Developmental Psychologists Quotes

If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.

Developmental psychologists agree that praising a child’s effort is helpful and promotes self-esteem, while valuing the achievement only programs kids to keep seeking external approval—not for who they are but for what they do, for what others demand of them. It’s yet another barrier to the emergence of a healthy self.

It also helps to be a developmental psychologist, since I know I am in a life stage when my growth involves relinquishing control.

The many Asian-American success stories have forced developmental psychologists to revise their theories about proper parenting. They used to warn against the “authoritarian” style, in which parents set rigid goals and enforced strict rules without much overt concern for the child’s feelings. Parents were advised to adopt a different style, called “authoritative,” in which they still set limits but gave more autonomy and paid more attention to the child’s desires. This warmer, more nurturing style was supposed to produce well-adjusted, selfconfident children who would do better academically and socially than those from authoritarian homes. But then, as Ruth Chao and other psychologists studied Asian-American families, they noticed that many of the parents set quite strict rules and goals. These immigrants, and often their children, too, considered their style of parenting to be a form of devotion, not oppression. Chinese-American parents were determined to instill self-control by following the Confucian concepts of chiao shun, which means “to train,” and guan, which means both “to govern” and “to love.” These parents might have seemed cold and rigid by American standards, but their children were flourishing both in and out of school. The

We decided to become developmental psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians. These brilliant beings with the little bodies and big heads are the closest we can get to a truly alien intelligence (even if we may occasionally suspect that they are bent on making us their slaves.)

In his book The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner pointed to the body of evidence showing that even “students who receive honors grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested.

As Harvard developmental psychologist Howard Gardner reminds us, The young child is totally egocentric—meaning not that he thinks selfishly only about himself, but to the contrary, that he is incapable of thinking about himself. The egocentric child is unable to differentiate himself from the rest of the world; he has not separated himself out from others or from objects. Thus he feels that others share his pain or his pleasure, that his mumblings will inevitably be understood, that his perspective is shared by all persons, that even animals and plants partake of his consciousness. In playing hide-and-seek he will “hide” in broad view of other persons, because his egocentrism prevents him from recognizing that others are aware of his location. The whole course of human development can be viewed as a continuing decline in egocentrism.2

As the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik and her colleagues have observed, general intelligence, behavioral flexibility, ability to solve novel problems, and a reliance on learning from others tends to roughly correlate with an extended period of helpless immaturity.13 This relationship is found across a broad range of animals, including birds and mammals, suggesting that it tracks a fundamental evolutionary trade-off between narrow competence and creative flexibility.

Harari’s belief that the Cognitive Revolution provided the modes of thought and reasoning that are the basis of our scientific civilisation could not therefore be further from the truth. We may accept that people became able to speak in sentences at this time, and language is certainly essential to human culture, but anthropologists and developmental psychologists, in their studies of primitive societies, have found that their language development and their modes of thought about space, time, classification, causality and the self have much more resemblance to those of the Piraha than to those of members of modern industrial societies.

Painful or frightening affect becomes traumatic when the attunement that the child needs to assist in its tolerance, containment, and integration is profoundly absent,”8 writes Robert Stolorow, a philosopher, psychologist, and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, in his book about trauma. “One consequence of developmental trauma, relationally conceived, is that affect states take on enduring, crushing meanings. From recurring experiences of malattunement, the child acquires the unconscious conviction that unmet developmental yearnings and reactive painful feeling states are manifestations of a loathsome defect or of an inherent inner badness.

One of the most intriguing ideas in the developmental sciences over the past decades is the phenomenon of the “J-shaped curve.”19 While observing children learning to master new skills in dozens of domains (math, writing, the arts), psychologists noticed a surprising pattern: as a learner struggles to master difficult new challenges, there is often an initial decline in skill. Errors are made on tasks that previously seemed easy, and the learner feels more “stupid” than ever before. This is the dip that forms the middle part of the “J.” But it turns out that the “stupid mistakes,” in retrospect, were nothing more than growth errors. Once the learner gets past the dip, performance rises rapidly to new heights.

Einstein’s developmental problems have probably been exaggerated, perhaps even by himself, for we have some letters from his adoring grandparents saying that he was just as clever and endearing as every grandchild is. But throughout his life, Einstein had a mild form of echolalia, causing him to repeat phrases to himself, two or three times, especially if they amused him. And he generally preferred to think in pictures, most notably in famous thought experiments, such as imagining watching lightning strikes from a moving train or experiencing gravity while inside a falling elevator. “I very rarely think in words at all,” he later told a psychologist. “A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.”4

The fundamental problem with learning mathematics is that while the number sense may be genetic, exact calculation requires cultural tools—symbols and algorithms—that have been around for only a few thousand years and must therefore be absorbed by areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes. The process is made easier when what we are learning harmonizes with built-in circuitry. If we can’t change the architecture of our brains, we can at least adapt our teaching methods to the constraints it imposes. For nearly three decades, American educators have pushed “reform math,” in which children are encouraged to explore their own ways of solving problems. Before reform math, there was the “new math,” now widely thought to have been an educational disaster. (In France, it was called les maths modernes and is similarly despised.) The new math was grounded in the theories of the influential Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who believed that children are born without any sense of number and only gradually build up the concept in a series of developmental stages. Piaget thought that children, until the age of four or five, cannot grasp the simple principle that moving objects around does not affect how many of them there are, and that there was therefore no point in trying to teach them arithmetic before the age of six or seven.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities.

Imagine the following experiment, performed by the developmental psychologist Grazyna Kochanska. A kind woman hands a toy to a toddler, explaining that the child should be very careful because it’s one of the woman’s favorites. The child solemnly nods assent and begins to play with the toy. Soon afterward, it breaks dramatically in two, having been rigged to do so. The woman looks upset and cries, “Oh my!” Then she waits to see what the child does next. Some children, it turns out, feel a lot more guilty about their (supposed) transgression than others. They look away, hug themselves, stammer out confessions, hide their faces. And it’s the kids we might call the most sensitive, the most high-reactive, the ones who are likely to be introverts who feel the guiltiest. Being unusually sensitive to all experience, both positive and negative, they seem to feel both the sorrow of the woman whose toy is broken and the anxiety of having done something bad. (In case you’re wondering, the woman in the experiments quickly returned to the room with the toy “fixed” and reassurances that the child had done nothing wrong.) In our culture, guilt is a tainted word, but it’s probably one of the building blocks of conscience. The anxiety these highly sensitive toddlers feel upon apparently breaking the toy gives them the motivation to avoid harming someone’s plaything the next time. By age four, according to Kochanska, these same kids are less likely than their peers to cheat or break rules, even when they think they can’t be caught. And by six or seven, they’re more likely to be described by their parents as having high levels of moral traits such as empathy. They also have fewer behavioral problems in general.

Having a TV—which gives you the ability to receive information—fails to establish any capacity for sending information in the opposite direction. And the odd one-way nature of the primary connection Americans now have to our national conversation has a profound impact on their basic attitude toward democracy itself. If you can receive but not send, what does that do to your basic feelings about the nature of your connection to American self-government? “Attachment theory” is an interesting new branch of developmental psychology that sheds light on the importance of consistent, appropriate, and responsive two-way communication—and why it is essential for an individual’s feeling empowered. First developed by John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, in 1958, attachment theory was further developed by his protégée Mary Ainsworth and other experts studying the psychological development of infants. Although it applies to individuals, attachment theory is, in my view, a metaphor that illuminates the significance of authentic free-flowing communication in any relationship that requires trust. By using this new approach, psychologists were able to discover that every infant learns a crucial and existential lesson during the first year of life about his or her fundamental relationship to the rest of the world. An infant develops an attachment pathway based on different patterns of care and, according to this theory, learns to adopt one of three basic postures toward the universe: In the best case, the infant learns that he or she has the inherent ability to exert a powerful influence on the world and evoke consistent, appropriate responses by communicating signals of hunger or discomfort, happiness or distress. If the caregiver—more often than not the mother—responds to most signals from the infant consistently and appropriately, the infant begins to assume that he or she has inherent power to affect the world. If the primary caregiver responds inappropriately and/or inconsistently, the infant learns to assume that he or she is powerless to affect the larger world and that his or her signals have no intrinsic significance where the universe is concerned. A child who receives really erratic and inconsistent responses from a primary caregiver, even if those responses are occasionally warm and sensitive, develops “anxious resistant attachment.” This pathway creates children who feature anxiety, dependence, and easy victimization. They are easily manipulated and exploited later in life. In the worst case, infants who receive no emotional response from the person or persons responsible for them are at high risk of learning a deep existential rage that makes them prone to violence and antisocial behavior as they grow up. Chronic unresponsiveness leads to what is called “anxious avoidance attachment,” a life pattern that features unquenchable anger, frustration, and aggressive, violent behavior.

There's a psychologist called Mary & Diamond who at Brooklyn in California, in the 80s studied rats. And they took rats at different ages. Newborns, some of whom they deliberately brain damaged, adult, middle-aged, elderly rats. And they exposed these rats to different levels of environmental stimulation, better food, more playmates, toys to play with and so on. They found out a couple of months later that the rats, at any age, including the brain-damaged rats, who had the better stimulation, they were smarter. But in the autopsy then they also found that in the front part of their brain they had larger nerve-cells with more connections with other nerve-cells and richer blood supply. In other words that environmental stimulation actually caused a change in the state of the brain, even in the older rats. And that's called neuroplasticity. The capacity of the brain to develop new circuits. So whether it comes to ADHD, addiction, depression or other childhood disorders or any other issue with adults as well, if we recognize them not as ingrained, genetically-determined diseases, but as problems of development, then the question becomes very different. Then the question becomes not just "how do we treat the symptoms?" (and addiction itself is a symptom, depression is a symptom), but "how do we help people develop out of these conditions?" In other words, it is not a medical question, purely, but a developmental question. And development always requires the right environment. Now, if you're a gardener you know that. If you are growing plants in your backyard and you want them to grow into healthy, functioning beings, botanical beings, you want to provide them with the right nurturing, the right nutrition, minerals, water, sunlight and so on. So the real question is how do we provide the conditions for further development for people whose development was impaired in the first place? Now we know how to do that. We are just not doing it.

We have seen already in the first chapter how one such model—the developmental, pioneered by child psychologist Jean Piaget—helps explain the roots of our unconscious emotional programs for happiness. Each of us needs to be reassured and affirmed in his or her own personhood and self-identity. If this assurance is withheld because of lack of concern or commitment on the part of parents, these painful privations will require defensive or compensatory measures. As a consequence, our emotional life ceases to grow in relation to the unfolding values of human development and becomes fixated at the level of the perceived deprivation. The emotional fixation fossilizes into a program for happiness. When fully formed it develops into a center of gravity, which attracts to itself more and more of our psychological resources: thoughts, feelings, images, reactions, and behavior. Later experiences and events in life are all sucked into its gravitational field and interpreted as helpful or harmful in terms of our basic drive for happiness. These centers, as we shall see, are reinforced by the culture in which we live and the particular group with which we identify, or rather, overidentify.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities

The counsel of caution regarding our ability to establish human mind/brain adaptation goes unheeded by those who call themselves "evolutionary psychologists"; they are not at all chary of claiming to have demonstrated all manner of human cognitive adaptations on what for mainstream evolutionary biology is very weak evidence. But evolutionary psychology was born and nurtured outside of the mainstream of evolutionary biology. It was developed by psychologists who sought a unifying monolithic framework for psychology to replace that of a discredited behaviorism. It is not surprising, therefore, that the "evolution" in evolutionary psychology run exceedingly shallow. For instance, the developmental turn in mainstream evolutionary biology occured before the advent of evolutionary psychology but has never been so much as acknowledged by evolutionary psychologists. Their use of genomic evidence is extremely limited, and their awareness of the increasingly sophisticated methods and tools for genealogical (phylogenetic) reconstructions seems completely absent. In this, evolutionary psychology stands in marked contrast to evolutionary anthropology, for which evo devo, genomics, and genealogical techniques essential for applying the comparative method have become increasingly central.

It takes a socially intelligent family to help build what developmental psychologists call a “positive affective core”—in other words, a happy child.4

Another doctor suggested a new anti-anxiety medication, which I duly added to the clutter of bottles by my bedside. And then, after a series of family consultations, a New York psychologist named Keith Westerfield surprised me first with a thoughtful explanation and then with a formal diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome. I bought a book of essays on the condition, edited by Ami Klin, Fred R. Volkmar, and Sara S. Sparrow, and devoured it with stunned fascination. Despite the daunting medical language of some of the chapters, I felt as though I had stumbled upon my secret biography. Here it all was—the computer-like retention, the physical awkwardness, the difficulties with peers and lovers, the need for routine and repetition, the narrow, specialized interests (one article even mentioned silent film, old recordings, and true crime—had they created a developmental disorder just for me?). I was forty-five years old when I learned that I wasn’t alone.

Anyone who has taken an introductory psychology course has likely encountered the developmental-stage models posited by Freud, Jung, Erikson, Piaget, and Maslow. But there’s one stage model I keep in mind nearly every minute of every session—the stages of change. If therapy is about guiding people from where they are now to where they’d like to be, we must always consider: How do humans actually change? In the 1980s, a psychologist named James Prochaska developed the transtheoretical model of behavior change (TTM) based on research showing that people generally don’t “just do it,” as Nike (or a new year’s resolution) might have it, but instead tend to move through a series of sequential stages that look like this: Stage 1: Pre-contemplation Stage 2: Contemplation Stage 3: Preparation Stage 4: Action Stage 5: Maintenance

After all, when one asks if a person is being rational, we aren’t asking very much: really, just whether they are capable of making basic logical connections. The matter rarely comes up unless one suspects someone might actually be crazy or perhaps so blinded by passion that their arguments make no sense. Consider, in contrast, what’s entailed when one asks if someone is being "reasonable." The standard here is much higher. Reasonableness implies a much more sophisticated ability to achieve a balance between different perspectives, values, and imperatives, non of which, usually, could possibly be reduced to mathematical formulae. It means coming up with a compromise between positions that are, according to formal logic, incommensurable, just as there’s no formal way, when deciding what to cook for dinner, to measure the contrasting advantages of ease of preparation, healthiness, and taste. But of course we make such decisions all the time. Most of life--particularly life with others--consists of making reasonable compromises that could never be reduced to mathematical models. Another way to put this is that political theorists tend to assume actors who are operating on the intellectual level of an eight-year-old. Developmental psychologists have observed that children begin to make logical arguments not to solve problems, but when coming up with reasons for what they already wan to think. Anyone who deals with small children on a regular basis will immediately recognize that this is true. The ability to compare and coordinate contrasting perspectives on the other hand comes later and is the very essence of mature intelligence. It’s also precisely what those used to the power of command rarely have to do. (p. 200-201)

Psychologists have shown, for example, that priming people with settling down in a city vs. visiting it briefly immediately evokes different preferences: settling down causes people to facultatively value loyal friends, while shorter visits spark more egalitarian motivations. Meanwhile, research also points to developmental effects: young adults who moved geographically as children make less of a distinction between friends and strangers. Overall, greater residential mobility and more relational freedom (i.e., fewer constraints on new relationships) lead individuals to form larger social networks, favor new experiences, prefer novelty, and perhaps even think more creatively (see Appendix C).23

The developmental psychologist Paul Bloom has shown that our minds were designed for dualism—we think that minds and bodies are different but equally real sorts of things—and so we readily believe that we have immortal souls housed in our temporary bodies.

Recent discoveries in developmental psychology and other behavioral disciplines have shown that babies are born with a “first draft” of a moral mind. Among others, brain scientist, Gary Marcus, has described this moral understanding as “already defined and organized before experience.” Evolutionary psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, describes this first draft of the moral mind as consisting of five primary values. Modern cross-cultural anthropologists point to these same five primary values as the foundation of all cultures, currently and historically, and 21st century ethologists suggest the same values apply to most if not all species.

developmental and cognitive psychologists find further evidence that language acquisition is ‘usage-based’. In this view, language acquisition is possible because of children’s general cognitive capacities and the vast number of opportunities they have to make connections between the language they hear and what they experience in their environment. Sophisticated electronic recording devices have been used to track and count words and phrases children hear in their daily lives. Deb Roy documented his son’s acquisition of words, showing the frequency and the contexts for the occurrence of language. Most remarkable, perhaps, is the demonstration of the power of interaction between the child and the adults and how adults focus on the language the child has begun to use (Roy 2009).

Developmental psychologists now talk about the cross-modality of language, meaning that language is expressed in various ways. Instead of the image of a brain issuing language to a mouth, from which it emerges as imperfect speech, think, rather, of language emerging in the child as an expression of its entire body, articulating both limbs and mouth at the same time.

I was surprised to find that developmental psychologists didn’t yet know how children made friends.

The baby Freud had envisioned is a creature filled with untamed instinctual tensions, a prehuman beast, that is brought under control, only incompletely, by social regulation. The unconscious, Freud stressed, is timeless; these infantile instincts always remain in a state of tension beneath the social veneer of adults. The baby envisioned by the developmental ego psychologists emerges sequentially out of a symbiotic union with the mother. The psychological birth of this baby is not coincident with his physical emergence from the womb. The mother

To completely analyse what we do when we read would almost be the acme of the psychologist’s achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind

Human children, on the other hand, are inherently cooperative. From the earliest ages, they desire to help others, to share information and to participate in pursuing common goals. The developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of experiments with very young children. He finds that if infants aged 18 months see an unrelated adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help. If the adult pretends to have lost an object, children from as young as 12 months will helpfully point out where

Piaget's work on infancy is based on the diligent observation of and experimentation with his own three children, Lucienne (born 1925), Jacqueline (born 1927), and Laurent (born 1931) and comprises three volumes, The Origins of Intelligence in Children (OI; 1936/1952), The Construction of Reality in the Child (CR; 1937/1954), and Play, Dreams and Imitation in Children (PDI; 1945/1962). These volumes, which have been characterized as “three of the most remarkable and original documents in psychology” (Russell, 1978, p. 92), can justly be said to have revolutionized the way in which developmental psychologists think about and study infants (Vonèche & Vidal, 1985).

Keep in mind, too, that feeling the pain of isolation is not an unalloyed negative. The sensations associated with loneliness evolved because they contributed to our survival as a species. “To be isolated from your band,” wrote John Bowlby, the developmental psychologist who pioneered attachment theory, “and, especially when young, to be isolated from your particular caretaker is fraught with the greatest danger. Can we wonder then that each animal is equipped with an instinctive disposition to avoid isolation and to maintain proximity?”5 Physical

Developmental psychologists have pretty much discarded the concept of developmental milestones, but developmental milestones remain the only thing that most people know about developmental psychology.

Developmental psychologists are interested in when and how changes occur in human psychology.

The Drama of the Gifted Child, psychologist Alice Miller maintained nearly forty years ago that all instances of mental illness had their developmental origin in unresolved, subconscious childhood trauma, which could be physical or psychological in nature.

Once you dedicate yourself to being present with your child’s emotions, you will find opportunities to connect with her in meaningful ways on a day-to-day basis. From a series of seemingly mundane incidents, you’ll form an important, lasting bond. You’ll become what my friend and developmental psychologist Ross Parke refers to as “a collector of moments.” You’ll recognize your interactions as precious opportunities and value aspects that others might miss. And when you look back, you’ll see your relationship with your child as you would a treasured string of pearls.

Clinical psychologist | Clinical Psychology services calgary | McAtee Psychology Gavin is a registered psychologist with over ten years of experience providing professional therapy and assessment services to children and teenagers along with couples & families. Gavin will help you gain clarity and move consciously towards what's truly important and meaningful to you and your family. Gavin's mission is to help you gain the knowledge you need to set goals, find solutions, and move towards actions that help you achieve a rich, meaningful, and full life. Gavin' expertise includes the following: - Relationship Issues (Couples & Family Therapy) - Children and Adolescent Issues - Parent Consultation & Strategies - Mood Disorders (Stress, Depression, Anxiety) - Developmental Disorders (e.g., ADHD, ASD) Working Phone No: 403 926 3738

We’ve covered the time and work and responsibility a jackpot often entails, the isolation, trust and security issues, and the reluctance of the superwealthy to engage with outsiders. Well, all of the above was shaping up to be a hurdle for Bob Kenny, who was eager to learn about the inner lives of America’s wealthiest citizens. We met Kenny before. He’s a developmental psychologist and cofounder of North Bridge Advisory Group, which helps superwealthy parents and their children “manage the unique opportunities, dilemmas, and challenges that can accompany family money.” Back in 2007, though, he was the newly minted associate director of Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy. The center’s data guru, John Havens, had projected that the baby boomers and their successors would leave behind about $59 trillion in private wealth between 2007 and 2061. Some portion of that would go to charity, and so getting a handle on the mindset of America’s elite was of big interest to the philanthropic world. With a $250,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Kenny and Havens set out to survey ultra-high-net-worth families. “If you’ve got kids and you got more money then you’re going to spend in your lifetime, you’ve got a dilemma,” Kenny explains. “And if you don’t think about it and plan it out a little bit, you’re going to cause a problem.… You gonna give it to them now, give it to them later, not going to give it to them at all? How do you talk about it? How do you think about it?

According to developmental psychologists, we need to be free of interruptions such as texts, emails, and news feed alerts, in order to access our deepest thoughts and feelings. Today such freedom does not come easily, but this makes it all the more important to intentionally reserve time for solitude on a regular basis.

One direct test of the hypothesis that parents have proclivities to invest in children according to their reproductive value is offered by a study of twins, of whom one in each pair was healthier. Evolutionary psychologist Janet Mann conducted a study of 14 infants: seven twin pairs, all of whom were born prematurely. When the infants were 4 months old, Mann made detailed behavioral observations of the interactions between the mothers and their infants (Mann, 1992). The interactions were observed when the fathers were not present and when both twins were awake. Among the behavioral recordings were assessments of positive maternal behavior, which included kissing, holding, soothing, talking to, playing with, and gazing at the infant. Independently, the health status of each infant was assessed at birth, at discharge from the hospital, at 4 months of age, and at 8 months of age. The health status examinations included medical, neurological, physical, cognitive, and developmental assessments. Mann then tested the healthy baby hypothesis: that the health status of the child would affect the degree of positive maternal behavior. When the infants were 4 months old, roughly half the mothers directed more positive maternal behavior toward the healthier infants; the other half showed no preference. By the time the infants were 8 months old, however, every single one of the mothers directed more positive maternal behavior toward the healthier infant, with no reversals. In sum, the results of this twin study support the healthy baby hypothesis. Another study found that the level of investment mothers devote based on the health status of the child depends on her own level of resources (Beaulieu & Bugental, 2008). Mothers lacking resources followed the predictable pattern—they invested less in high-risk (prematurely born) infants and invested more in low-risk (not prematurely born) infants. In contrast, mothers who have a lot of resources actually invest more in high-risk than in low-risk infants. The authors propose that if parents have abundant resources, then they can afford to give abundant resources to the needier child while still having enough resources in reserve to provide for their other children.

Over the next few pages, I’d like to sketch out this theory of life tasks, which I’ve adapted from the developmental psychologists, especially from scholars like Erik Erikson, the author of “Life Cycle Completed,” and Robert Kegan, author of “The Evolving Self.” As I lay them out for you, I should make it clear once again that these are just templates, not photographs. It’s not like every person goes through the same life tasks in the same way. The templates simply name some common patterns of human behavior. They help us step back and recognize ways in which you or I might be like the template and ways in which you or I might be different from the template. The templates also remind us that each person you meet is involved in a struggle. Here are a few common life tasks, along with the states of consciousness that arise to help us meet each one. THE IMPERIAL TASK

developmental phase that we psychologists refer to as separation-individuation.

Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1963) observed that in order for people to learn anything new, their old mental pattern must break up and rework itself around the new, incoming knowledge. This process of internal breakdown and accommodation is key to continuing intellectual development. Likewise, Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski (1972) theorized that emotional distress is potentially a sign of growth, not necessarily illness. He saw psychological symptoms as coming from a freshly activated urge to grow and coined the term “positive disintegration” to describe times when people break down inside in order to reorganize into more emotionally complex beings.

Parents worry when they hear the San Francisco-based developmental psychologist Diane Ehrensaft claim that a one-year-old ‘assigned male’ baby who unsnaps a onesie and waves it in a particular way is in fact giving a ‘pre-verbal communication about gender’.

Developmental psychologist Bernice Neugarten made this distinction between young-old age and old-old age. As long as we can do most of what we want to do, we are young-old age. When our health fundamentally changes the way we live, we have entered old-old age.

and it can’t be deleted just like the mind can’t be deleted.  Every person comes programmed with the Ego, which becomes activated in a small child at around the age of 18 months.  Up to this point, the baby identifies itself with its primary caregiver as one.  Once the Ego kicks in, the child begins to perceive itself as separate from others and the world around it.  Whenever parents and child psychologists speak of developmental periods like the “terrible twos”, “terrible fours” or the challenging teenage years, what they really are unknowingly referring to are the Ego’s growth spurts during which the Ego wishes to assert itself over its human host, resulting in challenging-to-the-caregiver developmental changes in the child itself.

Christian psychologist is called in; if it’s a spiritual problem, the pastor gets the call. We assume that our depression, panic, guilt, or addictions have little or nothing to do with our spirituality; they are two separate issues. But separating our problems into “emotional” problems and “spiritual” problems is part of the problem. All of our problems stem from our failure to reflect the image of God. Because of Adam and Eve’s fall into sin in the Garden of Eden, we have not developed the “likeness” of God in the vital areas of our person, and we are not functioning as we were created to function. Thus, we are in pain. In the course of my own spiritual and professional journey, I have identified four aspects of the personality of God that, if we would cultivate them, would greatly improve our day-to-day functioning. God is able to do four things that we, his children, have difficulty doing: 1. Bond with others. 2. Separate from others. 3. Sort out issues of good and bad 4. Take charge as an adult Without the ability to perform these basic God-like functions, we can literally remain stuck for years, and growth and change can elude our grasp. In this book I will explain these four developmental tasks, the barriers that get in the way of our achieving them, and the skills we need for completing them. Because we live in a fallen world, we all have deficits in all four areas. Transforming the effects of the fall and growing in the image of God is not an easy task. But God has promised that the “good work”he began in us, he will carry “on to completion until the day of

[A] fierce ideological battle between the two traditions of psychiatry is playing out on the world stage today. One side (the neo-Kraepelinian biological psychiatrists) holds that ADHD symptoms constitute a distinct biological disorder, even without brain damage from recognized diseases or brain injury. The other side (the psychoanalysts, humanists, social psychologists, and family therapists) maintains that ADHD is simply a catchall name for social, emotional, and developmental issues of childhood.

Because you are reading this book, you probably know that social anxiety has a large impact on your life. It creates problems in school, at work, and in your social life. It hurts your relationships with your classmates, teachers, family, friends, and coworkers. Social anxiety also makes it hard to have fulfilling friendships. You probably find it difficult to meet new people and may feel as though you aren’t very close to the friends you do have. You may think that social anxiety will improve once you graduate from high school, go to college, or get a full-time job. Unfortunately, in most cases, a change in circumstances will not change your social anxiety. A study done by developmental psychologists shows that decisions made by socially anxious teens set patterns for the rest of their lives. Adolescents who are reluctant to enter social situations will have difficulty with the activities required to become spouses, parents, and members of the working world.