Theories Of Child Development Quotes

Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.

In fact, some theories of language development suggest that humans learned to dance and sing before we could talk, that music was actually the first human language.

How did it come to pass that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity? The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Naturally I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities.

I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.

All knowledge is conjectural and ... science progresses through new theories coming to replace older ones when it becomes clear that a new theory is able to make sense of a greater circle of phenomena than are comprehended and explained by the older one and is able to predict new phenomena more accurately.

Sherlock Holmes: the Arthur Conan Doyle character who declared, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

In order to function socially, people need to develop what is known as a “theory of mind.

mothers suffered from major nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. When the children reached school age, 21 percent scored 130 or more points on a standard IQ test, a level considered gifted. If their mothers had no morning sickness, only 7 percent of kids did that well. The researchers have a theory—still to be proven—about why. Two hormones that stimulate a woman to vomit may also act like neural fertilizer for the developing brain.

Evolutionarily, the function of attachment has been to protect the organism from danger. The attachment figure, an older, kinder, stronger, wiser other (Bowlby, 1982), functions as a safe base (Ainsworth et al., 1978), and is a presence that obviates fear and engenders a feeling of safety for the younger organism. The greater the feeling of safety, the wider the range of exploration and the more exuberant the exploratory drive (i.e., the higher the threshold before novelty turns into anxiety and fear). Thus, the fundamental tenet of attachment theory: security of attachment leads to an expanded range of exploration. Whereas fear constricts, safety expands the range of exploration. In the absence of dyadically constructed safety, the child has to contend with fear-potentiating aloneness. The child will devote energy to conservative, safety enhancing measures, that is, defense mechanisms, to compensate for what's missing. The focus on maintaining safety and managing fear drains energy from learning and exploration, stunts growth, and distorts personality development.

Some of the most powerful personal burdens are similar to what attachment theory pioneer John Bowlby called internal working models.11 He saw them as maps you developed as a child of what to expect from your caretaker and the world in general, and then from subsequent close relationships. They also tell you things about your own level of goodness and how much you deserve love and support.

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

The difficulties connected with my criterion of demarcation (D) are important, but must not be exaggerated. It is vague, since it is a methodological rule, and since the demarcation between science and nonscience is vague. But it is more than sharp enough to make a distinction between many physical theories on the one hand, and metaphysical theories, such as psychoanalysis, or Marxism (in its present form), on the other. This is, of course, one of my main theses; and nobody who has not understood it can be said to have understood my theory. The situation with Marxism is, incidentally, very different from that with psychoanalysis. Marxism was once a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery and, through a more or less mild revolution, to socialism; it predicted that this would happen first in the technically highest developed countries; and it predicted that the technical evolution of the 'means of production' would lead to social, political, and ideological developments, rather than the other way round. But the (so-called) socialist revolution came first in one of the technically backward countries. And instead of the means of production producing a new ideology, it was Lenin's and Stalin's ideology that Russia must push forward with its industrialization ('Socialism is dictatorship of the proletariat plus electrification') which promoted the new development of the means of production. Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions (I have here mentioned just a few of these facts). However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience—as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality. Psychoanalysis is a very different case. It is an interesting psychological metaphysics (and no doubt there is some truth in it, as there is so often in metaphysical ideas), but it never was a science. There may be lots of people who are Freudian or Adlerian cases: Freud himself was clearly a Freudian case, and Adler an Adlerian case. But what prevents their theories from being scientific in the sense here described is, very simply, that they do not exclude any physically possible human behaviour. Whatever anybody may do is, in principle, explicable in Freudian or Adlerian terms. (Adler's break with Freud was more Adlerian than Freudian, but Freud never looked on it as a refutation of his theory.) The point is very clear. Neither Freud nor Adler excludes any particular person's acting in any particular way, whatever the outward circumstances. Whether a man sacrificed his life to rescue a drowning, child (a case of sublimation) or whether he murdered the child by drowning him (a case of repression) could not possibly be predicted or excluded by Freud's theory; the theory was compatible with everything that could happen—even without any special immunization treatment. Thus while Marxism became non-scientific by its adoption of an immunizing strategy, psychoanalysis was immune to start with, and remained so. In contrast, most physical theories are pretty free of immunizing tactics and highly falsifiable to start with. As a rule, they exclude an infinity of conceivable possibilities.

Why are women so ungenerous to other women? Is it because we have been tokens for so long? Or is there a deeper animosity we owe it to ourselves to explore? A publisher...couldn't understand why women were so loath to help each other.... The notion flitted through my mind that somehow, by helping..., I might be hurting my own chances for something or other -- what I did not know. If there was room for only one woman poet, another space would be filled.... If I still feel I am in competition with other women, how do less well-known women feel? Terrible, I have to assume. I have had to train myself to pay as much attention to women at parties as to men.... I have had to force myself not to be dismissive of other women's creativity. We have been semi-slaves for so long (as Doris Lessing says) that we must cultivate freedom within ourselves. It doesn't come naturally. Not yet. In her writing about the drama of childhood developments, Alice Miller has created, among other things, a theory of freedom. in order to embrace freedom, a child must be sufficiently nurtured, sufficiently loved. Security and abundance are the grounds for freedom. She shows how abusive child-rearing is communicated from one generation to the next and how fascism profits from generations of abused children. Women have been abused for centuries, so it should surprise no one that we are so good at abusing each other. Until we learn how to stop doing that, we cannot make our revolution stick. Many women are damaged in childhood -- unprotected, unrespected, and treated with dishonesty. Is it any wonder that we build up vast defences against other women since the perpetrators of childhood abuse have so often been women? Is it any wonder that we return intimidation with intimidation, or that we reserve our greatest fury for others who remind us of our own weaknesses -- namely other women? Men, on the other hand, however intellectually condescending, clubbish, loutishly lewd, are rarely as calculatingly cruel as women. They tend, rather, to advance us when we are young and cute (and look like darling daughters) and ignore us when we are older and more sure of our opinions (and look like scary mothers), but they don't really know what they're doing. They are too busy bonding with other men, and creating male pecking orders, to pay attention to us. If we were skilled at compromise and alliance-building, we could transform society. The trouble is: we are not yet good at this. We are still quarrelling among ourselves. This is the crisis feminism faces today.

G. Stanley Hall, a creature of his times, believed strongly that adolescence was determined – a fixed feature of human development that could be explained and accounted for in scientific fashion. To make his case, he relied on Haeckel's faulty recapitulation idea, Lombroso's faulty phrenology-inspired theories of crime, a plethora of anecdotes and one-sided interpretations of data. Given the issues, theories, standards and data-handling methods of his day, he did a superb job. But when you take away the shoddy theories, put the anecdotes in their place, and look for alternate explanations of the data, the bronze statue tumbles hard. I have no doubt that many of the street teens of Hall's time were suffering or insufferable, but it's a serious mistake to develop a timeless, universal theory of human nature around the peculiarities of the people of one's own time and place.

Sometimes, however, unmet attachment needs have a positive impact on future relationships, if those later friendships are experienced as second chances. Eager to love and be loved, eager to meet those basic needs for caring and affiliation, children can make up for those unmet needs by being outgoing, having strong leadership qualities, and becoming devoted friends. So insecurely attached children are not doomed to a life of desperation, withdrawal, clinging, aggression, or insecurity, but they may need some additional help negotiating the complex terrain of the social world. The deeper a child’s unmet need, the harder it may be to ever have it filled later on. Expecting rejection, neglect, or smothering, the child may respond to peers with passivity, withdrawal, or aggression. Children who are afraid to assert their own needs may follow along with whatever the friend or the group says.

So which theory did Lagos believe in? The relativist or the universalist?" "He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning." "But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits." "Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret." "The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out, but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it." "Yes. This was his interpretation." "Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?" "Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and of the body." "Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubs in English?" "Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town of the Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousand years ago." "A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking." "Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'" "The machine language of the world," Hiro says.

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.

When moving toward people he accepts his own helplessness, and in spite of his estrangement and fears tries to win the affection of others and to lean on them. Only in this way can he feel safe with them. If there are dissenting parties in the family, he will attach himself to the most powerful person or group. By complying with them, he gains a feeling of belonging and support which makes him feel less weak and less isolated... When he moves against people he accepts and takes for granted the hostility around him, and determines, consciously or unconsciously, to fight. He implicitly distrusts the feelings and intentions of others toward himself. He rebels in whatever ways are open to him. He wants to be the stronger and defeat them, partly for his own protection, partly for revenge... When he moves away from people he wants neither to belong nor to fight, but keeps apart. He feels he has not much in common with them, they do not understand him anyhow. He builds up a world of his own— with nature, with his dolls, his books, his dreams. In each of these three attitudes, one of the elements involved in basic anxiety is overemphasized: helplessness in the first, hostility in the second, and isolation in the third. But the fact is that the child cannot make any one of these moves wholeheartedly, because under the conditions in which the attitudes develop, all are bound to be present.

Psychologists Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper (1991) propose that a father’s presence or absence early in a child’s life can calibrate the kind of sexual strategy he or she adopts later in life. Individuals growing up in fatherless homes during the first 5 to 7 years of life, according to this theory, develop the expectations that parental resources will not be reliably or predictably provided and that adult pair bonds will not be enduring. These individuals adopt a sexual strategy marked by early sexual maturation, early sexual initiation, and frequent partner switching—a strategy designed to produce a large number of offspring, with little investment in each. Extraverted and impulsive personality traits might accompany this strategy. Other individuals are perceived as untrustworthy, relationships as transitory. Resources sought from brief sexual liaisons are opportunistically attained. Individuals who have a reliably investing father during their first 5 to 7 years of life, according to this theory, develop a different set of expectations about the nature and trustworthiness of others. People are seen as reliable and trustworthy, and relationships are expected to be enduring. These early environmental experiences channel individuals toward a long-term mating strategy—delayed sexual maturation, later onset of sexual activity, a search for securely attached long-term adult relationships, and heavy investment in children.

Although I have suggested that American culture tends to favor the side of independence over the side of inclusion (and I would extend that to Western culture in general), it is not a generalization that seems to apply uniformly to men and women in our culture. Indeed, although I have no idea why it may be, it seems to me that men tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for inclusion, tend to me more oriented toward differentiation, and that women tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for distinctness, tend to be more oriented toward inclusion. Whether this is a function of social experience throughout the lifespan, the effects of parenting anatomical (even genital) density, or some combination, I do not know. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. In this respect constructive-developmental theory revives the Jungian notion that there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man; saying so is both a consequence of considering that all of life is animated by a fundamental evolutionary ambivalence, and that 'maleness'/'femaleness' is but one of its expressions. Similarly, I believe that while Western and Eastern cultures reflect one side or the other of this ambivalence, they project the other. Western cultures tend to value independence, self-assertion, aggrandizement, personal achievement, increasing independence from the family of origin; Eastern cultures (including the American Indian) value the other pole. Cheyenne Indians asked to talk about themselves typically begin, 'My grandfather...' (Strauss, 1981); many Eastern cultures use the word 'I' to refer to a collectivity of people of which one is a part (Marriott, 1981); the Hopi do not say, 'It's a nice day,' as if one could separate oneself from the day, but say something that would have to be translated more like, 'I am in a nice day,' or 'It's nice in front, and behind, and above" (Whorf, 1956). At the same time one cannot escape the enormous hunger for community, mystical merging, or intergenerational connection that continually reappears in American culture through communalism, quasi-Eastern religions, cult phenomena, drug experience, the search for one's 'roots,' the idealization of the child, or the romantic appeal of extended families. Similarly, it seems too glib to dismiss as 'mere Westernization' the repeated expression in Eastern cultures of individualism, intergenerational autonomy, or entrepreneurialism as if these were completely imposed from without and not in any way the expression of some side of Eastern culture itself.

It is a capital mistake to develop a premature hypothesis in the absence of hard data. I am trying my best NOT to develop a theory.

The standard theory is that DID is caused by trauma, especially childhood physical and sexual abuse. Painful thoughts and feelings connected to the trauma are then linked to imaginary friends, fanciful creations of the mind that are common among children. During highly stressful situations, the imaginary friends become more prominent and may function in place of the self. The child begins to dissociate, which means that he is experiencing the start of separate personalities or identities. During adolescence, the imaginary friends complete the split from self and develop their own personalities or identities. The identities, often called alters, develop as needed in response to the abuse and the emotions that go along with it. For example, shame may result in an alter that is weak and allows itself to be hurt; anger may produce one that seeks revenge and is hostile; fear may create an alter that is protective. The alter most closely associated with an individual’s original identity is called the host. Alters are usually aware of at least some of their fellow alters and of the host. The host often does not realize when a transition takes place between one identity and another. Months or years may pass with another identity in control while the host is not conscious of it. Some alters are described as frightening and violent. Their negative behaviors may include self-mutilation, suicide, violence, and murder.36

At the time of birth, a child’s brain weighs approximately 400 grams and is the only organ that is not yet fully developed (Scientific Learning Corporation, 1999).  By the age of three, the brain has grown to approximately 1100 grams, or approximately 80 percent of its adult size (Scientific Learning Corporation, 1999).  During the time between birth and age three, a child’s brain develops more connections and acquires more knowledge than at any other period in life.  According to Bruce Perry, “the human brain develops to approximately 85 percent of its adult size in the first three years of life and puts in place the majority of systems and structures for all future emotional, behavioral, social, and physiological functioning” (2009).  In addition, research shows that brain growth is cumulative; that is, future growth is dependent on the establishment of a healthy foundation during the early stages of development (Gamache, Mirabell, & Avery, 2006).

Infants and toddlers are the most vulnerable cohort of children in the child welfare system.  Infants and toddlers enter foster care at a rate that is three times the rate of older children, remain in foster care 22% longer than older children, and are significantly less likely to be reunited with their families than older children (Kemp & Bodonyi, 2000).  One study found that the median length of stay for children who entered the foster care system as infants under the age of one year was approximately 48 months (Kempy & Bodonyi, 2000).

Presently, there are two foster parent training programs that are used and widely accepted as the gold standard.  The trainings are the Model Approach to Partnerships in Parenting Group Preparation and Selection of Foster and Adoptive Families (MAPP) and Foster Parent Resources for Information, Development, and Education (PRIDE).  “Both include a wide focus on the knowledge and skills necessary to work within the child welfare system and emphasize core values of foster care.  Both have been criticized for their relatively substantial attention to procedures and policies and relatively brief attention to issues involved in effectively meeting the needs of troubled youth (particularly their scant focus on managing difficult behaviors)” (Dorsey, et al., 2008 p.).

No one really loves the naked truth,” the old man replied. “It’s fine in theory, practical only in the dreams of youth. There is the schoolmaster, who shook things up in a vacuum, the heart of a child who only wanted to do good and ended up mocked and laughed at. You told me you are a stranger in your own land, and I can believe it. From the moment you arrived, you began to wound the pride of a priest who the people believe is a saint and whose peers consider wise. May God grant that this development has not predicted your future. Don’t think that because Dominicans and Augustines look down on the twill cassock, the rope belt, and the indecent

No one really loves the naked truth,” the old man replied. “It’s fine in theory, practical only in the dreams of youth. There is the schoolmaster, who shook things up in a vacuum, the heart of a child who only wanted to do good and ended up mocked and laughed at. You told me you are a stranger in your own land, and I can believe it. From the moment you arrived, you began to wound the pride of a priest who the people believe is a saint and whose peers consider wise. May God grant that this development has not predicted your future. Don’t think that because Dominicans and Augustines look down on the twill cassock, the rope belt, and the indecent lack of shoes, because once upon a time a great doctor of Saint Thomas recorded that Pope Innocent III had labeled the statues of that order as more appropriate for pigs than for men, not all of them

When moving toward people he accepts his own helplessness, and in spite of his estrangement and fears tries to win the affection of others and to lean on them. Only in this way can he feel safe with them. If there are dissenting parties in the family, he will attach himself to the most powerful person or group. By complying with them, he gains a feeling of belonging and support which makes him feel less weak and less isolated... When he moves against people he accepts and takes for granted the hostility around him, and determines, consciously or unconsciously, to fight. He implicitly distrusts the feelings and intentions of others toward himself. He rebels in whatever ways are open to him. He wants to be the stronger and defeat them, partly for his own protection, partly for revenge... When he moves away from people he wants neither to belong nor to fight, but keeps apart. He feels he has not much in common with them, they do not understand him anyhow. He builds up a world of his own— with nature, with his dolls, his books, his dreams. In each of these three attitudes, one of the elements involved in basic anxiety is overemphasized: helplessness in the first, hostility in the second, and isolation in the third. But the fact is that the child cannot make any one of these moves wholeheartedly, because under the conditions in which the attitudes develop, all are bound to be present.

Someone with a Dismissive-Avoidant attachment style will: • Generally appear withdrawn • Be highly independent • Be emotionally distant in their relationships • Be less likely to connect on an intimate level • Find it difficult to be highly involved with their partners • Become overwhelmed when they are relied on heavily • Retreat physically and emotionally as a result Their core beliefs, or the recurring perceptions that replay in their subconscious, will perpetuate a sense of defectiveness and uncertainty in relationships. They essentially believe at an innermost level that they are unsafe around people and that vulnerability always results in pain. Although the Dismissive-Avoidant may appear to have shortcomings in their relationships (as do those with all attachment styles), they can actually be wonderful partners. By having a deeper understanding of why someone is Dismissive-Avoidant, a relationship can be healthier, happier, and more fulfilling. So, why is the Dismissive-Avoidant individual so distant? Adults who are Dismissive-Avoidant typically had parents who were absent from their childhood. This absence can be in the form of physical, emotional, or intellectual abandonment. Since children quite literally depend on their parents for survival, those with neglectful parents have to learn how to self-soothe. Eventually this child is likely to develop a belief that they can only safely rely on themselves. This belief is then subconsciously brought into adulthood and manifests as distant and dismissive behavior. However, this can be remedied over time—a healthy relationship with a Dismissive-Avoidant can be built with consistent emotional support, autonomy, and direct communication.

Sulloway (1996, 2011) proposed that the adaptive problems imposed by parents on children will create different “niches” for children, depending on their birth order. Specifically, because parents often favor the oldest child, the firstborn tends to be relatively more conservative and more likely to support the status quo. Second-borns, however, have little to gain by supporting the existing structure and everything to gain by rebelling against it. Later-borns, especially middle-borns, according to Sulloway, develop a more rebellious personality because they have the least to gain by maintaining the existing order; studies of birth order and personality confirm this prediction (Healey & Ellis, 2007). The youngest, on the other hand, might receive more parental investment than middle children, as parents often let out all the stops to invest in their final direct reproductive vehicle. Salmon and Daly (1998) find support for these predictions. They discovered that middle-borns differ from first- and last-borns in scoring lower on measures of family solidarity and identity. Middle-borns, for example, are less likely to name a genetic relative as the person to whom they feel closest. They are also less likely to assume the role of family genealogist. Middle-borns, compared to firstborns and last-borns, are less positive in attitudes toward their families and less likely to help a family member who needs help (Salmon, 2003). These and other results (Salmon, 1999) lend some support to Sulloway’s theory that birth order affects the niches a person selects. Firstborns are more likely to feel solidarity with parents and perceive them as dependable, whereas middle-borns appear more likely to invest in bonds outside of the family. Interestingly, middle-born children might receive less total investment from parents even if parents treat all their children equally (Hertwig, Davis, & Sulloway, 2002). This result occurs because firstborns receive all of their parents’ investments early in life before other children are born and last-borns receive all of their parents’ investments after all other children leave the house. Middle-borns, in contrast, must share their parents’ investments, because there is rarely a time when other siblings are not around. Even when parents strive to invest equally in their children, middle-borns end up on the short end of the stick—perhaps accounting for why middle-borns are less identified with their families (Hertwig et al., 2002).

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing. My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say.

In the final stage of Mahler’s separation-individuation theory of child development, babies begin to become aware of their own selves, and in so doing start to understand their mothers as individuals. My mother walking around my lab, observing things, showing tenderness toward a mouse when she rarely showed tenderness toward any living creature, all while in the depths of her depression, deepened this lesson for me. Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn’t me. I forget this and relearn it anew because it’s a lesson that doesn’t, that can’t, stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, in her role as my mother, so when I see her as herself, like when she gets catcalled on the street, there’s dissonance.

The Lonely, Deprived Child The most popular theory is one we often encounter in the treatment room. It’s the story of a child who grew up feeling conditionally loved based on performance. His parents may have expected him to be the best, instilling that to be anything short of perfect is to be flawed, inadequate, and unlovable. He may have been taught that love is tentative and contingent, or that his emotional needs would be met if he achieved greatness. His parents may have sought pride and attention through his achievements, implying a less-than-perfect performance would devastate them. This scenario may be complicated by different treatment from each parent. These children are often criticized by one parent while doted on, overprotected, or used as a surrogate spouse by the other. They may comply with their parents’ demands and expectations to receive attention and dodge criticism and shame. In response to this profound emotional deprivation, manipulation, and stifling of the precious and vulnerable little self, the child develops an attitude of I will need no one, No one is to be trusted, I will take care of myself, or I’ll show you. He was not loved for being himself, and was neither guided nor encouraged in the discovery of his true inclinations. He was not made to feel completely safe and unquestionably cherished by a caregiver. He was not shown how to walk in someone else’s shoes—how to feel the inner emotional life of another person. There was no role model for empathy and attunement. He was left with shame and a sense of defectiveness, both from the direct criticism and from the withholding of emotional nourishment and, often, physical affection. He was made to feel there was something wrong with him, as if wanting comfort, attention, and understanding were weaknesses. In defense, he mustered up whatever safeguards he could to extinguish the pain.

Yet somehow, in recent years educational theory has come to reject repetition as a good educational tool when it comes to mastering our multiplication tables or identifying geographic locations or learning the correct spelling of words. We accept that to be good at sports or music you must practice over and over until your fine motor skills become your gross motor skills, meaning that you can play Tchaikovsky in your sleep! Over-practice implies enough repetition to make new skills seem easy and natural. Yet contemporary educational philosophies consider large amounts of rote practice to be unnecessary in academics. And so our modern educational system is weak. The purpose of a classical education is to strengthen one’s mind, body, and character in order to develop the ability to learn anything.

To counter the effects of too-early learning, here are some things you can do: Where possible, choose schools that are developmentally sensitive in their curriculum and appropriate for your child. Some kids will do really well as big fish in small ponds. It gives them the confidence to tackle the currents without being afraid of being swept away. They get to grow strong and feel strong. So what if there are bigger fish in bigger ponds? Help your children find the right curricular environments for them. Relax and take a long view, even if no one else around you is. Most kids who learn to read at five aren’t better readers at nine than those who learn to read at six or seven. Bill remembers vividly the mild panicky feeling he and Starr had when their daughter was five years old and some of her friends were starting to read. Even though they knew that kids learn to read much easier at age seven than at age five, and that pushing academics too early was harmful and produced no lasting benefit, Bill and Starr wondered if they were jeopardizing their child’s future by letting her fall behind her peers. They briefly considered pulling her out of her nonacademic kindergarten. But they stuck to their guns and left her in a school that did not push and did not give her any homework until the fourth grade. Despite an unrushed start, she received her PhD in economics from the University of Chicago at the age of twenty-six and is a successful economist. Bill loves telling that story, not to brag (okay, just a little), but to emphasize that it is difficult to buck the tide even when you know the current is carrying you the wrong way. Remember that any gains from rushing development will wash out. Parents often tell Bill that their third grader is doing fourth- or fifth-grade math—but he never hears twenty-six-year-olds brag that they’re more successful than most twenty-eight-year-olds. Don’t go overboard on AP classes. You are doing your child no favors if you let her take more APs at the cost of her mental health and sleep. There’s a reason why kids get more out of Moby-Dick in college than in high school. When we consider the enormous differences in the maturation of their prefrontal cortex—and the associated development in their capacity for abstraction and emotional maturity—it should come as no surprise that the majority of students will understand and appreciate novels written for adults better when they’re older. The same is true for complex scientific theories and data, quantitative concepts, and historical themes, which are easier for most kids to grasp when they are college aged. This isn’t to say that some students aren’t ready for college-level courses when they’re fifteen. The problem is that when this becomes the default for most students (I’ll never get into college if I don’t have five AP classes) it’s destructive.

Queer Theory’s most influential contributors were all Marxist in orientation. Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler inherited the core concepts developed by Marxists in the first half of the 20th century and applied them specifically to studying sex, gender, and sexuality. They used Marxist theology as a launchpad for their social critiques and, in so doing, created the new flavor of Marxism that we are all dealing with today—Queer Marxism.

Darwin’s Descent of Man left room for a theory of moral development, but most contemporary evolutionary naturalists make no allowances for the significant differences between a child’s preconventional moral instincts, the conventional conduct of adolescents, and the moral idealism of adults such as Darwin.

The goal of Queer Theory is to use political activism to make people conscious of the “prison” society locks us all into, thereby making people conscious of the prison they have constructed for themselves. This queer consciousness is the state of being awake to the “truth” of Queer Theory. In developing a queer consciousness, one becomes a radical activist who uses Queer Theory as the lens through which they view all of society. Queer Theory informs how those with queer consciousness think and act in the world. Queer consciousness inspires one to view society as a prison they must dismantle and break free from to free their soul. In short, Queer Theory is a vehicle for a complete and perpetual cultural and personal revolution.

Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler didn’t develop their theories of sex, gender, and sexuality from scratch. Each of these thinkers shares a common philosophical starting point—a framework that they mapped their ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality onto. If Queer Theory is a vehicle for cultural and personal revolution, it runs on the engine of Marxism. In fact, Queer Theory is Queer Marxism. Queer Theory cannot be understood without peeking under the hood, revealing the Marxist mechanics that give it life.

Horney put forth the idea of basic anxiety, which refers to a child’s perception of being helpless and alone in a scary and dangerous world. When a child’s relationship with his or her parents is problematic, this anxiety spikes. Horney theorized that parental inconsistency, lack of warmth, or failure to consider a child’s emotional experience threaten the parent-child bond, and that the child then tries to minimize the resulting anxiety by developing defense mechanisms. Eventually, this pattern can make its way into the child’s personality and lead to the development of more permanent traits. This

self-determination theory (SDT), which holds that humans have three basic needs: A sense of autonomy A sense of competence A sense of relatedness Autonomy, they argue, is the most important of the three for developing internal motivation,

may be tempting to dismiss these findings as by-products of midlife rather than the presence of teenagers in the house. But Steinberg’s results don’t seem to suggest this notion. “We were much better able to predict what an adult was going through psychologically,” he writes, “by looking at his or her child’s development than by knowing the adult’s age.” Which is to say that a mother of 43 and a mother of 53 have far more in common, psychologically speaking, if they both have 14-year-olds than two moms of the same age with kids who are seven and 14. And the mothers of the adolescents, according to Steinberg’s research, are much more likely to be experiencing distress. Steinberg has a theory about why this is. Adolescents, in his view, exacerbate conflicts already in progress, especially those at work or between the parents, sometimes unmasking problems parents hadn’t recognized or consciously acknowledged for years. You might say that adolescents are the human equivalent of salt, intensifying whatever mix they’re in.

Whether or not these ideas alone would solve any of the problems discussed, I look forward to the day when SLA is more widely recognized as the serious and socially responsive discipline I believe it can be. Chapters like this one (unpleasant for writer and assuredly some readers alike) would no longer be needed. One could instead concentrate on the genuine controversies and excitement in SLA and L3A: the roles of nature and nurture; special and general nativism; child-adult differences and the possibility of maturational constraints; cross-linguistic influence; acquisition and socialization; cognitive and social factors; resilience; stabilization; fossilization, and other putative mechanisms and processes in interlanguage change; the feasibility of pedagogical intervention; and, most of all, the development of viable theories.

When people hold on to a fixed mindset, it’s often for a reason. At some point in their lives it served a good purpose for them. It told them who they were or who they wanted to be (a smart, talented child) and it told them how to be that (perform well). In this way, it provided a formula for self-esteem and a path to love and respect from others. The idea that they are worthy and will be loved is crucial for children, and—if a child is unsure about being valued or loved—the fixed mindset appears to offer a simple, straightforward route to this. Psychologists Karen Horney and Carl Rogers, working in the mid-1900s, both proposed theories of children’s emotional development. They believed that when young children feel insecure about being accepted by their parents, they experience great anxiety. They feel lost and alone in a complicated world. Since they’re only a few years old, they can’t simply reject their parents and say, “I think I’ll go it alone.” They have to find a way to feel safe and to win their parents over. Both Horney and Rogers proposed that children do this by creating or imagining other “selves,” ones that their parents might like better. These new selves are what they think the parents are looking for and what may win them the parents’ acceptance. Often, these steps are good adjustments to the family situation at the time, bringing the child some security and hope. The problem is that this new self—this all-competent, strong, good self that they now try to be—is likely to be a fixed-mindset self. Over time, the fixed traits may come to be the person’s sense of who they are, and validating these traits may come to be the main source of their self-esteem. Mindset change asks people to give this up. As you can imagine, it’s not easy to just let go of something that has felt like your “self” for many years and that has given you your route to self-esteem. And it’s especially not easy to replace it with a mindset that tells you to embrace all the things that have felt threatening: challenge, struggle, criticism, setbacks.

It is a strange distortion, fostered by the biases of modern literary genealogy, that the novel is so often seen these days as the dominant and privileged genre of the nineteenth century. The Victorian novel, as a new, and of course, modern exploration of the self through narrative, has become an integral part of our story of modernity's culture... Novelists were indeed lions of literary society and creators of narratives by which the world was understood and lived... Yet such literary history distorts and diminishes the cultural significance of at least two other forms of genres. which in the nineteenth century were no less fundamental as narratives of the self, and which the novel is in constant dialogue with. The first... is poetry. ... Poetry as a narrative of self-formation - reading it, writing it, learning it so that it is inside you - is fundamental to nineteenth century Bildung... ... The second flourishing genre...biography is a fundamental way in which the process of 'writing down the self' was expressed. ... New theoretical models of psychological development, however, are equally influential in this changing sense of self-construction. Scientists and theoreticians of the mind - of which Freud is only the most starry example - were producing instrumental and wide ranging paradigms of psychological development as models of individual growth or as models of social transformation. How the child would or should become an adult - sexually, morally, socially - was becoming the question argued through at a particularly heated juncture between social science, educational theory, and medicine. Life-writing became the test cases of such intellectually explosive theorizing. Theories of psychology duly became systems of upbringing, which stimulated in turn a literature of resistance and questioning.

Albert Einstein’s breakthrough theories on the nature of the universe made him the most famous “genius” of all time. Somehow, he had the ability to see what no one else could, to unravel mysteries that most others hadn’t even considered. His antipathy for authority allowed him to see through the haze of the “settled science,” and his childlike curiosity compelled him to continue searching for answers to these incomprehensible mysteries. But how was he so smart? Did he develop his analytical powers through diligent effort? It’s hard to fathom a level of genius like Albert Einstein’s, so it’s too easy to conclude he must have just been born with a special brain. Perhaps he was, we can’t know. But even so, not every seed sprouts. A child born with a misshaped head, slow to speak, and prone to violent temper tantrums, could have been written off before his abilities were ever recognized. He could have been mislabeled — and then lived up (or “down”?) to this label. What would we label a child who can’t pay attention in school, argues with the teacher, refuses to follow instructions, does poorly in most of his classes, and can’t remember his lessons? Fortunately though, for Albert Einstein — and the world — his loving, patient parents consistently endeavored to support and encourage their son’s exceptional independence and curiosity.

The world is supposed to make sense. We want and need the things that happen to us and to those around us to adhere to laws of order and justice and reason. We want to believe that if we live wisely and follow the rules, things will work out, more or less, for us and for those we love. Psychologists refer to this as the Just World Hypothesis, a theory first developed by the social psychologist Melvin Lerner. Lerner postulated that people have a powerful intuition that individuals get what they deserve. This intuition influences how we judge those who suffer. When a person is harmed, we instinctually look for a reason or a justification. Unfortunately, this instinct leads to victim-blaming. As Oliver Burkeman writes in The Guardian, “Faced with evidence of injustice, we’ll certainly try to alleviate it if we can—but, if we feel powerless to make things right, we’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: we’ll convince ourselves that the world isn’t so unjust after all.” Burkeman cites as evidence a 2009 study finding that Holocaust memorials can increase anti-Semitism: “Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves.” So what happens when the victim is a child, a little boy walking to school, a little girl riding her bike, a baby in a car, victims impossible to blame? Whom can we hold accountable when a child is killed or injured or abused or forgotten? How can one take in this information, the horror of it, and keep on believing the world is just? In his history of childhood in America, the historian Steven Mintz defines a “moral panic” as the term used by sociologists to describe “the highly exaggerated and misplaced public fears that periodically arise within a society.” Mintz suggests that “eras of ethical conflict and confusion are especially prone to outbreaks of moral panic as particular incidents crystallize generalized anxieties and provoke moral crusades.” The late 1970s through the early 1990s was a period in American history rife with sources of ethical conflict and confusion.

First, it is important to note that in the London data, a mother’s attachment classification before the birth of the child was a powerful predictor of the child’s theory-of-mind competence at 5 years; 75% of children of secure, autonomous mothers passed the cognitive-emotion task, whereas only 16% of children of preoccupied mothers and 25% of those of unresolved mothers did so (Fonagy 1997).

Through these ongoing emotional interchanges with the mother, the child gradually develops a symbolizing function of its own, which allows the child to transform emotions and sense impressions into images that can be used in dreaming and linked to word representations that in turn allow the child to communicate subjective feelings and learn to think about and give meaning to its emotional experiences. However, the development of a symbolizing capacity in the child may be seriously compromised by traumatic events or by persistent deficiencies in the alpha function of the mother; untransformed beta elements are then liable to be discharged through mindless actions or evacuated into the body, resulting in somatic symptoms or illnesses.

Autism is a neurobiological disorder. The structures of the brains of people with autism are atypical. Research is pointing to differences in overall brain size and the numbers of certain cells; to abnormalities in the cerebellum that affect motor, sensory, language, cognitive and attention functions; and to altered genes that interfere with brain development. A new “underconnectivity theory” suggests that autism interferes with efficient integration, timing, and synchronization of brain activation patterns. Autism, or the umbrella term, Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD), is not one thing but many. Like SPD and LD, the term autism encompasses a wide array of symptoms. In broad terms, autism is a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) that affects verbal and nonverbal communication, social interaction, imagination, and problem-solving.

Worksheet– Build the Character Answer the questions below to use the theory in this section to develop your characters. What messages did your character receive as a child? Below are some examples of messages – choose the ones that apply to your character: You come first. I won’t pay attention to you no matter what you do. Your needs aren’t important. You need help. If you beg and whine you can get your way. I’m afraid of your anger. You’re clever. You’re so slow. Make me look good. Be happy. Keep trying. You can never pay me back for all I’ve done. I don’t have time for you. It’s okay to explore. Mind your own business. You’re in charge. Parents never make mistakes. Don’t leave me. You have a big mouth. Drop dead. Don’t you ever learn? It’s always your fault. I love you. You’re a problem child. Work before play. What other childhood messages can you think of that your character received? Which of the drivers/injunctions do these messages relate to? How were these childhood messages delivered?  What events occurred? What memories does the character have that relate? What beliefs do they have now as a result of each message? What behaviours do they have as a result of those messages and beliefs? How do they adapt when those messages are challenged? How do these messages contradict each other and what internal conflicts are set up as a result? Worksheet – Build the Story Answer the questions below to use the theory in this section to develop your plot and increase conflict. How can the events which delivered the messages be incorporated into or impact on the current story? What events in the story challenge the messages and subsequent beliefs? Who are the other characters in the story who challenge those messages/beliefs and how? How do the conflicting messages/beliefs of each character cause conflict in their relationship? What changes need to happen in the character for the beliefs related to their childhood messages to change?  What events could precipitate this?

relations.50 The idea of collective child-rearing was not unique to kibbutzim. It has been periodically attempted as a desired social disruption since antiquity. Plato believed that raising children communally would result in children treating all men as their fathers and thus more respectfully.51 Communist societies have also been associated with collective child-rearing; the family is seen as a threat to state ideology because it fosters a sense of belonging to a family unit, and totalitarian ideology requires that family allegiance be subordinated to allegiance to the party or state. Liberal political theory has also struggled with the issue of the family being an obstacle to an egalitarian society (for example, because child care and family life generally impose greater constraints on women).52 But attempts to fundamentally restructure or minimize the bond between parent and child have very rarely, if ever, endured.53 While mild forms of collective child-rearing are found in cultures all around the world (and in some other mammalian species, as we will see in chapter 7), they typically involve forms of alloparental care, whereby relatives share child-care duties. Dormitory sleeping arrangements for infants (of the kind initially attempted by the kibbutzim) are extremely rare. A 1971 survey of 183 societies around the world found that none maintained such a system.54 As in many utopian communities, the organization of child-rearing was motivated largely by adult imperatives. If men and women were to be treated truly equally, collective parenting might be seen as an obvious structural necessity, regardless of its implications for individual children and their development. Historian Steven Mintz noted in Huck’s Raft, his sweeping work on American childhood, that almost every innovation in child welfare in the United States, including orphanages and subsidized child care, has been driven primarily by adult concerns. Of secondary importance were philosophical and pragmatic convictions about what was best for children.55 As radical as communes may be in some key respects, they generally play by adult rules in regard to children, whose needs and concerns have never been, as far as I can tell, the primary motivation for any utopian community (even though some of them had amazing schools and treated children kindly). Setting up utopias seems to be like sex in at least one way: it is oriented to adult satisfaction.

Psychologist Alfred Adler developed a theory of birth order in the 20th century. The theory claims that the order in which a child is born shapes their development and personality. Firstborn children act like mini-adults. They're diligent and want to excel at everything they do. As the leader of the pack, firstborns often tend to be reliable, conscientious, structured, cautious, controlling, achievers, and responsible.