Category: Child Psychology

Research on the psychology of play suggests that both children and adults benefit.

Children who play outdoors have a stronger sense of purpose and self-fulfilment than those who don’t, a study finds.

The study, published in the Journal of the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, found that kids who were outdoors playing for between 5 to 10 hours a week had a stronger spiritual connection to the Earth (Van Wieren & Kellert, 2013).

The study’s lead author, Gretel Van Wieren, said:

“These values are incredibly important to human development and well-being.

We were surprised by the results.

Before we did the study, we asked, ‘Is it just a myth that children have this deep connection with nature?’

But we found it to be true in pretty profound ways.”

The small study of the psychology of play involving 10 children from a mostly Christian background (7 of the 10) examined how they interacted with the natural world through in-depth interviews, diaries and simple observation.

The children who spent more time outside felt more humbled by nature’s power as well as feeling a sense of belonging in the world.

Being outdoors more also enhanced the children’s appreciation of beauty.

These children took greater notice of colour, symmetry and balance in nature as well as displaying greater imagination and curiosity themselves.

Van Wieren continued:

“This is the first generation that’s significantly plugged in to a different extent and so what does this mean?

Modern life has created a distance between humans and nature that now we’re realizing isn’t good in a whole host of ways.

So it’s a scary question: How will this affect our children and how are we going to respond?”

In a fascinating coda, the researchers also interviewed the parents and it emerged that the children who spent the most time outdoors had parents who had done the same when they were children.

The parents felt that this experience had significantly shaped their adult lives.

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Toxic early life stress may critically affect memory, learning and the way emotions are processed.

Chronic early life stress — like that from abuse, neglect or poverty — can have a lasting impact on the developing brain, according to research.

Toxic stress at an early age may critically affect memory, learning and the way emotions are processed, finds a study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

The research investigated exactly why early life stress can lead to such a wide range of negative outcomes later in life, including depression, anxiety, poor educational achievement and also physical problems (Hanson et al., 2014).

Seth Pollak, co-leader of the study, said:

“We haven’t really understood why things that happen when you’re 2, 3, 4 years old stay with you and have a lasting impact.

Given how costly these early stressful experiences are for society…unless we understand what part of the brain is affected, we won’t be able to tailor something to do about it.”

Study of early life stress

The researchers recruited 128 children at around the age of 12 who had experienced neglect, abuse or other serious, chronic stressors in the first few years of their lives.

The children and their caregivers were interviewed about their early life experiences and any behavioural problems they now had.

Their brains were also scanned, with a special focus on the hippocampus and amygdala, both of which are heavily involved in how the brain processes emotions.

The results from these children were compared with other children from middle-class backgrounds who had not been maltreated.

What emerged was that those who had suffered chronic stress in early life had smaller amygdalas than those who had not.

In addition, those who were from very poor backgrounds or who had been physically abused also had smaller hippocampi.

While the implications of the reduced size of the amygdala is unknown, a smaller hippocampus is a recognised risk factor for negative outcomes.

Unsurprisingly the children who’d suffered early life stress also had more behavioural problems, and the smaller the affected brain structures were, the greater the behavioural problems.

Seth Pollak said:

“For me, it’s an important reminder that as a society we need to attend to the types of experiences children are having.

We are shaping the people these individuals will become.”

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Piaget’s theory of four stages of development has the dubious claim to fame of being one of the most criticised psychological theories ever.

Jean Piaget was a developmental psychologist whose four-stage theory, published in 1936, has proved extremely influential.

From the sensorimotor stage, through the pre-operational stage, the concrete operational stage and the formal operational stage, his theory attempts to describe how childhood development progresses.

However, Piaget’s experiments and theories about how children build up their knowledge of the world have faced endless challenges, many of them justified.

Let me give you a flavour of why Piaget’s research on stages of development has faced so much criticism and also why psychologists often regard him with such awe.

First I’ll describe one of the observations he made of his own three children, then why his conclusions are probably wrong and  finally the central insight at the heart of his four-stage theory of cognitive development.

Piaget’s research on his daughter

One of Piaget’s many careful observations was made when one of his daughters, Jacqueline, then 7 months old, dropped a plastic duck on the quilt and it fell behind a fold so that she couldn’t see it.

Piaget noticed that despite the fact that Jacqueline could clearly see where the duck had dropped, and it was within her reach, she made no attempt to grab for it.

Fascinated by this, Piaget put the duck in her view again but, then, just as she was about to reach for it, he slowly and clearly hid it under the sheet.

Again, she acted as though the duck had simply disappeared, making no attempt to search for it under the sheet.

This seemed strange behaviour to Piaget as Jacqueline was clearly interested in the duck while she could see it, but seemed to forget about it the instant it disappeared from view – out of sight and, apparently, out of mind.

What Piaget deduced from these observations, along with many experiments, was that children do not initially understand the idea that objects continue to exist even when out of sight (this is known as object permanence).

This concept, he thought, children had to work out by themselves by interacting with and experiencing the world.

It wasn’t until around 9 or 10 months of age that Piaget noticed his children began to search for a hidden object.

Piaget’s four-stage theory of development

While many parents play games with their children like this, what set Piaget apart was that he used these observations along with many experiments to develop a theory of how children acquire knowledge, the stages of development theory for which he is rightly best-remembered.

This theory is a four-stage ladder up which Piaget thought children climbed as they gathered knowledge about the world (Piaget, 1936).

1. Sensorimotor stage (birth to 18-24 months)

At the first of Piaget’s stages of development, the sensorimotor stage, infants are aware only of their sensations, fascinated by all the strange new experiences their bodies are having.

They are like little scientists exploring the world by shouting at, listening to, banging and tasting everything.

2. Pre-operational stage (18-24 months to 7 years)

At the second of Piaget’s stages of development, the pre-operational stage, children can process images, words and concepts but they can’t do anything with them, they can’t yet operate on them.

It’s like they’ve acquired the tools of thought, but don’t yet know how to use them.

E.g. in maths they can’t understand that 2 x 3 is the same as 3 x 2.

3. Concrete operational stage (7 to 12 years)

At the third of Piaget’s stages of development, the concrete operational stage, children gain the ability to manipulate symbols and objects, but only if they are concrete – abstract operations are still a challenge.

4. Formal operational stage (12 and up)

At the fourth of Piaget’s stages of development, the formal operational stage, children are able to think in abstract terms about the world.

Now they can understand concepts such as the future, values and justice.

From around this age children start thinking like adults.

Criticism of Piaget stages of development theory

It’s for this grand stages of development theory that Piaget is much admired.

Unfortunately, like many an ambitious theory, over time evidence was uncovered that contradicted aspects of this neat time-line.

For example, Piaget’s conclusions about his daughter Jacqueline’s failure to reach for the duck were probably wrong.

Subsequent studies have revealed infants as young as 3.5 months appear to understand object permanence.

Psychologists nowadays might explain Jacqueline’s behaviour as a failure of memory or an inability to grasp something that is out of view.

Einstein though Piaget was a genius

Although findings such as these have chipped away at Piaget’s stages of development theory, his work has continued to attract interest and stimulate research.

From observations like hiding his daughter’s duck to his grand four-stage theory of development, Piaget’s central insight was that children think in a fundamentally different way from adults.

They don’t just have less knowledge, less experience or less processing power; the qualitative content of their thoughts is actually different.

Even though psychologists now question many of the details of Piaget’s observations and theories, this central insight remains intact.

And it’s this central insight that Albert Einstein once described as “so simple that only a genius could have thought of it”.

→ This article is part of a series on 10 crucial developmental psychology studies:

1. When infant memory develops
2. How self-concept emerges in infants
3. How children learn new concepts
4. The importance of attachment styles
5. When infants learn to imitate others
6. Theory of mind reveals the social world
7. Understanding object permanence
8. How infants learn their first word
9. The six types of play
10. Piaget’s stages of development theory

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The emergence of theory of mind in children is a vital developmental milestone; some think a failure to develop it is central to autism.

One superpower all psychologists would kill for is the ability to read minds.

Not only would it make psychology research a lot easier, we would be able to experience what it is like to be someone else – a fascinating prospect.

Although telepathy is still science fiction most of us can do something clever that, while only a pale imitation, does allow us to step inside other people’s minds in a limited way.

We can do this because our brains are fantastic simulators – we can, for example, predict the paths objects will take through space and the decisions we should make now to cause a future event.

Similarly, we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes to try and imagine their thoughts, intentions and possible actions.

In fact, without the ability to simulate what other people are thinking we would be lost in the social world.

Theory of mind experiment

Psychologists call this ability to simulate or work out what others are thinking ‘theory of mind’.

The emergence of theory of mind in children is a vital developmental milestone; some psychologists think that a failure to develop a theory of mind is a central component of autism.

The first experiment to provide evidence about when theory of mind emerges using a test of false beliefs was carried out by Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner from the University of Salzburg (Wimmer & Perner, 1983).

To test the emergence of ‘theory of mind’ the researchers wanted to find out whether children could pass a false belief test.

To pass the test, children have to understand that it’s possible for other people to hold beliefs that are different to their own.

This is a surprisingly tricky task when your brain is so new it’s still under warrantee.

The Maxi task

Wimmer and Perner tested children between 3 and 9-years-old by telling them a story about a boy called Maxi whose mother had brought home some chocolate to make a cake.

When she gets home Maxi sees her put the chocolate into a blue cupboard.

Then Maxi goes out to play.

Meanwhile, his mother uses the chocolate for the cake but happens to put it back in the green cupboard.

When Maxi comes back in he feels hungry and wants some chocolate.

The children in the experiment are then asked, not where the chocolate is, but which cupboard Maxi will look in.

In the experiment the story is also acted out using dolls and matchboxes to make the story explicit for the children.

Test results

The results showed that 3 to 4-year-olds tended to fail the test by pointing to the actual position of the chocolate rather than where Maxi thought it was.

They seemed unable to understand that although they knew where it was, Maxi didn’t.

Wimmer and Perner argued that this was because they could not construct a separate mental model of the world that represented Maxi’s experience – they weren’t capable of a theory of mind.

From about 4 to 5-years-old the situation changed dramatically.

Suddenly, the children tended to point to the cupboard where Maxi thought the chocolate was, rather than where they knew it was.

However in some variations of the experiment children up to 5-years-old still had problems understanding someone else’s false belief.

Finally, at 6-years-old, the children did consistently understand that another person can hold a false belief about the world.

End of innocence

This experiment suggested that at about 4 to 6-years old a range of remarkable skills start to emerge in young children that are vital for their successful functioning in society.

They begin to understand that others can hold false beliefs, they themselves can lie, and that others can lie to them.

From one perspective it is a sad end to innocence, but from another it is a necessary base for a skill required for social success.

At around 4-years-old children are starting to understand that we don’t live out there in the world, we actually create a model of the world in our heads, a model that can easily be wrong.

Criticisms and alternative explanations

Like many child psychology studies, this experiment has sparked much debate about what its results mean.

Here are some of the alternative explanations addressed by the experimenters:

• Were the kids concentrating? Yes, they correctly answered questions that showed they were concentrating.
• Had the younger children forgotten the story? No, they were given a memory test which they passed.
• Were the younger children just pointing at where the chocolate was without thinking about the question? In another experiment children were specifically told to stop and think – this didn’t help the younger children.

While this experiment has been criticised, and other methods have been developed for examining theory of mind in children, tasks like this one are still in use around the world to this day, helping to uncover how and when we first develop the ability to understand other people’s thoughts.

→ This article is part of a series on 10 crucial developmental psychology studies:

1. When infant memory develops
2. The mirror test reveals when self-concept emerges in infants
3. How children learn new concepts
4. The importance of attachment styles
5. When infants learn to imitate others
6. Theory of mind reveals the social world
7. Understanding object permanence
8. How infants learn their first word
9. The six types of play
10. Piaget’s stages of development theory

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Frankly, it’s amazing we’ve all made it this far.

So, bucking the trend of random anecdote and superstition, here are twelve psychology studies about parenting that every parent should know.

1. Parents are happier than non-parents

First some good news for those worried about the burdens of parenting.

In recent years, some studies have suggested that the pleasures of parenting are outweighed by the pains.

“Ha!” said parents to themselves, secretly, “I knew it!”

Not so fast though: research has found that, on average, parents feel better than non-parents each day and derive more pleasure from parenting than from other activities (Nelson et al.,. 2013).

Fathers, in particular, derive high levels of positive emotions and happiness from parenting.

2. Child-centric parenting is worth it

Underlining the pleasures of parenting, research finds that child-centric attitudes are beneficial.

A psychology study by Ashton-James et al. (2013) found that parents who were the most child-centric were also happier and derived greater meaning in life from parenting.

Performing child-care activities was associated with greater meaning and fewer negative feelings.

“These findings suggest that the more care and attention people give to others, the more happiness and meaning they experience.

From this perspective, the more invested parents are in their children’s well-being — that is, the more ‘child centric’ parents are — the more happiness and meaning they will derive from parenting.” (Ashton-James et al., 2013)

So, what’s good for your kids, is also good for you and your parenting.

3. Good parenting involves supporting emotional expression

Parents who encourage their offspring to express their emotions raise happier children, psychological research finds (McKee et al., 2019).

When parents support emotional expression, young adults experience less depression and anxiety.

They are also more mindful, better able to regulate their attention and more open and accepting towards themselves and the world.

Children need ’emotional socialisation’: the ability to understand and deal with one’s own emotions.

Key parenting skills that achieve this include listening, giving comfort and helping children to solve problems.

4. Helicopter parenting may be depressing

As with many things in life, though, it’s a fine line between caring and smothering; especially when children have grown up.

Schiffrin et al. (2013) asked 297 undergraduate students about their parents’ behaviour and how they felt about it.

The study found links between ‘helicopter parenting’ and higher levels of depression amongst the students, as well as lower levels of autonomy, relatedness and competence.

“Parents should keep in mind how developmentally appropriate their involvement is and learn to adjust their parenting style when their children feel that they are hovering too closely.” (Schiffrin et al., 2013)

Other studies have also suggested that helicopter parenting raises maladjusted children.

5. Avoid strict discipline

Around 90 percent of American parents admit at least one instance of using strict verbal discipline with their children, such as calling names or swearing at them.

Rather than helping keep adolescents in line, though, be aware that this may just exacerbate the problem.

A child psychology study of 967 US families and their parenting found that harsh verbal discipline at 13-years-old predicted worse behaviour in the next year (Wang et al., 2013).

And it didn’t help if parents had a strong bond with their children.

The study’s lead author Ming-Te Wang explained:

“The notion that harsh discipline is without consequence, once there is a strong parent-child bond–that the adolescent will understand that ‘they’re doing this because they love me’–is misguided because parents’ warmth didn’t lessen the effects of harsh verbal discipline.

Indeed, harsh verbal discipline appears to be detrimental in all circumstances.”

Studies also find that harsh parenting practices when children are small is linked to smaller brain structures in adolescence.

6. Regular bedtimes are vital to parenting

Regular bedtimes really matter to children’s developing brains, psychology research on parenting finds.

Researchers followed 11,000 children from when they were 3-years old to the age of 7 to measure the effects of bedtimes on cognitive function (Kelly et al., 2013).

The researchers found that:

“…irregular bedtimes at 3 years of age were associated with lower scores in reading, maths, and spatial awareness in both boys and girls, suggesting that around the age of 3 could be a sensitive period for cognitive development.”

Regular bedtimes are important for both boys and girls and the earlier these can be implemented, the better for cognitive performance.

7. Do the chores together

Bringing up happy children is easier if Mum and Dad’s relationship isn’t too rocky.

One frequent bone of contention between parents is the chores.

A trick for achieving marital satisfaction over the chores is to do them together.

When partners perform their chores at the same time–no matter who is doing what — both people are more satisfied with the division of labour (Galovan et al., 2013).

Getting the children involved in chores is also a positive parenting step.

8. Good parenting means letting children see negative emotions

Surprisingly, it is good parenting to allow children to see negative emotions like anger and frustration, psychology research finds (Karnilowicz et al., 2018).

Many parents, though, try to hide all conflicts from their children.

However, children often know when their parents are trying to hide conflict and it confuses them.

They know something is wrong, but see no change in their parent’s behaviour, which is confusing.

Better, say psychologists, to allow children to see healthy conflict and how it is resolved — that is good parenting.

9. Limit infant TV viewing

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children should watch no more than two hours of TV per day after two years of age, and none before that age.

Here’s why: a study that followed almost 2,000 Canadian children from birth found that an extra hour’s TV viewing at 2.5-years-old predicted worse performance later when they attended kindergarten (Pagani et al., 2013).

The more children exceeded this recommendation at 2.5 years old, the worse their vocabulary, math and motor skills were at 5-years-old.

10. Exercise boosts kids’ school performance

Kids are increasingly sedentary and, as I frequently write here on PsyBlog, exercise is a wonderful way to boost brain power, and it has many other benefits.

A study of 11-year-olds has found that moderate to vigorous exercise was associated with increased academic performance in English, Maths and Science (Booth et al., 2013).

These gains from exercise were also seen in exams taken at 16-years-old.

Interestingly, girls’ science results benefited the most from extra exercise.

11. Intense mothering makes stressful parenting

Some women say that parenting is more stressful than being at work.

There are strong links between parenting and stress and guilt.

How can we square this with the reports and research findings that children fill your life with joy and meaning?

It may be down to differences in attitudes to parenting.

In particular, being an ‘intense mother’ may be bad for you.

In their child psychology study of 181 mothers of children under 5, Rizzo et al. (2012) found that mothers who most strongly endorsed the idea that children were sacred and that women are better parents than men, were more likely to be depressed and experience less satisfaction with life.

Yes, nurture your children, but don’t sacrifice your own mental health.

12. Why siblings are so different

Anyone with more than one child will have noticed a curious thing: their personalities are often very dissimilar.

In fact, according to a study by Plomin and Daniels (1987), siblings have no more in common in their personalities than two completely unrelated strangers.

This is very weird given that 50 percent of their genetic code is identical.

The answer isn’t in the genes at all, but in the environment in which children grow up.

Far from having the same environments, each child has:

• a different relationship with their parents,
• a different relationship with their other siblings,
• different friends and experiences at school…

…and so on.

And all these differences add up to quite remarkable dissimilarities between siblings — often such that if they didn’t look alike, you’d never know they were related.

All this means, of course, that because their personalities are often so different, parenting strategies that work with one child, may not work with another.

It’s just one more challenge of parenting!

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Psychologist Robert Fantz investigated what babies really understand about the world with his looking chamber experiment.

Robert Fantz, a developmental psychologist, in his 1961 series of experiments, investigated what babies really understand about the world.

The eyes of tiny infants look glazed and they mostly seem concerned with the bare necessities of life.

What do they understand about the world and how can you possibly find out, given that babies are not so hot on answering complex questions about their perceptual abilities?

In 1961, when Fantz carried out his experiment, there wasn’t much you could do to find out what was going on in a baby’s head – other than watch.

And watching the baby is what he did.

An enduring feature of human nature is if there’s something of interest near us, we generally look at it.

So Fantz set up a display board above the baby to which were attached two pictures (Fantz, 1961).

On one was a bulls-eye and on the other was the sketch of a human face.

Then, from behind the board, invisible to the baby, he peeked through a hole to watch what the baby looked at.

The results

What he found was that a two-month old baby looked twice as much at the human face as it did at the bulls-eye.

This suggested that human babies have some powers of pattern and form selection.

Before this it was thought that babies looked out onto a chaotic world of which they could make little sense.

In modern psychology the descendants of this experiment are still used today to find out what babies understand about the world.

These have discovered that we’re remarkably early developers.

At one month we can follow a slow-moving object.

At two months we can move both our eyes together and begin to appreciate how far away things are.

At three months we can tell the difference between members of our family (Hunt, 1993).

As a result of these and similar studies, psychologists have suggested that we are born with a definite preference for viewing human faces.

This would certainly make evolutionary sense as other human faces hold all sorts of useful information which is vital for our survival.

Not a bad set of conclusions from simply watching a baby’s eyes!

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