Life doesn’t stand still. We are in a state of constant change throughout our lives. When we ask ourselves who we are, we think of ourselves in terms of who we are now. But we have been and will be many different people in our lifetime; an infant, a child, a teenager, a young adult, a mature person, and an aged person. Young children understand their worlds in ways that are so different from adults.
To understand ourselves fully, we must understand the process of development, the more-or-less predictable changes in behavior associated with increasing age. Both nature and nurture work together in development. Without getting some advice (nurture), a child can’t use a baseball glove correctly. But the child must be physically developed enough to use the glove (nature). You cannot effectively teach children to do much with a glove until age 4 or so, after considerable physical development has taken place (nature). We are creatures of complex combinations of both our nature and nurture (Lahey (2007) page 316, 317 para 1).
It is very important to understand that it’s normal for child development to be highly variable, even when they are raised in typical conditions. This is true in two senses:
a) There are differences between children in their development
b) Children vary in the rate of their own development from one period to the next
Parents must make important decisions about raising children that can have a major impact on their child’s emotional and intellectual development (Lahey (2007) page 320, para 6).
What forces causes us to change as we pass through life? What factors determine whether we grow up to be baseball players or umpires, musicians or opticians? We will look at the factors that play key roles in the process of development (Lahey (2007) page 316, para 1).
Sigmund Freud gave us a language for our dreams, our deep secrets, our darkest