MODULE 2

THE CONCEPT OF GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

• Human beings change in terms of their size, appearance and psychological makeup.
• Each individual changes in unique ways and at their own pace
• The fundamental underlying patterns of growth and development remain more or less the
same and take place in an orderly way
• The individual attains the size, shape, capacities and developmental status in a way,
which is peculiar to him at each stage of life
• Children differ in physical, cognitive, social and emotional growth patterns. They also
differ in ways they interact with and respond to their environment as well as play,
affection
• Techers should have an understanding about these sequences of growth and development
• The human being is never static
• There are progressive changes in response to environmental conditions. The body organs
and psychological functions show the curves of capacity and achievement as well as show
erosion and decay
• Cognitive abilities develop and then degenerate; basic metabolism reaches a peak; then
declines; the endocrine function flourishes and then fades. There is a rise and fall of
physical energy in terms of both the force and speed of action with age
CHARACTERSTICS OF DEVELOPMENT
• Development is lifelong
• Development is multidimensional
• Development is multidirectional
• Development is plastic
• Developmental science is multidisciplinary
• Development is contextual
• Development involves growth, maintenance and regulation of loss
• Development is co construction of biology, culture and the individual

PRINCIPLES OF GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

• Development follows a pattern or a sequence (Cephalocaudal and Proximodistal
principle)
• Development proceeds from general to specific
• Development is a continuous process
• Different aspects of growth develops at different rates
• Most traits are correlated in development
• Growth is complex
• Growth is a product of the interaction of the organism and environment
• There are wide individual differences in growth
• Growth is both qualitative and quantitative
• Development is predictable

STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT
• Any development process proceeds through some stages and each development stage
differs from the other
• Psychologists have separated human life span into stages or periods and identified
specific changes that may be expected during each stage
• The transition from one stage to the next is gradual rather than sudden
 INFANTS (0-2 YRS)
PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

 The development of control and mastery over one's own body in both gross and fine
motor skills is the infant's primary physical task, culminating toward the end of the
first year in walking.
 The infant perfects the gross and fine motor skills that emerged during the first year
by developing balance, coordination, stability.
 There is also an improved ability to manipulate objects by the second year.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

 Psychosocial development occurs as children form relationships, interact with others,

and understand and manage their feelings.
 In social development, forming healthy attachments especially with the primary
caretakers is very important and is the major social milestone of infancy.
 The child can also be engaged in simple games and play.

EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
 Emotional development is a complex task that begins in infancy and continues into
adulthood.
 The caregiver-child relationship establishes the foundation for the development of
emotional skills, and sets the stage for future social relationships.
 A secure attachment leaves the child free to explore the world and engage with peers.

The theories reflecting emotional development in the Infancy stage of life are:

Erik Erikson: Psycho-Social Development Theory

Trust vs Mistrust - The development occurs between birth and 1 year of age and is the most
fundamental stage in life. Because an infant is utterly dependent, developing trust is based on
the dependability and quality of the child's caregivers. Children develop a sense of trust when
caregivers provide reliability, care, and affection. A lack of this will lead to mistrust.
Erikson believed that successful development was all about striking a balance between the
two opposing sides.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Children have much more of a challenge in maintaining this balance because they are
constantly being confronted with new situations, new words, new objects, etc. All this new
information needs to be organized, and a framework for organizing information is referred to
as a schema. Children develop schemas through the processes of assimilation and
accommodation.
In Piaget's theory of cognitive development, the period of infancy is covered within what he
called the sensorimotor period. According to Piaget, this child is in the sensorimotor
period and primarily explores the world with senses rather than through mental
operations.Infants is born with a set of congenital reflexes, according to Piaget, in addition
to a drive to explore their world. Their initial schemas are formed through differentiation of
the congenital reflexes The sensorimotor period is the first of the four periods. According
to Piaget, this stage marks the development of essential spatial abilities and understanding
of the world in six sub-stages:

 The first sub-stage, known as the reflex schema stage, occurs from birth to six weeks and
is associated primarily with the development of reflexes. This active learning begins with
automatic movements or reflexes (sucking, grasping, staring, listening). A ball comes into
contact with an infant’s cheek and is automatically sucked on and licked. The baby’s first
challenge is to learn to adapt the sucking reflex to bottles or breasts, pacifiers or fingers,
each acquiring specific types of tongue movements to latch, suck, breath, and repeat. This
adaptation demonstrates that infants have begun to make sense of sensations.

 The second sub-stage, primary circular reaction phase, occurs from six weeks to four
months and is associated primarily with the development of habits. the infant begins to
discriminate between objects and adjust responses accordingly as reflexes are replaced
with voluntary movements. An infant may accidentally engage in a behavior and find it
interesting, such as making a vocalization. This interest motivates trying to do it again
and helps the infant learn a new behavior that originally occurred by chance. The
behavior is identified as circular and primary because it centres on the infant’s own body.
At first, most actions have to do with the body, but in months to come, will be directed
more toward objects.

 The third sub-stage, the secondary circular reactions phase, occurs from 4 to 8
months. The infant becomes more and more actively engaged in the outside world and
takes delight in being able to make things happen by responding to people and
objects. Babies try to continue any pleasing event. Repeated motion brings
particular interest as the infant is able to bang two lids together or shake a rattle and
laugh. Another example might be to clap their hands when a caregiver says “patty-cake”

 Sub-stage 4: the co-ordination of secondary circular reactions (8-12 months).Now the

infant becomes more deliberate and purposeful in responding to people and objects and
can engage in behaviors that others perform and anticipate upcoming events. The infant
becomes capable of having a thought and carrying out a planned, goal-directed activity
such as seeking a toy that has rolled under the couch or indicating that they are
hungry. The infant is coordinating both internal and external activities to achieve a
planned goal and begins to get a sense of social understanding. Piaget believed that at
 about 8 months (during substage 4), babies first understood the concept of object
permanence, which is the realization that objects or people continue to exist when they
are no longer in sight.

EARLY CHILDHOOD (2-6 YRS)

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT
The average child grows 2½ inches in height and gains between 5 and 7 pounds a year during
early childhood. As the preschool child grows older, the percentage of increase in height and
weight decreases with each additional year
The brain
 One of the most important physical developments during early childhood is the
continuing development of the brain and nervous system. Although the brain continues to
grow in early childhood, it does not grow as rapidly as in infancy. By the time children
reach 3 years of age, the brain is three-quarters of its adult size. By age 6, the brain has
reached about 95 percent of its adult size.

 Some of the brain's interior changes involve increases in dendritic connections as well as
myelination, in which nerve cells are covered and insulated with a layer of fat cells

 Myelination has the effect of increasing the speed and efficiency of information traveling
through the nervous system

 Myelination is important in the development of a number of children's abilitiesFor

example, myelination in the areas of thebrain related to hand-eye coordination is not
complete until about 4 years of age.

 Researchers have found that in children from 3 to 6 years of age the most rapidgrowth
takes place in the frontal lobe areas involved in planning andorganizing new actions, and
in maintaining attention

Motor development
The preschool child no longer has to make an effort simply to stay upright and to move
around. As children move their legs with more confidence and carry themselves more
purposefully, moving around in the environment becomes more automatic.
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
The preoperational stage, which lasts from approximately 2 to 7 years of age, is the second
Piagetian stage. In this stage, children begin to represent the world with words, images, and
drawings.
They form stable concepts and begin to reason. At the same time, the young child's cognitive
world is dominated by egocentrism and magical beliefs. However, the label preoperational
emphasizes that the child does not yet perform operations, which are reversible mental
actions; they allow children to do mentally what before they could do only physically.
Adding and subtracting numbers mentally are examples of operations. Preoperational
thought is the beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been established in
behavior.
It can be divided into two substages: the symbolic function substage and the intuitive thought
substage.
1. The Symbolic Function Substage
The symbolic function substage occurs roughly between the ages of 2 and 4. In this substage,
the young child gains the ability to mentally represent an objectthat is not present. This ability
vastly expands the child's mental world, Young children use scribble designs to represent
people, houses, cars, so on; they begin to use language and engage in pretend play.

Pretend play- For a child in the preoperational stage, a toy has qualities beyond the way it
was designed to function and can now be used to stand for a character or object unlike
anything originally intended. A teddy bear, for example, can be a baby

Piaget believed that children’s pretend play and experimentation helped them solidify the
new schemas they were developing cognitively. This involves both assimilation and
accommodation, which results in changes in their conceptions or thoughts. As children
progress through the preoperational stage, they are developing the knowledge they will need
to begin to use logical operations in the next stage.

However,although young children make distinct progress during this substage, their
thoughtstill has important limitations-
Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish between one's own perspective andsomeone else's
perspective. Piaget’s classic experiment on egocentrism involved showing children a three-
dimensional model of a mountain and asking them to describe what a doll that is looking at
the mountain from a different angle might see. Children tend to choose a picture that
represents their own, rather than the doll’s view. Preschool children frequently show the
ability to take another's perspective on some tasks but not others.
Aminismis the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action.
A young child might show animism by saying, "The sidewalk made me mad: it made me fall
down." To an imaginative child, the cup may be alive, the chair that falls down and hits the
child’s ankle is mean, and the toys need to stay home because they are tired. Young children
do seem to think that objects that move may be alive, but after age three, they seldom refer to
objects as being alive. Many children’s stories and movies capitalize on animistic thinking.

Syncretism refers to a tendency to think that if two events occur simultaneously, one caused
the other. An example of this is a child putting on their bathing suit to turn it to summertime.

Artificialism refers to the belief that environmental characteristics can be attributed to human
actions or interventions. For example, a child might say that it is windy outside because
someone is blowing very hard, or the clouds are white because someone painted them that
color.

2. The intuitive thought sub-stage

In this substage, children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to
all sorts of questions.
By the age of 5, children have just about exhausted the adults around them with "why"
questions. The child's questions signal the emergence of interest in reasoning and in figuring
out why things are the way they are. For ex: "What makes you grow up?" "Who was the
mother when everybody was a baby?" "Why do leaves fall?" "Why does the sun shine?"
Piaget called this substage intuitive because young children seem so sure about their
knowledge and understanding yet are unaware of how they know what they know. That is,
they know something but know it without the use of rational thinking.
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
During this period, the child progresses from being relatively unsocial to a distinctly
socialised individual. He learns to adapt to others and to co-operate in group play activities.
He is resistive up to the age of three years, but becomes co-operative and friendly and seeks
the approval of adults by four years or so. He likes to share or exchange his toys with some of
his friends. He begins to regard himself as a member of a group, shows pride about his
parents and boasts about other members of his family.

His play no longer remains a solitary play. The play activity has, at once, qualities of a
parallel play, an associative play and a .co-operative play, the last type of play activity
becoming dominant when he is in the fifth or sixth year. Play with other children helps him to
adjust himself to group life, to give and take – and to share his possessions with his
playmates.

Some of the important forms of social behaviour during this period are negativism rivalry,
quarrelling, teasing and bullying, co-operation, sympathy and social approval.
The development of play is an important milestone in early childhood. Play holds a crucial
role in providing a safe, caring, protective, confidential, and containing space where children
can recreate themselves and their experiences through an exploratory process. During this
stage, pretend play is a great way for children to express their thoughts, emotions, fears, and
anxieties. Types of plays common in early childhood:
 Parallel play (adjacent play) – when the child plays separately from others but close to
them and mimicking their actions. This type of play is seen as a transitory stage from
a socially immature solitary and onlooker type of play, to a more socially mature
associative and cooperative type of play.

 Associative play – when the child is interested in the people playing but not in
coordinating their activities with those people, or when there is no organized activity
at all. There is a substantial amount of interaction involved, but the activities are not
in sync.
 Cooperative play – when a child is interested both in the people playing and in the
activity they are doing. In cooperative play, the activity is organized, and participants
have assigned roles. There is also increased self-identification with a group, and
a group identity may emerge. This is more common toward the end of the early
childhood stage. Examples would be dramatic play activities with roles, like playing
school, or a game with rules, such as freeze tag.

While Erik Erikson was very influenced by Freud, he believed that the relationships that
people have, not psychosexual stages, are what influence personality development. At the
beginning of early childhood, the child is still in the autonomy versus shame and doubt stage
(stage 2).

By age three, the child begins stage 3: initiative versus guilt. The trust and autonomy of
previous stages develop into a desire to take initiative or to think of ideas and initiate action.
Children are curious at this age and start to ask questions so that they can learn about the
world. Parents should try to answer those questions without making the child feel like a
burden or implying that the child’s question is not worth asking.

These children are also beginning to use their imagination. Children may want to build a fort
with the cushions from the living room couch and issue tickets to those who want to
come. Another way that children may express autonomy is in wanting to get themselves
ready for bed without any assistance. To reinforce taking initiative, caregivers should offer
praise for the child’s efforts and avoid being overly critical of messes or mistakes.

EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

BY 3 YEARS:
 Play is the work of this age – focus on becoming confident and efficient.
Quite balanced – normally happy and contented.
 Still self-centred and magical in thinking – believes wishes make things come true.
 Has imaginary friends to express emotions and feelings to

 Bargaining works but reasoning does not. Distraction still works.

 Doesn’t get so frustrated and gets less angry when stopped.
 Biggest fear is separation from parents

BY 4 YEARS:
 4–year–olds enjoy silly games/talk and showing off.
Through play they continue to seek balance between
dependence/independence
 May see return of some ‘2-year-old stubbornness’.
If naughty, may blame others or be naughty on purpose
to get a reaction.
 May be aggressive again – biting, kicking, and throwing
objects.
 Has a sense of past/future.
 Begin to compete with parent of same sex for the
attention of parent of opposite sex and experience emotions
associated to it

BY 5 YEARS:
 More balanced again.
 Quite independent and often serious and realistic.
Less frustrated and less angry – may bang doors/stamp
 feet, say ‘I hate you’ and ‘I wish you were dead’.
 Mostly friendly and talkative to strangers. Bargaining
continues to work. Calming down and time-out chairs
help them to regain self-control.
 Fears of being hurt are common.
 May also worry that parents may not be available when
needed, e.g. something happening to a parent while
child at school. Tender and protective towards younger
child or pet.
3. LATE CHILDHOOD (6-12 YRS)

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

BODY GROWTH AND CHANGE

 The period of middle and late childhood involves slow, consistent growth. This is a
period of calm before the rapid growth spurt of adolescence.
 Height :During the elementary school years, children grow an average of 2 to 3 inches a
year until, at the age of 11, the average girl is 4 feet, 10'% inches tall, and the average boy
is 4 feet, 9 inches tall
 Weight: During the middle and late childhood years, children gain about 5 to 7 pounds a
year. The weight increase is due mainly to increases in the size of the skeletal and
muscular systems, as well as the size of some body organs.
 Proportional changes: Head circumference and waist circumference decrease in relation
to body height (Hockenberry & Wilson, 2009). A less noticeable physical change is that
bones continue to ossify during middle and late childhood but yield to pressure and pull
more than mature bones.
 Changes in muscle mass and strength: Muscle mass and strength gradually increase
during these years as "baby fat" decreases. The loose movements and knock-knees of
early childhood give way to improved muscle tone. Thanks to both heredity and to
exercise, children double their strength capabilities during these years.

◦ THE BRAIN-

Total brain volume, stabilizes by the end of middle and late childhood, but significant
changes various structures and regions of the brain continue to occur. In particular, the brain
pathways and circuitry involving the prefrontal cortex, the highest level in the brain Continue
to increase in middle and late childhood (Durston& Casey. 2006). These advances in
prefrontal cortex are linked to children’s increased attention, reasoning and cognitive control,
Changes also occur in context or cerebral cortex which reflects the ability of language
recognition such as reading and writing.

◦ MOTOR DEVELOPMENT-

During middle and late childhood, children's motor skills become much smoother and more
coordinated than they were in early childhood. Increased myelination of the central nervous
system is reflected in the improvement of fine motor skills during middle and late childhood.
Children can more adroitly use their hands as tools. Six-year-olds can hammer, paste, tie
shoes, and fasten clothes. By 7 years of age, children's hands have become steadier. At this
age, children prefer a pencil to a crayon for printing. and reversal of letters is less common.
Printing Becomes smaller. At 8 to 10 years of age, the hands can be used independently with
case and precision. Fine motor coordination develops to the point at which children can write
rather than print words. Cursive letter size becomes smaller.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

 Cognitive skills continue to expand in middle and late childhood as thought processes
become more logical and organized when dealing with concrete information. Children at
this age understand concepts such as past, present, and future, giving them the ability to
plan and work toward goals. Additionally, they can process complex ideas such as
addition and subtraction and cause-and- effect relationships

 From ages 7 to 11, children are in the Concrete Operational Stage of cognitive
development. This involves mastering the use of logic in concrete ways. The word
concrete refers to that which is tangible; that which can be seen, touched, or experienced
directly. The concrete operational child is able to make use of logical principles in solving
problems involving the physical world. For example, the child can understand principles
of cause and effect, size, and distance.

 Inductive Reasoning, which is a logical process in which multiple premises believed to

be true are combined to obtain a specific conclusion.
 Classification: As children's experiences and vocabularies grow, they build schemata and
are able to organize objects in many different ways. They also understand classification
hierarchies and can arrange objects into a variety of classes and subclasses.
 Identity: One feature of concrete operational thought is the understanding that objects
have qualities that do not change even if the object is altered in some way.
 Reversibility: The child learns that some things that have been changed can be returned
to their original state. Water can be frozen and then thawed to become liquid again. But
eggs cannot be unscrambled. Many of these cognitive skills are incorporated into the
school's curriculum through mathematical problems and in worksheets about which
situations are reversible or irreversible.
 Conservation:Concrete operational children can understand the concept of
conservation which means that changing one quality (in this example, height or water
level) can be compensated for by changes in another quality (width). Consequently, there
is the same amount of water in each container, although one is taller and narrower and the
other is shorter and wider.
 Decentration: Concrete operational children no longer focus on only one dimension of
any object (such as the height of the glass) and instead consider the changes in other
dimensions too (such as the width of the glass). This allows for conservation to occur.
 Seriation: Arranging items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight, in a
methodical way is now demonstrated by the concrete operational child.

These new cognitive skills increase the child's understanding of the physical world,
however according to Piaget, they still cannot think in abstract ways. Additionally, they
do not think in systematic scientific ways. For example, when asked which variables
influence the period that a pendulum takes to complete its arc, and given weights they can
attach to strings in order to do experiments, most children younger than 12 perform
biased experiments from which no conclusions can be drawn

EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

 During middle and late childhood, stable self-concepts based on the child’s typical
emotional experiences emerge. With the increased capacity for self-reflection, children
gain an understanding of their self-conscious emotions. As a result, the consistent
experience of patterns of self-conscious emotions has an impact on the child’s self-
concept. For example, the tendency to experience shame rather than guilt in response to
negative transgressions affects the child’s emergent self-esteem and may encourage a
tendency to respond with aggression or violence.

 Also during middle and late childhood, children begin to understand that a single situation
or event can lead to the experience of multiple, mixed emotions. For example, older
children understand that a goodbye party for a sibling who will leave for college is likely
to be both a happy and a sad event for the child and his sibling. This capacity likely
emerges with the cognitive capacity to understand multiple aspects of a situation, called
decentration.

 Children also learn emotional display rules as they progress through middle and late
childhood. For example, a child learns to look happy even though she feels upset when a
friend or family member gives her an undesirable gift. The use of display rules tends to
increase as children begin to consider what consequences their actions may have for
others.

Some characteristic of Emotional development in late childhood

◦ Industrious
◦ Purposeful and goal directed in activities
◦ Confident and self-directed
◦ Develops a better sense of self
◦ Understanding of likes and dislikes and abilities and skills
◦ Capable to introspect
◦ Evaluates self-worth by ability to perform

· During late childhood stage it allows children to control and understand their emotions,
and as children develop empathy as such they begin noticing and identifying the emotions in
others

· During this stage children also become more skilled at expressing their emotions
in words, and this may increase control of their emotions

· Children start to begin to realise what they are good at and what they aren’t and as a
result the child may become self-conscious in situations where they feel inadequate. The
child might feel uncomfortable or embarrassed around other people they don’t know or
certain activities and sports if they feel they are not good at them

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

By 5 and older, a child’s social development begins to reach new levels. This is a point in
time when most children will spend more hours in a day with other children than with their
parents. It is normal for them to:

– Want to please friends, as well as be more like their friends

- Thrive on friendship

– Begin to recognize power in relationships, as well as the larger community

– Recognize and fear bullies or display bully-like behavior themselves

– As early as 10, children may begin to reject parents’ opinion of friends and certain
behaviors—this is a normal step, but can be especially frustrating for parents

Social and emotional milestones are centered on children gaining a better understanding of
their own emotions and the emotions of others. These skills also involve learning how to
interact and play with other people and the development of empathy.

Friendships take on new importance as judges of one's worth, competence, and attractiveness
in middle and late childhood. Friendships provide the opportunity for learning social skills,
such as how to communicate with others and how to negotiate differences. Children get ideas
from one another about how to perform certain tasks, how to gain popularity, what to wear or
say, and how to act. This society of children marks a transition from a life focused on the
family to a life concerned with peers.
 ◦ It is a Gang Age-

 Learn to live an organized group life

 Sense of loyalty to the gang
 Learns rules and code of conduct of the gang and uphold them quite faithfully and
obediently

◦ It is a Play Age : Group play and group activity

 Make the child more social, loyal and disciplined.

 Acquire social virtues like friendship, co-operation and competition
 Love to live in groups
 Widening social environment & interaction
 learns the spirit of sharing with others.
 Feel, think and act together with others
 Share joy and sorrow with them.


During the stages of late childhood relationships at school are usually restricted to members
of the same sex. The child’s relationship will change towards others and the child will
generally have multiple social contacts outside the family. Social skills such as sharing,
communication and conflict resolution are further develop during this stage

Morals further develop during this time and children acquire a greater sense of right and
wrong as well as a better understanding of what is acceptable behaviour in their society. As a
result, children have a clear idea to make decisions that are wrong or right even in new
situations

Children may tend to still ‘Show off’ in front of their friends and family to gain attention.
During this lifespan stage children place increasing importance on being accepted by others
such as their parents, friends, peers and even their teachers. So they may change their
behaviour in order to achieve approval

4. ADOLESCENCE (12-18 YRS)

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

It includes pubertal changes and the alterations in brain

Puberty is a period of rapid physical maturation, occurring primarily in early adolescence,

that involves hormonal and bodily changes. It is not a single, sudden event

Sexual maturation, height, weight:

There are specific stages of development that both boys and girls go through when
developing secondary sexual characteristics. These are the physical characteristics of males
and females that are not involved in reproduction, such as voice changes, body shape, pubic
hair distribution, and facial hair.

Male pubertal characteristics typically develop in this order: increase in penis and testicle
size, appearance of pubic hair, minor voice change, first ejaculation, onset of maximum
growth in height and weight, growth of hair in armpits, more detectable voice changes, and
finally, growth of facial hair.

Order of appearance of physical changes in females: First, either the breasts enlarge or pubic
hair appears. Later, hair appears in the armpits. As these changes occur, the female grows in
height and her hips become wider than her shoulders. Menarche-a girl's first menstruation-
comes rather late in the pubertal cycle. Initially, her menstrual cycles may be highly irregular.
For the first several years, she may not ovulate every menstrual cycle. No voice changes
comparable to those in pubertal males occur in pubertal females. By the end of puberty, the
female's breasts have become more fully rounded.

Marked weight gains coincide with the onset of puberty. During early adolescence, girls tend
to outweigh boys, but by about age 14 boys begin to surpass girls. Similarly, at the beginning
of the adolescent period, girls tend to be as tall as or taller than boys of their age, but by the
end of the middle school years most boys have caught up or, in many cases, surpassed girls in
height.

The growth spurt occurs approximately two year earlier for girls than for boys. During their
growth spurt, girls increase in height about 3% inches per year, boys about 4 inches.

Hormonal changes:

The concentrations of certain hormones increase dramatically during adolescence.

Testosterone is a hormone associated in boys with the increase in height, and a change in
voice. Estradiolis a type of estrogen; in girls it is associated with breast, uterine, and skeletal
development.

Testosterone levels increase eighteen-fold in boys and only two-fold in girls whereas
estradiol levels increase 8 fold in girls and 2 fold in boys during puberty. Thus, both
testosterone and estradiol are present in the hormonal makeup of boys and girls but
testosterone dominates in male pubertal development and estradiol in female pubertal
development.

Brain:

MRI studies of the brain show that developmental processes tend to occur in the brain in a
back-to-front pattern, explaining why the prefrontal cortex develops last. MRI research has
also revealed that during adolescence, white matter increases in the corpus callosum, the
bundle of nerve fibers connecting the right and left hemispheres of the brain. This allows for
enhanced communication between the hemispheres and enables a full array of analytic and
creative strategies to be brought to bear in responding to the complex dilemmas that may
arise in a young person’s life

In sum, the adolescent years are a time of intense brain changes. Interestingly, two of the
primary brain functions develop at different rates. Brain research indicates that the part of the
brain that perceives rewards from risk, the limbic system, kicks into high gear in early
adolescence. The part of the brain that controls impulses and engages in longer-term
perspective, the frontal lobes, mature later. This may explain why teens in mid-adolescence
take more risks than older teens.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

 Adolescents continue to refine their sense of self as they relate to others. Erikson referred
to the task of the adolescent as one of identity versus role confusion. Thus, in Erikson’s
view, an adolescent’s main questions are “Who am I?” and “Who do I want to be?” Some
adolescents adopt the values and roles that their parents expect for them. Other teens
develop identities that are in opposition to their parents but align with a peer group. This
is common as peer relationships become a central focus in adolescents’ lives.

 As adolescents work to form their identities, they pull away from their parents, and the
peer group becomes very important. Despite spending less time with their parents, most
teens report positive feelings toward them. Warm and healthy parent-child relationships
have been associated with positive child outcomes, such as better grades and fewer school
behavior problems

 Although peers take on greater importance during adolescence, family relationships

remain important too. One of the key changes during adolescence involves a
renegotiation of parent–child relationships. As adolescents strive for more independence
and autonomy during this time, different aspects of parenting become more salient. For
example, parents’ distal supervision and monitoring become more important as
adolescents spend more time away from parents and in the presence of peers.

 Adolescents within a peer group tend to be similar to one another in behavior and
attitudes, which has been explained as being a function of homophily, adolescents who
are similar to one another choose to spend time together
 Peers can serve both positive and negative functions during adolescence. Negative peer
pressure can lead adolescents to make riskier decisions or engage in more problematic
behavior than they would alone or in the presence of their family. However, peers also
serve as an important source of social support and companionship during adolescence,
and adolescents with positive peer relationships are happier and better adjusted than those
who are socially isolated or have conflictual peer relationships.

 Romantic relationships: Adolescence is the developmental period during which romantic

relationships typically first emerge. Initially, same-sex peer groups that were common
during childhood expand into mixed-sex peer groups that are more characteristic of
adolescence. Adolescents spend a great deal of time focused on romantic relationships.
Romantic relationships contribute to adolescents’ identity formation, changes in family
and peer relationships, and adolescents’ emotional and behavioral adjustment.
 Furthermore, romantic relationships are centrally connected to adolescents’ emerging
sexuality.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

 Improvements in basic thinking abilities generally occur in five areas during adolescence:

- Attention. Improvements are seen in selective attention (the process by which one
focuses on one stimulus while tuning out another), as well as divided attention (the
ability to pay attention to two or more stimuli at the same time).
- Memory. Improvements are seen in working memory and long-term memory.
- Processing Speed. Adolescents think more quickly than children. Processing speed
improves sharply between age five and middle adolescence, levels off around age 15,
and does not appear to change between late adolescence and adulthood.
- Organization. Adolescents are more aware of their own thought processes and can
use mnemonic devices and other strategies to think and remember information more
efficiently.
- Metacognition. Adolescents can think about thinking itself. This often involves
monitoring one’s own cognitive activity during the thinking process. It provides the
ability to plan ahead, see the future consequences of an action, and provide alternative
explanations of events.

 This stage of cognitive development, termed by Piaget as formal operational thought,

marks a movement from an ability to think and reason from concrete visible events to an
ability to think hypothetically and entertain what-if possibilities about the world. An
individual can solve problems through abstract concepts and utilize hypothetical and
deductive reasoning. Adolescents use trial and error to solve problems, and the ability to
systematically solve a problem in a logical and methodical way emerges.

- One manifestation of the adolescent’s increased facility with thinking about possibilities
is the improvement of skill in deductive reasoning (also called top-down
reasoning), which leads to the development of hypothetical thinking. This provides the
 ability to plan ahead, see the future consequences of an action and to provide alternative
explanations of events.
- This appearance of more systematic, abstract thinking allows adolescents to comprehend
the sorts of higher-order abstract logic inherent in puns, proverbs, metaphors, and
analogies. Their increased facility permits them to appreciate the ways in which language
can be used to convey multiple messages, such as satire, metaphor, and sarcasm.

 According to Elkind, adolescent egocentrism results in two distinct problems in thinking:

the imaginary audience and the personal fable. These likely peak at age fifteen, along
with self-consciousness in general.
- Imaginary audience is a term that Elkind used to describe the phenomenon that an
adolescent anticipates the reactions of other people to him/herself in actual or impending
social situations. Elkind argued that this kind of anticipation could be explained by the
adolescent’s preoccupation that others are as admiring or as critical of them as they are of
themselves. As a result, an audience is created, as the adolescent believes that they will be
the focus of attention.
- Elkind also addressed that adolescents have a complex set of beliefs that their own
feelings are unique and they are special and immortal. Personal fable is the term Elkind
created to describe this notion, which is the complement of the construction of imaginary
audience. Since an adolescent usually fails to differentiate their own perceptions and
those of others, they tend to believe that they are of importance to so many people (the
imaginary audiences) that they come to regard their feelings as something special and
unique. They may feel that only they have experienced strong and diverse emotions, and
therefore others could never understand how they feel.

 Cognitive psychologists often refer to intuitive and analytic thought as the dual-process
model; the notion that humans have two distinct networks for processing information.
Intuitive thought is automatic, unconscious, and fast, and it is more experiential and
emotional.In contrast, analytic thought is deliberate, conscious, and rational (logical).
While these systems interact, they are distinct
EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
 With adolescence comes an additional struggle for autonomy and increased time spent
with peers and less time spent with the family.
 Adolescents become less emotionally dependent on their parents, but this emotional
autonomy often emerges after a period of conflict and increased experience of negative
emotions.
 Young adolescents often experience more negative affect than younger children, but the
negative affect often decreases during the high school years.
 However, girls often experience a longer period of elevated negative affect than boys.
Adolescents tend to experience more extreme emotions, both negative and positive, than
their parents even in response to the same event.
 The rise in negative emotional experiences during early adolescence emerges in
conjunction with the capacity for abstract thinking. Adolescents often experience
emotional distress in response to ambiguous and imagined romantic exchanges, and their
capacity to experience complex and diverse emotions further promotes
the development of abstract thinking. As adolescents grapple with increasingly abstract
and complex social problems, they often seek a stable peer group as the context for
emotional management.
 Positive peer relationships emerge from the recognition of equality and the tendency to
offer emotional support. Adolescents who are not accepted by their peers face numerous
 risks, including school dropout and delinquency. Even adolescents who are accepted by
peers and have close friends often show an increase in negative emotions such as anger
and anxiety in the peer context during adolescence. Overall, positive and supportive peer
relations during adolescence promote healthy emotional development and mental
health as the adolescent enters adulthood.
ROLE OF TEACHER IN FACILITATING GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT
• Teacher needs to update their knowledge about the problems of children

• A teacher should know what to expect from the child

• Teachers should be empathic

• Teacher should accept and make students accept the reality of changes or transitions they
undergo

• Teachers need to create challenging conditions

• Teacher should ensure secure effective and desirable responses

• Teachers should encourage positive training for students

• Teachers should be present when the child requires guidance

• Teachers should have an understanding of proper guidance, rational shifts of treatment

and principles of autonomy

• Teachers should have adequate knowledge and skills and should be prepared to handle
students needs

• Teachers should appreciate students when they voice their concerns

• Teachers should be prepared to provide explanations and rationale about concepts that
students question

• Teachers should use some plan of classification to secure homogeneous groups

• Teacher should be able to assess the students correctly to facilitate growth and
development