Introducing Child Psychology

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy

Defenceless as babies are, they have mothers at their command, families to protect the mothers, societies to support the structure of families, and traditions to give a cultural continuity to systems of tending and training.
Erikson

later strong relationships and emotional experiences throughout life contribute to the individual’s psychosocial development.

The third point is evident in the contribution of Donald Winnicott’s ideas to the work of psychotherapists. In their work, therapists seek to re-create the qualities of the early ideal mother-and-infant relationship as a way of healing older children and adults and forming psychological well-being and health. In essence, this ideal relationship offers love and playfulness, something Winnicott referred to as a ‘play space’, in combination with encouragement to be independent and self-aware.

All that matters is love and work.
Freud

Fixation

An aspect of the unconscious mental processes of an individual, in which all psychic energies and actions are intensely focused on a thing or person.

Chomsky, like Bruner, saw humans as active learners in a particular social-cultural context.

This scaffolding is the support offered to the child in the form of encouragement, questions, a structured problem-solving approach, simplifying the task and allowing the child to do the simpler aspects to give them confidence, and instructions and demonstration.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) – all possible learning and development that a child can achieve with effort, support and the right conditions.

Teachers should try to provide lots of play-based learning in well-equipped, rich and stimulating environments for children in the sensori-motor stage (below two years of age). Children in the pre-operational and concrete operational stages (two to seven and seven to eleven respectively) need increasingly challenging learning activities that involve opportunities to classify, sort, order, locate and conserve using concrete objects. Children of eleven years and above need to be presented with complex and increasingly abstract and moral social issues and be allowed to reflect, research and discuss. Over time, the levels of adult support should decrease in order to help them to become increasingly independent and self-directing in their learning and problem-solving.