Growth and Lifespan Development
Developmental stems ask you to judge whether a presentation is expected for the client's age, a deviation warranting assessment, or a reaction to context. Precision about timing and sequence is what separates the correct answer from the plausible one.
Stage frameworks and their limits
- Erikson: trust versus mistrust (infancy), autonomy versus shame and doubt (toddler), initiative versus guilt (preschool), industry versus inferiority (school age), identity versus role confusion (adolescence), intimacy versus isolation (young adulthood), generativity versus stagnation (midlife), integrity versus despair (late life).
- Piaget: sensorimotor (object permanence emerges around 8 to 12 months), preoperational (egocentrism, conservation absent), concrete operational (roughly 7 to 11, conservation achieved), formal operational (abstract, hypothetico-deductive reasoning).
- Kohlberg: preconventional (punishment, instrumental exchange), conventional (good boy/girl, law and order), postconventional (social contract, universal principles); Gilligan critiqued the justice-oriented bias.
- Kubler-Ross's stages are descriptive, not a required sequence; use them cautiously.
Attachment and temperament
- Ainsworth: secure, avoidant, resistant/ambivalent; Main and Solomon added disorganized.
- Secure attachment does not mean no distress at separation; it means distress followed by effective soothing at reunion.
- Thomas and Chess: easy, difficult, slow-to-warm-up; goodness of fit with caregiving matters more than the label.
Milestones that anchor differentials
- Stranger wariness appears around 6 to 8 months; separation anxiety peaks around 10 to 18 months and is developmentally normal then, not at age five.
- Baumrind: authoritative (warm plus firm) is linked to the best adjustment; authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful differ on warmth and control.
- Fluid ability declines earlier than crystallized ability in normal aging.
Worked example
Parents of a 15-month-old report she cries when they leave the room and clings at daycare drop-off; development is otherwise on track. This is expected separation anxiety, since onset and peak fit the timeline and she settles afterward. No diagnosis is warranted; advise consistent, brief goodbyes. The same behavior at age six, or accompanied by regression in language and toileting, would prompt assessment.
Traps
- Applying Piagetian ages rigidly to an individual child.
- Treating regression as always pathological; brief regression after a sibling's birth is common.
- Assuming a difficult temperament predicts disorder.
- Presenting grief as something a client must move through in ordered stages.