Development

•  Developmental Psychology: Studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span.

Social Development

• Attachment: an emotional tie with another person
• According to Bowlby and Ainsworth, children develop an attachment style to their primary caregiver early in development.
• Secure Attachment: A strong attachment; the infant is distressed by the mother’s absence and immediately seeks contact with her when she returns (70% of infants)
• Avoidant Attachment: The infant does not seek contact with the mother, and shows little distress when separated from her. The infant avoids contact upon her return. (20% of infants)
• Ambivalent/Resistant Attachment: Insecure in the mother’s presence, becomes very distressed when she leaves, and resists contact upon her return (10% of infants)
• Authoritarian Parents: impose rules and expect obedience.
• Permissive Parents: Submit to their children’s desires, make few demands, and use little punishment
• Authoritative Parents: both demanding and responsive. They exert control not only by settling rules and enforcing them but also by explaining the reasons and encourage open discussion.
• Children with highest self-esteem, self-reliance, and social competence usually have warm, concerned, authoritative parents.
• Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development

1. Trust vs. Mistrust: Infancy (up to 1 year)
2. Autonomy vs.Shame and Doubt: Toddlerhood (1 to 2 years)
3. Initiative vs Guilt: Preschooler (3 to 5 years)
4. Competence vs Inferiority: Elementary School (6 years to puberty)
5. Identity vs Role Confusion: Adolescence (teen years into 20s)
6. Intimacy vs Isolation: Young Adulthood (20s to early 40s)
7. Generativity vs Stagnation: Middle Adulthood (40s to 60s)
8. Integrity vs Despair: Late Adulthood (late 60s and up)

Cognitive Development

• Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

1. Sensorimotor Stage: Experiencing the world through senses and actions; birth to nearly 2 years
2. Preoperational Stage: Representing things with words and images; use intuitive rather than logical reasoning; do not understand the notion of conservation; 2 to about 6 or 7 years
3.  Concrete Operational Stage: Thinking logically about concrete events; grasping concrete analogies and performing arithmetic operations.
4. Formal Operational Stage: Abstract Reasoning; about 12 through adulthood

• Assimilation: Interpreting one’s new experiences in term of one’s existing schemas
• Accommodation: adapting one’s new current understanding (schema) to incorporate new info
• Artificialism: the tendency to consider that physical objects and events were created by people
• Animalistic: The tendency to endow physical objects and events with psychological qualities
• Kohlberg’s Levels of Moral Thinking

1.  Preconventional Morality: Before age 9, most children have a preconventional morality of self-interest.  They obey either to avoid punishment or to gain concrete rewards.
2. Conventional Morality: By early adolescence, morality usually evolves to a more conventional level that cares for other and upholds laws and social rules s imply because they are the laws and codes.
3. Postconventional Morality: some of those who develop the abstract reasoning of formal operational thought may come to a third level. Postconventional morality affirms people’s agreed-upon rights or follows what one personality perceives as basic ethical principles. 

• Fluid Intelligence: One’s ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tends to decrease during late adulthood
• Crystallized Intelligence: One’s accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age. 

parenting styles

Diana Baumrind identified 3 distinct styles of parenting: 

1. permissive
   - few rules
   - minimal demands
   - allow children to reach own decisions
   - children tend to be immature, impulsive, and often fail to respect others
   
   
2. authoritative
   - firm rules
   - reasonable demands
   - listen to child’s viewpoint, but still insist on responsible behaviour
   - children tend to be well-adjusted, goal oriented, and socially competent
   
   
3. authoritarian
   - strict rules
   - enforce strict punishments 
   - rarely listen to child’s viewpoint
   - children tend to be moody, aggressive, and lacking in good communication skills 

Dahomey's Green Folly Sources Accidental Children

Martin Luther’s Accidental Revolution by Keenan Malik (Pandaemonium): Martin Luther was a strange kind of character, not really a revolutionary; when he nailed his 95 theses to the church door, he kind of knew he was asking for trouble, but he didn’t quite expect to start a revolution. At the same time, he was very conservative religiously (if not traditionalist), believing that we have no free will (e.g., that he literally had no choice but to nail the theses to the door) and that there was no place for reason in religion. So when he said that “if you respect and follow the judgement of human reason, you are bound to say either that there is no God or that God is unjust”, he thought we should not follow the judgement of human reason. [via]

Human Folly by Matthew Adams (New Humanist): Erasmus was a Dutch contemporary of Martin Luther who wrote a strange, genre-bending book called In Praise Of Folly, which was a hugely controversial book, poking fun at sacred cows during a time when sacred cows carried swords. This included a sort-of sarcastic Christopher Hitchens-esque volley against religion, which Erasmus later in the book shows to be folly. But which proved to be quite influential; once the seed of doubt is planted, it’s only a few years until you get Enlightenment, apparently. [via]

Children In The Roman Empire by Peter Thonemann (The Times Literary Supplement): The Ancient Roman poet Statius talks in rapturous terms about a newborn infant he is behold, full of wonder that the child was playing with his face. A new father? Nope - this is a slave that belongs to him, the child of two of his other slaves. And…later in life (but not that much later), the same child will probably be an erotic plaything for Statius (as well as a beloved child), and this was completely normal to the Romans. So, being a child in the Roman Empire could really be exceptionally weird. [via]

Dahomey’s Women Warriors by Mike Dash (Past Imperfect/Smithsonian): Modern day Benin used to be called Dahomey; and the kingdom of Dahomey’s army, when the French invaded in the late 19th century, was largely made up of women. And these women were renowned for their fierceness in battle, for fighting as well as any man. Unfortunately, you can fight fiercely all you want, but the French had modern weapons and the Dahomey women didn’t. But some of the warriors survived until surprisingly late into the 20th century.

Sources Of Illumination by Miri Rubin (Times Higher Education): Universities are only 800-900 years old; starting first in France and Italy and spreading quickly to the UK. And they were originally started in order to train the bureaucracies of the power systems that existed at the time (the states and churches); and so there was a focus on Latin and how to implement law. Once upon a time, the Bachelor of Arts meant that you had the gold standard of training, as far as literacy and ability to administer bureaucratic stuff went. [via]

Green Gold by Jack Turner (New Yorker): There was a craze in France, in particular, in the late 19th century for the drink absinthe; in the end absinthe was banned because it was thought to contain a psychoactive substance - wormwood - which sent men mad. And so Turner follows a group of men trying to resuscitate the art of making absinthe, using vintage distillery equipment and working out the subtleties of the old recipes that have been handed down.