments in children which Kohlberg believed could also be assessed using the scientific approach. He used Piaget’s theory of cognitive development which included a child's development of moral reasoning which he tested with the mountains task (Rogers, 2003 p.15) showing a child’s inability to de-centre and view the world from another’s point of view.  Kohlberg believed that moral judgements are universal and that they are not based on personal or biased thoughts.  He devised a theory of stages in moral development and to test it he used moral dilemmas to discover at which age children ...

This is a preview of the whole essay