Deck 10: B: Human Development

Question 1

Chronological age doesn't necessarily predict or explain the changes that accompany aging.Identify the four other indices of aging (other than chronological age)and describe each.

Answer 1

Answers will vary but should contain the following information for full credit.
(1)Biological age: the estimate of a person's age in terms of biological functioning.How efficiently are the person's organ systems,such as the heart and lungs,functioning? When a 65-year-old brags,"My doctor says I have the body of a 40-year-old," this is what his doctor is talking about.
(2)Psychological age: a person's mental attitudes and agility and capacity to deal with the stresses of an ever-changing environment.Some people display little change in their memory,ability to learn,and personality from adolescence to old age,whereas others deteriorate substantially.
(3)Functional age: a person's ability to function in given roles in society.Functional age may be a more appropriate basis for judging readiness to retire,replacing the arbitrary criterion of chronological age .
(4)Social age: whether people behave in accord with the social behaviours appropriate for their age.When people judge a woman as "dressing too young for her age" or roll their eyes at an 80-year-old man cruising around downtown in a sports car looking for young women,they're invoking expectations about social age.

Question 2

What are the different parenting styles and what does research suggest about the "right" parenting style?

Answer 2

Answers will vary but should contain the following information for full credit.
--Parenting styles fall into three (and later four)major categories:
• Permissive.Permissive parents tend to be lenient with their children,allowing them considerable freedom inside and outside the household.They use discipline sparingly,if at all,and often shower their children with affection.
• Authoritarian.Authoritarian parents tend to be strict with their children,punishing them when they don't respond appropriately to their demands.They show little affection toward their children.
• Authoritative.Authoritative parents combine the best features of both permissive and authoritarian worlds.They're supportive of their children but set clear and firm limits with them.
• Uninvolved.Neglectful parents tend to ignore their children,paying little attention to either their positive or negative behaviours.
--Outcomes: Baumrind (1991)and other investigators (Weiss & Schwartz,1996)found that children with authoritative parents tend to exhibit the best social and emotional adjustment and the lowest levels of behaviour problems,at least among Caucasian middle-class North American families.Children with uninvolved parents tend to fare the worst,and children with either permissive or authoritarian parents fall in between.But these findings do not tend to apply to collectivistic cultures.
--So what's the bottom line on parenting styles? Disappointingly,after decades of advice from parenting experts,it's hard to say all that much for sure.Still,the bulk of the research suggests that specific parenting styles may not matter as much as experts had once thought.By and large,if parents provide their children with what Heinz Hartmann (1939)termed the average expectable environment-that is,an environment that provides children with basic needs for affection and appropriate discipline-most of their children will probably turn out just fine.So contrary to what they may hear from parenting gurus on Oprah,parents needn't lose sleep about everything they do or every word they say.This doesn't let parents entirely off the hook,however.If parenting falls well below the range of the average expectable environment-that is,if it's especially poor-children's social development can suffer.

Question 3

Using specific examples,differentiate between the thinking patterns of a six-year-old child and a nine-year-old child,according to Piaget's theory of cognitive development.

Answer 3

Answers will vary but should contain the following information for full credit.
--Information related to six-year-olds should involve difficulty with conservation tasks,reversing operations,and some issues with logical thinking because intuitive thinking is more prevalent.A nine-year-old can conserve amounts through physical transformation and reason more logically and less intuitively about information.

Question 4

Explain what the Strange Situation test is,what it measures,how it categorizes infant behaviour,and present its shortcomings.

Question 5

Discuss both the nature and nurture accounts of motor development in infants and whether one or the other contributes more to this form of development.

Question 6

Regarding Kohlberg's theory,use specific examples to differentiate between a conventional moral reasoner and a postconventional moral reasoner.

Question 7

Discuss any two of the five major criticisms of Kohlberg's scheme of moral development.