Is Development Continuous or Does It Occur in Stages

Ruchitkumar Patel

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Essay 1

Before coming to the conclusion let us understand what does development mean development in psychology shows how human change and grow from conception through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and death. Mainly focus on three developmental domains – physical, cognitive and psychosocial. Think about babies when they are born they even can’t hold their head up, someone must support them so it doesn’t lean down as they grow their neck become strong and they are able to hold their head up and even move around. As they continue to grow they learn to sit up and then crawl and then eventually to stand, walk. Children learn to run, skip, jump, teenagers might learn steps to dance.

Theories of development examine whether development is continuous (involving gradual change) or discontinuous (taking place in unique stages). According to Hayslip, Bent Jr. (Development Stage Theories, 2012)The continuous development perspective views development as a cumulative process, gradually improving on existing skills. With this type of development, there is gradual change such as a child growing slightly taller each year, Child adding new lessons and skills on the top of the old lessons and skills as they get older. And on the other hand theorists like Several famous psychologists, including Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Lawrence Kohlberg, (Dula, 2015) describe development as a series of stages. A stage is a period in development in which people exhibit typical behavior patterns and establish particular capacities. The various stage theories share three assumptions: Firstly, people pass through stages in specific order, with each stage building on capacities developed in the previous stage. Secondly stages are related to age. And lastly development is discontinuous, with qualitatively different capacities emerging in each stage.

According to me development me I think development is a process that goes through stages with different kind of behavior occurring in each stage, such as specific emotion or way of thinking, have a definite starting point and ending point. However, there is on exact time at which an ability suddenly appears or disappears. Although some type of thinking, feelings, or behaving may seem to appear suddenly, it is more than this has been developing gradually for some time. For example, if a three-month-old baby sees a ball, she’ll probably be fascinated by it. But if someone hides the ball, the baby won’t show any interest in looking for it. For a very young child, out of sight is literally out of mind. When the baby is older and has acquired object permanence, she will start to look for things that are hidden because she will know that things can exist even when they can’t be seen.

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