Personality Development From Birth To Maturity

At conception the human being is but a single cell, 1/175th of an inch in diameter. At birth a male child averages 15-20 inches and weighs 6 to 7-1/2 pounds. He will eventually end up with over 100 billion cells and his height will eventually and 70 inches. This is dramatic physical change. But even more dramatic changes take place in behavior during the lifetime, growing from the single cell embryo , breathing, crying, seeing newborn and in due course, the adult who can read books and newspapers, obtain and hold a job and raise a family.

The development of intelligence and intellectual skills has to do with learning-ability, perception, and cognition ad language in three age periods-infancy (from birth to 2 years). Childhood (2 to 11 years), and adolescence in early childhood and the processes that follow lead to deterioration in intellectual abilities in some cases.

Infancy:

As a result of new researches, educationists have abandoned the myth that the newborn is unable to learn. In fact, he learns particularly those responses that are relevant to the maintenance of life or that provide an opportunity to explore the environment. Babies of 3 days quickly learn to respond to the appearance of a nipple by pulling it to their mouth without any guidance of the mother. The baby learns to recognize the position in which he is fed and he may begin sucking movements as soon as he is placed this position. It has been observed that info its turn their heads when a buzzer is sounded but not when a tone is sounded. Hence it is clear that the infants are capable of learning discrimination almost as soon as we are able to test them. Infants also begin responding to secondary reinforces at the age of 3 months. Their coming out with sounds and smiles owing jovial pats and body-like imitations by mother give them learning. Guffaws from the baby’s brothers and sisters during earliest infant also facilitate learning. Sometimes newborns are competent in certain skills, if they get active and selective stimuli in their environment. They  can hear differences in pitch as small as a note when the tones are presented at the loudness of conversational speech. They can differentiate odors and tastes. A child, however, cannot bring into focus near or far objects until fourth month of age. By two tears, however, a child’s visual acuity is as good as that of an adult. One of the child’s interesting visual preferences is the human face.

The acquisition of language is a remarkable achievement in a child. The child starts to speak intelligibly at about 1 year of age. He masters the fundamentals of language in about 3 years span. By the fourth year, he has a vocabulary of over a 100 words. He can understand and speak most of the grammatical structures of language. Generally sound production is divided into four periods: crying, cooing, babbling and speaking. Babies have a natural sensitivity to patterns. When an oval divided into black and white portions id shown, babies immediately focus on the edge dividing the colors. Usually familiar faces elicit more smiling from the baby. Perception of depth seems to be developed in a child by the time he begins to crawl. Sensor meter period takes place from birth to 2 years, to crawl. Sensor meter period takes place form birth to 2 years, the date usually used to define the end of infancy.

Childhood:

Childhood is a period of massive expansion in knowledge and skills for living. The 18-month old child can walk forward, backward, and sideways, scribble, and retrieve hidden objects. By 3 years he can walk up and downstairs, hop and jump. He can use a fork and a spoon, brush his teeth, and put on simple clothing. He is toilet trained. By 6 years most of the motor skills useful in daily life must have been mastered. At this age the child is always grappling with the task of perceiving and knowing his environment. During childhood his vocabulary jumps from just 100 words to 1,000 words. He perceives a larger world and forms concepts about it . He learns from his experiences and adds to his
Stock of knowledge. A good deal of child’s behavior involves learning and using concepts. He can now discriminate between dogs and cats and subsequently when he sees some other animal he will find its category. Changes in perception and learning often reveal changes in strategies of information-gathering with increases age. If he has elder brothers and sister, the stage is already set for adding a great lot to his knowledge by mutual talks and study of picture books on different subjects. Listening to stories from elder members of the family gives an accelerated dimension to his knowledge. In a family which has a religious atmosphere the child tends to develop God-fearing if he does something bad. He can thus discriminate between good and bad. Once the child starts going to the school, parents can get some relief in their responsibility to the child. The school gives the best scope for the development of body and the brain. Company of other children brings in him great sociability. He is taught about his country as well as about the whole world. His language and thinking boost his knowledge and concepts. He learns in his class various thinking and symbolic kills is the issue of inner speech. Inner speech refers to the ‘talking-to-ourselves’ decryption of thought. Thinking is seen by Russian psychologists as speech which has become implicit and mental.

Adolescence:

Adolescence implies the development period of transition from childhood to adulthood. It is a time of rapidly growing independence. What an exciting feeling to be stronger than ded How happy it is for parents to see a strong, independent, attractive tong adult to grow out form childhood Majority of adolescents, teenagers if you prefer, will successfully make the transition to adulthood. The majority of those who read about this period find it problem-centered, full of stress and strain. Rather than accepting this normal developmental period with grace, the portents approach this period with fear and the expectation of rrouble.The physiological revolution in the adolescent period causes the individual to reintegrate and requestionmany of his earlier adjustments. Sometimes the adolescent suffers from what Eric Erikson calls role diffusion or inability to solidify all of the various roles into a congruent stable self-image. In such a case an individual may gain his identity through conforming to the identity of the group which surrounds him at the moment. He is not Surrender Pal the individual but Surrender Pal, the hockey player. Growl: entails more than mere socialization to the new adult status. Socialization involves learning to understand the expectations of the social environment and accommodating oneself to them. Growth means personality change, increasing inner differentiation and integration, real autonomy, and fiexibility, and new capacities fore self-determination. Young people are both admirable and difficult to live with. They are admirable because of their courage, their tenacity, their boundless curiosity concerning both about themselves and the world at large, their appreciation of their critical faculty, their insistence upon using their minds to correlate what they feel with what they do, their lent less questioning of almost everything that enters their relentless questioning of almost everything that enters their ken (range of vision),s and their equally relentless demand that their questions be answered. They are impatient, they are in a great hurry, they are blind to every issue but the reissue of the moment. They quibble , argue, debate, and object.

The adolescent period is a direct product of the society in which the child is reared. In a sense, the vast amount of criticism directed at youth is hypocritical since it is the adult culture that allows this extended period of transition from child to adult. We should differentiate between puberty and adolescence. Puberty means the biological changes every child, regardless of culture, must pass through to be able to reproduce the species. Adolescence is a broader term that encompasses puberty as well as the entire social and culture conditions that must be met to become an adult. Many of today’s social critics see modem youth’s greatest shortcomings, his failure to develop a strong value system. The adolescent faces a bewildering variety of problems which he must master before he can be accepted on equal footing with the adults: 1. The new generation of students has to face ever-increasing domination of life by science, technology and automation. 2. The new generation will have ego recognize the impossibility of living in a state of absence of persons belonging to other races. 3. The new generation will have to deal with the population problem. 4. The adolescent needs a complete understanding of world societies and their marked differences in values. 5. The coming generation will have to take an interplanetary point of view or at least world point of view. 5. It must think in terms of solving world problems and try to create a world government of federated states.

Higher Education:

An educated person in the classical sense is a different person form one who has simply furthered a peculiar set of dills. Rather than being programmed or a particular job, the college graduate is capable of learning and thereby fitting into a wide array of vocations. In other words, his bored background of training in learning and his broader store of knowledge enable him to accept a new challenge without undergoing any type of retraining. In a sense he is a “learning machine”. He knows how to go about preparing himself to master the new opportunity. He will not become obsolete in a changing job world. He can adapt to the new advances.