My father is West-African descent and my mother is Northwestern European descent. They are above average height and there is no history

Child Human Growth and Development

By Gavin Gross

My father is of West African descent and my mother is of Northwestern European descent. My biological beginnings are looking pretty good because my parents are above average height and there is no history of any concerning diseases or health conditions in my family. Sadly there is no history of twins in my family, so my genetics were not inclined for my parents to give birth to twins. My parents also have very good reproductive health because my mom was able to birth four kids.

My parents took a more natural approach to prenatal care. My mother went on a clean diet during her pregnancies and she took a Lamaze breathing class. My birth story is quite boring. My birth was pretty normal except I came out with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. My mother stayed in the hospital for about two days and she had a little bit of post-partum depression and stress after my birth.

Nature VS. Nuture

From a nurture standpoint, my developmental context really shaped who I am today. I was born into a lower-middle-class family. The neighborhood I grew up in was pretty safe and it was close to my grandparents so It was a good place for my parents to raise kids and ensure that our cognitive development was not negatively affected. My older brother is two years older than me so right from birth, my sociological cognitive development had an upper hand compared to only childs. My mother also did not work when I was an infant so I was able to spend a lot of time with her which promoted my psychosocial cognitive development. Due to my mother being home when I was an infant, it led to her being a protective parent.

From a nature standpoint, I had the potential to have a very able-bodied physical and motor development which would allow me to succeed in sports later in life. My parents both have fast metabolism and were very good at sports when they were younger. Biologically, the factors that affected my cognitive development include my birth weight and mental disorder. My birth weight was pretty normal so that kept my cognitive development on track. My dad has ADHD and my mother has seasonal depression, so those mental disorders could have been passed down to me.

Kagan’s cognitive theory of The Long Shadow of Temperament would say that her protectiveness when I was an infant caused me to be more shy as an adult.

Gavin's Development

1

Infant

04

02

04

02

04

02

04

02

NATURE VS. NURTURE

0-1 Years Old

Building a Sense of Self

Gaining New Perspectives

KINDERGARDEN CONDITIONING

Gaining New Perspectives

Reflection

I recently found a report card from pre-k and on the report card was a little note about how I was doing in class. The note said that I was very active in the classroom, I was very good at thinking outside the box, and that my attention was all over the place. My lack of attention was then improved with a little bit of help from Pavlov’s classical conditioning. For the teacher to get everyone's attention during class they would say a call and response chant such a是s:

Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory five environmental systems: Microsystem, Mesosystem, Exosystem, Macrosystem, and Chronosystem (family, peers, neighborhood, and work; most direct relationships).

2

Early Childhood

By the time I was an adolescent, it was obvious that I was a momma's boy. Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis says that the unconscious mind has control over the person’s emotions and behavior and I think the fact that I spent a lot of time with my mother had a big influence on my unconscious mind. I felt very protected and comforted by my mother because she was the one I was with when I was an infant. Bowlby’s attachment theory would say that having someone to turn to when times got rough is one of the reasons why I survived adulthood. Whenever I came home sad, my mom instantly knew something was wrong and I was able to confide in her which helped me grow emotionally. Chodorow’s Psychoanalytic Theory says that a mother-child relationship is formative and my mother pushed me to grow in the most healthy ways possible so that I would become an independent, respectful, and successful adult.

People found a sense of community in common interests and what kids were interested in was impacted so much by their parents. This drove the segregation in my school. Owen believes that lower-income neighborhoods tend to have fewer resources, more students with lower achievement test scores, lower rates of graduation, and smaller percentages of students going to college. The advanced classes were predominantly white but there were so many outside factors affecting black kids' drive to be successful in school. Sternberg says that there are three parts of intelligence: analytical, creative, and practical. In school, I noticed many black students outshining the white students in the creative and practical parts of intelligence, but school tests the performance components of intelligence and this made black students seem and feel unintelligent. In High school, my rank was 21/300. Within the group of 20 people who had a higher rank than me, there were two black girls and no black guys.

2-5 Years Old

From a nurture standpoint, my developmental context really shaped who I am today. I was born into a lower-middle-class family. The neighborhood I grew up in was pretty safe and it was close to my grandparents so It was a good place for my parents to raise kids and ensure that our cognitive development was not negatively affected. My older brother is two years older than me so right from birth, my sociological cognitive development had an upper hand compared to only childs. My mother also did not work when I was an infant so I was able to spend a lot of time with her which promoted my psychosocial cognitive development. Due to my mother being home when I was an infant, it led to her being a protective parent.

She taught me to have more empathy for others because even at that young age, I knew that being an immigrant comes with its struggles and I wanted to help her as much as I could. Being in a big family allowed me to have help everywhere I turned. Because I was a stubborn child, I never wanted to ask for help and I wanted to figure things out myself. As the aspects of Brendtro & Brokenleg Circle of Courage Model started to grow, I started to get older, I started to become more independent by building skills and taking responsibility for my actions.

During my middle childhood, the rest of my siblings were born. Growing up in a family of seven in the lower middle class had its struggles. Socioeconomic Status had some effect on my cognitive development because my parents were working hard to make money for the family and they were coming home from work tired and stressed. My parents adopted my youngest sibling Sunny from Hong Kong which also had a big impact on my family. Sunny immigrated to the United States when she was four and did not speak much English. She was put into special classes to learn English and my family and I would also help her when she was at home. She seamlessly joined the family and she is loved dearly by all of us.

From a nurture standpoint, my developmental context really shaped who I am today. I was born into a lower-middle-class family. The neighborhood I grew up in was pretty safe and it was close to my grandparents so It was a good place for my parents to raise kids and ensure that our cognitive development was not negatively affected. My older brother is two years older than me so right from birth, my sociological cognitive development had an upper hand compared to only childs. My mother also did not work when I was an infant so I was able to spend a lot of time with her which promoted my psychosocial cognitive development. Due to my mother being home when I was an infant, it led to her being a protective parent.

From a nature standpoint, I had the potential to have a very able-bodied physical and motor development which would allow me to succeed in sports later in life. My parents both have fast metabolism and were very good at sports when they were younger. Biologically, the factors that affected my cognitive development include my birth weight and mental disorder. My birth weight was pretty normal so that kept my cognitive development on track. My dad has ADHD and my mother has seasonal depression, so those mental disorders could have been passed down to me.

“One two three, eyes on me” and then the students would say “One, two, eyes on you”.

From a nature standpoint, I had the potential to have a very able-bodied physical and motor development which would allow me to succeed in sports later in life. My parents both have fast metabolism and were very good at sports when they were younger. Biologically, the factors that affected my cognitive development include my birth weight and mental disorder. My birth weight was pretty normal so that kept my cognitive development on track. My dad has ADHD and my mother has seasonal depression, so those mental disorders could have been passed down to me.

Loftus would say that our memories don't always stick in their original form and they are subject to manipulation. With that being said, I do not have many memories of my early childhood. Out of Atkinson & Shiffrin's three types of memory, sensory register, short-term memory, and long-term memory, I think that my sensory register memory stayed intact the most during my early childhood.

Santrock would say that because the behavior system helped with adapting and gaining knowledge from social experiences, it promoted my cognitive development.

With that being said, there are so many things that makeup who I am today. From the amount of time I spent with my mother as an infant to how I was classically conditioned during early childhood to adopting a sister during my middle childhood to trying to find my identity during my adolescence. No one could ever live the life I lived due to my nature and how I was nurtured and I love that about living. Life threw me so many curveballs that had both a conscious and unconscious effect on me and it was my choice to decide what I wanted to do with those obstacles. During my child development, I made many mistakes that had a lasting impact on me. The lasting impact is not the scars on my body, the childhood trauma, or the relationships that I burned. The lasting impact is being able to learn from those mistakes now that I am an adult and using my past experiences to live my best life now.

I also remember that during pre-k we did a lot of hands-on activities. We did activities such as playing with sand, finger paintings, and writing our names with shaving cream. The teachers did this because they know from Williams & Shellenbeger that learning is incremental and that a child's sensory integration plays a huge part in their development.

3

What I do remember is having a clothespin behavior system in pre-k and kindergarten. This was like Watson’s behaviorism because our actions were being watched and not so much our thoughts and feelings. This behavior system was a form of Skinner's operant conditioning, we were rewarded with a prize box if we did not get our clip moved and when we would get introuble, we would have to move our clip to yellow or red.

Middle Childhood

6-11 Years Old

The Meososystem–which can also be viewed as Sinha’s upper layer of her Ecological Model–reflects a relationship between family and school. During my middle childhood, I developed a more stable friend group. I would pick up habits that my friends would do at school–Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory– and then repeat them at home. Sometimes I would get introuble at home for repeating actions I learned from my friends because they would teach me inappropriate things.

At this point in my life, I was in the Concrete Operational Stage according to Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development. During this stage, Stanovich’s (dual process theory) two cognitive systems underlying thinking and reasoning were working over time. I was able to use Siegler’s Overlapping Wave Theory to think through things in many different ways but my judgement was not always right. I'm not too sure if I was not making rational decisions because my perceptual development was not developed all the way yet or because of my cognitive limit at the time (Simon’s theory of bounded rationality).

Gilligan found that men prioritize “ethics of justice” rather than emotions and I think this caused problems when I was growing up because I would try to do “what was right” and I did not focus on how others would feel about it. For example, in second grade when we were learning our times tables, I saw my friend named Asa Wills cheat on his test. I then blurted out loud to the whole class that Asa was cheating when I should have quietly told my teacher or not said anything at all. I did not think about how he would feel when I did that; I was focused on doing the “right thing”.

I think I started to notice the effects of race, gender, income, and other dividing factors when I was an adolescent. Erikson says that at this age I'm going through a stage of identity vs. confusion. At this age I started to notice the racism that I was facing, I started to realize that my skin color stereotyped me, and I decided if I wanted to play the role that was predetermined by society. Hill-Collins Theory of Double Consciousness says that we are our race and gender. During middle school, I saw how true this really was. Most things were naturally segregated (I mean segregation as a state and not an action). Boys did sports, girls joined theater, white boys joined baseball, and black boys joined basketball. Most of this was not because people of different backgrounds did not want to hang out with each other, but because of the social and cultural environment we were raised in at home (Vygotsky-Sociocultural Cognition Theory). Prejudice and discrimination might have been taught by the parents of my peers but I went to a school that was 40% white,40% black and 20% every other race and I never noticed racism in my school.

Evolutionary psychologists state how evolution gave us biological potentialities but it doesn’t dictate behavior. From an outside perspective looking in, it would seem like biological potentialities had a role in how well people did in school but in this day and age, there are so many new factors that determine the potential someone sees in their self. One new factor that needs to be studied more when thinking about academic achievement is technology and social media. With a skewed version of the world at our fingertips, we can see people who look like us being successful in the things that they do. We see the 1% thriving, having millions of followers, and living a rich lifestyle and we want to be just like them. A black boy looking for role models who look like him on the internet would find famous athletes and rappers. The black boy strives to be like their role model and sets up a plan on how to be just like him. This plan does not include being academically successful. Academic success should not be a gauge of general success because different people with different backgrounds are trying to achieve different goals in life.

Posner's model of attention has three categories, alerting, which involves high-intensity states of arousal; orienting, which involves the selective direction of attention; and executive control. The call-and-response chant helped improve our orienting attention

4

Adolescence

Kagan’s cognitive theory of The Long Shadow of Temperament would say that her protectiveness when I was an infant caused me to be more shy as an adult.

10-19 Years Old

03

01

03

01

03

01

03

01

04

02

03

01

Gavin's Development

1

Infant

04

02

04

02

NATURE VS. NURTURE

0-1 Years Old

2

Early Childhood

2-5 Years Old

From a nurture standpoint, my developmental context really shaped who I am today. I was born into a lower-middle-class family. The neighborhood I grew up in was pretty safe and it was close to my grandparents so It was a good place for my parents to raise kids and ensure that our cognitive development was not negatively affected. My older brother is two years older than me so right from birth, my sociological cognitive development had an upper hand compared to only childs. My mother also did not work when I was an infant so I was able to spend a lot of time with her which promoted my psychosocial cognitive development. Due to my mother being home when I was an infant, it led to her being a protective parent.

From a nature standpoint, I had the potential to have a very able-bodied physical and motor development which would allow me to succeed in sports later in life. My parents both have fast metabolism and were very good at sports when they were younger. Biologically, the factors that affected my cognitive development include my birth weight and mental disorder. My birth weight was pretty normal so that kept my cognitive development on track. My dad has ADHD and my mother has seasonal depression, so those mental disorders could have been passed down to me.

3

Middle Childhood

6-11 Years Old

4

Adolescence

Kagan’s cognitive theory of The Long Shadow of Temperament would say that her protectiveness when I was an infant caused me to be more shy as an adult.

10-19 Years Old

03

01

03

01