Briefly describe the major theories of child development.

Behaviorism suggests that children are like clay, ready to be molded. It is primarily parents, through patterns of reinforcement and punishment, who are thought to provide this molding. The psychoanalytic theories view children as caught in a series of conflicts. For Freud, those conflicts are between children's urges and the constraints of society. For Erikson, they are crises such as trust vs. mistrust that influence whether children will develop in a healthy fashion and be positively prepared for the next crisis. Social cognitive theorists focus on what children learn by observing others such as parents, teachers, and other children. In addition, these theories attempt to explain the complex relationships between child behavior, cognitive characteristics, and the environment. The cognitive perspective became well known through the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget believed that childhood mistakes reflected as much or more about children's logic than their lack of knowledge. He proposed a well-developed stage theory of cognitive development that showed how the child's increasing ability to create internal mental representations of the world was linked to his/her cognitive development. Theorists operating from the biological perspective look at maturation (the predetermined and orderly unfolding of abilities). Ethology examines instinctive or inborn behavior patterns. The ecological perspective examines the relationships between living organisms and their environments. Bronfenbrenner is a well-known ecologist. According to him, human development must be considered within the context of five intertwined systems: (1) microsystem - such as home or school, (2) mesosystem
- such as how parents and school interact, (3) exosystem - such as the school board with which the child does not directly interact but is still affected, (4) macrosystems - such as one's culture and (5) chronosystem - the impact of events across time as well as the effects of sociohistorical time on child development. The sociocultural perspective attempts to answer the question "How much and what aspects of our development is influenced or determined by culture?"