Lecture: Theories of Development
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 2
Opening
Picture a preschool teacher kneeling beside a toddler who has pushed away a helping hand and announced, "Me do it." Picture a pediatric nurse explaining a child's behavior to a worried family, and a youth coach deciding when to praise a player. All three of them are leaning on a theory, whether they name it or not. In this lecture, I want you to learn to name the theory you are leaning on, and to see what it shows and what it hides.
In Week 1, you built the map. You learned the three domains, physical, cognitive, and social-emotional, and the periods of childhood. You met the big questions, like nature and nurture working together. You also met the running case, an illustrative child we follow from birth to 15, and Bronfenbrenner's picture of the systems around a child. This week, we ask why children change, and each answer is a theory. Next week, in Week 3, you'll learn how researchers and educators watch children carefully enough to test these theories.
Here's the plan. We'll say what a theory does. Then we'll meet Erikson's stages, behaviorism, social learning, two theories of thinking, the ecological model, and the study of evolution and behavior. We'll finish by reading one toddler's moment through three of those lenses.
1. What a theory does
Let's start with something you've done many times without a label. You see a child do something, and you guess why. Maybe a toddler in a clinic waiting room clings to a parent when a stranger walks in. One guess is that toddlers fear new people. Another guess is that they've learned strangers sometimes bring shots. Each guess tells you what to watch for next.
That's the heart of a theory. A developmental theory is an organized explanation of how and why children change that ties many observations together and makes predictions that research can test. I like to say a good theory does three jobs. It explains what you saw. It predicts what you should see next. And you can test it, because a prediction can turn out to be wrong.
Go back to the waiting room. The first guess predicts that toddlers will cling to any stranger. The second predicts they'll cling mostly to people who look like they work at the clinic. Watch enough toddlers, and those two guesses come apart.
Here's why this course uses several theories instead of one. Each theory was built to explain certain parts of development, and it does those parts well. One theory is strong on feelings and relationships. Another is strong on how experience changes behavior. No single theory covers every domain at every age, so we keep several lenses in the bag.
Pause and try this. A classmate says, "Erikson's theory is older, so newer theories must have replaced it." What would you say back?
Hold your reply for a moment before I go on.
Here's the answer. Newer theories didn't replace it, because each theory answers a different question. Erikson's stages, learning theory, and the ecological model are still used side by side because each explains something the others don't.
2. Erikson's psychosocial stages
Think about a toddler learning to use the toilet, a preschooler inventing a game, and a teenager choosing friends. Each is facing a different challenge, and each challenge involves other people. One theory lines those challenges up in order.
The story starts with Freud. Freud began the psychoanalytic tradition, the line of theory that looks for the roots of personality in early childhood experience and inner drives. Erik Erikson built on that tradition, but he turned toward the child's relationships and social world. In Childhood and Society, in 1950, he set out his psychosocial theory: eight stages across life, each centered on a crisis between a person's needs and the demands of the social world. Five of those stages fall in childhood and adolescence. The other three belong to adulthood, and this course names them in words only.
A psychosocial crisis is the central tension of a stage, written as two poles. Now, "crisis" sounds scary. Here it means a turning point every child meets. Nobody passes or fails it, and most children end up somewhere between the two poles.
Here are the five childhood and adolescent stages in order, which the course calls Dataset E. Stage 1 is trust versus mistrust, in infancy, about birth to 1. Stage 2 is autonomy versus shame and doubt, in toddlerhood, about 1 to 3. Stage 3 is initiative versus guilt, in early childhood, about 3 to 6. Stage 4 is industry versus inferiority, in middle childhood, about 6 to 11. Stage 5 is identity versus role confusion, in adolescence. Every age I said there was "about." The ages are approximate, never deadlines.
Pause and try this. Our running case's record R4 shows a child of 2½ years. Which of Erikson's five childhood and adolescent stages does that age fall in?
Count through the five stages in your head.
Here's the answer. It falls in stage 2, autonomy versus shame and doubt. Toddlerhood runs about 1 to 3, and 2½ sits inside that range.
3. Behaviorism and operant conditioning
Now picture a birthday party in a community room. A 3-year-old hands a toy to a cousin, and an adult smiles and says, "Thank you for sharing!" At the next party, the same child shares again. A behaviorist would say: look at what happened right after the sharing.
Behaviorism began with John Watson's paper, "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It", in 1913. Behaviorism is the approach that holds psychology should study observable behavior and how experience shapes it, rather than unseen mental states. If you can't see it or count it, a behaviorist sets it aside.
Later, Skinner studied how consequences shape behavior. Operant conditioning is Skinner's account of learning in which the consequences that follow a behavior change how likely it is to happen again. Two words do the work. Reinforcement is a consequence that makes the behavior more likely to happen again, such as praise or a success. Punishment is a consequence that makes the behavior less likely to happen again. Notice that both words describe an effect on behavior. "Punishment" here is a technical word, not a recommendation and not a synonym for harsh treatment.
So, at the party, the test is simple to state and takes time to run. Does sharing happen more often after the smile? If yes, the smile worked as reinforcement.
Pause and try this. A toddler stops reaching for a cup after a sibling frowns each time. In operant terms, what did the frown do?
Think about what happened to the reaching.
Here's the answer. The frown worked as punishment. The reaching became less likely after the frown followed it, and that effect is what makes a consequence a punishment.
Behaviorism is strong wherever you can see and count behavior. It's weaker on what a child thinks or feels, because it chooses not to study those things.
4. Social learning: learning by watching
Here's a moment behaviorism struggles with. In a family living room, a 2-year-old watches an older sibling practice a dance. Nobody claps for the toddler or offers a treat. Ten minutes later, the toddler is spinning and bouncing in the same pattern. The toddler learned before any consequence arrived.
That's where social learning theory comes in: children learn by watching what other people do and what happens to them, not only from the consequences of their own actions.
The famous test is the Bobo doll study. In 1961, Bandura, Ross, and Ross found that children who watched an adult act aggressively toward an inflatable Bobo doll were more likely to imitate that aggression than children who did not watch it. The researchers compared children who saw different things, so they could link the watching to the copying.
I want to slow down here, because this study gets stretched. People sometimes say it proves that one cartoon makes a child aggressive. That's not what it found. It found that watching an adult's aggression made imitating it more likely. That's evidence that children learn by observation. It isn't a finding about one show, about every child, or about lasting harm.
Pause and try this. In the living-room story, which theory explains the toddler copying the dance before anyone clapped?
Picture the order of events before you answer.
Here's the answer. Social learning theory explains it. The toddler learned the moves by watching the sibling, with no reward first.
And operant conditioning still has a job. If the family claps, does the dancing happen more often? Watching can teach a behavior, and consequences can then make it more or less likely.
5. Two theories of thinking, named now
Imagine a 4-year-old at a library story time who's sure the moon follows the family car. Then imagine an older child at a library homework table, stuck on a puzzle until a volunteer offers a hint. Both moments are about thinking, but two theories would explain them differently.
Piaget's cognitive-developmental theory describes how children's thinking changes in four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational, each with approximate ages. Piaget saw the child as an active thinker who builds understanding by exploring, a bit like a scientist running small experiments. The course teaches those stages one at a time, starting in Week 6.
Vygotsky's sociocultural theory says children's thinking develops through social interaction with more skilled people and through cultural tools such as language. Think of the volunteer's hint at the homework table. The course teaches Vygotsky's key ideas in Week 9.
Here's a quick way to hold the contrast. Piaget looks first at what the child figures out alone. Vygotsky looks first at what the child learns with others.
Pause and try this. Name Piaget's four stages in order.
Say them out loud if you can.
Here's the answer. Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. You'll meet each of them in its own period later in the course.
6. The ecological model as a theory
Go back to the toddler at the childcare center. That child's day depends on more than the block area. It depends on how the center and the family talk to each other, on a parent's work hours, and on what the wider culture expects of toddlers.
You met this picture in Week 1: Urie Bronfenbrenner's model, from The Ecology of Human Development, in 1979. It places the child inside nested systems. The microsystem holds the child's own settings, like a home or a classroom. The links between them form the mesosystem. Out at the edge is the macrosystem, culture, laws, and values. The chronosystem, change over time, came in his later work.
This week, I want you to treat that model as a theory, not a list to memorize. So ask what it explains and what it leaves out. It explains settings very well. It reminds you that behavior always happens somewhere, with someone, inside a culture. But it says much less about what's happening inside the child, such as how thinking changes. That's where the other lenses help.
Pause and try this. A childcare center changes its rule about how teachers help children at the block area. In Bronfenbrenner's model, which system did that change happen in?
Think about the child's own settings.
Here's the answer. It happened in the microsystem. The childcare center is one of the child's own settings, so a rule change there is a change in the microsystem.
7. Ethology: imprinting and sensitive periods
On a farm, newly hatched goslings follow the first moving figure they see. That's a striking sight, and it raised a big question about timing.
Ethology is the study of behavior in its evolutionary setting. It asks how a behavior helps an animal, or a human infant, survive. Konrad Lorenz described imprinting in goslings, a rapid early bond that forms in a short window after hatching.
From that work came a powerful idea. A critical period is a fixed window of time in which a behavior or ability must develop if it is to develop at all. For most human abilities, though, that idea has largely given way to the sensitive period: a time of special readiness when an ability develops most easily, after which learning it is still possible, though it may take more effort. I like to picture the difference this way. A critical period is a locked door. A sensitive period is a door that's easiest to open early but still opens later.
This evolutionary way of thinking leads to Bowlby's attachment theory, which you'll meet in Week 7.
Pause and try this. Someone says, "If a child misses the critical period for a skill, it's gone forever." What would this course say instead?
Remember the two doors.
Here's the answer. For most human abilities, the course teaches sensitive periods. Learning comes most easily during the window, but it is still possible afterward.
8. One record, three lenses
Now let's use the tools together. Here's record R4 from the running case. It's illustrative, so it describes no real child. A child of 2½ years is at a childcare center's block area. The child builds a tower beside another child. Both children talk to themselves, and they share no plan. A caregiver reaches in, and the child pushes the hand away and says, "Me do it."
We read it in the course's order: what the child did, the concept, one theory, then a second theory.
Lens one is Erikson. At 2½, the child is in toddlerhood, stage 2. Pushing the hand away and saying "Me do it" fits the autonomy side of autonomy versus shame and doubt, a toddler's push to do things for themselves.
Lens two is learning theory, from Skinner and Bandura. Here's an honest limit: the record can't show the child's history. So this lens asks questions for the next observation. Has doing it alone been followed by success or praise? That would be reinforcement. Has the child watched other children build towers? That would be social learning.
Lens three is ecological. The block area is part of the child's microsystem, and the links between the center and the family form the mesosystem.
Two details wait for later. The side-by-side building gets its name in Week 8, and the talking to themselves gets its name in Week 9. For now, you flag them and read on.
And none of these readings judges the child. The child isn't "stubborn" or "advanced." The record shows one moment of behavior.
Pause and try this. Which lens in this reading asks a question the record itself can't answer, and why?
Look back at what each lens needed.
Here's the answer. The learning lens does. It needs the child's history of consequences and models, and one record from one morning doesn't show that history.
So here's the reading in one plain sentence. The child's "Me do it" fits Erikson's autonomy versus shame and doubt, at about 1 to 3; the learning lens adds what the child may have seen and what has followed, and the ecological lens adds the setting.
Closing
Let me pull it together. A theory explains, predicts, and can be tested, and this course uses several. Erikson's psychosocial theory gives eight stages across life, five in childhood and adolescence, each a crisis, with ages that are only approximate. Behaviorism watches what follows a behavior: reinforcement makes it more likely, punishment less likely. Social learning adds that children learn by watching, and the Bobo doll study is evidence for that, not a verdict on one show. Piaget looks at thinking in four stages, and Vygotsky looks at thinking with others. The ecological model explains settings. And for most human abilities, think sensitive period, not critical period. When you read a record, no single theory is the one right answer.
Later in this module, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, the quiz, the discussion, the assignment, and the Child Observation Workshop let you try these lenses yourself. Next week, in Week 3, the course turns to studying children: research, observation, and ethics.
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