A Comparison Of The Difference Between Childhood Development And Adult Development?

Developmental psychology is said to be a scientific approach that explains growth, change, and consistency through the lifespan. Psychologists study a wide range of theoretical areas from social, emotion, biological, and cognitive processes (McLeod, 2015). Three theorist, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Erik Erikson influence most of the research on developmental psychology. These theorists explained the difference between childhood development and adult development the best.

Jean Piaget is a psychologist that altered the view of how a child learns. Within his research Piaget was said to have concluded that children who were allowed to make some mistakes often go on to discover their errors and correct them, or find the solutions ( 2001).

He viewed the developmental changes throughout one’s life with a series of eight stages. Four of the stages occurred during one’s childhood (Feldman, 2012). Erikson thought it was necessary to go through each stage to be able to resolve conflict or crisis. The first stage is from birth to one and ½ years old, second stages is one and ½ to three years old, third stage is three to six years old, and the fourth stage is from six to twelve years old. His theory has been criticized because it emphasized more on male development than female development, and even with that, his theory is still

He introduced the term andragogy, which is based on five assumptions. The first assumption is that “learners move from being dependent personalities to self directed”. Second, “adults come to an educational activity with a greater volume and a different quality of experience from youth”. Third, “the timing of learning activities is related to developmental tasks”. Fourth, “adult learning is problem centered rather than subject centered”. Finally the fifth is “adults are internally rather than externally motivated to learn”. (Bates, 2009).

It is a known fact that children change as they age, so it is only to be expected that adults change as they age as well. These changes are what make it difficult to truly understand adult development. Some seem to think that adults move toward closely specified goals in terms of self-actualization or fully integrated sense of ego. You also have others that think development as a more dialectical in nature, with development a function of the “constant interaction of the person and the environment” (Merriam,