Every parent wants to know their children while they develop and continue to grow up gradually. Knowing your children includes knowing how they feel and see the world or how they learn to think and reason things throughout the process. Every parent also wants to mentor the way their children feel or get known to the changes. All of these things are part of being a good parent. However, the process has never been that easy. This where the specialized branch of developmental psychology, child psychology has developed.
When a child grows up he has to go through the developmental stages, from birth to adulthood, which is definitely of a progressive nature. Besides, lots of factors including genetic, environmental, and cultural factors influence these developmental stages.
According to psychologists, the development process is so fast that they don’t even realize what they are going through let alone being able to express their feelings to others. Literally, this is where child psychology functions to aid the parents with valuable and necessary inforamtion.
What is Child Psychology?
The process or technique of studying the conscious and subconscious development of children/childhood is known as child psychology. It is a specialized branch of developmental psychology and a lot of specialized psychologists know as child psychologists work to observe how a child feels and sees the world, reason things, interact with themselves, their parents, and the world at large.
Merriam-Webster defines child psychology as “the study of the psychological characteristics of infants and children and the application of general psychological principles to infancy and childhood.”
Why Is this specialized branch Important?
Every parent wants their children to have a healthy throughout the whole development process, from both to adulthood. But, as mentioned earlier, the process is complicated, and sometimes it is not even possible to understand if a child is developing with normal behavior at a normal stage or s/he has possesses the sign abnormality. However, a child psychologist can help you understand and evaluate that; technically, this is what they do and this is why this brunch has developed.
If you understand the normal or abnormal psychological pattern, you will be able to find out the best ways to communicate and influence a child very easily. Thus, the parents, with the help of child psychology, can easily get to know their children and communicate with them to teach how to control and deal with emotions and other coping and managing mechanisms like that. This way, it becomes easy to help the children to develop efficiently and thrive at all the concerned stages until adulthood.
Apart from these, child psychologists can identity the abnormality at a very early stage. Thus, they also help to identify and get to the roots of such abnormal behaviors, e.g., anxiety, hyperactivity, and other issues concerned with learning. In this way, they can aid the children to deal with the early trauma of childhood.
As the get into the root, they can also aid to prevent, diagnose and evaluate the delays in normal development or the abnormalities, for instance, autism.
5 basic areas of child psychology:
There are 5 basic areas of child psychology. Theb these main areas are further divided into sub-areas.
1. Development
2. Milestones
3. Behavior
4. Emotions
5. Socialization
Child Development:
Child development has total of 3 sub-categories. It is classified for easy understanding.
1. Physical Development: It involves gradual physical changes. This process is quite stable and predictable and involves acquiring certain physical skills.
2. Cognitive or intellectual development: It involves the process how a child gain knowledge, e.g., thought, language, intimation and reasoning.
3. Social and emotional development: It refers to how the children are interrelated and form groups to learn and relate with each other. At the same time, the emotional development involves how the children feel and the expression of feelings.
Put simply, fear, pride, trust, friendship, humor etc are the part of one’s social-emotional development.
Development Milestones:
This vital part of child psychology is concerned with evaluating the gradula progress of the children. The psychologists evaluate the behavior of the children and find out what the verage children can do at a certain age. Therefore, if any child fails to develop that way, the psychologists detemine potential abnormality.
There are 4 subcategories of developmental milestones:
1. Physical milestones: Development in physical abilities and skills, e.g., both fine and gross motor skills.
2. Cognitive or mental milestones: The development in a child’s thinking, learning, and solving and resoning capabilities.
3. Social and emotional milestones: The development in a child’s emotion expressions and social interaction.
4. Communication and language milestones: The development in a child’s verbal and non-verbal communication skills.
Behavior:
This areas involves the indentification and evaluation of severe or mild abnormal behavior or the children. Psychologists try to find out the reason and solutions to such problems like conduct disorder (CD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) or the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Behaviour challenges are the most common reason to consult a Child Psychologist.
Emotional development:
Emotional developmentinvolves a child’s gradual understanding of what emotion or feeling actually is. Before you evaluate the emotional growth of a child, you need to know how emotion of feekings functions in him/her.
Some children even find it harder to learn and regulate emotion than the average children. Thefore, the children psychologists help them to learn, evaluate and express their emotions the right way. This is what this area of child psychology is concerned about.
Social development:
refers to a child’s gradual understanding of how society functions and how to adapt in a society by acquiring the values, knowledge and skills needed. This way child psychology functions to make sure that a child be able to relate others in a thoughful manner and to maintain proper relations with the others.
When all these areas function together, child psychology reaches to a new height in identifying, evaluating the abnormality of children thus ensures a healthy development of children.
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